A first year of blogging in 2009 – penning on the tenth anniversary of my first blog article (Part 3)

(Continued from Part 2)

In February-March 2009 in the first three Parts of my second blog article, I analyzed some tantalizing facts reflecting certain matters of ethics in Canadian politics that had been playing out in the public eye as two related “affairs”.

There was the ongoing Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, about a disputed business relationship between German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber and former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney; and there was the older but broader Airbus Affair, about possible kickbacks Mr. Mulroney had received from Airbus Industrie for its 1988 sale of planes to Air Canada, which had been the subject of a criminal investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Central to the two affairs was not only Mr. Mulroney’s ethics and conduct, but also business lobbying by Mr. Schreiber who had distributed Airbus commissions in Canada, and his connections to prominent Canadian political figures including, in Mulroney’s circle, Mr. Peter MacKay, then cabinet minister in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, the deceased Mr. Frank Moores, former Newfoundland Premier and former Air Canada board member, Justice John C. Major, Prime Minister Mulroney’s appointee to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the deceased Mr. Bruce Verchere, formerly Prime Minister Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee who also represented the Swiss Bank where Schreiber had accounts for Airbus commissions as well as for a disputed $300,000 he had given Mulroney in their subsequently-disputed financial relationship.

In Parts 1 & 2, dated February 20 & March 8, 2009, respectively, I discussed a key fact linking the two affairs, in the form of an allegation Schreiber included in a court document filed during the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair in 2007, that could be central to the Airbus Affair; it regarded possible roles by Moores and Verchere in getting the Airbus money to Mulroney, here partially re-quoted as in Part 2 of my current review article:

“And yet by early November 2007 when he was trying hard to avoid extradition to Germany, railing against “abuse of power” by Mr. Mulroney earlier when the latter was prime minister, Mr. Schreiber took an extra legal step to try to expose Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, a role that was connected to the company Government Consultants International, an Ottawa lobbying firm during the Mulroney era founded by Frank Moores, Mr. Mulroney’s appointee to the Air Canada board, according to a report in The Globe and Mail newspaper: ²⁶

“An adviser to former prime minister Brian Mulroney asked Karlheinz Schreiber to transfer funds, made in connection with Air Canada’s 1988 purchase of Airbus airplanes, to Mr. Mulroney’s lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland, according to an affidavit sworn by Mr. Schreiber and filed Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

The affidavit states that Mr. Schreiber informed Mr. Mulroney during a meeting at Zurich’s Hotel Savoy on Feb. 2, 1998 that one of Mr. Mulroney’s closest friends and advisers, Fred Doucet, had asked him to transfer funds “related to the Airbus deal” from the lobby firm, Government Consultants International, or GCI, to Mr. Mulroney’s Swiss lawyer.”

…”

And,

“The reason for then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Canadian lawyer to be referred to as his lawyer in Switzerland is that Bruce Verchere was also the Canadian lawyer representing the Swiss bank where (in a branch in Zurich, Switzerland) Mr. Schreiber opened bank accounts for Airbus commissions and other funds including his now famous $300,000 given to Mulroney in 1993-94.^{59, 60, 61}”

As in the above two quotes, Prime Minister Mulroney’s close friend and advisor Fred Doucet once asked Schreiber to send money “related to the Airbus deal” to Mulroney’s lawyer Bruce Verchere.

In 2009 I noted in Part 1’s footnote that, according to Norman Spector, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Mulroney, Fred Doucet, also a former Chief of Staff, often brought visitors to see Mulroney without formally going through the Prime Minister’s Office:

“27. … Mulroney’s former chief of staff Norman Spector has also revealed that after leaving a former chief of staff position Fred Doucet became a lobbyist in Ottawa and from time to time would bring persons to meet with Mulroney, and that those appointments were not booked through or recorded by the Prime Minister’s Office…”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 1)”, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Doucet also had a key role in the financial relationship between Mulroney and Schreiber that was at the center of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, having arranged the meetings during which Schreiber gave Mulroney envelopes containing cash:

“Mr. Doucet, a former chief of staff for Mulroney, told the Commons ethics committee that he only remembers arranging two of four meetings between his old boss and Schreiber, including one in a New York City hotel in 1994 where he saw Mr. Schreiber hand the former prime minister an envelope at the end of a 90-minute meeting.

He said Mr. Schreiber told Mr. Mulroney the money was to pay for expenses and services rendered by the former prime minister after hearing a presentation on his lobbying efforts in China, Russia and France. Mr. Doucet said he did not know at the time that the envelope, which Mr. Mulroney put in his briefcase, contained cash.

…

“Mr. Mulroney reported on a meeting he had had with the presidents of Russia, France, and the Chinese leadership, and his view that these countries . . . could play an important role in the United Nations peacekeeping initiatives and where the use of Thyssen military vehicles might be very appropriate,” said Mr. Doucet.

In early December, Mr. Doucet released a statement denying allegations by Schreiber that he asked for the transfer of money “for Airbus” into a Swiss bank account destined for the former prime minister.”

(“Former Mulroney staffer didn’t know envelope contained cash”, By Jack Aubry, February 12, 2008, Ottawa Citizen)

As discussed in Part 2 of my current review, Spector later stated in June 2009, during a public inquiry presided over by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant into the Mulroney-Schreiber business relationship, that Schreiber had been a frequent visitor to Prime Minister Mulroney, enjoying more access than any other lobbyist.

That public inquiry capped the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair that had first been brought forward by Schreiber and received intense public attention in the 2000s. But as recently reviewed in Part 2 of my current article, it was likely only the tip of a much larger iceberg that had been the Airbus Affair of the 1990s.

In February-March 2009, I then reviewed the historical political contexts of these affairs as they relate to government leadership ethics, in particular, some basic historical facts relating to Mr. Mulroney’s rise to power in the 1980s, and the various ethics and corruption problems dogging his government and him.

In reviewing the historical ethics and corruption problems associated with Mulroney, I highlighted the key roles of the left-leaning Canadian media in investigating and exposing them, and the important roles of women journalists, especially anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron who conducted wide-ranging investigative journalism work over a long period of time and whose efforts led to the intensification of the RCMP’s Airbus Affair criminal investigation in 1995.

I remarked in my post on February 20, 2009, that back in November 1995 – when the criminal investigation of Mulroney became publicly known – the RCMP’s lead investigator, Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, acknowledged that it had been media reports that led to the police’s intensified efforts:

“This particular controversy about what the RCMP have or have not done in its Airbus Affair investigation is hardly unique. When the Airbus Affair first broke into news headlines in November 1995, the RCMP investigator at the time, Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, actually revealed that although the criminal investigation had been first set up in 1988-89 soon after the Air Canada-Airbus Industrie deal, not much was done until March 1995 when he received some media reports containing intense allegations against former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on the matter of kickbacks. ³¹”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Then in my post on March 8, 2009, I noted in a footnote that Sgt. Fiegenwald singled out several media venues, including the German news magazine Der Spiegel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate TV program, and Stevie Cameron, as his source of information:

“44. RCMP investigator Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald stated in November 1995 that it was stories in “the German news magazine Der Spiegel and the CBC-TV current affairs program Fifth Estate” that prompted him to look into the allegations, starting in March 1995; Fiegenwald later also identified Stevie Cameron as an early source of information…”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 2)”, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In that March 8 post, I also noted that over a decade later during the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, Ms. Cameron personally acknowledged her own leading role in investigating Mr. Mulroney’s problems, as well as the key role of Justice Minister Allan Rock in then Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s government in the 1990s, citing Schreiber’s letter to Mulroney dated January 29, 2007, here as previously quoted in Part 2 of my current article:

“Ms. Cameron herself is also sure that the persons she has been chasing view her in this way as well, as she has been quoted as saying on November 13, 2007: ⁵⁷

“Would I be at the top of Mulroney’s list of journalists? You bet. In a letter Schreiber wrote to Mulroney on Jan. 29 this year, he said, ‘All my personal problems began with Stevie Cameron’s book On The Take and Allan Rock’s political witch hunt with the RCMP against you.’”

”

Nonetheless, as discussed in February 2009 and reviewed in Part 2 of my current article, the RCMP closed its Airbus Affair criminal investigation in April 2003 without finding sufficient incriminating evidence against Mulroney, but it had not been a thorough investigation and the RCMP later expressed the willingness to conduct a new one if new information became available.

As I have discussed in Part 2 of my current review, the much more limited Mulroney-Schreiber Affair did have an official outcome, a report released in May 2010 with findings by Justice Oliphant who had conducted a public inquiry, concluding that Mr. Mulroney’s conduct in his financial dealings with Mr. Schreiber had been “inappropriate”.

But before Justice Oliphant’s inquiry and conclusions, in the spring of 2009 after reviewing some key facts and evidence and the media’s expository work on the subject, in my article’s Part 4 dated April 29 I commented on a huge gulf in perception between Mulroney’s ethics problems and the lacklustre, fruitless efforts on the part of the RCMP and the former Chretien government to uncover the truth:

“The legacy of Brian Mulroney, in his known propensity to associate with persons of corrupt or unsavoury repute and in the yet-unclear depth of his political problems of ethics and conduct relating to business interests close to or lobbying his government, may in the end be compared to some of the more notorious in the recent history of the western, Judeo-Christian, democratic world. Yet, as have been previously shown, neither the RCMP nor the Liberal government of Jean Chretien during its 10-year tenure from 1993 to 2003 really went after Mr. Mulroney: in public they were merely reacting to, and maintaining a continuing interest in, issues in the Airbus Affair as brought forward by members of a left-leaning Canadian media – particularly by Stevie Cameron and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate – and supported by those in the federal government system opposed to Mr. Mulroney’s rightwing agendas.

The conclusion would again appear to be that not only there was no political vendetta against Mulroney on the part of the RCMP or the Liberal government, which he has alleged, but that the long-running saga was mostly a media circus despite that – as previously shown – very serious and nagging questions still exist as to the nature of the Airbus Affair, the depth of corruption and Mr. Mulroney’s real role in them.”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 4)”, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As commented above, the Airbus Affair appeared more of a “media circus” than being driven by the police criminal investigation or by the government.

But I then immediately added, in the above April 2009 blog post, that in order to understand the agendas of the RCMP and of the Chretien government I would review more facts relating to what the government, particularly then Justice Minister Allan Rock, had been aware of and what priority the government gave to the corruption investigation:

“However I am not ready to conclude such but would next illustrate that the Chretien government and the RCMP did likely have their own agendas in seeing the criminal investigation against Mulroney be launched and be ongoing for an extended period of time (from 1995 to 2003), and that although neither wanted to get to the bottom of the Airbus Affair both had an interest to see it hound Mr. Mulroney through to the end of the Chretien political era.”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As quoted, my assertion was that the Chretien government and the RCMP did not want to get to the bottom of the Airbus Affair matters but rather wanted to “see it hound Mr. Mulroney through to the end of the Chretien political era”.

As a matter of fact, it was Mr. Mulroney himself who asserted in November 1997 that the Chretien government and Rock had been behind the criminal investigation since 1993, especially behind a criminally accusatory letter to the Swiss authorities – dated September 29, 1995 as mentioned in Part 2 of my current review – as I noted in my April 2009 post:

“In November 1997 in his first media interview after winning a legal settlement with the federal government over the libel issue, Mr. Mulroney alleged that there had been pressure from Liberal justice minister Allan Rock to prosecute him since 1993: ¹⁵²

“Allan Rock arrives (in Ottawa) in 1993. The first thing he does as minister of justice is to write to the RCMP, conveying gossip about me personally to the commissioner of the RCMP requesting an investigation. Out comes (Stevie) Cameron’s book (On The Take), Herb Gray, the solicitor general, gives a copy of it to the commissioner of the RCMP, asking that he look into it. These are clear signals by a new government to a national police force, and the signals say, it’s all right for open season on Mulroney”.

And Mulroney further stated the Liberal government must have been behind the RCMP in branding him a criminal in a letter to the Swiss authorities:

“If anyone believes that this could take place without the knowledge of the minister of justice or the knowledge of the solicitor general or the knowledge and approval of the commissioner of the RCMP or the knowledge of the PMO [i.e., Prime Minister’s Office] anybody who believes that, I wish them well in Disney World”.

”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As quoted in the above from Mr. Mulroney, “the first thing” the new Justice Minister Allan Rock did in 1993 was to convey some “gossip” about him to the RCMP commissioner, “requesting an investigation”; and then when Stevie Cameron’s book on corruption in the Mulroney era was published, Solicitor General Herb Gray gave a copy to the RCMP commissioner, “asking that he look into it”. Mulroney called it “open season on Mulroney”.

That’s very interesting. What could the “gossip” be about Mr. Mulroney in 1993 that Mr. Rock knew?

I contended that it could be information from the family of Bruce Verchere, formerly Prime Minister Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee, given to Liberal Party-friendly lawyers by Mrs. Lynne Walters Verchere during a family legal feud before Mr. Verchere’s sudden death in August 1993 due to suicide:

“They might have some evidence. According to Stevie Cameron, during 1993 lawyers closely affiliated with the Liberal Party had in fact been provided with documents pointing to fraud and financial mismanagement on the part of Bruce Verchere, then tax lawyer and financial trustee for Prime Minister Brian Mulroney: when Verchere’s wife Lynne Walters Verchere had a fallout with her husband whose fraud had gotten to the point of defrauding her and their children, Mrs. Verchere made the point of specifically retaining notable lawyers with distinction in the Liberal Party to represent her in the legal proceedings against Bruce Verchere, and she gave copies of many important documents she found in their home to these lawyers. ^{165, 166, 167}

Note that this Bruce Verchere, who then died in an gunshot suicide in August 1993 only two months after being appointed board chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited in one of Mulroney’s patronage appointments on his last full day as prime minister, as previously discussed had been the “Swiss lawyer” of Mulroney’s who Karlheinz Schreiber alleges wanted Schreiber to transfer Airbus money to Mulroney; then later in the RCMP investigation, the September 29, 1995 Canadian government letter accusing Mulroney of criminal activity was written to the Swiss authorities to investigate the Airbus money.

If Liberal-affiliated lawyers indeed had access to documents containing clues of possible mismanagement in Brian Mulroney’s finances related to Airbus money, the issue would be how seriously, or not, during 1993-95 the Liberals push the RCMP to pursue those aspects, rather than that they had Mulroney accused without any evidence; in particular, did the “gossip” Allan Rock conveyed to the RCMP in 1993 right after he became justice minister – something Mulroney has alleged – include stuff to do with Mulroney’s former lawyer and trustee Bruce Verchere?

…

166. Other sources of information indicate that Raynold Langlois, the lead lawyer for Lynne Walters Verchere from around March 1992 to the time of her husband’s death in August 1993, recovering money from her husband Bruce Verchere, was son of a former Liberal senator, was himself a former chairman of the constitutional committee of the Quebec Liberal Party, and had earned a lot of legal fees from the former Trudeau government…”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted earlier, Verchere not only was Prime Minister Mulroney’s lawyer but also represented the Swiss Bank where Schreiber had accounts for Airbus commissions as well as for the $300,000 he gave Mulroney that would later become a focus of dispute in the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

As noted above, two months after Mulroney’s stepping down and appointing Verchere as chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited, Verchere died of a gunshot-inflicted suicide.

Taking into account this intriguing Bruce Verchere facet, in my April 2009 post I concurred with Mr. Mulroney’s facts about the Chretien government’s encouraging the RCMP to investigate him since 1993, but countered his view about the Chretien government’s “open season on Mulroney”. I asserted that the criminal investigation of Mulroney had likely been a part of the Liberal government’s law-and-order agendas:

“While the Chretien government at the time denied any involvement in the RCMP investigation, I would give Mr. Mulroney the benefit of the doubt on his points quoted above. My analysis of press archives has suggested to me that such were likely the case, however that it was not obvious vendetta against Mulroney but a part of the incoming Liberal government’s law-and-order agendas during 1993-1995 to include a criminal investigation of Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, and that the Liberal brand of law-and-order may at least partially explain the criminally accusatory language in the September 29, 1995 letter to the Swiss authorities.”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As I remarked above in 2009, “the Liberal brand of law-and-order may at least partially explain the criminally accusatory language in the September 29, 1995 letter to the Swiss authorities”.

In other words, in my assessment, if the Canadian government letter to the Swiss authorities referred to “criminal activities carried out by the former prime minister” as previously quoted in my current review’s Part 2, then the “gossip” Justice Minister Allan Rock had been aware of likely suggested such.

Regarding Mr. Mulroney’s use of the word “gossip” to refer to certain information, an important point that I later emphasized in a blog post dated July 6, 2012, from a multipart article written after 2009, is that practically all of what had gone on among Schreiber, Mulroney, Verchere and Major had been shielded from the public during the Mulroney government era, and even later at the height of the Airbus Affair publicities in 1995-1997:

“As mentioned in Parts 3, 5 & 6, the business relationship between Mulroney and Verchere was never reported in public until Cameron’s 1998 book, despite the fact that it had been from Verchere’s law firm lawyer John Major was first appointed to Alberta Court of Appeal and then on November 13, 1992 to Supreme Court of Canada.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 8) — when political power games rule”, July 6, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Hence a counterpoint to Mr. Mulroney’s complaint about “gossip” would be that, when what mattered to the country’s interests were the prerogative of a higher few, “gossip” was what ordinary members of the public could learn only.

As for my contention cited earlier that the Chretien government and RCMP used the long-lasting criminal investigation to “haunt Mr. Mulroney through to the end of the Chretien political era”, as circumstantial evidence I noted that the day the RCMP announced closure of the fruitless investigation, April 23, 2003, happened to be the 10-year anniversary of the Chretien Liberal Party’s unveiling of its law-and-order platform for the 1993 election that would turn out to be “the worst federal electoral defeat in Canadian history” for Mulroney’s Tories, namely the Progressive Conservative Party:

“Now, taking notice of Mr. Chretien’s liking of anniversary dates and milestones, one recognizes that on April 22, 2003 when the RCMP announced termination of the Airbus Affair criminal investigation, the day happened to be the 10-year anniversary of the Liberal Party’s unveiling of its law-and-order platform for the 1993 election, an election that would turn out to be historic as the Tories under Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell would be reduced to only two seats and without official-party status – the worst federal electoral defeat in Canadian history. ¹⁵⁸”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, I mentioned “Mr. Chretien’s liking of anniversary dates and milestones”. I especially compared the above 10-year anniversary date to Chretien’s euphoric celebration, as Prime Minister, of the most significant and related 10-year anniversary in 2003, that of his October 25, 1993 election victory, at “the sacred Sikh Golden Temple in India on a day that happened to be Diwali”, as he held on to the country’s leadership to beyond the 10-year mark despite being challenged by his rival, incoming Liberal leader Paul Martin:

“On the date of the 10-year anniversary of his election to power, Saturday, October 25, 2003, Chretien celebrated by visiting the sacred Sikh Golden Temple in India on a day that happened to be Diwali – India’s equivalent of Christmas, basking in happiness among over 100,000 revellers and accompanied by natural resources minister Herb Dhaliwal, one of several Sikh Canadian Liberal MPs, while in Ottawa in the House of Commons a motion put forward by the Bloc Quebecois was to be voted on that Tuesday to force Chretien to step down as soon as Paul Martin became the Liberal leader in November; but Mr. Chretien was still planning to attend the Commonwealth summit in Nigeria in December, and he survived the motion, notifying new leader Paul Martin on November 18 that he would leave office on December 12 after returning from Africa – an unusually long time for a new Liberal leader to wait (for anything more than 10 days). ¹⁵⁵”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I further reasoned that the Chretien Liberals in government wanted to take a strong stand when it came to Mulroney’s “criminal activities”, because Chretien had previously been accused of being weak on law and order by the Reform Party that had siphoned away votes from the Tories formerly under Mulroney:

“Behind and beyond any symbolism of a 10-year law-and-order milestone regarding Brian Mulroney was likely a Liberal view of Mulroney – like a criminal who should be subjected to law and order, even if the Liberals did not openly say such. Back in early 1993, the Liberal Party under Jean Chretien was criticized as weak on crime, a reputation to do with Chretien’s stint as justice minister under Pierre Trudeau before the Mulroney era; in 1993 the new Reform Party which was going to siphon off much of the Tory votes in Western Canada, ran on a strong law-and-order platform, and so Chretien responded by putting forward a law-and-order platform to make him look respectable. ¹⁶¹”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

However, a difficulty for the RCMP criminal investigation to uncover the Airbus money trail could be that certain Swiss bank accounts identified as containing Airbus money for Mulroney and Frank Moores turned out not to have it, as I noted in a footnote on February 20, 2009:

“27. Several months before his filing at court of an affidavit alleging that Mulroney had asked him for Airbus money, Karlheinz Schreiber wrote a letter to Mulroney in May 2007 threatening to expose Mulroney for accepting Airbus-related money (i.e., in addition to the $300,000 from Schreiber) from Government Consultants International… Schreiber’s allegations have been partially corroborated by his former accountant, Swiss businessman Giorgio Pelossi, in the latter’s testimony in front of the parliamentary ethics committee, who stated that Schreiber opened Swiss bank accounts for Airbus commissions for Mulroney and Frank Moores although money was never transferred into these particular accounts…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In other words, the Airbus money trail could be craftier and more elaborate. Still, as pointed out in Part 2 of my current article, in its investigation the RCMP missed the fact that some $300,000 from one of Schreiber’s accounts in this Swiss Bank did reach Mulroney in cash envelopes; and, following the RCMP investigation’s closure, that money became the focus of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

Moreover, the persons involved, such as Mr. Mulroney’s close friend the late Frank Moores, almost always denied any role. In Moores’s case, despite his having received Airbus money from one of Schreiber’s Swiss bank accounts, his public denial was lifelong, contradicted by Schreiber only later – over two years after Moores’s death:

“From the first whiff of an Airbus controversy in 1988 until he died 17 years later, Frank Duff Moores and all of the lobbyists from his firm were adamant: Mr. Moores had nothing to do with Airbus and its sale of $1.8-billion worth of airplanes to Air Canada.

The denials came from everywhere and everyone, such as his third wife, Beth Moores: “He has frequently, in previous statements, said that he has never, ever had anything to do with Airbus, ever,” she told The Globe and Mail in 1995.

Mr. Moores’ partner at his lobby firm Government Consultants International used equally strong language in 1988 shortly after Air Canada announced its purchase. “We never received any mandate … to work for Airbus,” the late Gary Ouellet told the Toronto Star. “We have not lobbied Air Canada.”

However, a letter written by Mr. Moores and obtained during months of research by The Globe and Mail and CBC’s fifth estate, shows the opposite.

On Feb. 3, 1988, only two months before the board of directors at Air Canada agreed to make the largest civilian aircraft purchase in the country’s history, Mr. Moores wrote to the chairman of Airbus Industrie, the late Franz Josef Strauss, about the financing agreement for the sale.

“I would like to bring to your attention a situation that has developed regarding the sale of aircraft to Air Canada,” Mr. Moores wrote, explaining that Air Canada required a “deficiency guarantee” before proceeding with the sale.

…

In 1995, his firm made headlines when Mr. Moores, along with Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney, was accused in a letter to the Swiss government of conspiring to defraud Canadians on the Airbus sale.

The federal government later apologized to all three.

In recent interviews with The Globe and CBC, Mr. Schreiber has acknowledged paying Mr. Moores for his lobbying services in cash. In fact, Mr. Schreiber created a sub-account in Switzerland with a codename for Mr. Moores – “Frankfurt” – from which numerous cash withdrawals were made.”

(“Despite denials, Moores worked on Airbus file”, by Greg McArthur, November 14, 2007/April 26, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

It has been confirmed by investigative journalistic work that Moores received at least $1.3 million Airbus commissions from Schreiber, out of around $20 million the latter received from Airbus, here partially re-quoted as in Part 2 of my current review:

“… after Karlheinz Schreiber received around $20 million dollars of commissions from Airbus Industrie (an amount according to himself), Moores billed Schreiber at least a confirmed $1.3 million for his part of the commissions; the conventional wisdom is that Moores was a middle man for Schreiber in distributing millions of dollars of commissions to others in Canada…”

Nonetheless, I pointed out in my April 2009 post that, when it came to law and order, the Chretien Liberals’ more serious interest was in gun control; the criminal investigation of Mr. Mulroney was thus, in a sense, an also-ran for the Liberal government in a way befitting its overall objectives:

“But in hindsight, Chretien was only testing the political water: his real brand of law and order would go against the political rightwing, and to him it was not so much harder penalties on crime, which the Reform Party championed, but more stringent gun control, about which Chretien stated on April 22, 1993 that he wanted to wait and see. ¹⁶² Gun control subsequently became the most high-profile law-and-order legislative issue of the Liberal government throughout the 1990s, and on that agenda both the Reform Party and the Tories put forth fierce opposition. ¹⁶³

For the Liberals, why not deploy the same tack, as they did with gun control, on Brian Mulroney who had the reputation of a political “bully boy” and whose party had been so soundly trounced in the election? ¹⁶⁴”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In the subsequent several blog posts in 2009, starting with Part 5 dated May 27, I reviewed Mr. Chretien’s politics in government, especially the Chretien Liberals’ law-and-order politics.

I first highlighted RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster’s resignation early in the Chretien era, announced by Prime Minister Chretien, as being crucial due to Inkster’s long tenure under the Mulroney government since 1987 at the helm of the national law-enforcement agency that exhibited highly publicized political biases in favor of Mulroney, in particular in the “Richard Grise affair”:

“At the beginning in late 1993/early 1994, the politics of targeting Brian Mulroney would have been understandably tricky to the incoming Liberal government given that Mulroney had just served for nearly nine years as a majority-government leader; however the new government soon got a change of guard at the helm of the RCMP when in February 1994 Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced the resignation of RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster to take effect in June, while justice minister Allan Rock was busy with other Liberal priorities such as banning discrimination of homosexuals. ¹⁶⁹

Appointed by Mulroney in 1987, Commissioner Inkster largely enjoyed a trouble-free seven years leading the RCMP, with a big part of the blames for controversies the RCMP was entangled in – particularly during 1988-90 over possible political biases in the Richard Grise affair (about certain timing in corruption investigation near the 1988 election time) and in the Doug Small affair (investigation into a 1989 federal budget leak) – shouldered by his second-in-command, deputy commissioner Henry Jensen. ¹⁷⁰

But within the RCMP, Inkster was perceived by some as uninterested in political investigations or even yielding to high-level political pressures: when the Airbus Affair investigation broke into the news in late 1995 it was revealed that back in 1990 when Commissioner Inkster ordered an inquiry by Ontario Judge Rene Marin into RCMP handling of a corruption investigation on Tory Senator Michel Cogger, at the time part of the initial 1989 Airbus-Mulroney investigation had been hidden under the Cogger case for fear of Mulroney government interference. ¹⁷¹”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 5)”, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Besides his having been appointed by and served under Mulroney, I noticed that Inkster had never publicly endorsed gun control by the time when his resignation was announced in early 1994:

“On the other hand, by early 1994 Mr. Inkster never publicly expressed support for stricter gun control (as a quick survey of the press archives would reveal) despite passion for it from the new prime minister expressed during the election campaign; Allan Rock’s first public talk of tougher gun-control law started in April 1994 two months after announcement of Inkster’s resignation, and in contrast to Inkster the new RCMP commissioner Philip Murray in June on the day before taking over the job publicly expressed strong support for a full handgun ban suggested by Allan Rock. ¹⁷⁴”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, the incoming RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray publicly expressed “strong support for a full handgun ban” before taking over the job.

In my assessment, Inkster’s departure made easier not only the Chretien government’s gun control agenda but also the criminal investigation of Mulroney:

“It is also interesting to note that Commissioner Inkster’s intent to resign was announced in February with departure in June, much like Mr. Mulroney had done a year prior as prime minister. ¹⁷⁵

The point is that if the change of guard at the RCMP gave the Liberal gun-control drive crucial momentum, it likely also bolstered whatever Liberal plan there was to pursue Airbus Affair investigation against Mulroney.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

On the other hand, the cost of Inkster’s departure was high for Canada in an international context, as I remarked, that it came with the premature loss of the prestigious Interpol presidency that was in Canadian hands for only the second time in history:

“The price of Inkster’s resignation was high in early 1994: in November 1992 Mr. Inkster who had served from 1988 to 1991 as vice president for the Americas in the International Police Organization (Interpol), was elected as president of Interpol for a 4-year term – only the second Canadian to ever hold the top international police job. ¹⁷²”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, Inkster had been elected Interpol president in November 1992. As I later noted in a blog post dated October 26, 2012, another part of my later article from which I have quoted a July 6, 2012 post, after leaving the RCMP in June Inkster quit the Interpol presidency in September 1994, having served less than 2 years of a 4-year term:

“Inkster was hoping to keep his INTERPOL presidency, but later gave that up in September …”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 9) — when individual activism ranks at oblivion”, October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It remains unclear for what reasons Inkster also soon left the Interpol presidency, whether he was pressured to resign.

The only other Canadian president of the Interpol, William Léonard Higgitt from 1972 to 1976, retired from his RCMP Commissioner position in 1973 but continued to serve as Interpol President for another 3 years to the end of his full term. (“Former RCMP Commissioners”, March 31, 2018, Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and, “Former Presidents”, INTERPOL)

A media story at the time when Inkster’s RCMP departure was announced,  dated February 5, 1994, and quoted by me in October 2012, reported, “he could stay on as president of the international police organization Interpol”:

“During the period of my FPI committal and court disposition of charges, there was an important change at RCMP. On February 4, nearly a year after former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s February 24, 1993 announcement of retirement which then took place in June,  Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster’s retirement, to take effect in June (“Top Mountie to turn in his badge, says force needs periodic renewal”, by Stephen Bindman, February 5, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):

“Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced Friday that Inkster will step down after almost seven years as RCMP commissioner when Parliament adjourns for the summer, likely in June.

…

He could stay on as president of the international police organization Interpol – he was named in November 1992 to a four-year term – but will discuss it with his replacement as commissioner and the world body’s executive.

…

Among the low points, Inkster said, was the political storm he created on Parliament Hill in 1989 when he revealed more than a dozen MPs and senators were under RCMP investigation.

Another was last year’s suicide of Insp. Claude Savoie, who was under investigation for leaking information to a Montreal drug kingpin.

“We will never know why he chose to be his own judge and jury. It was a very sad point for all members. We all suffer and we all lose a little bit if one of our own gets into that sort of difficulty.””

”

(October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted in the above, in early February 1994 Inkster planned to discuss “with his replacement as commissioner and the world body’s executive” about the prospect of staying on as Interpol president.

As indicated above, in February 1994 when Prime Minister Chretien announced Commissioner Inkster’s retirement from the RCMP, I was under forced psychiatric committal at FPI – the British Columbia Forensic Psychiatric Institute – that suppressed my political activism.

But back in November 1992 when Inkster first ascended to the Interpol’s helm, there already was an intriguing facet that may have had relevance to my political activism:

“Even more intriguing is the fact that back on November 10, 1992 when Mr. Inkster was named president of Interpol, he got the job without competition: he became the only candidate when a second nominated candidate – from China – withdrew in favour of him. ¹⁷⁶

Now that’s worth pondering: with Mr. Mulroney’s diplomatic clout among western leaders, Mr. Inkster likely had been agreed upon by them; but a Chinese government non-compete gesture at a time when the June 4, 1989 violent military crackdown on Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests was still fresh in people’s minds? ¹⁷⁷ That had to be the result of some deal from Mr. Mulroney.

What is personally interesting is that the day when Norman Inkster was acclaimed president of Interpol happened to be the day when I first sent written press releases to the media – especially CBC-TV in Vancouver – criticizing Mulroney’s leadership in general and his conduct in the Charlottetown constitutional process, which had recently ended with the failure of the Charlottetown accord in a national referendum (an accord and failure previously discussed in the context of the role of David Cameron, husband of Stevie Cameron, in the Diane Wilhelmy affair).”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In short, as above, Inkster was “acclaimed” Interpol president when the only other candidate, representing China, withdrew in his favor; moreover, it took place on the same day – November 10, 1992 – when I happened to send out my first press releases to the media, criticising Prime Minister Mulroney’s leadership and conduct.

In relation to this history quoted above, in my blog post in May 2009 I reviewed the start of my political activism in November 1992 – in the context of relevant Canadian politics around that time, namely the transition from the era of Brian Mulroney’s Tories in power to that of Jean Chretien’s Liberals in government.

I quoted from one of my first press releases, sent out on the day when RCMP Commissioner Inkster became Interpol president, to demonstrate the matters of my pursue starting my activism on Canadian politics in November 1992:

“In one of the press releases on this date, November 10, 1992, I called for B.C. Tory MPs to support their caucus chair Stan Wilbee who had publicly demanded a leadership review, I stated that a cabinet restructuring proposed by Mr. Mulroney should not be the priority but rather the priority was Mulroney’s fitness as prime minister, and I demanded that constitutional affairs minister Joe Clark give a public account of the damages to national unity and to the economy inflicted by the Tory government’s constitutional misadventure. The quote below is from a copy of my old press release – disclosed to me in an October 1, 2003 RCMP personal-information disclosure: ¹⁷⁸

“Mr. Stan Wilbee, MP for Delta, B.C., has spoken out publicly, criticizing Mr. Mulroney’s leadership and requesting a province-by-province Tory leadership review. The B.C. Tory MPs should speak out now in support of Mr. Wilbee, reaffirm their confidence in him as the B.C. caucus chair, and defy Mr. Mulroney’s threats of retaliation by means of cabinet restructuring or by any other means. … the most pressing issue facing the country right now, that of Mr. Mulroney’s fitness as the prime minister. … Before taking up any new tasks, Mr. Joe Clark needs to give the people of Canada an adequate explanation for the recent Charlottetown constitutional fiasco and a satisfactory account of the full extent of damages the latest constitutional adventure of the Tory government has done to both national unity and the economy.”

”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The substance of the above excerpt from one of my first press releases dated November 10, 1992, can be summarized as the following two topics:

A) criticising Mulroney’s leadership as the prime minister, expressing support for British Columbia Member of Parliament Stan Wilbee’s call for a Tory party leadership review, and demanding other B.C. Tory MPs’ support for Wilbee; and,

B) criticising the recent Charlottetown constitutional reform “fiasco”, and demanding that Mr. Joe Clark – responsible for constitutional affairs as noted in Part 2 of my current review – give a satisfactory account for the damages caused by the Tory government’s latest constitutional adventure.

In my May 2009 post I also noted that, in addition to my first press releases coinciding with RCMP Commissioner Inkster’s being acclaimed Interpol president, three days later on November 13 Prime Minister Mulroney appointed Justice John C. Major to the Supreme Court of Canada; Justice Major had been a lawyer in the law firm headed by Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere, was a friend of Karlheinz Schreiber who had helped Mulroney defeat Joe Clark in 1983 to become Tory leader, and happened to have the same annual birthday as my father:

“Also note that Mulroney’s appointment of John C.  Major of Alberta – a lawyer in the law firm Bennett Jones Verchere headed by Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere and a friend of Karlheinz Schreiber – to the Supreme Court of Canada happened on November 13, 1992, i.e., amid the tension of Stan Wilbee’s call for a leadership review, and that back in 1983 Schreiber had been involved in political maneuvers to oust Joe Clark and bring in Mulroney as Tory leader (the topic has been discussed in previous Notes, with attention to the fact that Justice Major later took early retirement on Christmas Day 2005 ahead of his turning 75 on February 20, 2006 – a date when my late father would have turned 73).”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

By 2009 when I reviewed the above history, the installations of Mr. Inkster at the helm of the Interpol and Mr. Major at the Supreme Court of Canada back in November 1992 very much looked like crucial measures by Prime Minister Mulroney to protect his rule and his legacy.

Thus, in hindsight it wasn’t surprising that, despite my efforts communicating to and interacting with the media in November 1992 and afterwards, no changes happened directly as a result of my activism; but that might not matter as much, given the disastrous defeat the Tories soon suffered in the next election:

“History as it happened has been that Mulroney’s leadership never became an issue of debate within the ruling Progressive Conservative party, though a few short months later in February 1993 Mulroney announced his resignation to take place in June; no accounting of the party’s constitutional policy was ever done, or if it mattered, as in the coming election the party was nearly wiped out.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In 2009 I cited the example of interacting with BCTV after sending the earlier-quoted press release to the media venue, that my efforts brought to their attention the leadership politics going on in British Columbia within Mulroney’s party:

“As it happened, I also sent a copy of this press release to BCTV (then part of the CTV network, today part of the Global TV network). In the morning of the day of the B.C. Tory caucus meeting to discuss the fate of Stan Wilbee as caucus chair (November 17, 1992 as per press archives), who had drawn up a letter of resignation to hand in for his challenge of Mulroney, ¹⁷⁹ I phoned BCTV to follow up on my press release and told a news staff member about the caucus meeting in Ottawa, who replied that BCTV would send a camera crew there; later that day when I called again (likely in the afternoon) the same staff member said the camera was there right now; but when I called back the day after I sensed disappointment on the part of this BCTV news staff member, probably because it wasn’t as I had told him that the B.C. Tory MPs might turn against Mulroney’s leadership.

Regardless, I was disappointed that BCTV did not report on the caucus meeting it had camera footage on.  Brief press reports indicated that Stan Wilbee’s resignation was rejected by the caucus and days later Dr. Wilbee, a medical doctor and chair of the House of Commons subcommittee on health issues, also launched a parliamentary investigation on the HIV-tainted blood supply issue.^{180, 181}”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As recalled above, I was told by BCTV that it sent a TV crew to a B.C. Tory caucus meeting in Capital Ottawa after being alerted by me of its potential importance; the meeting outcome was encouraging but was not as great as I had suggested it might be, and the TV network never reported it.

The encouraging outcome from that B.C. Tory caucus meeting, which to me partially validated my active efforts, came in the caucus’s rejection of Wilbee’s offer to resign his caucus chair position as recalled above, and also in Dr. Wilbee’s being able to launch a new parliamentary project in his capacities as a medical doctor and the chair of the House of Commons subcommittee on health issues.

Wilbee had been requested to quit his B.C. caucus chair position by B.C. MP Kim Campbell, at the time Justice Minister; even though the caucus let him keep the chair position, as a compromise Wilbee then refrained from further criticising Mulroney’s leadership; however another B.C. Tory MP, Al Horning, took over the role of doing so:

“Immediately, Kim Campbell, MP for B.C. Vancouver Centre, requested Wilbee to resign his B.C. caucus chair position for the reason that Wilbee’s view on leadership did not represent other B.C. caucus members. ¹⁸³

But then the November 17 B.C. caucus meeting rejected Wilbee’s offer to resign as caucus chair; after that, Wilbee no longer called for a leadership review and would only state that Mulroney was unpopular in Western Canada but was better than leaders of the other parties: ¹⁸⁴

“He is unpopular in the West, but once you get into an election campaign, where people start to compare leaders, I think that he comes out far and away above the rest.”

Wilbee said the above on January 31, 1993 after a national caucus meeting in which all were read “the riot act” not to speculate on leadership, by Mulroney personally. ¹⁸⁵

But before that, in early January there was a cabinet shuffle and Joe Clark indeed kept his constitutional affairs job (and was given a new cabinet-committee position), and the press wondered why he was staying on a “nothing job”; Kim Campbell got the best “plums” to become defence minister and veterans affairs minister. ¹⁸⁶

Also before that on January 18, Al Horning, Tory MP for B.C. Okanagan Centre (Kelowna), who earlier had praised Mulroney (“still head and shoulders ahead of” other party leaders) in a way similar to what Wilbee now did, took over as the only Tory MP to publicly challenge Mulroney, saying Mulroney should step down and predicting so. ¹⁸⁷”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, another encouraging sign in late 1992-early 1993 that I viewed as partial validation of my active efforts was Joe Clark’s being kept at his Constitutional Affairs Minister position in a cabinet shuffle by Prime Minister Mulroney in January 1993 – when the Charlottetown Constitutional Accord had just been defeated in a national referendum on October 26, 1992 as mentioned in the context of the Diane Wilhelmy Affair in Part 2 of my current review.

The situation then persisted in January 1993 as more Tory MPs, not just in British Columbia, asked Mulroney to make his future leadership intention clear, though not openly opposing his staying as the leader:

“The discontent was spreading in January before it was gagged by Mulroney at month’s end, as a The Vancouver Sun article, “Minority dreaming of a Blue heaven after purge-a-Tory”, quoted Tory House leader Harvie Andre as stating on January 25 that there was a minority in the party and among the MPs who wanted Mulroney to step down: ¹⁸⁸

““There is no grassroots sense that the leader must go, but they all read polls too and certain people are undoubtedly worried about whether we can win or not,” Andre said in an interview Monday.

”However, I don’t think that’s anywhere near the majority, that’s a minority at this point.”

Andre adds that given Mulroney’s unpopularity and the government’s standing in the polls, the prime minister is no doubt contemplating his future.

”Goodness knows, he’d be inhuman if he weren’t thinking about it.””

The news article reported that a dozen Tory MPs during a caucus meeting over the weekend actively called for Mulroney to make his intention clear – though apparently in early 1993 as in late 1992 only one Tory MP (in each case from B.C.) openly challenged Mulroney’s staying as leader.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Mulroney continued to display the intent and the enthusiasm to lead and win another election; then in late February 1993, major changes suddenly happened – even though there is no clear evidence that my activism had direct effects on them – in the form of retirement/resignation announcements by Joe Clark on February 20 and then by Brian Mulroney on February 24:

“His warning to Tory MPs apparently worked, Mulroney became feisty and fiery during much of February, predicting a third-term majority under his leadership, calling it “triple crown” and taunting opposition leader Jean Chretien with it in the House of Commons. ¹⁸⁹

On February 20, just one day after Mulroney said he would seek re-nomination of MP candidacy in his riding, Mulroney’s long-time leadership rival Joe Clark, a former prime minister originally from Alberta, announced he would retire by the next election but in the meantime would continue with constitutional affairs – he had been hoping to negotiate a self-government accord for the Metis people. ¹⁹⁰

On February 24, Brian Mulroney announced his intent to step down in June after a new leader was chosen.

Stan Wilbee immediately resumed his criticism, stating Mulroney “has become a lightning rod for everything that’s bad”, and, “Sometimes you have to start with a clean sheet”; as well, Kim Campbell confirmed that she had been harbouring leadership ambition while Mulroney pondered his future: ¹⁹¹

“People have approached me and my staff offering support. My position is that there wasn’t a campaign until the prime minister made a decision to retire”.

”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, following Mulroney’s announcement of resignation to take effect in June, B.C. Tory MP Stan Wilbee immediately resumed his criticism of Mulroney’s leadership – in words even more critical and frank than before.

After Clark’s retirement announcement, something happened that I considered as another partial validation of my activism; the former prime minister and constitutional affairs minister, and his wife Maureen McTeer, soon became professors at my alma mater of graduate study, the University of California, Berkeley – a university known for its reputation of left-wing politics:

“Despite “attractive” private-sector job offers, and turning down Mulroney’s offer for him to become Canadian ambassador to the U.S., Mr. Clark (who was still an MP) and wife Maureen McTeer soon became professors at the University of California, Berkeley – my alma mater of graduate study as previously mentioned in the context of author Chalmers Johnson – with Mr. Clark at the same political science faculty Dr. Johnson had been in and Mrs. Clark joining the public health faculty; within a few short months an election-defeated Campbell would join Clark in the academic world, going to teach at Harvard University. ¹⁹⁹”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, later after losing the election – in October 1993 – to Jean Chretien, Kim Campbell also joined the academia, teaching at Harvard University.

I remarked in the above May 2009 post, that in the end Kim Campbell was “the biggest winner” as well as “the biggest loser” from the sudden major political changes, becoming the first female Canadian prime minister but then suffering a historically worst electoral loss, with even her own parliamentary seat swept away in a wave of advances by ethnic minorities in Canadian politics:

“Kim Campbell turned out to be the biggest winner – and the biggest loser – of the ambiguous, non-open pressure waiting on Mulroney’s decision, as she would be crowned Mulroney’s successor (i.e., without a lot of competition) and become the first female prime minister after having been the first woman as justice minister and as defence minister ¹⁹² – a real “triple crown” – but she would also suffer the worst electoral defeat in Canadian history at the hand of the Chretien Liberals.

Adding insult to injury was the fact that Campbell would lose her own MP seat, to Liberal Dr. Hedy Fry, former president of B.C. medical association and the first woman of color to be in the cabinet; the Vancouver area also elected Raymond Chan, the first Chinese-Canadian cabinet member, and Herb Dhaliwal, later the first (Sikh) Indo-Canadian cabinet minister and the one accompanying Chretien to the Sikh Golden Temple in India to celebrate their 10-year victory anniversary. ¹⁹³”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Succeeding Mulroney in June 1993, Campbell relied on many of the political figures who had helped Mulroney’s ascent to power, including Frank Moores and others with links to the scandals of the Mulroney era, such as Peter White of the “Richard Grise affair ”, for her election campaign:

“For the core of her campaign team Campbell used many of the controversial figures who had helped Mulroney win his 1983 leadership, persons such as Frank Moores, who as discussed in previous Notes had served on the Air Canada board and whose role in the 1988 Airbus purchase had been questioned by the media, Guy Charbonneau, Tory senator and a known central figure dealing with money in Mulroney’s political circle, David Angus, another Mulroney appointee on the Air Canada board who had also provided Tory party funds for Mulroney family’s expenses exposed during the 1987 “Guccigate” publicity, and Peter White, a Conrad Black associate who had had a hand in the Richard Grise affair as Mulroney’s principal secretary in 1989 – a scandal regarding possible RCMP political bias in favour of Mulroney at the time of the 1988 election. ¹⁹⁵ ”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Stan Wilbee, within the Tory party a leading critic of Mulroney’s leadership, also lost in the election; and he pinned the blame on Mulroney and on Campbell’s having “inherited” Mulroney’s old political associates, as I remarked in Part 7 of my 2009 article, dated July 23:

“But Wilbee’s willingness to take open stands opposite Mulroney’s wasn’t enough to save him later from the nationwide tide sweeping away the Tories during the 1993 election, when he would come in third in his B.C. Delta riding behind Reform party’s John Cummins and Liberal party’s Karen Morgan; Wilbee placed the blame for his and the Progressive Conservative party’s election losses at Mulroney, and at “Mulroney’s campaign team” Kim Campbell inherited: ²⁸²

“She started off well but one of her problems was she inherited Mulroney’s campaign team”.

”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 7)”, July 23, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

A reason that Campbell “inherited Mulroney’s campaign team” as pointed out by Wilbee in the above, was likely because – according to revelations by author Murray Dobbin in a 1993 book entitled, “The politics of Kim Campbell: from school trustee to Prime Minister” – Prime Minister Mulroney had secretly begun to cultivate Campbell as his successor, in an arrangement between them, since no later than early December 1992:

“According to author Murray Dobbin, no later than in early December 1992 Kim Campbell had actually made a ‘secret’ arrangement with Mulroney to succeed him, while Canadians were in the dark about whether Mulroney would leave: ¹⁹⁷

“When Brian Mulroney met in early December 1992 with his Quebec lieutenant Marcel Masse… Mulroney asked Masse to take on the task of chaperoning Campbell around Quebec and organizing a few private dinners to introduce her to key business people, journalists, artists and other opinion makers. Masse agreed. And Campbell’s silent run for the leadership was underway.”

“… at a time when Canadians were still wondering whether Brian Mulroney would really resign, the man himself was already preparing Campbell for the crown and offering her the entire palace entourage. Masse would not only organize a series of private dinners for Campbell, but he would bring with him to Campbell’s side the entire organizing team that had helped Mulroney win the leadership of the Tory party.”

”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

To me that was quite intriguing, i.e., the timing of early December 1992 when Mulroney began to cultivate Campbell as his successor could be a significant validation that my activism had some effects.

On November 30, i.e., the day before early December, I had faxed my press releases – with two dated November 10 and another dated November 20 – to Campbell’s MP constituency office in her Vancouver riding, in which I happened to be a resident; later that same day two RCMP officers, one of them introducing himself as Sergeant Brian Cotton, arrived at my apartment and the suppression of my political activism began:

“It turned out that in the morning of November 30 I had faxed several previous press releases – attached to a cover note – to the local constituency office of MP Kim Campbell in whose riding I was a resident, and in the afternoon two RCMP officers, one of whom introducing himself as Sgt. Brian Cotton, a detective from the UBC detachment, were in my city apartment to take me to UBC Hospital for a psychiatric assessment (and committal), citing something related to my prior dispute with my former employer UBC and the RCMP (a lawsuit by me had been mentioned at the start of the above-mentioned press release) as well as concern with my persistent communications with the CBC.

To the hospital, Sgt. Brian Cotton accused me of having “paranoid ideation”, and some UBC Hospital psychiatrists then determined my thinking as “delusional” and of “persecutory type”. But as everyone can read a copy of my fax received by Kim Campbell’s local MP office got into the hand of the RCMP on that same day – and not even by fax as there isn’t a second fax-mark line on this RCMP copy.

Police simply would not act this closely and quickly on a non-emergency mental-health case in apparent disregard for proper rules or conflict of interest: the officers were outside their normal jurisdiction area of UBC, the RCMP and UBC were defendants in a civil lawsuit by me over that prior dispute, and Sgt. Brian Cotton also rejected my response of going to the nearby Vancouver General Hospital for a ‘neutral’ assessment, citing pre-arrangement at UBC.

…

Within three weeks a mental-health review panel ordered my release. But in mid-January 1993 (days before Tory MP Al Horning came out saying Mulroney should step down), I was again under psychiatric committal – this time by Vancouver Police action – and again within a few weeks I was released by a review panel, in mid-February with Brian Mulroney still talking about winning a third majority.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As quoted earlier when first discussing my old press releases, many years later on October 1, 2003, the RCMP provided a copy in a personal-information disclosure to me; and as above, the RCMP copy showed that a copy of my fax received by Campbell’s MP office in Vancouver on November 30, 1992, went into the hands of the RCMP on that same day.

Also as told above, Sgt. Brian Cotton took me to the hospital of the University of British Columbia for a psychiatric assessment, where I was then committed, partly because of a prior dispute I had with the university involving the RCMP.

I had been a UBC faculty member. But Ms. Campbell had a deeper root there as a UBC graduate, law graduate and former faculty member, and by that time was the federal justice minister. (“The Right Honourable Kim Campbell: From Brock Hall to Parliament Hill”, by Veronika Bondarenko, January 19, 2015, The Ubyssey)

Upon reviewing the relevant history in the late 1992 and early 1993 – selectively quoted so far – that included the start of my political activism critical of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership, the ascent of then RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster to the Interpol presidency and a Chinese facet to his achieving it unopposed, the promotion of Justice John Major to the Supreme Court of Canada and his relationships to Karlheinz Schreiber and Bruce Verchere, the RCMP-led suppression of my political activism, and Prime Minister Mulroney’s sudden resignation less than three months later, I commented in regard to the RCMP’s and Commissioner Inkster’s possible political roles at the time:

“To refer here to this part of history of personal efforts to help bring down Mr. Mulroney is not to accuse then RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster of having-forged/forging deals with the devils, but to show that the RCMP played political roles – in my personal experience in particular.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

That brief period of history, in particular what went on behind the scenes in the suppression of my political activism, is of special relevance and importance to me, and more generally of significance as an integral part of Canadian history – especially relating to the departure of then Prime Minister Mulroney, and also to Canada’s leading role in international policing.

When Inkster was acclaimed Interpol president in November 1992, some in the media, also citing opinions within the RCMP, recalled historical controversies about the Interpol and its presidency, mainly their links to authoritarianism and corruption, here as I remarked in May 2009:

“Imagine what kind of clout in the international law-and-order arena the new Chretien government would lose with the departure of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, whose Interpol appointment had been praised by the RCMP as “a great honour for Canada” and for the RCMP, even if within the RCMP there were different opinions about the Interpol: while Inspector Claude Sweeney, head of Interpol’s Canadian branch, was enthusiastic about the benefit of computerized information hook-up in the plan, others pointed to examples of concern, such as in Venezuela where Interpol was expected to help track dissidents as criminals, or former Interpol drugs committee chairman Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader indicted in 1988 in the United States on narcotics charges, or former Interpol president Jolly Bugarin, crony of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, widely accused of a cover-up in the killing of Marcos opponent Benigno Aquino in 1983. ¹⁷³”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

It was “a great honour for Canada” and for the RCMP. However, from the viewpoints of those expressing reservations about the Interpol as above, later Inkster’s premature departure from its presidency in September 1994 could easily be shrugged off, or even explained as ‘better off’.

But the real truth matters, especially when it comes to about Canada’s history in international policing.

Interestingly, and in an ironic sense fortunately, history can sometime repeat and in a way more in the open such that the shrouded past may be forced to surface as well.

Practically an exact 24 years after ceding to Canada’s Norman Inkster without a contest, on November 9-10, 1016, a candidate of the People’s Republic of China, Vice Minister of Public Security Meng Hongwei, was elected Interpol president. (“China’s Meng Hongwei elected President of INTERPOL”, November 10, 2016, INTERPOL)

Mr. Meng Hongwei was the first Chinese person to become president of the International Criminal Police Organization, the second-largest international organization after the United Nations; also elected was Mr. Alexander Prokopchuk, a candidate of Russia, as vice president – at a time when American business tycoon Donald Trump had just been elected President of the United States:

“Donald Trump isn’t the only president-elect sparking controversy this week. The International Criminal Police Organization elected a former Chinese paramilitary police force deputy as its president, and many human rights observers are up in arms about it.

Interpol announced the election results for its new chief, China’s Vice Minister for Public Security Meng Hongwei, on Twitter on Thursday. Meng is the first Chinese official to take the helm of the organization. Hongwei’s career history, and his country’s questionable human rights and policing record, have already drawn criticisms from day one.

…

Before Meng became vice minister since 2004, he was deputy director of the armed police forces Beijing would send to quell unrest in Tibet, Xinjiang, and other unstable outskirts of China.

…

Interpol’s president is primarily a symbolic figurehead, but Meng can still drive the organization’s strategy and set guidance for its general assembly body. Interpol also has a secretary general; that job currently is held by Jürgen Stock, who chairs the organization’s executive committee. With 190 members, Interpol is the second-largest international organization after the U.N.

And just to round things out, Interpol also elected a Russian official, Maj. Gen. Alexander Prokopchuk, as its vice president on Thursday. Russia, like China, isn’t known for having a particularly fair and just police force. Prokopchuk has been with Russia’s Interior Ministry since 2003.”

(“China and Russia Take the Helm of Interpol”, by Robbie Gramer, November 10, 2016, Foreign Policy)

Understandably, as noted above, human rights observers were concerned, especially since Mr. Meng had served as a deputy director of China’s armed police forces responsible for suppressing unrests.

Moreover, Meng’s Chinese public security job placed Communist Party politics above other regards, and his government ministry was in charge of cracking down on political dissent, such as arresting the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo:

“The day-to-day operations of Interpol are run by the secretary general, Jurgen Stock, who is from Germany. From 2000 to 2014, Interpol’s secretary general was an American.

…

Mr. Meng is a top official in the world’s biggest internal security force, tasked with clamping down on dissent and maintaining stability in an authoritarian, one-party state. Mr. Meng’s ministry arrests and interrogates political dissidents like the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, rounds up suspected separatists in restive areas such as Xinjiang, and arrests people protesting against environmental pollution or official corruption.

Mr. Meng, who turns 63 this month, is deeply immersed in Communist Party politics, in contrast with most police officials in Western nations, who are expected to be apolitical on the job.

In his public statements, Mr. Meng has made it clear that he places the politics of the Communist Party above any other considerations, as would be expected of any senior Chinese official. Speaking in October 2014, Mr. Meng told police officers preparing to go to Syria to put “politics first, party organization first and ideological thinking first.””

(“Interpol Names Chinese Police Official as Its New President”, by Michael Forsythe, November 10, 2016, The New York Times)

As described above, most police officials in Western nations were “expected to be apolitical” on the job, but not Mr. Meng or “any senior Chinese official”.

However, as mentioned earlier, at the time of Mr. Inkster’s ascent to the Interpol presidency there had previously been questions in the Canadian media, in particular regarding the “Richard Grise affair”, about whether the RCMP – the federal police in a Western nation – had political biases in favor of then Prime Minister Mulroney.

In other words, in reality the Western police officials were not always “apolitical”.

In a more positive light, Meng’s election was expected to give international credibility to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive:

“Li Wei, head of the anti-terrorism centre at China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said: “As the head of Interpol, Meng Hongwei will deepen the fight against transnational crime.”

Since taking power in 2012, China’s President Xi Jinping has launched a sweeping crackdown on corruption, punishing more than a million officials. But critics say the anti-graft drive is merely a way for Xi to take down his political enemies.

China has worked through Interpol to bring back officials it says fled overseas and last year issued 100 “red notices”, a type of international arrest warrant.

It says about a third have been returned to China, but many western countries are wary of complying with extradition requests given China’s harsh treatment of prisoners, use of the death penalty for economic crimes and a lack of concrete evidence.

Most officials on the list had fled to the US or Canada, and China does not have extradition treaties with either country. But in a surprise move in September, Canada announced it would start negotiating a treaty.

Li said: “We see people who China has issued red notices for are still very active in Europe.” With Meng at the head of Interpol “there will be closer cooperation between countries in fighting crime,” he added.”

(“New Interpol head is Chinese former deputy head of paramilitary police force”, by Benjamin Haas, November 10, 2016, The Guardian)

As reported above, from 2013 to 2016 over a million Chinese officials had been punished in President Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, and in 2015 China had issued 100 “red notices”, a type of international warrant, through the Interpol.

Especially worth noting is that most of these corrupt Chinese officials wanted by the Interpol had fled to the U.S. or Canada, and it wasn’t until September 2016 – only two months before Meng’s ascent to the Interpol helm – that the Canadian government announced it would negotiate an extradition treaty with China.

Most significantly, Mr. Meng’s taking the helm at the Interpol highlighted the integration of Chinese policing with international policing, as well as China’s growing importance in that international community, with the 2017 Interpol general assembly to be held in Beijing:

““We currently face some of the most serious global public security challenges since World War II,” Mr. Meng said in a statement following his selection at an annual meeting of the group in Bali, Indonesia. “Interpol, guided by the best set of principles and mechanism to date, has made a significant contribution to promoting international police cooperation.”

Next year’s general assembly will be in Beijing.

…

Lu Kang, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters on Thursday that China had expressed its “heartfelt thanks” to Interpol member states for Mr. Meng’s election. “China will continue to support Interpol with all its strength and will continue to support Interpol’s work, to deepen cooperation with member states on cracking down on multinational crimes, and to build a good and safe environment for prosperity and development for every country of the world.””

(Michael Forsythe, November 10, 2016, The New York Times)

The future appeared bright for Mr. Meng at the Interpol, just as it had appeared for Mr. Inkster in November 1992.

Where history repeated was not so much in their elections but in what turned out to be their abnormally brief tenures.

Less than two years later in September-October 2018, Meng was detained in China for corruption and resigned his Interpol position:

“The head of Interpol, who vanished after taking a flight to Beijing, is being held and investigated for corruption, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security said in a statement Monday.

Meng Hongwei, who also was a vice minister of public security in China, has been accused by the Chinese government of accepting bribes and committing unspecified other crimes.

“(Meng) insisted on taking the wrong path and had only himself to blame (for his downfall),” the country’s top law enforcement official, Zhao Kezhi, was quoted as saying in the statement.

Authorities had previously remained tight-lipped about the whereabouts of Meng, following his sudden disappearance last month after he flew from France to China.

In an earlier statement released on Sunday, the Chinese government said Meng was “under investigation” by the National Supervisory Commission, the country’s top anti-corruption unit, but gave no further details on whether he was in custody or what the charges might be.

Concerns over Meng’s whereabouts were first raised by wife, Grace, who reported him missing to French authorities in the city of Lyon, where the couple live, last Thursday.

…

In a separate development, Interpol said it had received Meng’s resignation from the international police agency with “immediate effect” according to statement posted Sunday. It made no mention of the former president’s whereabouts or the Chinese investigation.”

(“Head of Interpol Meng Hongwei accused of corruption, Chinese government says”, by Ben Westcott and Steven Jiang, October 8, 2018, CNN)

In March 2019, the Chinese authorities announced that Meng would face criminal charges:

“Meng Hongwei, the former Chinese head of Interpol, will be prosecuted in his home country for allegedly taking bribes, China’s Communist Party says.

He has also been expelled from the party and stripped of all government positions, according to the party’s watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

…

Mr Meng is said to have abused his position for personal gain, misusing state funds to finance his family’s “extravagant lifestyle” and disregarding Communist Party principles.

These charges amount to “serious violation of law and discipline”, according to the CCDI, which said it had referred the case to state prosecutors.”

(“Meng Hongwei: China to prosecute former Interpol chief”, March 27, 2019, BBC News)

Recently in June, Meng pleaded guilty, in court, of taking over $2 million in bribes:

“Former Interpol President Meng Hongwei has pleaded guilty to accepting more than $2 million in bribes and expressed regret for his crime, China’s state-run newspaper People’s Daily reported Thursday.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of China’s Communist Party charged Hongwei with abusing his posts within the Communist Party between 2005 and 2017 to garner special benefits, promotions for his wife, and to collect bribes totaling more than 14 million yuan.

…

Before Meng was elected as Interpol’s president in 2016 — the first Chinese person to hold the post — he served as head of the China Coast Guard and as vice-minister of public security, a position he kept until his arrest.

…

As NPR’s Bill Chappell reported, “He’s now stripped of that role, which he had gained under Zhou Yongkang, the former security czar who is now serving life in prison on bribery charges, snared in President Xi’s anti-corruption campaign.””

(“Former Interpol President Pleads Guilty To Bribery In Chinese Court”, by Vannessa Romo, June 20, 2019, National Public Radio)

So, very ironically, the international police leader turned out to be corrupt himself; and some of the concerns expressed in the Canadian media about the Interpol when Inkster ascended to its helm in November 1992 has turned out to be still quite relevant 24 years later.

Or Meng’s downfall could also be due to political conflicts with the Chinese leadership, according to some Western critics:

““Meng’s arrest seems like a powerful demonstration of China’s commitment to rooting out corruption, even when it can cost them the directorship of an important international vehicle,” Dimitar Gueorguiev, who teaches Chinese governance at Syracuse University, told The Guardian.

But critics say the anti-corruption campaign is also used as cover for political purges intended to strengthen Xi’s grip on power. There are hints of a political element in Meng’s detention; when announcing the charges against Meng, Chinese authorities also stressed the need for “absolute loyal political character.” Meng is now being held in a custody system notorious for torture, abuse, and denial of access to lawyers or a fair trial. It is certainly normal for any country to prosecute government officials for corruption; it is not normal to detain them without notice or charge, then thrust them into a system without fair representation or transparency.”

(“Can the Chinese Be Trusted to Lead Global Institutions?”, by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, October 11, 2018, The Atlantic)

Political power conflicts leading to a powerful figure’s downfall can be common in any country. It is also an important facet in my current review about the departure of Inkster from the RCMP and subsequent early departure from the Interpol, that is, soon after formerly Mulroney’s Tory party was trounced in an election and Liberal leader Chretien became the prime minister.

Mr. Meng served only weeks, if not only days, longer than Mr. Inkster at the top of the Interpol, stepping down in October compared to Inkster in September – ahead of the November mark of two full years in both cases.

In any case, without making light of the harsher punishments in law and order routinely handed down by the Chinese authorities compared to punishments by the justice system in a Western democracy, or of the obvious perception of more rampant corruption among Chinese officials than among their Western counterparts, about 24 years earlier Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had been involved in ethically suspect, potentially corrupt and possibly criminal activities, and my political activism criticising his leadership was suppressed forcibly by oppressive means.

Yet, reviewing the Canadian press archives I have barely come across open comments relating Mr. Inkster’s departure to Mr. Mulroney’s, whether back around that earlier time, afterwards, or even during the times of the Airbus Affair and Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

So unsurprisingly, my activism was coercively cast aside, rather easily with the involvements of the RCMP, and the damaging consequences of the suppression and oppression were then ignored.

But Inkster and Meng have not been alone, as Meng Hongwei has not been the only Interpol president officially caught and prosecuted for corruption.

Jackie Selebi, then South African police commissioner and former leading anti-apartheid activist, served at the Interpol’s helm for a little over three years of his 4-year term that began in 2004, was officially arrested and prosecuted in South Africa for “corruption, fraud, racketeering”, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison; related health problems led to Selebi’s death in January 2015 at the age of 64:

“The long saga of trials, prison and parole has ended for disgraced former police chief Jackie Selebi, who died after a long illness on Friday morning.

Selebi would have turned 65 on 7 March.

…

The former head of Interpol started serving a 15-year jail sentence in 2011, after being found guilty of corruption in 2010.

He was released on medical parole from Pretoria Central Prison after serving less than a year of his sentence.

…

In the apartheid-era 1980s, he served in Budapest, Hungary, as a representative of the World Federation of Democratic Youth.

In 1987, he was elected head of the ANC Youth League and was a member of the party’s national executive committee.

…

After the first democratic elections in 1994, he was elected to Parliament.

His stature grew further after he left, in 1995, to serve as the South African permanent representative at the United Nations in Geneva.

Three years later, he was presented with the International Service for Human Rights Award for his chairing of the 54th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, and for the way he presided over a 1997 diplomatic conference on anti-personnel mines in Oslo.

In 1999, Selebi returned to South Africa and took up the post of foreign affairs director-general.

…

It is believed to be his strong performance in this department that prompted former president Thabo Mbeki to ask him to take over the role of police commissioner, despite his having no background in law enforcement.

He stepped into the post in 2000. Two years later, he was made vice president of Interpol’s African region. In 2004, he was elected president of Interpol.

His fall from grace came swiftly. On 10 September 2007, the National Prosecuting Authority issued a warrant of arrest for Selebi for corruption, fraud, racketeering, and defeating the ends if justice.

Within months, Mbeki placed him on an “extended leave of absence”, essentially a suspension, and he resigned his Interpol position.

…

In 2007, Selebi was criticised for responding to concern about South Africa’s rising crime rate with: “What’s all the fuss about crime?”

But it was his friendship with convicted drug dealer Glenn Agliotti that brought about his downfall. In a three-month trial in mid-2010, nearly two years after charges were first laid against him, Selebi was found guilty of corruption and having received money from Agliotti.

…

Ahead of his trial, Selebi told journalists that claims he was corrupt were “garbage, total and unadulterated garbage”.

He famously remarked of Agliotti that “he is my friend, finish and klaar”.

Agliotti testified during the trial that he had handed him envelopes stuffed with cash and bought handbags for Selebi’s wife.”

(“Jackie Selebi: A spectacular fall from grace”, January 23, 2015, News24)

As told above, Mr. Selebi took cash in envelopes from a convicted drug dealer, Glenn Agliotti whom he called a “friend” – in a manner reminiscent of Mr. Mulroney’s taking cash in envelopes from Karlheinz Schreiber who was later convicted of fraud in Germany.

The trial of Jackie Selebi started in October 2009, and the guilty verdict was delivered at the beginning of July 2010. (“Ousted South African police chief’s corruption trial begins”, by David Smith, October 5, 2009, and, “Former South Africa police chief convicted of taking bribes”, by David Smith, July 2, 2010, The Guardian)

The time scheduling made that South African justice process overlap with, but run somewhat behind, the Canadian public inquiry on the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair: as in Part 2 of my current article, that inquiry’s hearings had taken place by mid-June 2009 when they were reviewed in the press by Mulroney’s former chief of staff Norman Spector, and Justice Jeffrey Oliphant’s report was published in May 2010.

Cash given Selebi by Agliotti included an amount for an Interpol dinner related to Selebi’s election to its presidency, and was handed over at a meeting of the two – much like between Mulroney and Schreiber:

“Another way in which Selebi allegedly gained financially was when he was up for the presidency of Interpol. He was to attend an Interpol dinner in France, to rally votes, in 2004.

Selebi needed money and “I was happy to sponsor this dinner,” said Agliotti. “We worked out a figure of R30 000 and I handed it over in cash at Europa coffee shop in Sandton.” Selebi was soon after elected as head of Interpol.”

(“Agliotti: ‘I paid Selebi R1-million’”, by Adriaan Basson and Ilham Rawoot, October 6, 2009, Mail & Guardian)

Through drug dealer Glenn Agliotti as the intermediary, Jackie Selebi also received bribes from South African mining tycoon Brett Kebble:

“Agliotti told the court that his payments to Selebi started with small amounts in envelopes and escalated to large amounts being “packed” into thick envelopes and collected by Selebi from his former fiancée, Dianne Muller’s, Midrand office.

…

When slain mining magnate Brett Kebble and his business partners wanted to meet Selebi, Agliotti was hesitant to expose his source to them.

“I didn’t want them to have easy access to the accused because then they would no longer need me or my services.”

Agliotti also explained the racket allegedly set up to pay Selebi. He bought a shelf company, called Spring Lights 6, from Muller’s father, Martin Flint, and used it to pocket the payments from the Kebble companies, mainly JCI and CMMS.

Agliotti also testified how he convinced the Kebbles to replace their head of security, Paul Stemmet, with Clint Nassif, another key state witness, who was convicted of drug dealing in 2007.

Agliotti estimates that the Kebbles deposited a total of R26-million to Spring Lights 6, of which he used R2-million as cash pay-outs.”

(Adriaan Basson and Ilham Rawoot, October 6, 2009, Mail & Guardian)

The tales, told by news stories reviewed above, of the falls from grace of onetime Interpol presidents Meng Hongwei and Jackie Selebi showed that corruption at the helm of international policing was by no means isolated. They also served to demonstrate that the shrouded Canadian past involving Mulroney, Schreiber and Inkster had most likely not been accidental, either.

But the sobering reality has been that, despite their abnormally short stints at the Interpol’s helm, the times of Mr. Inkster, Mr. Selebi and Mr. Meng were not the worst for the Interpol in its nearly century-long history.

Established in 1923, the international criminal police organization was a part of the German Nazi regime for a number of years during the 1930s and 1940s, beginning in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria:

“The International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL, helps police departments around the world communicate with each other. It was established in 1923 at a meeting of the International Police Congress.

And, during World War II, it was a part of the Nazi war machine.

During the Anschluss of 1938, when Germany effectively conquered Austria, all Austrian police and military forces were absorbed by the Nazi party–and Interpol, which was headquartered in Vienna, came right along. The United States, encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover (who was in charge of the FBI at that time), joined Interpol in 1938–two weeks after the Nazis installed Otto Steinhäusl, an SS officer, as Interpol’s president.

Although Hitler promised to maintain the “strictly nonpolitical character” of Interpol’s mission statement, it was effectively absorbed as an arm of the Nazi regime–with Nazi leaders, Nazi money, and Nazi priorities. In fact, its list of presidents during that era includes prominent Nazis such as Otto Steinhäusl, Arthur Nebe, and the infamous Reinhard Heydrich–the latter of whom was one of the architects of the Holocaust.”

(“When the Nazis Ran Interpol”, by Jewniverse, May 17, 2012, Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

In particular as above, one of the Nazi-era presidents of the Interpol was Reinhard Heydrich, “one of the architects of the Holocaust”.

Also as above, encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI, i.e., the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States joined Interpol in 1938 soon after Nazi Germany had conquered Austria and Otto Steinhäusl, a Nazi member, had been installed as Interpol’s president.

In March 1938 to install Steinhäusl, then head of the Vienna Police and a tuberculosis sufferer, at the Interpol, at the time called the International Criminal Police Commission, or ICPC,  the German Nazis demanded the resignation of the sitting president Michael Skubl and then imprisoned him:

“On March 12, 1938, German troops invaded Austria. At noon that day, the President of the ICPC, Michael Skubl, was called to the building of the Austrian federal chancellery where he was told that Himmler demanded his resignation. Skubl was arrested and imprisoned until he was freed by Allied Forces in 1945 …With the annexation of Austria, nothing would prevent the Nazis from taking full control of the ICPC. By implication of the appointment procedure of the ICPC presidency decided upon in London, the Nazi-approved President of the police at Vienna, Otto Steinhäusl, became the new ICPC President in April 1938. Not only was Steinhäusl’s loyalty to Nazi Germany secure, the Germans also reckoned he would be but an interim figure, as he was known to suffer from tuberculosis … The first meeting under Steinhäusl’s Presidency, in Bucharest in 1938, produced only one unanimous decision: that the next meeting was to be held in Berlin. …”

(“The Logic of Nazification: The Case of the International Criminal Police Commission (‘Interpol’)”, by Mathieu Deflem, Volume 43, Number 1, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Steinhäusl died of tuberculosis in June 1940. By no later than August of that year Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the German Security Police, became the ‘elected’ president of the Interpol through manipulated vote counting, and one of Heydrich’s first presidential decisions was to move the Interpol headquarters to the German capital of Berlin:

“… In June 1940, the FBI received an ICPC circular letter with the notice that Reinhard Heydrich, the Chief of the German Security Police, had accepted the presidency of the Commission …

…

Following the death of Steinhäusl in June 1940, Secretary General Dressler sent a report to all ICPC members which specified that he and other police, including Nazi officials Nebe and Zindel, had decided “to request the Chief of the German Security Police” to accept the Presidency of the ICPC …. Reportedly, twenty-seven police officials representing 15 states consented with the suggestion … Because this was less than two-thirds of the total ICPC membership, the countries that could not be addressed were not counted and those that had abstained were considered as not voting against the motion, so that, the Nazi-controlled ICPC leadership reasoned, the necessary majority was reached. In a circular letter of August 24, 1940, Reinhard Heydrich declared–in a manner all too characteristically familiar of Nazi officialdom–that he had been informed that his candidacy as ICPC Presidency had “passed unanimously.” Heydrich continued that he would “lead the Commission into a new and successful future” and that the ICPC headquarters would “from now on be located in Berlin” …”

(“The Logic of Nazification: The Case of the International Criminal Police Commission (‘Interpol’)”, by Mathieu Deflem, Volume 43, Number 1, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Back in 1938 not long after the annexation of Austria, the Nazis launched a campaign of mass violence against Jews in Germany and Austria; as a top Nazi security leader, Heydrich was responsible for its start in a widespread event known as “Kristallnacht”, or Crystal Night, a precursor to the Holocaust, on the night of November 9-10, destroying Jewish buildings and businesses:

“At 1:20 a.m. on Nov. 10, 1938, Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal Nazi security boss, sent an urgent telegram to German police nationwide.

The subject was: “Measures against Jews tonight.”

“Places of business and apartments belonging to Jews may be destroyed but not looted,” he wrote. “Non-Jewish businesses are [to be] completely protected against damage … the demonstrations are not to be prevented by the Police.”

“As many Jews in all districts — especially the rich — as can be accommodated in existing prisons are to be arrested,” Heydrich added.

“For the time being only healthy male Jews, who are not too old, are to be detained,” he instructed. “After the detentions have been carried out the appropriate concentration camps are to be contacted immediately for the prompt accommodation of the Jews in the camps.”

These were the official Nazi orders for the wave of savage anti-Semitic attacks that became known as Kristallnacht — Crystal Night, the night of the shattered glass. It was so called because broken glass littered the streets of many German and Austrian cities. The attacks are widely seen as a violent turning point in what would become the Holocaust.

It was a massive upheaval across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia that killed scores of Jews and destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses. In total, 267 synagogues were destroyed. Torahs were burned. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated.

Houses were ransacked, often by neighbors and acquaintances of the victims.”

(“Kristallnacht: The night Nazis killed Jews and destroyed synagogues 80 years before Pittsburgh”, by Michael E. Ruane, October 30, 2018, Washington Post)

As mentioned above, Kristallnacht also took place in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. That region had been annexed by Nazi Germany in September. (“Sept. 30, 1938 | Hitler Granted the Sudentenland by Britain, France and Italy”, by The Learning Network, September 30, 2011, The New York Times)

In light of this history of Nazi anti-Jewish violence, it is worth noting that, very ironically at the Interpol’s helm, both the acclamation of Norman Inkster in 1992 and the election of Meng Hongwei 24 years later fell on an anniversary of Kristallnacht.

In general, a new Interpol president was elected during an annual general assembly, the time of which varied in the later part of the year, such as in October when Jackie Selebi was chosen in 2004. (“New INTERPOL President chosen by General Assembly”, October 8, 2004, INTERPOL)

After Kristallnacht and following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, at Heydrich’s order Nazi death squads were formed and began physically killing Jews and Communist party officials, resulting in the deaths of over a million Jews in two years:

“The Nazi genocide and ethnic cleansing efforts did not begin as a specific plan to gas Jews and others in concentration camps, but rather evolved over time, beginning with systematic persecution aimed in part at encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany to other countries. It grew from spontaneous murders to planned massacres of Jewish communities, to the establishment of an industrial apparatus for the efficient, wholesale slaughter of a people.

…

Kristallnacht marked the transition of the Nazi policy vis-a-vis Jews from social ostracism, abrogation of legal rights and economic boycotts, to organized physical violence including murder. As such, some consider the November ‘38 pogrom as marking the actual beginning of the Holocaust – the date when anti-Jewish persecution in Germany began moving toward genocide.

Mass killings of Jews became commonplace following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Death squads called Einsatzgruppen, formed at the order of Reinhard Heydrich, director of the Reich Main Security Office at the time, were tasked with murdering Jewish civilians and Communist Party officials with the help of local citizens. Historians estimate that between June 1941 and May 1943, these roaming death squads killed over 1 million Jews.”

(“When Did the Holocaust Begin? A Genesis of Genocide”, February 17, 2014, Haaretz)

As above, Heydrich was also the director of the Reich Main Security Office.

Then in January 1942, Heydrich led the start of planning for the “Final Solution”, that is, the extermination of Jews in Europe, by convening the Wannsee Conference:

“Industrial-scale murder of Jews, known as the Final Solution, was approved by the senior Nazi leadership on January 20, 1942 at the Wannsee Conference, held just outside Berlin. At the meeting, called by Heydrich, he presented the plan to transport Jews from Eastern and Western Europe to extermination camps located in Poland.”

(February 17, 2014, Haaretz)

More accurately, the Wannsee Conference plan called for the estimated 11 million Jews in Europe to be deported to labor camps in “the East” where most would work till their deaths, and the “possible final remnant” would be “treated accordingly” so that any future “Jewish reconstruction” could not happen. The following are two excerpts from a “top secret” Nazi document, the Wannsee Protocol, produced by that conference.

Prior to introducing the “final solution”, the Wannsee Conference document reviewed past “accelerated emigration” of Jews, enforced under Heydrich’s authority since January 1939:

“By order of the Reich Marshal a Reich Central Office for Jewish emigration was set up in January 1939 and the Chief of the Security Police and SD was entrusted with the management. …

…

The aim of all this being that of clearing the German Lebensraum of Jews in a legal way.

All the Offices realized the drawbacks of such enforced accelerated emigration. For the time being they had, however, tolerated it on account of the lack of other possible solutions of the problem.

…

The Jews themselves, or rather their Jewish political organizations financed the emigration. In order to avoid the possibility of the impoverished Jews staying behind, action was taken to make the wealthy Jews finance the evacuation of the needy Jews, this was arranged by imposing a suitable tax, i.e. an emigration tax which was used for the financial arrangements in connection with the emigration of poor Jews, and was worked according to a ladder system.”

(“The Wannsee Protocol (January 20, 1942)”, German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute)

As described above, the Nazi German government had taxed the Jews to obtain the funds to send them abroad on a large scale, regardless of their being wealthy or poor.

The next step, according to the Wannsee Protocol, would be the “final solution”:

“Such activities are, however, to be considered as provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.

Approx. 11,000,000 Jews will be involved in this final solution of the European problem…

…

Under proper guidance the Jews are now to be allocated for labor to the East in the course of the final solution. Able-bodied Jews will be taken in large labor columns to these districts for work on roads, separated according to sexes, in the course of which action a great part will undoubtedly be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, as it must undoubtedly consist of the toughest, have to be treated accordingly, as it is the product of natural selection, and would, if liberated, act as a bud cell of a Jewish reconstruction (see historical experience).

In the course of the practical execution of this final settlement of the problem, Europe will be cleaned up from the West to the East. Germany proper, including the protectorate Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first because of reasons of housing and other social-political necessities.

The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, into so-called transit-ghettos from which they will be taken to the East.

SS-Obergruppenfuehrer HEYDRICH went on to say that an important provision for the evacuation as such is the exact definition of the group of persons concerned in the matter.

It is intended not to evacuate Jews of more than 65 years of age but to send them to an old-age-ghetto – Theresienstadt is being considered for this purpose.

…

Through such expedient solution the numerous interventions will be eliminated with one blow.

…”

(German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute)

As shown in the above Wannsee Protocol of January 20, 1942, and earlier in his telegram order to German police nationwide for Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938, at each stage of escalation against the European Jews Reinhard Heydrich not only supervised the initiation and implementation of the Nazi anti-Jewish measures, but methodically engaged in the specifics of their planning and execution.

In Heydrich’s vision, which he had advocated through his writings in the mid-1930s, the cleansing would not be confined to the Jews alone but would also include those racially, socially, politically or intellectually influenced by the Jews:

“The enemies themselves were “eternally the same”: “the Jew, the Freemason, and the politically-oriented cleric.” The “invisible,” submerged, camouflaged ideological wellsprings of these “enemies” lay in the “infectious residue” of “Jewish, liberal and Freemasonic spirit,” modes of thinking (democracy, communism, Christian and liberal individualism) that were outgrowths of allegedly inherited racial characteristics. Only the complete destruction of the “biological sources” of such thinking would eliminate the danger presented by such influences.

Ultimately, “invisible” Jewish opponents were the Jewish people themselves—as the Nazis defined them—and those who “thought like Jews”: Communists, liberals, democrats, champions of minority rights, Freemasons, Christian clerics who opposed the regime, Soviet communists, and the US and British leadership classes who opposed the “natural” expansion of Nazi Germany. To be absolutely safe, the Nazis had to destroy the members of the so-called Jewish race, whose genetic makeup created the basis for such thinking, as well as the Slavic and Asiatic leadership classes, whose heredity incorporated a propensity to follow that Jewish leadership.

Heydrich developed some of these themes in his writings of the mid-1930s and used them to advocate Security Police and SD leadership in “solving the Jewish Question.” …”

(“Reinhard Heydrich: In Depth”, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Prior to the Wannsee Conference, in late 1941 Reinhard Heydrich had been given the additional responsibility of overseeing the Nazi rule in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, then referred to as “the protectorate Bohemia and Moravia” as in the Wannsee Protocol quoted earlier, and treated like a part of the German proper to be of top priority in the cleansing of Jews.

It began on September 27, 1941, when Heydrich became “Reichsprotektor” of Bohemia and Moravia, with the objectives of eliminating local resistance to Nazi German occupation, increasing arms production for the Nazi war operations, and planning for the eventual “Germanization” of Czechoslovakia:

“Exactly 70 years ago, on 27 September 1941, Reinhard Heydrich came to Prague on Hitler’s orders to take up the position of Reichsprotektor. He was 37 years old. At a gathering of Nazi officials several days before his arrival in Prague, he clearly expressed how he wanted to handle the population of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A “final solution” awaited Jews, Roma and others in the death camps, while the Slavs were to be either murdered or Germanized and moved as far east as possible. “The Bohemian-Moravian area must never be left in such a state that the Czechs might be able to claim it as theirs… This space must be German once and for all so the Czech will have no claim to it in the end,” Heydrich said in that speech.

Reinhard Heydrich was one of the direct co-authors of the Holocaust – both of the idea of murdering homosexuals, Jewish people, mentally or physically disabled people, Romani people and others, as well as of the methods for pursuing genocide – death camps, Germanization, and racial/ethnic pogroms. The tragic fate of the Czech and Moravian Jews and Roma began under his rule.

…

Heydrich was sent to Prague for both military-economic and political reasons. After a significant rise in resistance activity and sabotage in 1941, Konstantin von Neurath, then-Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, was sent on medical leave “at his own request” by Hitler. The ambitious SS General Heydrich was sent to Prague to replace him. At the end of July 1941, Heydrich was entrusted with preparing “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.

The other reasons were economic. In addition to the Ruhr district, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia had become an important center of the German arms industry during the second year of the war. At the Škoda factories in Plzeň and the Brno-based Zbrojovce armament factory, the Germans had access to some of the highest-performing metalworking shops for arms manufacturing in the world. The Nazis also frequently transferred production from the west of Germany to the Protectorate. One-third of German tanks and 40 % of their light artillery were being produced there at the time.

…

Heydrich’s short-term aim was the liquidation of the domestic resistance for the purpose of “pacifying” the situation in the Protectorate. On the day after his appointment, he announced a state of emergency and immediately took Czechoslovak Prime Minister Alois Eliáš into custody (who was sentenced to death in October for espionage and treason and executed on 19 June 1942). During this period of martial law (the second announced in the Protectorate; the first was announced in June 1939), representatives of the illegal leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the National Defense (Obrany národa), and the Sokol organization were executed between 28 September 1941 and 20 January 1942.

Heydrich gave a speech on solving the “Czech problem” at Černín Palace in Prague on 2 October 1941 that listed the following: deportation to the east, Germanization, and the physical liquidation of all who resisted. In the interim, the majority of the Czech population should be maximally exploited for the war effort.”

(“70th anniversary of Reichsprotektor Heydrich’s rule over Bohemia and Moravia”, September 27, 2011, Romea.cz)

As told above, prior to arriving in Czechoslovakia, “at the end of July 1941” Heydrich had already been “entrusted with” planning for the Final Solution for European Jews; and in Heydrich’s vision of “Germanization”, the eventual fate awaiting other non-Germans in Czechoslovakia would not be that much better than the Jews.

Immediately upon arrival, arresting Czechoslovakian Prime Minister Alois Eliáš and sentencing him to death were an integral part of Heydrich’s crackdown on resistance; Eliáš had had secret involvements in the resistance movement – on one occasion even personally offering poisonous sandwiches to some pro-Nazi journalists, resulting in the death of the most prominent of them:

“Since the first days of occupation a home resistance movement began to be formed. Unfortunately, expectations of some members of the movement concerning their activities were rather naive. Germans were quite different opponent than the Austrian authorities in the period of the First World War. Lots of resistance fighters paid dearly for their experience and lost their lives. It is surprising that the information on the Eliášs involvement in the resistance movement did not leak right in the very beginning. He became a member of so-called Council of Seniors of a military resistance movement group “Defence of the Nation”. The staff of this organization had its seat in the premises of the Presidium of Ministerial Council which was similar institution like the Office of the Government nowadays. The Prime Minister also maintained radio connection with newly formed exile government in London and was trying to follow their instruction. However, it was not always possible as the exile government had rather distorted notion on the everyday life in the protectorate and its policy.

…

At that time Eliáš was also involved in a significant action of the resistance movement – the removal of activist journalist. These collaborationists were received by Eliáš and during the audience they were offered poisonous sandwiches. The most prominent journalist, editor of “České slovo” daily, eventually died of the poisoning. Thus the Czech collaborationist journalism was got rid of one of the most prominent representatives.

The turn of the situation was the removal of Konstantin Neurath from the position of the Reich Protector. It was Reinhard Heidrich who was appointed to this position and he was decided to make short work with the Czech resistance movement. In the framework of measures taken, also Prime Minister Eliáš was arrested. After that, President Hácha formally dismissed him from the position of the prime minister. … Several days later a speedily arranged lawsuit was held and Eliáš was sentenced to death. The entire lawsuit was trumped-up as it had been decided before about the punishment.”

(“Alois Eliáš (29.9.1890 – 19.6.1942)”, September 29, 2010, Government Information Centre, Government of the Czech Republic)

As described above, when Heydrich replaced Konstantin Neurath as the Reich Protector of Czechoslovakia, the Nazi crackdown on local resistance was immediately intensified and hardened.

Despite the goal of Germanization, in order to increase arms production in Czechoslovakia to support Nazi Germany’s ongoing wars Heydrich adopted a pacification approach toward the working population, and soon achieved remarkable results:

“Heydrich as acting Reich Protector then courted Czech industrial workers and farmers, whose productive capacity was necessary to the German war effort, with wages and benefits packages equivalent to those of their German counterparts. The result of his policies was a 73% reduction in acts of sabotage within six months. By spring of 1942, the German authorities could boast of a pacification of the Protectorate. Some have speculated that Heydrich aimed next to assume a newly created top civilian position in occupied Northern France and Belgium.”

(Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

As noted above, Heydrich may have also planned to expand his pacification rule to Northern France and Belgium.

As quoted earlier, at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 – a few short months after taking over the Nazi rule in Czechoslovakia – Heydrich mentioned a particular “old-age-ghetto”, “Theresienstadt”, for the Jews.

The Theresienstadt ghetto was established on November 24, 1941, by Heydrich in Czechoslovakia:

“Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS (the Nazi paramilitary corps), established the camp at Theresienstadt on November 24, 1941. It soon became the home of Jews from Prague and other parts of German-occupied Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). In 1942 the Nazis expelled 7,000 Czechs who lived in Terezín and isolated the Jewish community in a closed environment. The Nazis intended the camp to house elderly, privileged, and famous Jews from Germany, Austria, the Czech lands, and western Europe. As the home—and the place of death—of some of the most prominent Czech, Austrian, and German artists, writers, scientists, jurists, diplomats, musicians, and scholars, Theresienstadt had a rich cultural life.

Some 15,000 children passed through Theresienstadt, and the community ensured that their education continued with a rigorous daily routine of classes, athletic activities, and art. They painted pictures and wrote poetry. By war’s end, however, no more than 1,100 (according to some estimates, no more than 150) of these children survived.

Conditions were harsh. At times, over 50,000 Jews lived in the space once inhabited by 7,000 Czechs. Food was scarce. In 1942, 15,891 people died, more than half the average daily population of Theresienstadt at the time.”

(“Theresienstadt: Concentration Camp, Czech Republic”, by Michael Berenbaum, Encyclopaedia Britannica)

As described above, in addition to the old-age Jews incarcerated there, including “some of the most prominent Czech, Austrian, and German artists, writers, scientists, jurists, diplomats, musicians, and scholars,”, around 15,000 Jewish children passed through Theresienstadt during its time and were allowed to continue their education and cultural activities; however, in the end no more than 1,100, or maybe no more than 150, of these children survived the Nazi concentration camps.

But any broader Nazi machination, on the “Final Solution” or on the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”, did not fully materialize while under Heydrich’s supervision, as he would soon die in the Czechoslovakain capital Prague in June 1942, after an assassination effort by the Czechoslovakian resistance.

Almost from the start of his arrival in Prague, the Czechoslovakian resistance to Nazi German occupation planned to assassinate Heydrich.

The operation, code-named Operation Anthropoid, was initiated by the Czechoslovak government in exile in Britain and supported by the British Special Operations Executive; a team of resistance agents received training in Britain and parachuted into Czechoslovakia on December 28, 1941:

“The operation was instigated by František Moravec, head of the Czech intelligence services, with the knowledge and approval of Edvard Beneš, head of the Czechoslovak government in exile in Britain, almost as soon as Heydrich was appointed Protector. Moravec personally briefed Brigadier Colin Gubbins, who at the time was the Director of Operations in the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and who had responsibility for the Czech and Polish “country” sections of the organization. Gubbins readily agreed to help mount the operation, although knowledge of it was restricted to a few of the headquarters and training staff of SOE. The operation was given the codename Anthropoid, Greek for “having the form of a human,” a term usually used in zoology.

Preparation began on October 20, 1941. Moravec had personally selected two dozen of the most promising personnel from among the 2,000 exiled Czech soldiers based in Britain. They were sent to one of SOE’s commando training centers at Arisaig in Scotland. Warrant Officer Jozef Gabčík (Slovak) and Staff Sergeant Karel Svoboda (Czech) were chosen to carry out the operation on 28 October 1941 (Czechoslovakia’s Independence Day), but Svoboda was replaced with Jan Kubiš (Czech) after a head injury during training. This caused delays in the mission as Kubiš had not completed training, nor had the necessary false documents been prepared for him.

…

Gabčík and Kubiš, with seven other soldiers from Czechoslovakia’s army in exile in the United Kingdom, were flown in two other groups named Silver A and Silver B (who had different missions) from RAF Tangmere by a Halifax of No. 138 Squadron RAF at 22:00 on December 28, 1941. They landed near Nehvizdy east of Prague. …”

(“Operation Anthropoid”, Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)

Meanwhile, Heydrich became so confident of his success in pacification of the Czechoslovakian population that he travelled around Prague in an open-top vehicle without extra security protection:

“Heydrich was so confident that his pacification program had succeeded that he flagrantly disregarded measures for his own security and traveled around Prague in an open vehicle. …”

(Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Heydrich even moved to live in a Château outside the city, commuting daily to and from his office and in so doing making himself an even easier target for assassination:

“The paratroopers devised various plans for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. At the beginning of April 1942 Heydrich himself contributed to the options for his own assassination when he moved from his temporary quarters in Prague Castle to a Château in Panenské Břežany. In the end a sharp right-hand curve, straddling the streets Kirchmayerova and V Holešovičkách, below a school in Kobylisy, was chosen for the attack. It was known that his car was driven through this curve daily on the way to Prague Castle and that his chauffeur, SS-Oberscharführer Johannes Klein, had to slow down significantly.”

(Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík, ASSASSINATION: Operation ANTHROPOID 1941–1942, 2002, Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic)

On May 27, 1942, exactly 8 months from his taking over the Nazi rule in Czechoslovakia, a resistance assassination took place out and a wounded Heydrich died 8 days later on June 4:

“… On May 27, 1942, as he traveled on a familiar route to the airport to fly to Hitler’s headquarters, two Czech parachute agents succeeded in rolling a hand grenade under Heydrich’s transport vehicle. Though not mortally wounded by the blast itself, the grenade splinters in his leg and lower back led to an infection that killed him on June 4, 1942.”

(Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

As told above, On that day Heydrich was supposed to fly to Berlin to see the Nazi supreme leader Adolf Hitler, and the attempted assassination was not immediately successful – he was “not mortally wounded”.

As described in the last two quotes above, Heydrich was in a convertible Mercedes with only his chauffeur, “SS-Oberscharführer Johannes Klein” as named in the 2002 Czech Republic Ministry of Defence paper quoted, but the gunshots fired at him by the resistance agents all missed, except that, as in the Holocaust Encyclopedia article quoted, a “hand grenade” rolled toward Heydrich’s car succeeded in exploding on the ground and wounding him in the leg and lower back.

The “hand grenade” that wounded Heydrich was more precisely a “modified anti-tank grenade”, as in the following story of the assassination attempt:

“… Gabčík stepped in front of the vehicle and tried to open fire with his Sten submachine gun, but it jammed. Heydrich ordered his driver, SS-Oberscharführer Klein, to stop the car, then stood up to shoot Gabčík with his Luger pistol. Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade (concealed in a briefcase) at the vehicle. Its fragments ripped through the car’s right rear bumper, embedding shrapnel and fibers from the upholstery in Heydrich’s body upon detonation. The grenade also injured Kubiš.

Following the explosion, Gabčík and Kubiš fired at Heydrich with their Colt M1903 pistols but failed to hit him, as they were shocked by the explosion as well. Heydrich staggered out of the car, apparently unaware of his shrapnel injuries, returned fire, and tried to chase Gabčík, but he soon collapsed. Klein returned from his abortive attempt to chase Kubiš, who fled the scene by bicycle. Now bleeding profusely, Heydrich ordered Klein to chase Gabčík on foot, saying, “Get that bastard!” Klein chased him into a butcher shop, where Gabčík shot him twice with his pistol, severely wounding him in the leg, and then escaped to a local safe house via tram. Gabčík and Kubiš didn’t know that Heydrich was badly wounded and were convinced the attack had failed.”

(Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)

As told above, after carrying out the attack the two resistance agents responsible, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, were convinced that the assassination attempt was a failure.

In particular, I note that the agents’ shooting accuracies were so poor that only the last two shots eventually hit someone, far away from Heydrich – in the leg of Heydrich’s chauffeur Johannes Klein after Klein had chased Gabčík into a butcher shop.

Ironically, at the time Heydrich was called “Butcher of Prague” by the Czechoslovakians. (“Son of detested Nazi leader sparks outrage after announcing he wants to restore castle where ‘Butcher of Prague’ ruled”, by Allan Hall, March 28, 2011, Daily Mail)

The error-prone assassination of Reinhard Heydrich was the “only successful assassination” of a senior German Nazi leader in history:

“The attack on Heydrich would be the only successful assassination of a high-ranking Nazi functionary during the party’s 12-year rule.”

(“Reinhard Heydrich Biography: The First In-depth Look at a Nazi ‘God of Death’”, by Georg Bönisch, September 19, 2011, Spiegel Online)

But as already noted, it did not immediately kill or even mortally wound Heydrich. Rather, he died eight days later in the hospital.

After a surgery on the day he was wounded, performed by experienced German medical surgeons, Heydrich appeared to be recuperating in the hospital under German protection and under the medical care of Dr. Karl Gebhardt, the private physician of Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich’s superior Nazi security leader. However, on the seventh day while eating a meal, Heydrich suddenly fell into a coma and died the next day, June 4, due to blood poisoning as concluded by the official autopsy:

“… The patient was then transferred to the operating room and surgery was performed by thoracic surgeon Walter Dick and abdominal surgeon J. Hohlbaum, both experienced German practitioners. … The Czech personnel
were prohibited from entering the operating room or the floor
where Heydrich was taken after his operation [6].

… During the course of treatment Heydrich received several blood transfusions as well as anti-gangrene and anti-tetanus injections. Within two days the patient was recovering well; there is no record that postoperative X-rays were performed.

From this point, SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s private physician, Dr. Karl Gebhardt, an orthopedic surgeon from Berlin, was in charge. Gebhardt bypassed all the other surgeons, preventing the use of sulphonamide (Prontosil®*) when Heydrich’s temperature rose, and forbidding the transfer of the patient for re-operation at any other hospital [6]. The omission of treatment with Prontosil was particularly noteworthy since “the SS and Hitler insisted on believing that sulphonamides were a ‘miracle drug’ (Wundermittel) which could prevent all infections if only correctly administered” [1]. In the postoperative days, a gradual fever developed. On the seventh day the patient was able to sit up in bed to eat, but he collapsed suddenly and remained in a coma until the early hours of 4 June when he died. …

…

The official autopsy report by pathologists Herwig Hamperl and Gunther Weyrich, both professors at Prague University, determined the cause of Heydrich’s death to be “septicaemia due to virulent Bacteria that led to parenchymatous intoxication of the liver, kidney and myocardium” [7]. The management of Heydrich’s care and the autopsy findings have been disputed. …”

(“The Attempt on the Life of Reinhard Heydrich, Architect of the “Final Solution”: A Review of his Treatment and Autopsy”, by George M. Weisz MD FRACS MA and William R. Albury BA PhD, Volume 16, Number 4, April 2014, Israel Medical Association Journal)

As noted above, following the surgery Heydrich gradually developed a fever, probably due to Dr. Gebhardt’s preventing the use of sulphonamide, which Hitler and the Nazis considered a “miracle drug” that could prevent all infections. Gebhardt’s treatment approach was controversial, and the exact medical cause of Heydrich’s death has been disputed.

Some medical experts have suggested that Himmler, through his own personal physician, may have caused Heydrich’s death. This has been the conclusion of the above quoted review by Dr. George M. Weisz and Prof. William R. Albury, published in 2014; it cited the precedent of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath’s death at the hands of Hitler’s private physician Karl Brandt after an assassination attempt in 1938:

“In 1938, Ernst vom Rath, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Paris, was shot by a protesting Jewish adolescent. The medical attention that he received was supervised by Hitler’s private physician (Begleitarzt), Karl Brandt. The required treatment was withheld for political reasons. Indeed, his death was politicized in Germany and used as an opportunity to launch
a nationwide pogrom, known as Kristallnacht [2]. By acting in this way the leaders of the Third Reich sacrificed vom Rath, in accordance with the principle that Dr. Brandt later cited at his trial in Nuremberg, using him “in the interest of [Nazi] society.”

The present article reviews the surgical management of a much higher ranking officer of the Reich, SS ObergruppenfÜhrer Reinhard Heydrich (1904–42), who was attacked by partisans in Prague in 1942. The documented medical response to his injuries and the record of the autopsy reveal a number of parallels with the Rath case and raise the possibility of similar political interference in his medical treatment.

…

It is our conclusion that the cause of death was pulmonary embolism, originating in the pelvic plexus (or in the unexamined lower limbs), due to pulmonary insufficiency and to a multi-system septic failure. Since the autopsy investigation did not examine the head, the possibility of anoxic brain damage cannot be excluded.

In legal terms, the medical approach of the German doctors provided substandard medical care to one of their highest officers. …

It is well known that Himmler, as SS chief and Heydrich’s immediate superior, had begun to feel that his own position was threatened by the ruthless ability and repeated successes of the younger man, such as the pacification of Bohemia/Moravia. Could Himmler have taken advantage of the unexpected wounding of Heydrich by sending his physician Gebhardt to hasten the Reichsprotektor’s death?

The evidence from Heydrich’s medical treatment and autopsy suggests that Himmler may well have used Gebhardt as his instrument to dispose of a rival who Himmler feared would eventually supplant him. …”

(George M. Weisz MD FRACS MA and William R. Albury BA PhD, April 2014, Israel Medical Association Journal)

As above, previously in 1938 the Nazis had withheld necessary medical care for German diplomat Ernst von Rath who had been wounded by a Jewish assassin, in order to use his death to rally political support for launching Kristallnacht – Nazi Germany’s first nationwide violent anti-Jewish campaign, directed by Reinhard Heydrich on November 10, 1938, as earlier reviewed.

Thus, one can suspect that in May-June 1942 it may have become Heydrich’s own turn to fall victim to the Nazis’ premeditated medical malpractice – as per the medical opinions of experts like Dr. Weisz and Prof. Albury, quoted above.

In an earlier review, published in 2009, Dr. Ray J. Defalque and Prof. Amos J. Wright cited facts showing that after the attempted assassination Heydrich was mentally conscious and still physically abled to some degree, and appeared normal throughout the surgery:

“… While Klein pursued Gabèik, Heydrich, in severe pain, staggered back to the car and collapsed on the hood.

After 20 minutes of confusion, he was placed face down among cans of wax and polish in the rear of a passing commercial van and driven to Bulovka hospital, one and-a-half miles away. Bulovka, with 1,400 beds, was at the time the second largest Czech hospital.

…

Heydrich reached the Bulovka emergency room shortly after 11:00 a.m. and was registered under the number 12.555/42. Summoned by the emergency room nurse, Dr. Snadjr arrived at once and found Heydrich seated on the examining table, bare-chested, silent and aloof, profusely bleeding from his left lower back. While checking the injury, Dr. Snadjr had the nurse call Dr. W. Dick, the Sudeten German chief of surgery at Bulovka since 1940 and an experienced thoracic surgeon. …

Heydrich was taken to the radiology suite in a wheelchair but walked
unassisted to the X-Ray machine. The film showed a left pneumothorax, a fracture of the left eleventh rib, a diaphragmatic tear and a metal fragment in the spleen. The left kidney and spine were intact.

Told that he needed immediate surgery, Heydrich refused and insisted on a Berlin surgeon. Dr. Dick repeated that the operation was urgent and offered to call Professor J. Hohlbaum, the chairman of the Surgery Department at the nearby Charles V University. Dr. Hohlbaum was a Silesian German. Heydrich accepted after a few minutes of hesitation and Professor Hohlbaum was summoned. …

…

The operation started around noon and ended shortly after 1:00 p.m. Drs. Dick and Slalina had started scrubbing when Professor Hohlbaum walked in with two assistants. As he was ready to scrub, Dr. Hohlbaum noticed that in his haste he had forgotten his glasses and an aid was sent to fetch them. He told Dr. Dick to start the procedure and that he would assist him until he had his glasses. Dr. Mach gave the patient a transfusion of type A blood at the
beginning of the operation and another at the end, along with tetanus and gas gangrene antitoxins.

…

… Dr. Hohlbaum, now wearing his glasses, made an incision from sternum to
mid-abdomen. As he was reaching the umbilicus, Dr. Honek noticed that he was perspiring profusely.¹ Dr. Dick reacted at once, and in his usual quiet and courteous manner whispered, “Professor Hohlbaum, you are not well, allow me to take over.” He then extended the incision under the left costal margin and finished the procedure with Drs. Hohlbaum’s and Slalina’s assistance. … Heydrich tolerated the surgery well, with normal vital signs.”

(“The Puzzling Death of Reinhard Heydrich”, by Ray J. Defalque, M.D. and Amos J. Wright, M.L.S., Volume 27, Number 1, January 2009, Bulletin of Anesthesia History)

As told above, the actual surgery was performed not by the German surgeon whom Heydrich had agreed to, namely Professor Dr. J. Hohlbaum, because Hohlbaum acted nervous and also forgetful, but by the German surgeon Dr. W. Dick who had examined Heydrich and decided on an urgent surgery.

The anti-tank grenade damaging Heydrich’s car and causing his injuries had been modified in a way for it to be “easier to handle” – albeit with substantially reduced power:

“… The weapon was a powerful British number 73 anti-tank grenade, the lower two-thirds of which had been removed to make it lighter (1 lb.) and easier to handle (4 in.). The bottom of the remaining upper one-third had been sealed with adhesive tape and the whole body was wrapped in more tape. German experts judged its powerful explosive, polar ammon gelatin, to be dangerous to handle.¹⁰ ¹¹ …”

(Ray J. Defalque, M.D. and Amos J. Wright, M.L.S., January 2009, Bulletin of Anesthesia History)

Both the review by Dr. Weisz and Prof. Albury and the review by Dr. Defalque and Prof. Wright remarked on the disagreements between Hitler and Himmler over Heydrich’s medical treatments.

Weisz and Albury noted that Hitler’s “genuine dismay” over Heydrich’s death, with Hitler’s personal physician Dr. Theodor Morell accusing Himmler’s personal physician Dr. Gebhardt of “negligence”, led to Himmler ordering Dr. Gebhardt to conduct “barbaric medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners”:

“… A complicating factor for both Himmler and Gebhardt, however, was Hitler’s genuine dismay when he learned of Heydrich’s death. Worse still, Gebhardt was accused of negligence by Dr. Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician (Leibarzt). Morell owned a factory that produced sulphonamides and argued that Gebhardt should have treated Heydrich with the drug. Gebhardt, on the other hand, insisted that sulphonamides were of little use and had not been required in Heydrich’s case.

To maintain his standing in Hitler’s eyes, Himmler ordered Gebhardt to demonstrate the correctness of his position, and so began Gebhardt’s barbaric medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Septic wounds were deliberately inflicted on male inmates at Sachsenhausen and then on female inmates, mostly Polish political prisoners, at Ravensbrück. Some of these victims were then treated with sulphonamides while others were not. …”

(George M. Weisz MD FRACS MA and William R. Albury BA PhD, April 2014, Israel Medical Association Journal)

Defalque and Wright described how Dr. Gebhardt had Dr. Morell from Heydrich’s medical care, Dr. Morell later complained to Himmler about Gebhardt’s “gross negligence” that “had caused Heydrich’s death”, and Himmler instead thanked and promoted Gebhardt:

“Himmler, at Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg (East Prussia) was immediately notified of the incident and ordered Dr. K. Gebhardt, his personal physician and professor of orthopedics in Berlin, to fly at once to Heydrich’s bedside. Gebhardt landed in Prague the evening of May 27, accompanied by his SS deputy, Dr. L. Stumpfegger, and the renowned Berlin surgeon F. Sauerbruch. Professor Sauerbruch had been Gebhardt’s teacher and was a close friend of the Heydrich family. Dr. Morell, Hitler’s physician, never came to Prague.² Gebhardt followed Heydrich closely and phoned Himmler twice a day to report on his patient’s progress. …

…

… At his 1947 trial, Gebhardt testified that he did not prescribe sulfonamides for Heydrich because of his medical training in Munich and his 1940 experience as a frontline surgeon had convinced him of their futility in gunshot wounds.¹⁵ ¹⁶ He had refused Morell’s offer to fly to Prague as well as his recommendation to try the new thiazole sulfonamides (e.g., ultrasept) in the production of which Morell had large financial interests.

Gebhardt added that Morell had later told Himmler that this gross negligence
had caused Heydrich’s death. This accusation had estranged him from his SS superior.

Gebhardt’s testimony, however, is contradicted by the warm letter of thanks that Himmler sent him on October 19, 1942, praising Heydrich’s surgeons and especially Gebhardt’s for easing his patient’s suffering.¹⁷ Over the following months Gebhardt was promoted to SS Major General and to “Supreme SS Physician” and was awarded the rare “Knight’s Cross with Diamonds.”¹⁵ At his trial, Gebhardt implied that he had accepted his superiors’ order to test sulfamides on concentration camp inmates partly to vindicate his treatment of Heydrich.”

(Ray J. Defalque, M.D. and Amos J. Wright, M.L.S., January 2009, Bulletin of Anesthesia History)

As in the above quote, after Heydrich’s death his superior Himmler seemed pleased that the doctors had eased this “patient’s suffering”.

If there had indeed been “gross negligence” in Reinhard Heydrich’s death on the part of the Nazis under Heinrich Himmler’s direction, it may not have been limited to, as Weisz and Albury suggested in their medical review quoted earlier, Himmler taking advantage of “the unexpected wounding of Heydrich” “to dispose of a rival”.

The Nazi security forces under Heydrich in Czechoslovakia had most likely been aware of a resistance assassination team in Prague, sent from Britain, and that Heydrich was at risk, because a secret radio-transmitted message from the Czechoslovakian local resistance to persuade the leadership in exile in Britain to abort the assassination of Heydrich, so as not to incur a severe reprisal by the German Nazis, had been intercepted by the Gestapo, i.e., the German Nazi secret police, two weeks before the assassination attempt:

“The home resistance movement’s representatives realised from the preparations of the paratroopers that they were trying to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich. Fearing a major reprisal, they decided to contact London through the LIBUŠE transmitter, with a dispatch warning not to continue with assassination plans. In an operation directed against the SILVER A group, the Gestapo intercepted one of these warnings on May 12, 1942: “From the preparations that Ota and Zdeněk are working on and the place where it is happening, we guess, despite their silence, that they’re preparing to assassinate H. This assassination would not help the Allies and would bring immense consequences upon our nation… we ask you to give an order through SILVER not to carry out the assassination. There is a danger of delay, issue the order immediately. If necessary, for international reasons, assassinate a local Quisling… the first choice would be E(manuel) M(oravec).””

(Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík, 2002, Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic)

Intriguingly, and fatefully, Nazi security protection for Heydrich was not beefed up despite the assassination threat the Gestapo discovered on May 12, before it materialized on May 27.

If Heydrich’s Nazi security boss Himmler had indeed harboured the idea of possibly disposing of this rival, as suggested in the medical experts’ recent reviews I have discussed, then under his direction the Gestapo might have withheld notifying Heydrich, even though he had authority over them, of the communication intercept signalling danger to him.

The “EM” in the intercepted radio message cited above, Emanuel Moravec, the substitute target of assassination suggested by the local resistance, was Minister of Education in the Czechoslovakian government collaborating with the Nazis and a favorite Czech official of Heydrich’s, even though prior to the German occupation Moravec had been a leading advocate of defending Czechoslovakia against Nazi Germany:

“On January 19, 1942, a new Protectorate government was named, replacing the old government (entirely according to Heydrich’s ideas), which was in effect non-functional from September 27, 1941, onwards. The reason behind the reorganization of the government was the destruction of the Protectorate’s autonomous administration. The number of ministries was reduced to seven. A single German minister in the Protectorate government, SS-Oberführer Walther Bertsch, directed a newly created key ministry of economy and labour. The greatest change to take place, apart from changes in personnel, was the establishment of the Office for People’s Enlightenment. The affairs of the press, theatre, literature, art, film and foreign tourism were subordinate to this office. The ministry, in turn, was subordinate to the newly named Minister of Education, Emanuel Moravec. This former Czechoslovak legionnaire and later General Staff Colonel and a professor of war history and strategy at the University of War Studies in Prague was – prior to Munich – the most ardent defender of fighting against Nazi Germany. After the occupation, however, he sided with the Nazis entirely and became a symbol of extreme collaboration. Moravec was, in Heydrich’s opinion, unusually well suited for collaboration. …”

(Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík, 2002, Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic)

One may wonder, had the Nazis beefed up security protection for Heydrich after intercepting the secret radio message referring to assassination, whether it might not have occurred to the Czechoslovakian Nazi-collaborator Emanuel Moravec instead of the leader of Nazi German occupation.

On the other hand, Reinhard Heydrich was such a self-confident man that, bolstered by the success of his pacification policy, he did not believe the Czechoslovakians would try to kill him, even once saying, “Why should my Czechs shoot at me?”:

“… he almost always rode without a bodyguard, confident that the cowed Czechs would never make an attempt on his life. “Why should my Czechs shoot at me?” Heydrich loftily responded when another Nazi official chided him for his recklessness. His chauffeur—a brawny six-foot, five-inch SS guard—was his only protector.”

(Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War, 2018, Random House)

Ironically, the musical son of a German composer, in his “pacification” and “Germanization” measures Reinhard Heydrich had personally and actively planned the establishment of “Prague Musical Weeks” as a new cultural tradition for the Czechoslovakian capital; and one day before his assassination he had announced a “reform” plan to educate all Czech youth, and that evening attended an extraordinary music performance featuring his favorite violin music by G. F. Handel and the Piano Concerto in C-minor by his father, Bruno Heydrich:

““Prague’s Musical Weeks” were to start a new cultural tradition, with Reinhard Heydrich himself planning the first opening of the event. He personally invited Protectorate celebrities to the Opening Concert.

On May 26, 1942, on the eve of the assassination, an extraordinary performance was given by the String Quartet of Arthur Bonhardt accompanied by the pianist Kurt Sanke. The highlight of this evening concert in Valdštejn Palace was the Piano Concerto in C-minor by composer Bruno Heydrich, the father of the Reich Protector.

One of the last photographs of Reinhard Heydrich. The Acting Reich Protector, only a few hours before the assassination, listening attentively to his favourite violin composition of G. F. Händel. …

On the same day, May 26, 1942, Heydrich was appointed to the Protectorate government and announced the establishment of a Curatorium for the Education of Youth. He had begun to plan setting up this organization as early as 1942. With the help of the Curatorium, all Czech youth between the ages of 10-18 were to be “reformed”. The Curatorium was subordinate to Minister of Education Moravec and inherited the gymnasiums of the Sokol organization.”

(Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík, 2002, Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic)

The human costs of Heydrich’s assassination, i.e., the “immense consequences upon our nation” that the Czechoslovakian local resistance had feared and communicated to the government in exile in Britain in the secret radio message quoted earlier, were indeed immense.

Infuriated, the Nazi supreme leader Adolf Hitler wanted to kill 10,000 Czechoslovakians as retaliation, but was persuaded not to by Heydrich’s deputy, Karl Hermann Frank:

“Heydrich’s assassination infuriated the Nazi leadership, particularly Adolf Hitler. The Führer demanded the murder of 10,000 Czechs in retaliation for the killing. He was dissuaded by Heydrich’s deputy, Karl Hermann Frank, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the Protectorate, Frank argued that such action might interfere with long-term plans for the region. …”

(Lidice, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

In the end, over 13,000 Czechoslovakians were arrested and an estimated 5,000 people were killed by the German Nazis in revenge, in atrocious acts that included the killing of practically the entire team of resistance agents from Britain, and the destruction of two villages, Lidice and Ležáky, suspected of links to the agents:

“The assassination had immediate reprisals. More than 13,000 people were arrested, and 5,000 people were killed according to estimates.

A Gestapo report suggested the village Lidice was the hiding place of the assassins, but this was not true. Germans massacred the residents of Lidice on June 9, 1942. Some 199 men were executed, 195 women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and 95 children taken prisoner. Most of the children died in concentration camps. The village of Ležáky was destroyed because a radio transmitter was found there.

The paratroopers took refuge in Karel Boromejsky Church near Karlovo náměstí. The Germans found out their location after one of the paratroopers, Karel Čurda, betrayed them.

Kubiš, Adolf Opálka, and Jaroslav Svarc were killed in the prayer loft after a two-hour gun battle. Gabčík, Josef Valcik, Josef Bublik and Jan Hruby committed suicide after fire brigade trucks started to flood the crypt.”

(“Heydrich assassination took place 75 years ago”, by Raymond Johnston, May 27, 2017, Prague.TV)

In a symbolic act of retaliation, the Lidice village was razed to the ground, turned into wheat fields and covered with “German” soil:

“NAZIS employed some 100 labourers for almost a year from mid 1942 to clear rubble, then shovel tonnes of “German” soil carted at least 200km into Czechoslovakia for wheat fields outside Prague.

The soil was laid over razed remains of Lidice, a village that until June 9, 1942 was home to about 503 people.

On that day 75 years ago, they bore the wrath of Hitler and his Nazi leadership for the death of German Reich protector Reinhard Heydrich…”

(“Death of ‘Butcher of Prague’ sparked Hitler to order destruction of entire Czech village at Lidice”, by Marea Donnelly, June 9, 2017, The Daily Telegraph)

The priests and lay leaders of the Karel Boromejsky Church in Prague, who let the resistance agents took refuge at the church after the assassination as described in the second last quote, and the Orthodox Bishop of Prague, were executed:

“Naturally, the cathedral priests and lay officers held responsible for harboring Heydrich’s killers were themselves executed. Bishop Gorazd, the Orthodox prelate of Prague, accepted responsibility in a bid to spare others, gaining Nazi torture and execution for himself, later deservedly declared a martyr by his church. His cathedral survived the war and is today a bullet-ridden memorial to the slain freedom fighters who died there and to their protectors.”

(“An Assassinated Nazi & a Church Martyr”, by Mark Tooley, August 18, 2016, Providence Journal)

Among the people executed in revenge was former Czechoslovakian Prime Minister Alois Eliáš, who as discussed earlier had been arrested and sentenced to death when Heydrich first arrived in Prague in 1941, but had not yet been executed:

“The last months of his life, the former Prime Minister spent in the prison in Pankrác. The execution was postponed and Eliáš had a status of a prominent prisoner. He managed to send several secret messages to his family. It was the death of somebody else which decided on the death of Alois Eliáš. Reinhard Heidrich was that person. After the assassination performed by parachutists dispatched from the Great Britain, the occupation authorities decided to vigorously frighten the Czech nation. Parts of that warning were also executions of number of condemned persons and former Prime Minister was among them. …”

(September 29, 2010, Government Information Centre, Government of the Czech Republic)

Among the 5,00o Czechoslovakians killed in revenge were 3,000 Jews, and some 300 of the family relatives of those who had helped the assassination agents:

“An estimated 5,000 Czechs paid for Heydrich’s death with their lives, including 3,000 Czech Jews who were immediately sent to Nazi death camps in occupied Poland. Eduard Stehlík is a historian for the Czech Army’s historical institute.

“The reprisals were truly terrible. Some 300 people were murdered because they were relatives of those who helped the commandoes. Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, who carried out the assassination, were certainly brave soldiers but they could have never achieved this without the help of these ordinary people.””

(“Czechs Mark 70th Anniversary of Heydrich Assassination”, by Jan Richter, May 28, 2012, Radio Praha)

The assassination of Heydrich also led to hardening resolves on the part of the German Nazis to accelerate the extermination of European Jews, i.e., the Final Solution, and its implementation in Poland was now named “Aktion Reinhard” – after Reinhard Heydrich:

“… Speaking on the day of Heydrich’s funeral, 9 June 1942, Himmler declared, in the context of a broader discussion of forced population movement, that the extermination of the European Jews would be completed within one year.³⁷ The final solution was accelerated in various directions thereafter, but it is unlikely that the assassination itself provided significant impetus beyond further strengthening the security rationale.³⁸ One thing Heydrich’s death did provide was a name for the continuing murder of the Jews of the Generalgouvernement: it was dubbed ‘Aktion Reinhard’ in his honour. …”

(Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide, 2009, Oxford University Press)

The “Generalgouvernement” in the above quote referred to central Poland, where the German Nazis planned to send Jews to work and eventually be exterminated:

“(General Government), territorial unit in Poland with its own administration, created by the Nazis on October 26, 1939. When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, they split the country into three parts: the western third was annexed to the Third Reich; the eastern third was occupied by the Soviet Union; and the central third was made into the Generalgouvernement, a semi-independent unit which the Nazis intended to use as a place to do all their racial “dirty work.” The Generalgouvernement was to serve as a “racial dumping ground,” an endless supply of slave labor, and ultimately, as a site for the mass extermination of European Jewry.”

(“Generalgouvernement”, Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies)

I should point out that, as per the above description, “Generalgouvernement” was a part of “the East” that Heydrich had envisioned in the Wannsee Protocol, discussed earlier, as the land to implement the Final Solution.

At the time of his death Heydrich was Interpol’s president – a job he had taken over after Otto Steinhäusl’s death in June 1940 as mentioned earlier:

“On June 4, 1942, ICPC President Reinhard Heydrich died and was provisionally replaced by Arthur Nebe …”

(Mathieu Deflem, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Thus, it was while as the Interpol president that the Nazi security police leader Reinhard Heydrich started death squads in June 1941, killing over one million Jews within two years as discussed earlier.

And it was also while as the Interpol president that Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 to plan for the “Final Solution” to exterminate European Jews.

At the time of the Wannsee Conference, there was in fact indication that Heydrich might have envisioned a role for the Interpol in the Final Solution, as he had initially designated the Interpol headquarters as the Wannsee Conference venue:

“Wiesenthal and others have also claimed that the infamous conference at which Reinhard Heydrich and other Nazi officials discussed the practical aspects of the implementation of the “Final Solution” was held in the headquarters of the ICPC (Wiesenthal 1989:253). This is inaccurate. The Wannsee Conference, as the meeting has come to be known, was held on January 20, 1942, in a villa located at “Am Grossen Wannsee, No. 56-58.” However, the meeting was originally planned by Heydrich to be held “on December 9, 1941, at 12:00 p.m., in the headquarters of the International Criminal Police Commission, Berlin, Am Kleinen Wannsee No. 16” (Heydrich to Luther, in Friedman 1993). The planned meeting was postponed because of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the American entry in World War II. There is no evidence to determine whether Heydrich had scheduled the meeting in the ICPC headquarters because he conceived of the extermination of European Jewry as a matter of international criminal police.”

(Mathieu Deflem, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

As told above, roughly interpreted, Heydrich had scheduled to hold the Wannsee Conference in the Interpol headquarters located at the ‘Small Wannsee’ lake, but later changed the location to a villa located at the “Big Wannsee” lake.

However, the assertion in the above quoted passage that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to the change of the conference’s time and location is inaccurate. The original meeting venue at the Interpol headquarters was first announced on November 29, and several days later on December 4 was changed to the villa that was a Nazi police guesthouse, still for the same scheduled December 9 date. In other words, the surprise international events  – the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7, 1941 – postponed the conference but did not affect the venue:

“The invitations went out between 29 November and 1 December. The meeting, followed by a buffet, was to be held on 9 December at an address given as the ‘offices of Interpol, 16 Am Kleinen Wannsee’.³ A subsequent memo of 4 December altered the venue to an SS guesthouse, 56-58 Am Großen Wannsee.⁴ …”

(Mark Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, 2003, Penguin Books)

It should be noted that even before Reinhard Heydrich’s rule, in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria and the International Criminal Police Commission fell under Nazi control, enforcing racial laws against ethnic minorities had already immediately become an official Interpol agenda:

“The annexation of Austria left little in the way of the nazification of the ICPC. Austrian police officials were either dismissed or allowed to remain in place when considered sufficiently loyal to the Nazis. For Oskar Dressler, Secretary General of the ICPC since 1923, the consequences of the “Anschluss” provided no main obstacles. Dressler cooperated with the Nazi-appointed ICPC President and as Editor of the ICPC periodical, which contributed to the growing prominence of Nazi viewpoints. Since 1938, the renamed periodical “Internationale Kriminalpolizei” (International Criminal Police) published articles on racial inferiority and crime, praiseworthy reviews of books on racial laws, and reports concerning preventive arrests …”

(Mathieu Deflem, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Nevertheless, the number of cases handled by the Interpol during the Nazi era was relatively small – compared to the mass detentions and executions carried out directly by the Nazis in Germany and in the Nazi-occupied countries – and so some history experts, such as Prof. Mathieu Deflem quoted above and here, have viewed the Interpol’s role in the Nazi crimes and atrocities as insignificant:

“… Several commentators have suggested that the Commission no longer functioned after the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, or that at least the nations of the free world then ceased participating in the organization … Others, however, have argued that the Nazi regime took control of the ICPC with the express and consequential purpose of using the organization to further its own goals … This debate was additionally fueled when it was discovered in the early 1970s that Paul Dickopf, President of Interpol from 1968 until 1972, had been a member of the SS until 1943, when he fled to Switzerland to work for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA … The Dickopf affair then also led to question the involvement of other police officials in the years before 1945. …

In 1975, when U.S. participation in Interpol was evaluated by Congress, the famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal declared that the ICPC had been used by the Nazis to track down fugitive criminals and force them to provide information on (fellow) Jews …

… Effective use of the ICPC headquarters to advance the nationalist agenda of Nazi rule is improbable because the files were few in number and could not be of much practical benefit, especially not relative to the extensive collections of the national police systems in the Nazi-occupied countries.⁹ Also, based on available evidence, it is unlikely that the ICPC achieved any of the Nazi-aspired continuity in investigative work or international cooperation, especially across the Atlantic …

…

9 Before the war, the ICPC headquarters contained less than 4,000 investigative … case files. And, although the number rose rather dramatically to 18,000 at war’s end …, it is still negligible relative to the files available to the Nazis through the occupation of Europe.”

(Mathieu Deflem, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Still, as the history relating to Reinhard Heydrich, a top Nazi security leader, architect of the “Final Solution” and president of the Interpol, that I have reviewed highlighted, nothing was impossible.

In particular, even the above-quoted opinion by Deflem, who viewed the number of cases handled by the Interpol during the Nazi era as “negligible”, noted that as late as of 1968-1972 the Interpol president, Paul Dickopf, was a person with a hidden Nazi past, once a member of the Nazi security apparatus before defecting to work for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services – the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency.

I note that Dickopf was the immediate predecessor to William Higgitt, the first Interpol president from Canada.

My long digression into several periods of the Interpol presidency in history has shown that, be it corruption at the top such as with recent Interpol presidents Jackie Selebi and Meng Hongwei, or political oppression such as in the era of German Nazi domination, especially under Interpol president Reinhard Heydrich, characters at the helm of the Interpol can be far more controversial than what the Canadian media reported in 1992 when RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster became its president and was later referred to in my May 2009 blog post as quoted earlier.

Thus, concerns relating to Interpol history could be, if it had indeed been taken into consideration, a rationale behind Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s announcing, in February 1994 only a few short months after winning power, the resignation of Norman Inkster from the helm of the RCMP, given that the prestigious Interpol presidency held by Inkster wasn’t necessarily as glorious as it might appear.

On the other hand, in my 2009 review I pointed out that – unless Inkster had indeed been involved in corrupt activities or in covering them up – the move, with the resulting premature loss of the Interpol presidency, could be viewed as Canada’s retreat from, or setback in, international political engagement, and that there were other signs of such a tendency with the new Chretien government:

“While Inkster’s resignation in 1994 was expected to give the Liberal government a fresh start in gun control at home, it also took place amid the Liberals’ retreat from its election promise of higher priority for international human rights, to focus on the economy and business; and as if that had not been enough, prime minister Chretien’s first official foreign visit – to Mexico instead of traditionally to the U.S. – in March 1994 was marred by the assassination by gunshot of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio (of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that had ruled uninterruptedly for 65 years) just before Chretien’s arrival, by a large and angry mob shouting “out” while Chretien attempted but failed to pay respect to the body of the slain, and by a rare type of rebuttal of Chretien’s notion that Mexican democracy and Canadian democracy were just different types – from Subcomandante Marcos of the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in a jungle interview in Chiapas, Mexico. ²⁰¹”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, in March 1994 – the subsequent month after the announcement of Inkster’s RCMP resignation – Chretien broke a tradition by making Mexico, not the United States, the destination of a new Canadian prime minister’s first official foreign visit.

Here is the full press story I cited in 2009 that referred to Chretien’s breaking a tradition by not officially visiting the U.S. first, a terse report but one of the very few referring to the tradition breaking:

“(CP) – Prime Minister Jean Chretien will make an official visit to Mexico City on March 23 and 24.

The visit will be Chretien’s first official state visit to another country, an honor traditionally reserved for the United States.

Chretien will be travelling to Mexico with a full contigent of cabinet ministers, though who and how many was also not known. He will be received with full ceremony, including a state dinner.

Credit: CP”

(“PM picks Mexico for first visit”, February 24, 1994, The (Kitchener-Waterloo) Record)

At that point as Prime Minister for only a few months, Chretien had actually travelled to several leading Western countries and met their leaders, but none in an official-visit capacity:

“Prime Minister Jean Chretien makes his first official foreign visit this week when he travels to Mexico City to hobnob with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and attend a Canadian trade fair.

Chretien has been outside Canada a handful of times since his October election victory. He met U.S. President Bill Clinton in Seattle in November, British Prime Minister John Major in London in January and French President Francois Mitterand later that month. But they were courtesy calls.

This one is different. Although the distinction of “official visit” may be lost on those not schooled in diplomatic niceties, it is significant to the Canadians and their Mexican hosts.

Its importance is also not lost on government critics, who complain the Liberals have downplayed human and democratic rights in Mexico in the quest for greater export sales.”

(“Trade and rights issues on Mexico visit”, by Shawn McCarthy, March 22, 1994, Toronto Star)

However, shockingly, as I noted in the last quote from my May 2009 post, Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had ruled Mexico uninterruptedly for 65 years, was gunned down just before Chretien’s arrival, and an angry mob then prevented Chretien from paying respect to the slain.

Also as I noted, a well-known Mexican figure, Subcomandante Marcos of the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico, publicly criticized Chretien’s notion of democracy.

I especially commented that, in this respect, the rights of the Mexican Mayan people enjoyed the support of Canadian native leaders:

“Subcomandante Marcos’s criticism of Chretien was voiced at a time when Canadian native leaders had been expressing support for more rights (including land-title rights) for the Mexican Mayans in light of swift acceptance of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by the new Chretien government – an agreement that had been negotiated by the Mulroney government and had contributed to its unpopularity, and one that Chretien during the election campaign had talked about renegotiating. ²⁰²”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Despite such international political dimensions as Mexico and Chretien’s tradition-breaking diplomatic goodwill gesture, as also noted in the last two quotes from my May 2009 post the incoming Chretien government quickly turned its focus to “the economy and business”, illustrated by its “swift acceptance of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)”.

Here are more details from a press article I cited in May 2009, showing the new Chretien government’s inability to renegotiate NAFTA with the U.S. government as Chretien had promised during the 1993 election campaign:

“During the federal election campaign, Prime Minister Jean Chretien said a Liberal government would “renegotiate” improvements to the 1989 Canada-U.S. free trade deal and the North American pact extending free trade to Mexico.

Yesterday, Chretien announced that Canada will proclaim the North American Free Trade Agreement by Jan. 1 without negotiating any changes to the two trade deals.

What he got from the Americans and Mexicans were add-ons, but none that added up to greater protection for Canada from U.S. harassment, critics charge.

Others, however, insist Chretien got what he could.

Maude Barlow, head of the nationalist Council of Canadians, said the most glaring retreats from Chretien’s campaign promises were on the energy and water fronts.

“Chretien is substituting meaningful changes to NAFTA’s energy and water provisions for empty ceremonial gestures,” Barlow said.

…

But Gordon Ritchie, former deputy chief negotiator of the Canada-U.S. deal, said Chretien got what was “politically possible” given Washington’s adamant refusal to reopen the free trade deals.

…

“It was a deft political move.”

…

Officials in Ottawa and Washington had agreed there is “absolutely nothing” in the North American or Canada-U.S. free trade agreements that require Canada to export bulk water to the United States.

So the Americans and Mexicans were only too happy to comply with Chretien’s request to clarify the issue in a joint agreement.

In Canada, Chretien can expect the most political flak over the energy issue.

The Liberal campaign Red Book, now the government’s political bible, said Canada must obtain “the same energy protection as Mexico” under a “renegotiated” North American pact.

The Liberals have always objected to provisions in the Canada-U.S. deal that require Canada to share energy supplies with the United States, even during a serious shortage, and which preclude Canada from charging Americans a higher price than it would Canadians if world oil prices soar.

When Mexico negotiated an exclusion from similar terms in the NAFTA energy provisions, Chretien said it was a blatant example of trade rules putting Canada on an unequal footing.

However, Chretien hit a made-in-America brick wall over reopening NAFTA’s energy section.

With the Americans unwilling to renegotiate the issue, Chretien issued a unilateral declaration to “clarify the limits of Canada’s obligations to export energy to the United States.””

(“Did Chretien get a good deal? PM caved in, critics say; others hail a ‘deft move’ on improving energy and water provisions in NAFTA”, by Jonathan Ferguson, December 3, 1993, Toronto Star)

In short as above, Chretien had wanted to renegotiate NAFTA but the U.S. government was unwilling to, so the Chretien government settled on making improvements on water and energy issues in the agreement: on water, Chretien’s demand did not contradict the agreement so the U.S. and Mexican governments agreed to additional clarifications; but on energy, his demand conflicted with the established arrangement between Canada and the U.S., and the Chretien government was able to only make a “unilateral declaration”.

I note that all of this “swift acceptance”, as I called it in 2009, had taken place by the end of 1993, with the Chretien Liberals having just won the election on October 25. Therefore, in this sense, when Chretien began his first official foreign visit to Mexico in March 1994, his government’s course had already been ‘set in stone’ for “the economy and business” in North America – namely, through the NAFTA free-trade framework negotiated by a previous government of an opposite political stripe.

The goal of making Mexico the country of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s first official foreign visit, from the Canadian government’s perspective, was to highlight trade and NAFTA, even though the Mexican government hoped for it to be broader – as reported at the time:

“Mexico’s ambassador in Ottawa, Sandra Fuentes-Berain, says it is “very important that the Prime Minister has chosen Mexico as the first country to visit in this capacity.

“And I think the reason for his decision is the new relationship that has been established between Mexico and Canada that is, of course, somehow revamped by the signing of NAFTA but goes well beyond NAFTA.

“For Canada, a whole continent opens up in the south of the United States, starting with Mexico.”

Senior aide to Chretien Peter Donolo says that Chretien is making Mexico his first official visit to highlight the importance of NAFTA, which the Liberal government proclaimed into law just before the new year.

“Trade is really important to this government and to the Prime Minister in particular,” Donolo says. “He sees expanded Canadian trade as one of the main contributors to economic growth and jobs.”

So the visit is planned to coincide with Canada Expo ’94, one of the largest international trade shows Canada has ever mounted. The show will feature 450 Canadian companies and about 1,000 business people, representing industries such as automotive, telecommunications, food, environmental products and medical supplies.

Chretien will make a brief stop at the trade fair, while Trade Minister Roy MacLaren and Industry Minister John Manley will be front-and-centre there.”

(Shawn McCarthy, March 22, 1994, Toronto Star)

As reported above, Chretien’s visit was planned to coincide with Canada Expo ’94 in Mexico, featuring 450 Canadian companies and about 1,000 business people representing a broad spectre of Canadian industries.

But how would NAFTA really impact Mexico, the newcomer to the free trade that had been in place between Canada and the U.S. since 1989?

Here are some discussions from a press article that I cited in May 2009, that had appeared on October 16, 1993, i.e., nine days before the Chretien Liberals’ election victory:

“Until a decade ago, about the only thing that recommended Tijuana for a visit was cheap tequila and a taste of something exotic just 20 minutes away from downtown San Diego.

But in the early 1980s, foreign-based corporations began to take advantage of the maquiladora program that had been set up in the 1960s to allow companies to bring materials for assembly into the country duty-free, manufacture them and export them back again still without paying duty.

The allure was that labor was — and remains — cheap in Mexico. It was an experiment that laid the groundwork for President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to push for free trade.

Maquiladoras — assembly plants — have doubled Tijuana’s population in a decade and turned it into Mexico’s second richest city.

But the average salary here is $100 a week.

In September, two workers died in Calinor’s foam rubber plant. The men were using industrial solvents in an enclosed space without proper safety equipment. Fernando Briseno was 23. Armando Romero Meraz was 24. A third man, Hugo Javier Cardenas, was sent to hospital in critical condition.

In the suburban town of Chilpancingo, which sits below one of the large maquiladora areas, all of the wells are contaminated by runoff from various factories, including heavy metals from a lead smelter that has since been closed.

Women from that suburban slum have given birth to six anencephalic babies — without brains.

No one has been able to establish a link between the babies and the pollution here. But in Matamoros, where more anencephalic babies have been born, workers are suing their employers.

Last month, Canadian and U.S. trade unionists were detained by police for three hours after they met with workers who are trying to organize an independent union at the Plasticos Bajacal plant.

Last year, 531,689 Mexicans were apprehended by the 995 U.S. Border Patrol agents along the rugged 110-kilometre stretch between Tijuana and San Ysidro, Calif., just south of San Diego. An estimated one million
Mexicans cross illegally into California each year.

…

In Canada, NAFTA hasn’t caused the kind of sound or fury of the 1988 debate over the Canada-U.S. agreement. Trade Minister Tom Hockin calls it “an elaborate defence mechanism” for two reasons: The United States was determined to go ahead anyway, and Canada has already eliminated most tariffs on trade with Mexico, while Mexico has maintained theirs.

“We’re playing hockey without a goalkeeper and they have a goalkeeper,” Hockin said.

Although the Conservatives say NAFTA will create about 30,000 jobs in Canada, Reform party leader Preston Manning opposes NAFTA as it stands because there aren’t enough safeguards for Canadian jobs.

The Liberals’ NAFTA policy is fuzzy. At the beginning of the campaign, leader Jean Chretien had said he would renegotiate it. Now he says he’ll wait to see what the U.S. Congress does in its vote Nov. 17.

The New Democrats and the National party want the deal squashed. Their leaders point to the 450,000 jobs that have been lost because of the bilateral trade deal and say NAFTA will be worse.”

(“On the border: The free-trade deal is intended to improve the lot of Mexicans. But critics worry it will bring more poverty, pollution and health problems: Mexico: despite new industry and promises, old problems remain”, by Daphne Bramham, October 16, 1993, The Vancouver Sun)

As described above, there had been serious problems of environmental pollution and of lack of worker protection with the industrial plants set up by foreign companies in Mexico for its cheap labor; but when it came to trade with Mexico through the NAFTA agreement, Canada did nearly all it could to give Mexico an advantage, according to Trade Minister Tom Hockin of the Kim Campbell government; the smaller Canadian opposition parties all opposed NAFTA, and the leading opposition Chretien Liberals talked about renegotiating, but in the end would follow the U.S. Congress – other than adding some “declarations” to meet the Liberals’ perspectives as earlier discussed.

I should note that the NAFTA agreement had been negotiated under the Mulroney government in Canada and the George Bush administration in the U.S., whereas the Chretien government in Canada, as I have reviewed, assured its enactment on January 1, 1994. (“NAFTA negotiations: Timeline of rocky negotiations of the world’s largest free trade area”, by David Alire and Michael O’Boyle, September 1, 2017, Global News)

Ironically, just like the Canadian Chretien Liberals had wanted in 1993 during the election campaign, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico also wanted changes to NAFTA, in order to attain better protections and better future economic prospects for the indigenous Mayan people, here as reported on February 24, 1994, about a month before Chretien’s official visit to Mexico:

“The leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army guerrillas in southern Mexico demanded changes Wednesday to the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it is destroying indigenous peoples.

Subcomandante Marcos, on the third day of peace talks with the Mexican government, said the Zapatistas are also demanding political change at a national level.

As both sides began focusing on the Zapatistas’ specific demands, Marcos said NAFTA needs to be altered.

“There must be a side agreement that takes into account the indigenous people because, if not, they are going to destroy us without bullets,” he said.

“We are destined to disappear . . . How can we compete (with U.S. and Canadian farmers) when we can’t even compete with death?”

The Zapatistas said changes made to Mexico’s land-reform law under NAFTA will make it nearly impossible for indigenous peoples to become owners of land.”

(“Rebels want NAFTA changes”, February 24, 1994, Edmonton Journal)

The Zapatista uprising led by Subcomandante Marcos had in fact been prompted by the incoming NAFTA, and also by issues of serious human-rights abuses; it had begun on the same day as NAFTA’s start on New Year 1994, and met by “brutal response” from strong government forces that bombed these peasant rebels and killed hundreds; the new violent conflict posed new human-rights issues for the visiting Chretien who wanted to focus his attention on trade, especially Expo ’94, a $1.9-million exhibit of Canadian products that was the largest export trade fair the Canadian government had ever organized:

“When Canada and the United States included Mexico in their free-trade area at the end of 1993, the new partner was hailed for its vast economic potential and its attempts at political restructuring.

Since then the political system has been rocked by the uprising in the state of Chiapas and the economy has declined for two consecutive quarters.

That’s the environment that will greet Jean Chretien when he arrives in Mexico City on Wednesday for his first meeting as prime minister with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

The ostensible reason for Chretien’s trip is to visit Expo ’94, a $1.9-million exhibit of Canadian products that the government claims is the largest export trade fair it has ever organized.

…

“The question before Mexico’s North American partners is whether they can support positive change toward greater democracy and respect for human rights, and if so, how?” a Library of Parliament Research Branch analysis of the Chiapas uprising concludes.

“Quite obviously all three parties to the NAFTA would have preferred a more auspicious backdrop to the beginning of the intergovernmental co-operation required for implementing the treaty.”

The uprising, which saw several towns occupied by armed rebels, began on New Year’s day in the poor southern state of Chiapas where Mexican economic reforms have brought hardship rather than improvement.

The brutal response of the Mexican government quickly undermined its repeated claims during the free-trade talks that the corner had been turned on human rights abuses.

More than 15,000 troops were brought in and bombs were dropped on the peasant rebels. Several hundred people – the exact number still isn’t clear – died before the government unilaterally declared a ceasefire and began conciliation talks.”

(“Political climate in Mexico is rocky as Chretien prepares to meet president”, by Ian Austen, March 21, 1994, The Gazette)

For the Chretien Liberals the Mexican violence, including what no doubt shocked Chretien personally in his first official foreign visit in late March, regardless of its political stripe highlighted the need for security, which would be reviewed by Solicitor General Herb Gray, RCMP Commissioner Inkster and Foreign Affairs Minister Andre Ouellet, with the focus on improving Prime Minister Chretien’s security without impeding his ‘people-oriented’ politics:

“To the Chretien Liberals who were shifting governing focus from human rights to trade, the concern from all this Mexican violence seemed to be security – in Canada there had already been similar angry crowd of unemployed construction workers in his hometown (riding) of Shawinigan shouting at Chretien and smashing a window of his constituency office – but on the other hand the security should not hinder a prime minister who took pride in being “close to the people”, according to solicitor general Herb Gray who would review the PM’s security arrangements with RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster and foreign affairs minister Andre Ouellet. ²⁰³”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Here from a press article I cited in May 2009, is what Chretien proudly said about his being “close to the people”, or being “a populist” as the press characterized it, all while Gray was very concerned about security:

“Solicitor-General Herb Gray has ordered a review of security arrangements for Jean Chretien after the prime minister was jostled by an emotional mob in Mexico this week.

“I was concerned by what I saw on television and also the photographs that appeared in the newspapers,” Gray told reporters Friday.

“I’m going to ask for a report on what happened there and I’m going to see if changes should be made in the (security) arrangements.”

Chretien was surrounded by thousands of angry mourners when he tried to enter a funeral home Thursday to pay his respects to assassinated Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.

Wrapping up his Mexico trip on Friday, Chretien dismissed the incident as the price a politician pays for being a populist.

“I was close to the people. I didn’t feel in danger a minute.”

Gray said the incident might not have been as risky as it appeared on film. “It certainly looked troubling on television . . . (But) I was told that there were actually Mexican security people all around him.”

Although some RCMP security agents always travel with Chretien, security abroad is primarily the responsibility of the host country.

Still, Gray said he’ll review the arrangements with RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster and Foreign Affairs Minister Andre Ouellet. He would not reveal how many RCMP agents travel with Chretien or whether his security contingent has been reduced.

Noting that Chretien was also jostled last week by several hundred, angry, unemployed construction workers in his hometown of Shawinigan, Gray said such incidents can’t be avoided entirely.

“The prime minister’s the type of person who wants to be in touch with people and doesn’t believe his role should keep him away from people, wherever he goes.

“So there has to be a balance between security and his and our view of the role of the prime minister or a cabinet minister being in touch with people.””

(“PM’s security to be reviewed following incident in Mexico: Solicitor-general concerned after viewing TV footage, newspaper pictures”, by Joan Bryden, March 26, 1994, The Vancouver Sun)

As reported above, Chretien said, “I was close to the people. I didn’t feel in danger a minute”, whereas Solicitor General Gray said, “It certainly looked troubling on television”.

As mentioned in the last two quotes, even in Canada, of all places in Chretien’s own hometown, some low-level, politics-related violence was also demonstrated toward Chretien personally – by unemployed construction workers in his hometown of Shawinigan, Quebec.

But for Prime Minister Chretien and Justice Minister Allan Rock, the need for more security translated foremost to the need for stricter gun control – especially, I would add, when Chretien did not care as much about “Subcomandante Marcos” as the Canadian native leaders did – as I noted:

“Such could only add momentum to the gun-control drive being launched by justice minister Allan Rock, and prime minister Chretien personally announced on the last day of a high-profile Liberal party convention in mid-May in Ottawa that he would instruct Allan Rock to proceed with stricter gun-control legislation to be introduced in parliament in the fall, after the convention unanimously endorsed a resolution on tougher gun control – sponsored by the National Women’s Liberal Commission. ²⁰⁴””

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, in May 1994 when the Liberal Party convention was held in the national capital Ottawa, it unanimously endorsed a resolution sponsored by the National Women’s Liberal Commission calling for stricter gun control, and Chretien instructed Justice Minister Rock to introduce a legislation in the parliament in the fall of that year.

A few days later, when Chretien was attending a Liberal fundraiser at the convention centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, while hundreds of native demonstrators protested outside chanting “we want jobs”, there was a man carrying a crossbow and arrows who wanted to see the prime minister – a curious but serious incident that caught my attention while I was studying the press archives in 2009:

“Several days afterwards Chretien was at the Winnipeg convention centre attending a high-profile Liberal fundraiser, and there were not only around 200 native demonstrators outside chanting “We want jobs”, but also 29-year old Earl Kevin Jans wandering about in the convention centre and arrested for wanting to see the prime minister while carrying a pistol-like crossbow and three arrows²⁰⁵ – proof that a handgun is not always necessary, given the precedent that with crossbow and hunting arrow Montreal student and author Colin McGregor had killed his estranged wife Patricia Allen (a Revenue Canada lawyer and daughter of retired RCMP assistant commissioner George Allen), on November 13, 1991, i.e., one year before the Stan Wilbee and John Major events near the end of the Mulroney era, and nearly two years before the Chretien era began. ²⁰⁶”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As with the above, I made the point that the case of 29-year-old Earl Kevin Jans carrying a crossbow and three arrows looking for the prime minister served to remind others that guns were not always necessary to commit deadly violence, because there had been a high-profile precedent on November 13, 1991, when Montreal author Colin McGregor used such a weapon to kill his wife Patricia Allen, a Revenue Canada lawyer and daughter of retired RCMP assistant commissioner George Allen.

Here are more details from a press article I cited in May 2009 on the Jans incident that occurred on May 19, 1994:

“A man with a small crossbow entered the Winnipeg Convention Centre Thursday night shortly before Prime Minister Jean Chretien was to arrive for a speech.

Police say the man, who indicated he wanted to see the prime minister, was arrested on the second floor of the centre, carrying a pistol-grip bow and three small metal arrows.

Police and security staff descended on the man within minutes of entering the convention centre. RCMP in charge of security for the prime minister were also alerted.

The type of crossbow the man was carrying is about a foot long.

Earl Kevin Jans, 29, who gave his address as “Canada, the world,” was charged with carrying a weapon to a public meeting and possession of a dangerous weapon.”

(“Man with crossbow nabbed at PM’s speech”, May 21, 1994, The Gazette)

That was ambitious, that 29-year-old Earl Kevin Jans gave his address as “Canada, the world”.

Police noted that Jans carried the crossbow and arrows openly:

““He was wandering around with it quite openly — the darts in one hand and the bow in the other hand,” police spokesman Eric Turner said yesterday.”

(“Man disarmed before PM’s speech”, May 21, 1994, The Spectator)

With such a weapon in open display, Jans would quickly attract public attention and security response. In such manner, he probably only intended to make a point and ‘send a message’ to Prime Minister Chretien – at least that was my interpretation as in the last quote earlier from my May 2009 post.

But now, with the more detailed reviews I have conducted since after 2009 on the Airbus Affair and Canadian politics, as well as in my current article on the history of the Interpol presidency, some of the earlier-cited facts of these past Canadian incidents involving crossbow-and-arrow, namely Patricia Allen’s death in November 1991 and Earl Kevin Jans wanting to see Chretien in May 1994, appear more intriguing and concerning in the additional contexts.

First of all, in November 1991 the dead victim of the crossbow-and-arrow attack was a lawyer for Revenue Canada, the government agency managing taxation and in the process often dealing with matters of fraud and corruption – like Karlheinz Schreiber’s fraud case later in Germany.

Furthermore, this lawyer happened to be the daughter of a retired RCMP assistant commissioner, a former senior leader of the Canadian federal police responsible for investigating corruption, including possible corruption on the part of then Prime Minister Mulroney relating to Airbus commissions – although this particular criminal investigation had not been in full swing at the time and was not known to the public.

Now, with the information since coming to light about the Airbus Affair and the RCMP criminal investigation, could a murder like this have been an act of intimidation or retaliation against those in the government and the RCMP who might be uncovering something wrong?

Regarding this, any political facet would not be obvious due to the seemingly domestic nature of this 1991 murder: the attacker was the estranged husband and thus it was a case of domestic violence.

Publicly reported facts seem scant when it came to the professional work of Patricia Allen, or of her father George Allen.

A University of Ottawa philosophy graduate and 1987 McGill University law graduate, Patricia Allen worked at Revenue Canada as “an authority on the legal ramifications of the goods-and-services tax”; her estranged husband Colin McGregor was a 1987 McGill philosophy graduate and a reporter “always picking fights in print with various lobby groups”; the two were introduced in the summer of 1987 at the “plush lounge” of McGill’s graduate student building Thomson House. (“THE CROSSBOW KILLING; They were in love. She left him. Now she’s dead”, by Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

George Allen had worked for 35 years in the RCMP and retired in 1987 as the assistant commissioner in charge of organization and personnel, and had in January 1988 become “commissioner of Canada Elections”, “in charge of election law compliance and enforcement”. (“Bureaucracy’s pension problem haunts victim with nightmarish persistence”, by Frank Howard, January 15, 1988, The Ottawa Citizen; “No spending limit set for groups”, by Jes Odam, August 11, 1988, The Vancouver Sun; and, “George Allen”, December 20, 2005, Obituaries, Ottawa Citizen)

The basic facts gathered above did not appear directly related to the Airbus Affair per se, given that Patricia Allen’s specialty wasn’t income tax or property tax, and that George Allen had already retired from the RCMP and then started working at Elections Canada in the year of the Airbus sale of planes to Air Canada.

When it comes to the May 1994 Jans incident, with my latest review of Interpol history I notice two intriguing, albeit secondary coincidences.

Firstly, Earl Kevin Jans’s name bore some similarities to one of the two World War II Czechoslovakian resistance assassins of Interpol president Reinhard Heydrich, also in May in 1942, namely Jan Kubiš discussed earlier.

And secondly, when Earl Kevin Jans carried a crossbow and three arrows to want to see Prime Minister Jean Chretien, Norman Inkster was not only still the RCMP commissioner, albeit leaving – his departure would come in June – but also the Interpol president, undecided about stepping down but later quitting in September.

Whatever transpired in the Earl Kevin Jans incident, and whether or not Jans had been inspired by Jan Kubiš in history, no actual violence occurred – in contrast to the Patricia Allen case.

Still, it was a sign that not only violent protests but deadly violence could potentially get to the Canadian prime minister and not just to a political leader in a country much more violent than Canada that Chretien happened to visit.

In 2009 I noted a timing coincidence in Patricia Allen’s case, that her death occurred only several weeks before the second anniversary of the Montreal Massacre which had seen the shooting deaths of fourteen women at École Polytechnique, the University of Montreal’s engineering school, and that on the eve of that second anniversary the Mulroney government’s gun-control legislation, originally prompted by that tragedy, was approved by the Canadian parliament:

“Back in 1991 several weeks after Patricia Allen’s death, the Mulroney government’s weaker gun-control law that had been stimulated by the December 6, 1989 Montreal massacre – killing of 14 women at Ecole Polytechique (engineering school of the University of Montreal) by gunman Marc Lepine – passed the Senate on the eve of the massacre’s two-year anniversary (after it had passed the Commons earlier). ²⁰⁷”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But again, the timing of Allen’s murder was incidental in this instance: since no gun was involved, her death did not inspire anything in gun control.

Nonetheless, there was a similarity that could relate Allen’s murder to the Montreal Massacre of December 6, 1989, though in some hazy sense. One of the women killed was Maryse Leclair, daughter of Montreal Police director of communications Pierre Leclair, who found her daughter’s body at the scene:

“As Pierre Leclair girds himself for the 10th anniversary of the massacre at École Polytechnique, he is coming to a sorrowful realization: The tragedy didn’t end when the crazed gunman stopped firing.

…

Mr. Leclair was head of communications for the Montreal Urban Community police when he reported for duty at the university on Dec. 6, 1989. He was standing outside the engineering building briefing reporters when he decided to gather information inside.

“Hold on, I’ll go see what’s happening and I’ll come back and see you,” he told them.

He knew his daughter was at the university that day delivering her term-end presentation. But with hundreds of students in the school, he wasn’t worried. Then, as Mr. Leclair slowly made his way through the university’s eerie hallways, the sickening scale of the carnage began to sink in.

In one room, he saw the bodies of six young women. In another, he saw a woman who had been shot through the glass of her office.

“I was getting more and more worried,” Mr. Leclair recalled.

Then he came to a classroom on the third floor. He looked inside and saw before him what no parent ever wants to behold.

“I saw my daughter on the ground. I recognized her right away. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to react. It was her.”

Maryse, 23, had been giving her presentation on a podium at the front of the class when she was shot. “She fell on the podium, crying, but she didn’t die. Maryse was crying out, ‘Help me, help me,’” her father said.

The gunman stalked the classroom, shooting three more women before returning to a moaning Maryse Leclair. He pulled out a knife from a sheath on his belt and stabbed her to death.

…

Maryse Leclair was the final victim. …”

(“The awful echoes of Marc Lépine”, by Ingrid Peritz, December 6, 2004/April 21, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

So as above, the public were told the grizzly tale of his daughter’s murder, by the heartbroken father ten years later, informing the public that his daughter had been the only victim not just shot but stabbed to death, and the final victim of the killer who then committed suicide.

Sadly, but ironically, Maryse Leclair could still be alive today had violence been committed only in its most commonly feared form, i.e., by guns.

Nonetheless, assessing what has been publicly reported it remains unclear to me whether, like the other victims, Maryse Leclair and her Montreal police-official father were strangers to the killer Marc Lépine. This is because the intelligent young man, a former reject by École Polytechnique and a failure at other schools and at the workplace, had for a time been a friend of Maryse Leclair’s cousin Dominique:

“… At age thirteen, sick of being called “Arab” and having to explain about his loathed Algerian father, Gamil Gharbi officially changed his name to Marc Lépine.

…

What remaining close relationships Marc had established perished in the summer of 1982, when his mother sold the family home in Pierrefonds and moved with her two children to a rented two-storey row house in the suburb of Saint-Laurent. Life at 2675 Marlborough Court had the advantage of being closer to St. Jude’s Hospital in Laval, where both Monique and Marc were employed; the former as a nursing director and the latter washing dishes in the hospital kitchen. By September, Marc had finished his summer job and was entering his first semester of a two-year CEGEP program in Pure Sciences at Saint-Laurent Junior College. …

…

Without the benefit of hindsight, in 1983 Marc Lépine seemed angelic compared to his sister, Nadia, whose habitual disobedience had landed her in a boarding school for troubled teens. Lépine was not sorry to see her go, For years she had constantly taunted him in front of his friends, exacting a devastating toll on his fragile self-esteem. Though Lépine had fared poorly in his fall 1982 term at CEGEP, by winter 1983 he had revitalized his academic performance, earning grades which ranged from the seventies to the nineties. His boyhood dream of entering the engineering program at École Polytechnique was now close to becoming a reality.

In the meantime, he continued to work part-time as a custodian at St. Jude’s Hospital, and was also responsible for serving meals to patients. Here his social shortcomings became increasingly evident. Considered weird and loud, Lépine was judged to be seeking attention. Though he made friends, he argued with them constantly, a trait which some found annoying. Nicknamed “James Bond” for his high IQ and puzzle-solving abilities, sadly Lépine lacked 007’s confidence and easy charm with the ladies. He would routinely take meals and breaks with female co-workers, but was stifled in his efforts to court them by his crippling shyness. …

When autumn of 1983 came, Lépine suddenly changed academic direction, dropping out in the middle of his two-year Pure Sciences program in favour of a three-year vocational trade program in Electronics Technology. He continued to achieve good grades, including an 82 in Industrial Electronics and an 87 in Control Systems. However, in both the school and the workplace, he was regarded as high-strung – a bundle of nerves who was always “in a hurry.” Lépine would often slam meal carts, spilling soup, which his co-workers interpreted as aggression…  Unsurprisingly, when Nadia returned to living at 2675 Marlborough in 1986, Lépine’s behaviour took a turn for the worse. With only nine courses left before graduating CEGEP in Electronics Technology, on January 31, 1986, the twenty-one-year-old simply stopped attending classes. He applied for the engineering program at École Polytechnique and was predictably rejected. …

Lépine’s habitual clumsiness resulted in him being transferred to the cafeteria at St. Jude’s, but the constant steam from the kitchen only worsened his repulsive acne. Fellow employees mocked him and refused to let him serve their meals. …

That summer, Lépine befriended nineteen-year-old Dominique Leclair, the daughter of the man who ran the hospital. “I was kind to him because he was so hyperactive and nervous,” Dominique recalled. “Nobody would talk to him at lunch or break time. . . . Everyone else tried to avoid him because he was a bit strange because of his shyness. …”¹³ Regarding his co-workers, she readily admitted, “They were mean.” If Lépine ever had any romantic interest in Dominique, she did not pick up on it. …

“I’ve asked a lot of girls out, but they have all refused,” he once confessed to her. “I know so many girls, but they won’t go out with me. I’m not good-looking. . . .” The two finally went their separately ways in September 1987, when Dominique returned to school. Lépine was fired from his job at the hospital and attended a CEGEP in Montmorency. Although he received a $2,400 severance package, he was infuriated. One witness remembers him threatening to go on a killing rampage that would culminate with his own death. In a chilling coincidence, the last victim of the Polytechnique massacre would turn out to be Dominique’s cousin Maryse. He had repaid her kindness with a lifetime of agony.”

(Lee Mellor, Rampage: Canadian Mass Murder and Spree Killing, 2013, Dundurn)

Ten years later recalling the sad history, rather than revealing any crime-solving insight into the horrific Canadian mass murder that claimed his daughter Maryse and her follow university women, the former communications director of the Montreal Police and still-grieving father Pierre Leclair spoke with mystique about his “theory”, which I interpret as of the ‘consecration of flesh’, that is, his daughter Maryse’s:

“The mystery of why Maryse was the only victim to be stabbed haunted Mr. Leclair for years. But he has come up with a theory over time, and it has nurtured his deep belief in gun control.

“He was forced to touch her,” he said. “With a bullet, there’s no contact with the person. But when you touch someone, you feel them, you feel their warmth.

“Maybe all of a sudden he realized the magnitude of what he’d done. It was as if he woke up.”

Maryse Leclair was the final victim. The killer uttered, “Oh, shit,” then turned his gun on himself.

…

Mr. Leclair, a solidly built man who speaks about his daughter with nervous intensity, said he’s decided to talk about her death after years of silence in the hope that something – he’s not sure what — will come of it. But events over the past 10 years haven’t been encouraging: Dunblane, Scotland; Littleton, Colo.; Taber, Alta.,; Honolulu — every other week, someone seems to go berserk and fire on innocent people.

“Ten years later, do incidents like this happen any less? No,” he said. “Its causes are still not settled. Did it happen because Mr. Lépine was deranged? Well there are still lots of deranged people out there. Was it because he was a misogynist? There are still others out there today, too.

“I’m not so sure we’ve learned anything.”

But Mr. Leclair, now the chief of police in the Quebec City suburb of Ste-Foy, is remarkably free of anger. He described the killer, the son of a brutally violent father, as a victim himself. And he spoke lovingly of his deceased daughter, finding solace in the memory of a determined young woman and good student in her final year in metallurgy who wanted to make it in a man’s field.”

(Ingrid Peritz, December 6, 2004/April 21, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

I suppose that in Mr. Leclair’s mind, the need for gun control was due not so much to the efficacy of guns as lethal weapon, but to the lack of close human touch in using such a weapon.

Leclair expressed indignation at not being able to reach the truth, and peace for more people, even after ten years. But in my view truth, or the science of something, cannot be reached if those who hold the keys to it are consumed by the piety of blood or preoccupied with the sacredness of prayer.

For a first question of a practical inquiry, could it not have been that Lépine knifed Maryse because she was unique to him, that in his murderous crime spree he knew exactly who she was?

While the two deaths share the common dimension of a police official as the victim’s father, in the case of Patricia Allen murder the seemingly incidental, indirect link between the killer and the only stabbed victim in the earlier École Polytechnique gun-shooting spree was replaced with a passionate romance turning sour and ending with a crossbow killing, also acted out in public view:

“Even in the beginning, Colin McGregor believed relationships between men and women were doomed to end in failure – sometimes, with what he called “a terribly cruel vengeance.”

Last week, the 30-year-old author of those chilling words was charged with the murder of his estranged wife, Patricia Allen, a 31-year-old lawyer.

Allen, who worked in Ottawa, was shot through the heart with a steel-tipped hunting arrow as she left her dentist’s office at 8:30 on the morning of Nov. 13. The 18-inch bolt had been fired at close range from a crossbow.

The last thing she saw was probably the massive stone facade of Christ Roi Church, across the street.

Her dentist later told Allen’s parents he was the last person to see her alive. He said she had been in a happy, optimistic mood when she left his downtown Ottawa offices.

It was 12 weeks since Allen had initiated legal-separation procedures against McGregor.

Five people witnessed the killing on Argyle St.

Minutes later, McGregor calmly walked through the main entrance of an Ottawa police station two blocks from the scene. He was interrogated for less than an hour, charged with first-degree murder and remanded to the Royal Ottawa Hospital for a 30-day psychiatric examination.

…

Inspector Ronald Lamothe, the Ottawa police officer in charge of the case, won’t discuss the evidence for fear of jeopardizing the trial’s outcome.

…

Lamothe refused to discuss the nature of items police seized in an apartment McGregor had rented on Chapel St. in downtown Ottawa.

He said McGregor drove a rented Dodge Shadow and parked it near Allen’s Toyota Tercel. The Dodge was later found abandoned at the scene.

McGregor, a graduate of Selwyn House, an exclusive Westmount school, moved into his low-rent Ottawa apartment after his wife changed the locks on her house and got an unlisted telephone number.

She lived on Prince Albert St., about 2 kilometres away.

Just landed promotion

The daughter of George Allen, a retired RCMP assistant commissioner, Patricia worked for Revenue Canada, where she was an authority on the legal ramifications of the goods-and-services tax.

“She loved tax,” one of her friends said, “but you had to pry it out of her that she worked for the dreaded GST branch.”

Allen, a witty and bright conversationalist, had recently landed an important promotion that put her in charge of five people.”

(Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

Before his relationship with and then marriage to Patricia Allen, there had been no sign that Colin McGregor, whose writings could be antagonistic, had any physical tendency toward violence:

“Ron Seltzer, publisher of the Downtowner, said McGregor joined his staff in 1985 after spending some time at a small weekly in Halifax.

“He was fine to work with,” Seltzer said.

He said he was shocked to hear that McGregor had been charged.

“I have no recollections of his having had a bad temper,” Seltzer added. “No incidents of desk-kicking to report.”

Brian Todd, now a political aide to Phil Edmonston, the New Democratic Party MP for Chambly, remembers that McGregor loved to debate issues.

“I knew him at McGill as a right-leaning contrarian” – someone who says black is white just for argument’s sake.

“He was a professional debunker, always picking fights in print with various lobby groups,” Todd said.

But McGregor didn’t seem a violent fellow “in any way,” he said.

Indeed, some of McGregor’s columns in the McGill Tribune show he had a keen sense of humor but was generally cynical. He was also a fairly accomplished writer.”

(Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

However, after they were introduced and their romance instantly blossomed, McGregor became extremely and obsessively possessive of Allen:

“In McGregor’s mind, unhappy endings weren’t unusual. He had lost his mother to cancer when he was only 12.

His views on relationships between men and women are contained in yellowing copies of the McGill Tribune, a weekly student newspaper for which he wrote while he attended McGill University, starting in 1982.

In a column on sex in the Nov. 2, 1982, issue, McGregor wrote:

“Most sex does not last forever. Relationships go wrong, they end up on the rocks, and often they do so with a terribly cruel vengeance. The vast majority of affairs on this planet have ended in that fashion. Failure. Heartbreak. Bad news.”

…

But it was love at first sight on that summer evening in 1987 when Allen and McGregor met.

Allen had effortlessly sailed through her third year of law school. McGregor, who had just got his BA in philosophy, had a job with the Montreal public-relations firm of Gervais, Gagnon, Frenette &Associes. He had just completed a year-long stint as a reporter with the Downtowner, a Montreal weekly newspaper.

…

Allen’s friends say she and McGregor were introduced by mutual acquaintances at Thomson House, a building for graduate students, located across from the law faculty on McTavish St.

The 10 male and female students who belonged to what they jokingly called the “rat pack and cat pack” liked to frequent the building’s plush lounge.

Pack members agreed to be interviewed on condition that their names not be used.

“We used to hang out there,” one of the women recalled. “One night Colin showed up and in a matter of weeks Patricia had him pegged as ‘Colin-the-man-I’m-going-to-marry-Gregor.’ It was as quick as that.”

Allen’s friends say she was lonely when McGregor arrived on the scene.

Allen’s family was in Ottawa and she lived in a downtown Montreal apartment. She had several close friends, but there was no man in her life.

…

But in the midst of it all, there were disquieting signs.

A woman friend remembered being at Allen’s apartment one evening before the two married.

“I swear I’m not exaggerating. In the space of three hours, he called 10 times. He wanted to be reassured she loved him.

“I found it sick. I thought nobody should call you that many times.”

Thane Burnett, a friend of McGregor, said Colin didn’t make friends easily.

“But when you were his friend, you were his friend for life.”

As the relationship progressed, Allen’s friends felt themselves shunted aside by McGregor’s growing possessiveness.

“I couldn’t even go to their home,” one woman said. “And whenever I called Pat, he’d be on the extension clicking the phone.”

McGregor was an incredible snob, she added.

“He wanted everyone to think he was upper crust and he didn’t want Pat to associate with anyone who wasn’t worthy.””

(Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

As reviewed earlier, the normal friendship between Marc Lépine and Dominique Leclair tapered off in September 1987 when Leclair returned to school after a summer at the hospital where her father was the boss, Lépine’s mother a manager and Lépine a worker; in timeline, that was soon after Colin McGregor and Patricia Allen becoming romantically involved in the summer of 1987, though the two cases were unrelated.

But the two pairs were heading in opposite directions, with McGregor and Allen’s relationship growing into a marriage a year later.

After their marriage, McGregor became financially dependent on Allen and then also fell off his career and education tracks; the predicaments led to quarrels between them and Allen’s decision to separate from McGregor, viewing McGregor as violent but not anticipating any violence toward her:

“McGregor moved to Ottawa at the end of 1987 to join the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada as media relations officer. It was a significant move up the corporate ladder for a young man who by all accounts was obsessed with impressing people. He held the post from January till the fall of 1988.

On Oct. 1, Allen and McGregor married.

After that, McGregor registered at Carleton University for the master’s degree program in public administration.

With Allen supporting him, McGregor attended classes on a part-time basis. And he quarrelled with his wife.

Lost track

Their next-door neighbor, Debbie Monette, told the Ottawa Sun:

“He would be yelling, saying he wanted to stay in school and she would be telling him he had to pull his own share.”

After the couple separated on Aug. 20, Allen lost track of McGregor.

“She couldn’t do anything with him, and he wouldn’t do anything for himself,” one of her friends said.

By the end of August, McGregor had dropped out of school and was unemployed.

“I asked her how he was supporting himself,” a friend said, “and she didn’t have a clue.”

If the marriage broke down, it was McGregor’s fault, the friend added.

“Pat was a very determined person. And when she married him she intended for it to work.”

One friend who was in touch with Allen three days before her death said she asked Patricia if she was afraid of McGregor.

“She thought he was violent, but she didn’t think he would hurt her,” the friend recalled.”

(Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

In a sense of irony, though, as I can perceive, the all-consuming romance between Colin McGregor and Patricia Allen and McGregor’s obsessive possession of Allen – in contrast to Marc Lépine’s persistent failures in intimate socialization and the numerous ridicules heaped on his personality in public settings – may have prevent the victimization of others when McGregor’s inner violence was eventually unleashed.

Perhaps not irrelevant to that contrast was the different choices of weapon for the murders, that a rather humble crossbow with arrow was sufficient for McGregor’s purpose.

The same choice of weapon clearly could not be adequate for Earl Kevin Jans several years later in May 1994 – at a security-protected public gathering where the prime minister was to be his target. But as I have commented earlier, that weapon’s real use may not have been Jans’s purpose.

By the early fall in 1994, several months after the Liberal Party convention that launched a stricter gun-control drive and the Earl Kevin Jans incident, both in May, there was still no action for gun control by the Chretien government on the legislative front.

Around that time in late August, Stevie Cameron’s book on corruption in the Mulroney government era, On The Take: Greed And Corruption In The Mulroney Years, was being eagerly anticipated, along with several other books on Canadian politics, including the second volume of Trudeau And Our Times, subtitled The Heroic Delusion:

“Fortunately for Chretien, by the fall of 1994 gun control would not be the only political issue stirring controversy with passion as Stevie Cameron’s major book exposing corruptions in the Mulroney years was scheduled for the same fall season; there were both excitement and nervousness awaiting for the upcoming fall books on Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney: ²⁰⁸

“Last year McClelland & Stewart’s big fall book was Pierre Trudeau’s own memoir, which sold more than 200,000 copies. This year it’s deja vu all over again, when M & S brings out the second volume of Trudeau And Our Times, by the Governor-General’s Award winning team of Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson. Subtitled The Heroic Delusion, it takes up the former prime minister’s career after the ‘74 election. A hot political book, awaited with trepidation by some, is On The Take: Greed And Corruption In The Mulroney Years by Stevie Cameron (Macfarlane Walter & Ross). Another book that will make Conservatives uncomfortable is The Poisoned Chalice: How The Tories Self-Destructed by David McLaughlin (Dundurn)”.

…

208. Judy Stoffman, “New books season full of promise Excitement from CanLit favorites and newcomers”, August 31, 1994, Toronto Star”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As discussed earlier, investigating corruption on the part of former Prime Minister Mulroney was a part of the Chretien Liberal government’s law-and-order agenda, if not of the same high priority as stricter gun control. With Cameron’s new book coming out, both law-and-order issues were expected to enjoy public attention.

As noted earlier, around this time in September, former RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, who had retired from the RCMP in June, also stepped down from the Interpol presidency.

Cameron’s book came out in late October 1994, and became an instant bestseller. However, even though it portrayed Mulroney as turning a blind eye to the corruption around him, disappointingly it showed little hard evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Mulroney himself, in the Airbus Affair in particular:

“In late October 1994 Stevie Cameron’s book on the Mulroney years came out and became an instant bestseller: it portrayed a damning picture of the greed, crime and corruption in the political circle associated with the Mulroney government, and of Mulroney turning a blind eye to the grease around him while living his extravagant lifestyle at the expenses of the party and the government; coming out around the anniversary of the Tories’ historic election debacle it served as a reminder how democracy could go wrong. ²¹⁰

But Cameron presented little hard evidence Mulroney himself had done anything seriously crooked or criminally wrong: a story about a $4-million trust fund set up by some Montreal businessmen for Mulroney’s retirement was categorically denied by Mulroney and by Tory senator Marjorie LeBreton, while a brief section on the Airbus Affair went unnoticed by the media. ²¹¹”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I noted that there may have been personal safety concerns on the part of the author, as well as on the part of some of those cited in the book, including a police informant:

“Nonetheless, controversies over risks of publicizing the Mulroney-era problems abounded: publisher Gary Ross went public about break-ins at the publishers’ offices attempting to steal Cameron’s manuscripts, Cameron was reported to have received intimidation through a family member, and a Vancouver man, Michael Lee Mitton, quoted in the book as a former fraudster in a sting operation for an RCMP investigation into the Mulroney government’s Mafia link, also told the media he feared for mob revenge on his life. ²¹²”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Nevertheless, the RCMP announced that it was studying Cameron’s book, and Solicitor General Gray also discussed the subject:

“The RCMP also announced they were studying the book, much to the delight of solicitor general Herb Gray. ²¹³”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As reviewed earlier, Mulroney later complained about “open season on Mulroney”, referring to this time, as quoted earlier, “Out comes (Stevie) Cameron’s book (On The Take), Herb Gray, the solicitor general, gives a copy of it to the commissioner of the RCMP, asking that he look into it.”

By November 1994, both of these major Chretien government law-and-order agendas were getting public attention. But just like Cameron’s new book lacking in evidence of personal corruption on the part of Mulroney, in the fall of 1994 the Chretien government was weakening its gun-control plan:

“While Cameron’s book was proving to be lacking hard material on Mulroney, around that time the Chretien government was retreating from a possible handgun ban due to opposition in the Liberal party to tougher gun control, and to stronger homosexual-rights protection; a universal gun registry, expanding from an existent one for handguns and restricted weapons, now became the main gun-control issue Chretien was stumping for, and even that did not appear assured. ²¹⁴

…

214. Sarah Scott, “Rock mulls total ban on handguns”, September 22, 1994, The Gazette; Bob Cox, “Liberal MPs demand freedom: Promises of free votes have been forgotten”, October 11, 1994, The Record; and, Tim Harper, “Every gun will be registered Chretien vows”, October 22, 1994, Toronto Star”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, by October 1994 there did not appear to be any gun ban in the Chretien government’s stricter gun-control legislation, which instead would primarily be an expansion of the existing gun registry on “handguns and restricted weapons” to cover all guns.

At this critical juncture, an unusual gun-shooting crime occurred in Vancouver in early November, and garnered nationwide public attention:

“At this juncture, a critical shot in the arm turned out to come from the shooting of an abortion doctor in Vancouver: while reading a Time magazine and waiting for breakfast at home Dr. Gary Romalis, a gynaecologist who performed abortions at the Vancouver General Hospital but who did not consider himself an abortion activist, was seriously wounded in the thigh by one of two AK-47 assault rifle shots  fired from the alley through the kitchen window on November 8, 1994. ²¹⁵ ”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told, the victim in this case, wounded in the leg by an AK-47 assault rifle bullet from outside his home kitchen window while he was reading a Time magazine, was gynaecologist Dr. Gary Romalis who performed abortions at the Vancouver General Hospital.

It was the first-ever shooting of an abortion doctor in Canada, and drew public condemnations from Prime Minister Chretien and British Columbia Premier Mike Harcourt; the public attention enabled Justice Minister Rock to rally support in the medical community for stricter gun control, and strengthen the proposed legislation to include a ban on military-style assault weapons:

“The shooting of an abortion doctor was the first of its kind in Canada – after several recent shootings that had killed two U.S. doctors – and it drew condemnations from prime minister Chretien and B.C. premier Mike Harcourt who were on an Asian trip in Shanghai, and got justice minister Allan Rock to rally the medical community to support tougher gun control; momentum from the public outcries contributed to the inclusion of a ban on military-type assault weapons in the gun-control measures unveiled by Rock on November 30, 1994 (a military-type assault weapon, Ruger Mini-14, had also been responsible for the deaths of the 14 women in the Montreal massacre in December 1989). ²¹⁶”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, a military-type assault weapon had been used in the Montreal Massacre that killed fourteen women in December 1989 – but apparently the Mulroney government’s gun-control legislation two years later in 1991 did not include a ban on such weapons – and now with the wounding of Dr. Gary Romalis, again by such a weapon, a ban was added to the Chretien government’s new gun-control measures unveiled on November 30, 1994.

Here is some of what Prime Minister Chretien said on the eve of unveiling the new gun-control measures, referring to Dr. Romalis:

“Prime Minister Jean Chretien says the gun lobby won’t stop him from pushing through “the toughest gun control measures in Canadian history.”

Justice Minister Allan Rock will unveil a package of reforms in Parliament today “to crack down on criminals who have guns and to ban the kinds of weapons we have seen kill young students in Montreal and that seriously wounded a medical doctor in Vancouver a few weeks ago,” Chretien told a Liberal fundraiser last night at the Metro Convention Centre.

“I know that some in the gun lobby will scream when Allan introduces our gun control package,” he said. “But Canadians don’t want special interests to keep us from doing the right thing – in any area.

“And I pledge to the people of Canada that we will not let that happen.”

Although the reforms are to be unveiled today by Rock, Solicitor-General Herb Gray and Revenue Minister David Anderson, enabling legislation won’t be introduced until February.

The Prime Minister said last night Canadians want decent neighborhoods and safe streets.

“People here in Toronto and in communities across Canada are tired of all the guns on the streets – the violence, the murders,” he said. “They don’t want their communities to become combat zones like some American cities.””

(“PM vows not to yield to foes of gun control Canadians ‘tired of the violence, murders,’ he says”, by Rosemary Speirs, November 30, 1994, Toronto Star)

As quoted above, “the toughest gun control measures in Canadian history”, “to crackdown on criminals who have guns”, and “to ban the kinds of weapons we have seen kill young students in Montreal and that seriously wounded a medical doctor in Vancouver”, were among Chretien’s words. Chretien also referred to some American cities as “combat zones”, stating that people in Canada do not want their communities to become such.

Gun control appeared somewhat like a ‘blood sport’ in Canada, didn’t it?

But if it was any consolation, unlike the fourteen Montreal women slain in 1989, in 1994 Romalis was only shot in the leg – kind of like Interpol president Reinhard Heydrich’s driver Johannes Klein in 1942.

In my 2009 article I mentioned some interesting coincidences in my past political activism with Dr. Gary Romalis’s case. To make the presentation easy to understand they are summarized here in a list, as from my May 2009 post:

1. When I started my political activism in November 1992, besides to media venues I also sent my press releases to the local Member of Parliament, Justice Minister Kim Campbell; though shot two years later in November 1994, Romalis had received threats during the Mulroney government era and complained to Justice Minister Kim Campbell.
2. After my faxing documents to Campbell’s Vancouver constituency office on November 30, 1992, RCMP officers came to my apartment to suppress my activities; it was then exactly two years later on November 30, 1994, when Justice Minister Rock unveiled the Chretien government’s gun-control legislation that included a military-type assault weapons ban partly stimulated by the shooting of Romalis earlier that November in Vancouver.
3. When RCMP officer Brian Cotton took me to a psychiatric assessment on November 30, 1992, he rejected my suggestion of going to the nearby Vancouver General Hospital for a “neutral” assessment, stating that it had been arranged at the hospital of the University of British Columbia; Dr. Romalis practised at the VGH.
4. In subsequent occasions of being sent to psychiatric assessments and committals, the assessments at VGH were more favorable to me, and the release sooner, than at other institutions including UBC Hospital.
5. In January 1993 when I was sent to my second psychiatric committal, through an arrangement by the prosecution with Judge William J. Kitchen, for the criminal charge of “harassing phone calls” from me to staff at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I was supposed to be sent to the B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute, where persons with harder criminal offences were sent to – as mentioned earlier, later I was committed there in February 1994 when Chretien announced Inkster’s resignation from the RCMP – but a Vancouver police officer suggested that I get a referral from my family physician, Dr. James K. Lai, so I could be sent to the VGH instead; according to a personal-information disclosure I later obtained, on at least one occasion Dr. Lai stated his opinion that I was “very healthy”.
6. Years later on July 11, 2000, Dr. Romalis was physically attacked a second time, by a man yielding a knife, and a caller to The Vancouver Sun claimed responsibility on behalf of the “Baby Liberation Army”; by this time Romalis was no longer with VGH but with the Seymour Medical Clinic headed by Dr. Lai, where he was attacked – it was my “former” medical clinic as I had left Vancouver in 1997 to work in the United States.

To further clarify Point #1 above, namely communicating to Justice Minister Kim Campbell during the Mulroney era, for his abortion work Dr. Romalis had been threatened in very physical manners:

“The threat of violence was not new to Dr. Romalis, who has been a gynecologist in the city for almost three decades. Anti-abortion advocates had previously demonstrated in front of his house and office, throwing roofing nails on his driveway and harassing him at the Vancouver General Hospital. Dr. Romalis had warned Kim Campbell of his concerns when she was federal justice minister, said one of his colleagues, Lynn Simpson.”

(“B.C. doctor hit by sniper Gynecologist who does abortions had received threatening call”, by Robert Matas and Miro Cernetig, November 9, 1994, The Globe and Mail)

About Point #6 above, namely Dr. Romalis working at my former medical clinic headed by my former doctor James K. Lai, when he was stabbed, here is what I wrote in 2009:

“In the New Millennium, Dr. Gary Romalis again received a threatening call though he was no longer based in Vancouver General Hospital, and was attacked with a knife and wounded on July 11, 2000 in the Seymour Medical Clinic where he worked. ²²⁰

If the reader has guessed again now you may be right: this time Dr. Romalis was a member of my (former) medical clinic chaired by my family physician Dr. James Lai; the day after the attack a phone call was placed to the Vancouver Sun newspaper on behalf of a “Baby Liberation Army” claiming responsibility ²²¹ – but by the fall of 1997 I had left Vancouver and in 2000 I was working in Silicon Valley in California …”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Neither of the two seriously violent attacks on Gary Romalis has ever been solved by the police. But, interestingly, the main suspect of the 1994 shooting was not a Canadian but American James C. Kopp, as I remarked in my 2009 article’s Part 6:

“American James C. Kopp, long-time anti-abortion activist serving a life sentence since 2007 for the 1998 murder of Amherst, N.Y. abortion doctor Barnett Slepian, is a main suspect in the 1994 shooting of Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) abortion doctor Gary Romalis; a Canadian warrant for Kopp was issued for the 1995 shooting of abortion doctor Hugh Short in Ancaster, Ontario, though the prosecution has recently decided to stay the charges; Kopp is also a main suspect in the 1997 shooting of abortion doctor Jack Fainman of Winnipeg.²²²

In the New York case, two anti-abortion activists harbouring and helping Kopp, Loretta Marra and Dennis Malvasi, received light penalties. ²²³

As previously discussed, the Romalis shooting incident in November 1994 turned the Canadian medical community into showing strong support for justice minister Allan Rock’s stricter gun-control legislation, which was unveiled on November 30, 1994 and included a ban on military-type weapons, one of which – an AK-47 – had been responsible for wounding Dr. Romalis.

There has been no press report of any identified suspect in the second, knife attack on Dr. Romalis in July 2000, which took place at my former medical clinic headed by my family physician Dr. James K. Lai, where Dr. Romalis practiced after retiring from the VGH.”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 6)”, June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, James C. Kopp was an American who took out his military-style assault weapon and aimed it at abortion doctors in the U.S. as well as in Canada – convicted of killing a U.S. doctor and suspected of wounding three Canadian doctors.

I have always felt intrigue with the similarities in the names James K. Lai and James C. Kopp. But now with the review of Interpol history in this current article, it’s worth mentioning in light of the name similarities between Earl Kevin Jans, who brought a crossbow and arrows to want to see Prime Minister Chretien, several months before the shooting of Gary Romalis, and Reinhard Heydrich’s assassin Jan Kubiš in history.

As I wrote in June 2009, I also noted that the active shooting of abortion doctors had not ended but had, just in May 2009, claimed the life of Dr. George Tiller, an American peer of Dr. Romalis’s:

“But recently on May 31, 2009, only days after the Canadian charges were dropped against Kopp in the Dr. Short case, American abortion doctor George Tiller, who had previously been shot and wounded and who had lectured to abortion providers in Vancouver at the invitation of Dr. Romalis, was gunned down in the lobby of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, becoming the first dead doctor of anti-abortion violence in the U.S. after Kopp’s killing of Dr. Slepian; the main suspect, Scott Roeder, had been a member of an extreme Christian militia group, the Freeman movement. ²²⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Nevertheless, I feel somewhat relieved that, though as painful and potentially as deadly, the second attack on Dr. Romalis used only a knife.

I don’t know if the Chretien government’s stricter gun ban deserved credit for the ‘curtailed’ choice of weapon against Dr. Romalis in the second attack in 2000, but I notice a different kind of similarity: while in March 1994 Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was gunned down just before Chretien’s official Mexican visit, two months later in Canada Earl Kevin Jans carried only crossbow-and-arrows; likewise, Dr. Romalis was shot when he was a doctor with Vancouver General Hospital, but later with my former physician Dr. Lai’s clinic he was only stabbed.

Returning to my review of the Chretien government’s stricter gun-control drive that received a boost of public support due to the shooting of Dr. Gary Romalis, the legislative process began in February 1995, on St. Valentine’s Day, which happened to have some relevant history in regard to gun violence, in the U.S. but also related to Canada:

“When the gun-control bill was officially put to the legislative process in February 1995, it was on St. Valentine’s Day, “known as the day of the St. Valentine’s Massacre”, noted John Perrochio, president of the Canadian Firearms Action Council, referring to a rival-gang slaughtering in 1929 Prohibition-era Chicago, in which the killers dressed as policemen, and behind which control of illegal liquor from Canada by the notorious gangster boss Al Capone was apparently a motivating factor. ^{225, 226, 227}

…

226. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre in which gangsters believed to be from Al Capone’s organization dressed as policemen, lined up 7 members of a rival bootlegging gang at a Clark Street garage in Chicago and machine-gunned them to death, was never solved although Capone’s bodyguard and successor Anthony J. Accardo was thought to be responsible…

227. After 13 female engineering students and one female employee were gunned down at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, the media noted that it was twice as bad as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre; later the school’s student association president Alain Perrault chose the day before St. Valentine’s Day 1990 to unveil a gun-control petition signed by over 200,000 people, starting a campaign pushing Mulroney government’s justice minister Kim Campbell toward gun-control efforts…”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Immediately, the legislation won praise from U.S. President Bill Clinton who happened to visit Canada and give a speech at the Canadian Parliament:

“The Chretien Liberal government’s gun-control bill immediately won praise from U.S. president Bill Clinton, whose own 1994 legislation on banning assault weapons had been lauded in Canada by Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, in the wake of the Dr. Romalis shooting in Vancouver; in a speech to the Canadian parliament, Clinton compared Canada’s move “to outlaw automatic weapons designed for killing and not hunting”, to universal healthcare Canada had – something Clinton had also tried to introduce in the United States but failed. ²²⁸”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Around the same time, the efforts to investigate possible corruption on the part of former Prime Minister Mulroney was getting into international action.

In January 1995, two RCMP officers, Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald and Inspector Carl Gallant, visited Stevie Cameron to discuss her new book published in October 1994, and she recommended interviewing persons in Europe, who in her experience had been more helpful than the Canadian government and police; then in March, partly based on Cameron’s book, the CBC’s The Fifth Estate in Canada and the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and der Spiegel magazine in Germany reported Karlheinz Schreiber’s secret Airbus commissions and Swiss bank accounts for Canadian politicians:

“During that same spring of 1995, efforts by the media and by the RCMP to pursue former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s possible corruption were also expanding, following the October 1994 publication of Stevie Cameron’s book exposing Mulroney-era corruption. Cameron’s book had become not only a bestseller alongside books such as Open Secrets by Alice Munro, but a favorite Christmas gift. ²³¹

In January, the press reported that author Peter C. Newman living in a “Kitsilano tower” in Vancouver was writing a revealing book on the Mulroney era to be published in September 1995, that Newman had collected materials from Mulroney himself and persons in his circle including Frank Moores and Fred Doucet, and also obtained “proof” about certain controversial episodes involving Mulroney in the late period of the Meech Lake accord …

Also in January, RCMP investigators Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald and Inspector Carl Gallant visited Stevie Cameron after listening to her talking about her book on the CBC Radio program The House; they told her that in 1988 there had been a brief FBI investigation on the Airbus sale to Air Canada but that the Canadian government and police had been unwilling to cooperate; she told them in return her experience that interviewing people in Europe had been more helpful. ²³³

In March, CBC’s The Fifth Estate aired an episode on the Airbus story, alleging that Airbus Industrie paid secret commissions to Karlheinz Schreiber to smooth the 1988 sale of Airbus A320 planes to Air Canada, and that Swiss bank accounts were opened by Schreiber for Frank Moores and for an unidentified Canadian politician; part of the information aired came from Cameron’s file she had gathered for her book, and all of the materials in her file were also reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and the der Spiegel magazine in Munich, Germany. ²³⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, in the beginning in 1988 there had been an U.S. FBI investigation into the Airbus sale to Air Canada. The Canadian government and police had been uncooperative until now when RCMP officers visited Cameron in early 1995.

On the gun-control front, the Chretien government’s legislation would eventually become law, but not before overcoming some unexpectedly strong oppositions in the Parliament through 1995.

The legislation needed to pass several votes in the lower chamber, the House of Commons, and similarly in the upper chamber, the Senate. In the House, Liberal internal dissents would take stern measures by Jean Chretien as the party leader to keep under control, which when I first reviewed in 2009 prompted comparisons of Chretien to other political party leaders and to Brian Mulroney in the past, as to whether Chretien acted less, rather than more, democratically in parliamentary politics. In the Senate,, the governing Liberal Party did not even have a majority.

The legislation easily won the first vote in the House in April 1995; but a large number of Liberal Members of Parliament, 49 of them, were purposely absent from the voting, causing serious concerns for Chretien:

“The size of the Liberal internal opposition was a concern for Jean Chretien: in the first vote in the House of Commons which the Liberals easily won, 3 Liberal MPs voted against the bill, 49 of the 177 majority Liberal MPs (in a parliament of around 300 MPs) were absent and as many as 30 of them stayed away to show their opposition…

…

Bob Speller, chair of the rural Liberal caucus who had advised rural Liberal MPs inclined to vote ‘no’ to skip the first vote instead, was reported as saying the 49 Liberal MPs who had not shown up for the first vote could vote ‘no’ in the final vote…”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As the head counts in the above showed, if most of those 49 Liberal MPs absenting from the first vote, many of them from rural regions, were to vote “no” in the final vote, which they could, then the Liberal government’s majority 177 seats in a chamber of around 300 could fail to get the legislation through.

Immediately, Chretien enforced disciplines on the very few – only three – of Liberal MPs who voted “no” the first time, stripping them of all their parliamentary committee positions:

“… at a caucus meeting before the vote Chretien had warned his MPs to vote with the party, and after the vote he quickly stripped all parliamentary committee positions from the 3 Liberals Benoit Serre, Paul Steckle, and Rex Crawford who had voted no regardless – despite their claims that they represented the anti-gun-control sentiments of their rural riding constituents. ²³⁷

Chretien also planned to enforce party discipline in the same manner with the hate-crime bill protecting minority rights (including homosexual rights) that was being processed through the parliament in parallel to the gun-control bill.”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, Chretien would not accept the argument by any Liberal MP who voted “no” that his constituents were opposed to the gun-control legislation.

Also as above, at the time the Chretien government was also pursuing a hate-crime legislation to protect minority rights, and Chretien stood firm on requiring Liberal MPs to vote for this other legislation being pushed through in parallel to the gun-control bill.

The major opposition parties at the time were the separatist Bloc Quebecois and the Reform Party, the latter the main opponent to gun control:

“Like the Bloc Quebecois led by Tory-breakaway MP Lucien Bouchard taking many formerly Tory seats in Quebec, the Reform party formerly represented by only one MP Deborah Grey and led by party leader Preston Manning outside the parliament, took most of the western Canada rural ridings (particularly in Alberta) from the Tories in the 1993 election, also winning over 50 seats and just two fewer than Bloc Quebecois. ²⁴¹ On conservative issues such as against gun control, the Reform party became the Liberals’ main opposition in the House of Commons – even though Reform had championed an anti-crime platform …”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But the Reform Party allowed its MPs to vote according to their constituents’ wishes and one of them, Stephen Harper, voted “yes” on the gun-control legislation in the first vote:

“Across the aisle from among the opposition Reform party, a lone MP (and future prime minister) Stephen Harper voted for the gun-control legislation in this first vote, as did one of the only two Tory MPs, Elsie Wayne. ²⁴⁰

…

… but the Reform party allowed its MPs to vote their constituents’ wishes …”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told in the above two quotes, in the 1993 election most of the past electoral support for Mulroney’s Tory party had gone to the two new parties, Bloc Quebecois and Reform Party; the old party by this time had only two MPs, one of whom, Elsie Wayne, voted for the legislation.

In my June 2009 post, I compared the way Chretien disciplined Liberal Party dissenters on gun-control in April 1995 to how B.C. Tory MP Stan Wilbee had faired in November 1992 after demanding a Tory party review of Mulroney’s leadership, concluding that Chretien seemed harsher, i.e., less democratic in this respect:

“Compared to the previously discussed case of Stan Wilbee in November 1992, i.e., the lone Tory MP publicly calling for a leadership review on Brian Mulroney and asked to resign his B.C. caucus chair by justice minister Kim Campbell, that Wilbee in the end not only retained the caucus chair and kept his chair at the Commons committee on health issues but also got to embark on leading a new parliamentary probe into the HIV-tainted blood-supply issue, Chretien’s measures in April 1995 seemed harsh.

Comparison to Mulroney – on lack of democracy within the party – was evident: it was acknowledged by Liberal party whip Don Boudria who had often criticized Mulroney for “muzzling independent thought” in the Tory caucus…”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Nonetheless, Chretien probably felt strongly that his government’s stricter gun-control measures had the support of a majority of Canadians, given that polls had consistently shown support nationwide, especially for the universal gun registry:

“Since before the 1993 election polls had consistently showed that a majority of Canadians, including most Albertans, supported stricter gun control, including mandatory gun registration: nationally, support for a gun registry was 86% in September 1993, and by late May 1995 with the legislation near final vote it was still 71% and higher than support for the full bill at 64%. ²⁴²”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

However, among the Liberal MPs from rural regions, and from some influential persons and groups in the Canadian society, including the Canadian Medical Association that strongly supported the military-style assault weapons ban, there was considerable opposition to the universal gun registry:

“Despite the high poll numbers supporting it, besides the Reform party and the pro-gun groups there were other public shows of opposition to the gun-control bill.

One high-profile act of opposition came from Justice Jean-Claude Angers of the New Brunswick Court of Appeal, who wrote an open letter to prime minister Jean Chretien and the MPs, calling the gun-control proposal ”serious infringements of the rights to security and enjoyment of the person and to own property”; two law professors complained about his conduct to the Canadian Judicial Council, and Angers received a public reprimand from council chair, B.C. Chief Justice Allan McEachern, about his “highly partisan attack” on a proposal that could become law which he would often need to interpret and enforce…

Another high-profile act of opposition, that of backtracking from supporting, curiously came from the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), which had become a strong public supporter of gun control after the shooting of Dr. Gary Romalis in November 1994: the association still stood by its support for banning military-type assault weapons, one of which had wounded Dr. Romalis, but changed its position on the gun registry – also the main point of contention for the dissident rural Liberal MPs – and questioned its effectiveness for violent-crime reduction; the reversal caught justice minister Allan Rock by surprise, but the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians continued to support the gun registry. ²⁴⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, the Canadian Medical Association retracted its support for the gun registry, although the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians continued to support it.

Some of the concerns about the gun registry regarded penalties being potentially too harsh for people failing to register their guns, and Justice Minister Rock responded by suggesting some lighter alternatives:

“Within the notion of a universal gun registry a key point of contention was whether failure to register would be treated as a serious criminal offence or closer to a motor-vehicle registration violation; Allan Rock had earlier hinted at the possibility of a compromise, and after the CMA expressed to the Commons justice committee its new doubts on the gun registry, Rock suggested to the committee adding a category of lighter criminal penalties – outside of the Criminal Code – for some situations, and the committee quickly endorsed it. ²⁴⁵”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The final House vote on the gun-control legislation came in June 1995. Leading up to the vote, Chretien continued to clamp down on Liberal dissents to try to ensure no internal revolt would happen.

Several days before the final vote, Liberal MP and justice committee chair Warren Allmand voted “no” on a budget-related bill, and Chretien moved to strip Allmand of his committee chair position; but Chretien’s disciplinary action hit a snag when Reform Party whip Jim Silye refused to give his signature, stating publicly that the Chretien government was no better than the Mulroney government when it came to “quashing internal dissent or rewarding friends with patronage”:

“… several days earlier there was also a lone Liberal no vote on the government’s budget-implementation bill, from justice committee chair Warren Allmand protesting budget cuts that reminded him of the Mulroney Tories’ cuts on spending for social programs…

After the budget vote in early June, Chretien had immediately moved to take Warren Allmand off his chair position at the justice committee, but unexpectedly Reform party whip Jim Silye refused to give his signature to expedite the removal, and also went public accusing the Chretien government of doing no better than the Mulroney government when it came to quashing internal dissent or rewarding friends with patronage. ²⁵⁰”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Jim Silye not only spoke his mind but acted accordingly as days later, despite being the opposition Reform Party whip, he announced that he would vote for the gun-control legislation because his constituents supported it even though he himself was opposed to it; Reform MPs Ted White and Ian McClelland also announced similarly:

“In early June prior to the final Commons vote after which the gun-control bill would be sent to the Senate if passed, the Liberals were bolstered by announcement of voting for the bill from 3 Reform MPs, Ted White, Ian McClelland and Jim Silye, who made their decisions based on polling their constituents; Jim Silye’s position was especially significant because he was the Reform party whip in charge of enforcing party line on MP votes, but the Reform party allowed its MPs to vote their constituents’ wishes and though Silye was opposed to the bill his constituents at the riding of Calgary Centre favoured it. ²⁴⁶”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

On the other hand, Stephen Harper who had been the lone Reform MP to vote “yes” in the first vote, now flip-flopped to a “no” in the final vote because his constituents, though showing 64% support for the legislation, showed 60% opposition to a potential 10-year jail penalty for failing to register guns:

“On the other hand Stephen Harper, MP for Calgary West who had been the lone Reformer voting for it in the first vote based on a poll of 64% constituent support, now would vote no because a second polling of his constituents showed that although most still supported the gun registry, 60% of them did not like a potential 10-year jail penalty still in there for failure to register. ²⁴⁷”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

On June 13, the gun-control legislation passed the final vote in the House, and on June 15 the hate-crime legislation did, both with the support of the Bloc Quebecois; the Liberal MPs largely followed the party line, though nine of them voted “no” on June 13 and four voted “no” on June 15:

“On June 13, the gun-control bill easily passed the Commons, with support from Bloc Quebecois; two day after, the hate-crime legislation also passed, with Bloc Quebecois support, ensuring tougher criminal penalties for crimes “motivated by hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, or mental or physical disability”. ²⁴⁸

The yes votes on gun-control from Jim Silye and the other two Reformers had been expected to compensate for the loss of votes from the 3 rural Liberal MPs who had voted no the first time, but the number of Liberal MPs casting final no vote increased to 9, and 4 other Liberal MPs voted no on the hate-crime bill…”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The three key votes in the first half of June 1995 came to a total of fourteen Liberal MPs – fifteen if counting Rex Crawford, who was absent due to illness but had voted “no” on the gun-control legislation in the first vote – disobeying party instructions, the highest number since the Chretien Liberals had come to power in November 1993:

“… that came to a total of 14 Liberal MPs who openly dissented on important votes – in fact 15 had MP Rex Crawford not suffered a heart attack and missed the final gun-control vote – and a record high of vote dissent since the Chretien government began in November 1993. ²⁴⁹”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Chretien’s uncompromising demand for loyalty in these votes led to criticism from Liberal MP Warren Allmand – his justice committee chair position Chretien had failed to take away as discussed earlier – that Chretien was less democratic than his leadership predecessor and old rival John Turner:

“Chretien was unfazed by the setback in demoting Warren Allmand, and unbending in demanding party loyalty. He praised the Liberal MPs who voted for the gun-control bill “against the very strong wishes of constituents who fiercely opposed the firearms law”, he declared that a vote against the government was a vote against him personally, and he told his MPs that if they did not follow the party line he might refuse to sign their nomination papers for the next election. ²⁵¹

Warren Allmand countered that back in April 1988 when 22 Liberal MPs signed a letter asking then party leader (and Chretien’s rival) John Turner to resign, they did not receive any punishment, and many of the Liberal MPs who had opposed Turner were now in Chretien’s cabinet; Allmand said Chretien was going too far in demanding loyalty. ²⁵²”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

So, on these key legislative votes, under Jean Chretien the Liberal Party was less democratic than under former leader John Turner, than the opposition Reform Party and in some sense than the old Tory party under Brian Mulroney.

Moreover, Chretien’s rule enforced the party line not only on these key votes but on government legislation votes in general; in doing against the Liberal MPs’ constituency wishes, Chretien actually broke a written promise he had made for his party during the 1993 election:

“A public-relations problem for prime minister Chretien in his hard-line stand on loyalty within the party caucus was that it had been his election promise in 1993 as party leader – written in the Liberals’ election Red Book – to allow more free votes by Liberal MPs following their constituents’ wishes, but that afterwards no free vote was allowed on government legislations; there were many other unfulfilled Red Book promises such as, according to Warren Allmand, protecting spending that helped disadvantaged Canadians. ²⁵³

The 13 Liberal MPs dissenting on the gun-control or hate-crime legislation had won the 1993 election in their ridings with promises of parliamentary voting to reflect the constituents’ wishes, and had been hailed as heroes at the time; it had been a Liberal Red-Book promise but now in 1995 they were condemned as “trained seals” by the party. ²⁵⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told, those Liberal MPs who voted against the gun-control or hate-crime legislation did so to reflect their constituents’ wishes as they had promised during the 1993 election.

But Chretien was unfazed in enforcing the party line in disregard of his past electoral promise. After the summer recess when the Parliament reconvened in September 1995, committee memberships were assigned anew and Chretien demoted the Liberal MPs who had shown dissent on those key votes:

“… in absolute-control mode over his Liberal MPs, Chretien wasted no time when the parliament reopened on September 18 for its fall session, at which time committee memberships were assigned anew: Warren Allmand was stripped of his justice committee chair on a day that happened to be one day before his 63th birthday, a move seen as signalling the start of a lonely end for a veteran Liberal who had once been Chretien’s cabinet colleague under Pierre Trudeau – as the solicitor general who ended capital punishment – and who had just shepherded gun control through the justice committee but voted against the budget; Dan McTeague, an ambitious young Liberal MP who had voted against the hate-crime law, was transferred from the heritage committee to the obscure Library of Parliament committee; and rural Liberal caucus chair Bob Speller who had advised the dissident rural Liberal MPs to skip the first vote on gun control, and warned they might vote no in the end, was stripped of his agriculture committee chair. ²⁶⁰”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

A few years later in October 2000, former Liberal leader John Turner spoke out and praised the Canadian Alliance – the Reform Party with a new name – as being more democratic:

“John Turner in fact shared some of the other Liberals’ misgivings about Chretien’s intolerance of democratic debate or dissent, and he later would also start to speak about it, in October 2000 less than 3 weeks after the death of Pierre Trudeau whom both Turner and Chretien had wanted to succeed and Turner did in 1984; Turner even praised the opposition Canadian Alliance – the Reform party with a new name in 2000 – for being more democratic: ²⁵⁷

““The Alliance is debating the issues,” Mr. Turner said.

“Whether or not you agree with the result of the debate or even the scope of the debate or even the subject of the debate, they are debating the issues.

“They’re opening up the system. And I believe the system needs opening up – beginning with the democratization of Parliament.””

”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In relation to Turner’s opinion, quoted above, expressed right after former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s passing, I remarked in 2009 that back in October 2000 Prime Minister Chretien had been more interested in winning a third electoral majority by capitalizing on Canadians’ sympathy for Trudeau:

“In October 2000 when Turner heaped the above praise on the Reform party as a subtle criticism of Chretien, Chretien had wasted no time – after the mourning was over for Pierre Trudeau who had passed away of prostate cancer – to announce that he would call an election in which his campaign would emphasize Trudeau’s legacy; although election speculations had been around before Trudeau’s death, some cynics opined that Chretien must have known for a while Trudeau had been gravely ill, and was so eager to make electoral history as to take the opportunity of Canadians’ sympathy over Trudeau’s death to get his third majority term – without other urgent issues calling a new election sooner than any majority leader in history but former Liberal prime minister Wilfred Laurier in 1911 – over the relative inexperience of the new Alliance leader Stockwell Day and the split of conservative votes between the Alliance and the Tories – the latter again led by Joe Clark. ²⁵⁸

Chretien would win his third majority handily on November 27, 2000, garnering 41% of the popular vote – highest of his 3 times. ²⁵⁹”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, Chretien did win a third majority government in 2000 with 41% of the popular vote, and that was the highest for the Liberal Party under his leadership.

It is worth noting that even though the total popular vote won each time in three consecutive elections was far below 50%, under Chretien’s leadership, the Liberals won House of Common seats in a majority of the ridings each time.

That kind of electoral outcomes might lead one to ponder the rules of parliamentary democracy as it was practiced in Canada.

In my June 2009 post, I discussed various opinions voiced by political commentators, among them William Thorsell, about party discipline and about the prime ministerial power in a majority government, expressed following the several important House votes in June 1995:

“At this point of record-high Chretien Liberal internal dissent, John English, historian and Liberal MP for Kitchener, believed party discipline to be important to national unity for a country as diverse as Canada, but Newfoundland Liberal MP George Baker suggested that the British model should be adopted in which government MPs, like opposition MPs, were allowed to question the government during the Question Period in the Commons; in contrast, the rightwing Reform party MPs, including leader Preston Manning, were during this time practicing free votes or at least freely discussing their opinions on the issue. ²⁵⁵

Some political commentators, e.g., William Thorsell, noted that the Canadian parliamentary system vested too much power in the prime minister of a majority government, more than any other industrialized democracy did in the government leader, and that in most Canadian political party constitutions the party leader’s authority could not be easily challenged unless a full party convention was held; they also noted that democratic rights and freedoms as guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (crowning achievement of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1982 Canadian Constitution) as the only reduction of the political power of the government – and “the single most “Americanizing” event in Canadian history” according to some – merely put the power in the hands of court justices appointed by the prime minister. ²⁵⁶”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Here is some of what William Thorsell actually wrote in June 1995 that I cited in 2009:

“CANADA is among the most decentralized federations in the world, but Canada also has one of the world’s most centralized political power structures. A Canadian prime minister with a majority of seats enjoys more personal power than any elected leader among the industrialized democracies. We saw robust evidence this week in Jean Chretien’s military-style disciplinary threats against dissident members of his own parliamentary caucus. L’etat, c’est lui. This reflects several basic factors:

• We conduct “first-past-the-post” elections in a multi-party system. A majority of seats is almost always delivered by a minority of votes – as small as 37 per cent in recent Ontario and Quebec elections. So Canadian democracy is based on the practice that the minority rules.
• We govern through a parliamentary system that is unicameral in all the provinces, and where the appointed Senate in Ottawa exercises minimal authority over the elected House of Commons.
• Membership in the cabinet exists entirely at the discretion of the prime minister or premier.
• The rules and conventions in our legislatures enforce strict party discipline in an environment where free votes or the initiation of bills are discouraged. Government majorities on most committees ensure political control through all phases of legislation.
• Most party constitutions require full party conventions to vote on a leader’s status before he or she can be ousted. As a result, parliamentary caucuses are neutered as immediate threats to the leader’s authority.

…

Other than public opinion (including the media), the only real check over Canadian first ministers comes from the courts, especially since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. The Charter has been described as the single most “Americanizing” event in Canadian history, which is to say that it is the only event that has structurally reduced the political power of the prime minister and premiers. It has done so not by distributing political power more broadly, but by enhancing the power of the appointed judiciary.

…”

(“Freedom of expression gets short shrift in Canada’s parliamentary caucuses”,  by William Thorsell, June 17, 1995, The Globe and Mail)

As noted by Thorsell, the Canadian parliamentary system vested too much power in the prime minister of a majority government, whose authority as the governing party leader also could not be easily challenged within the party, while the constitutionally-protected democratic rights and freedoms were dependent on court justices who were appointed by the prime minister.

Thorsell thus characterized a Canadian government with the prime minister heading a parliamentary majority as “one of the world’s most centralized political power structures”.

In 1995 after the gun-control legislation passed the House of Commons in June, it headed for the Senate of Canada.

Recall as cited earlier, Reform Party whip Jim Silye had stated publicly that the Chretien government was no better than the Mulroney government when it came to “quashing internal dissent or rewarding friends with patronage”.

In this regard, having illustrated Prime Minister Chretien’s suppressing dissents within the Liberal caucus in the House, in my June 2009 post I then examined his government’s maneuvering in the Senate, including political appointments, or patronage, that in this case he viewed as needed to get the gun-control legislation through.

In Canada, senators have been appointed by the government, namely by the prime minister. At the time in 1995, a slim majority of the sitting senators had been appointed by the Mulroney government years ago – even though there were now only two elected MPs in Mulroney’s old party in the House – and these Tory Senators were unwilling to cooperate with the Chretien government on gun control; political opponents of the gun-control legislation, from various directions, wanted the Senate to block its passage or make substantial changes to weaken it, as I reviewed in 2009:

“The gun-control bill was now in the Senate for the parliamentary session of fall 1995. Canadian senators were not elected but appointed, and the Senate at this point was controlled by a slim majority of Tories appointed by Brian Mulroney years ago; it was predicted that it could be 1996 before the Senate would begin to consider the bill, or as Calgary Senator Ron Ghitter, the Tories’ designated person on the gun-control bill in the Senate, had put it while the bill was still in the Commons: ²⁶¹

“It’s not like this is an issue of national urgency; that crime is going to stop the moment we have registration. Homicides aren’t increasing. The statistics do not show this registration is going to solve any crime problems”.

Opponents of the gun-control bill, noticing a gradual decline in the poll numbers for it even though a majority of Canadians still supported gun control, began to mount vigorous lobbying campaigns to have the Senate force the Liberal government to withdraw part of the bill or accept substantial changes to water it down; in addition to the gun-owner groups, the opponents included the powerful provincial governments of Ontario and the Prairies, i.e., Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the governments of the Northern Territories, where there were large rural populations; they also included critics such as columnist David Frum who blasted the legislation for allowing justice minister’s discretion to exempt native people from gun-control requirements, and curiously the Assembly of First Nations representing the native people, who complained that mandatory gun registration would intrude on their traditional lifestyle of hunting protected by their constitutional and treaty rights, and that a ”back-door” exemption was not good enough for them. ²⁶²”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Because the Senate was not an elected body, it usually did not obstruct legislations arduously; and Tory party leader Jean Charest, one of the only two Tory MPs, struck a compromising tone in this case, promising only to use the Senate to make changes to the legislation and would not indefinitely obstruct its passage:

“But despite the sabre-rattling of the opponents who aimed to scuttle national gun registration in the Senate, few observers believed the demise of stricter gun control. One reason is that, being unelected – and labelled a “mixed blessing” on such issues by Reform party leader Preston Manning – the Senate usually did not dig in its heels to block legislations passed by the Commons, and with the Tories nearly wiped out in the Commons the Tory-controlled Senate did so only twice after the Chretien government took power: on a bill cancelling the Mulroney government’s privatization of Toronto Pearson Airport, which prevented the developers from going to court to sue for punitive damages, and on an election-boundaries bill which was viewed as thinly disguised gerrymandering in favor of the Liberals. ²⁶³

Moreover, Tory leader Jean Charest (who had lost to Kim Campbell in the 1993 leadership contest and then taken over after Campbell’s electoral defeat) was rather conciliatory on gun control: he was absent during the final Commons vote, and also stated that the Tory-controlled Senate would only propose changes to the bill to send it back to the Commons, and that if the Commons then rejected the changes the Senate would not block it further. ²⁶⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, Charest was consistently willing to compromise, having himself already absented from the House’s final vote on the gun-control legislation, i.e., instead of voting against it.

Still, Chretien did not like to tolerate the prospect of a long, drawn-out parliamentary maneuvering, which could not only alter the legislation but also delay its passage long after 1995; he decided to fill all the vacancies there were in the Senate, 4 of them, with Liberal appointments on September 22, 1995:

“Still, the complexity of parliamentary maneuvers meant that the Senate could hold long public hearings on the matters, that any changes approved by the Senate would require re-examination and vote by the Commons where politics involving the rural MPs was always volatile, and that if the legislation could not be approved by both chambers during this fall session it might have to be reintroduced in a new session in 1996. ²⁶⁵

Several days after punishing some of the key Liberal MPs for straying from the party line, Chretien moved on Friday, September 22 to appoint 4 new Liberal senators – including 3 women for a record-high 23 women in the upper chamber – to fill the Senate to its full size of 104 and bring the total number of Liberals to 50 versus the Tories’ 51, with 3 independent senators leaning toward the Liberals. ²⁶⁶”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Very importantly as noted above, three of the four newly appointed Liberal Senators were female and the resulting total of 23 women in the Senate were a record high.

These might not be really “patronage” appointments but as above they were highly partisan, and now the fully-filled Senate had 50 Liberals vs. 51 Tories, with an additional 3 independents leaning toward the Liberals. Consequently, the Liberals were now in a better position to defeat Senate opponents of the gun-control legislation.

In 2009 I commented that the timing of the gun-control legislative process in the Senate was also entangled with the publicity of the Airbus Affair, namely the RCMP criminal investigation of former Tory prime minister Mulroney:

“Chretien’s appointment of new senators would eventually lead to passage of the gun-control legislation but not after several more months of bickering and maneuvering, including amid a heightened public atmosphere due to revelation of an RCMP Airbus Affair probe in which the Canadian government informed Swiss authorities former (Tory) prime minister Mulroney was being investigated for criminal activity.”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Here I note that, more specifically as previously mentioned, the date of the Canadian Justice Department letter to the Swiss authorities to seek cooperation for the criminal investigation of Mulroney, in relations to Airbus commissions, was September 29, 1995 – exactly one week after all Senate vacancies were filled with Liberals for the gun-control legislation contest in the upper chamber.

In 2009 I did not quote any details from the press about the coincidental timings of the late-stage parliamentary maneuvering on gun control and the publicity of the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney. Here now are some passages from a news story on November 21, 1995 – with the gun-control legislation still in the Senate and the Airbus Affair publicity just started:

“WHAT DO you say when the former prime minister of the country sues the government he used to lead for $50 million for defamation of character?

You say you hope the RCMP checked the rumors out very carefully before naming Brian Mulroney as a possible suspect in the Airbus story.

If they did check, they could be on to the scandal of the century.

If they didn’t, the national police force will have disgraced itself even more. RCMP bumbling on the night when Jean Chretien’s wife faced an armed intruder at 24 Sussex will be nothing compared to this potential foul-up.

…

Chretien cancelled the Tory deal at Pearson airport in late 1993, partly to demonstrate he was in charge and the old ways were changing. He backed Rock’s gun-control bill to prove a Liberal government could deliver for Canadians. Both those matters still are hung up in the Senate, and the Prime Minister cannot prorogue Parliament and write a new Throne Speech until the old business is finished.

…

In this vacuum, Chretien and his cabinet are proving prone to errors, which is the real danger of Mulroney’s lawsuit. It, too, will drag on, becoming a problem for a Liberal government that had nothing at all to do with the 1988 Airbus purchase. When political problems drag, they have the potential, as we’ve seen in the Somalia inquiry, to do damage to sitting governments whose hands are clean but whose handling errs.

Tory Senator Marjorie LeBreton already is suggesting the RCMP’s Airbus investigation really is a Liberal witch hunt. She says Chretien’s government is seeking political revenge for the Tory senators’ stalls of the Pearson and gun-control bills.

It’s difficult to see why Liberals would want more revenge than that already inflicted by Canadian voters, who reduced the Tories to two seats. This smacks less of revenge than of bureaucratic error, either here or overseas,
which may yet hurt the Liberals along with Mulroney.”

(“Mulroney case holds danger for Liberals”, by Rosemary Speirs, November 21, 1995, Toronto Star)

As journalist Rosemary Speirs reported above, Tory Senator Marjorie LeBreton was alleging that the RCMP’s criminal investigation of Mulroney really was a “Liberal witch hunt”, and a “political revenge” for the Tory senators’ stalls of the Liberal government’s gun-control legislation and another legislation reversing the Mulroney government’s privatization of Toronto Pearson International Airport.

That was in November 1995 when the RCMP investigation of Mulroney had just become news. On the basis of newer allegations by Mr. Mulroney two years later in November 1997, quoted and discussed earlier, in my April 2009 post I did an analysis concluding that both stricter gun-control and investigating possible criminal corruption on the part of the former prime minister were important law-and-order agendas of the Chretien government from the start.

Thus, what coincided, and alleged as “revenge” by Tory Senator LeBreton publicly in November 1995 was only the timing, i.e., the timing of the onset of Airbus Affair publicity with the timing of the gun-control legislation’s stalls in the Senate – the stage had already been set by the Chretien government in September 1995 when it filled the Senate vacancies with Liberal appointments and had a letter sent out to Swiss authorities for the criminal investigation of Mulroney.

Nonetheless, in a blog post dated September 29, 2013, a part of of a later article in my blogging after 2009, I was able to show that Mr. Mulroney’s side, in connection to Karlheinz Schreiber, his friend at the time, was likely partly responsible for the public disclosure in November 1995 that he was the subject of an RCMP criminal investigation into Airbus commissions.

The first news stories about a criminal investigation into the Airbus commissions came on November 11-12, 1995, in Europe, without mentioning any Canadian politician by name; in the several days after, the Swiss and Canadian authorities, including the RCMP, confirmed the existence of an ongoing criminal investigation without naming any person being investigated:

“In the weekend of November 11-12, amid the Canadian media frenzies on Chretien residence break-in, French and Swiss media reported that the Swiss justice system was investigating alleged Airbus bribes funnelled into Swiss bank accounts, that unnamed Canadian political leaders received large commissions; RCMP confirmed it was evaluating “certain allegations” and had asked the Swiss for help, but wouldn’t give details until Tuesday…

…

The European reports were confirmed on November 13 by Swiss police spokesman Folco Galli and Swiss justice department spokesman Peter Lehmann, that Switzerland had received a September 29 request from Canada to look into certain Swiss bank accounts…

…

Frank Moores immediately denied everything…

…

On Tuesday, November 14, the lone RCMP investigator on the case, Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald, did a media interview, stating he merely started with information from media reports; former senior officers Tim Quigley and Rod Stamler and former Commissioner Norman Inkster all confirmed RCMP had looked at allegations in 1989 but gave conflicting assessments of the seriousness; Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps confirmed a continuing RCMP investigation…

…”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 11) — when police statecraft runs political-scandal shows”, September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

I commented, in this September 29, 2013 post, that the Tory leaders after Mulroney, namely Kim Campbell and Jean Charest, had either distanced or was now distancing from a potential scandal related to the Airbus commissions and from Mr. Mulroney’s legacies, but again without mentioning Mulroney:

“Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell had said Stevie Cameron’s book was “very interesting”, as earlier; now her successor, Progressive Conservative party leader Jean Charest, stated on November 14 he’s focused on the future, but admitted that the devastating 1993 election defeat leaving his party with only 2 MPs was “the opportunity for Canadians to voice their views on their party”

…

The current Tory leader decided not to stand by Brian Mulroney’s legacies.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The first news story referring to Mr. Mulroney as being investigated by the RCMP came from reporter Philip Mathias of The Financial Post on November 18, 1995, who quoted from the September 29 Justice Department letter to the Swiss authorities:

“On November 14, 1995, the RCMP did not say if Mulroney was named in the September 29 Justice Department letter to the Swiss Authorities. That information came a few days later on November 18 when The Financial Post reporter Philip Mathias quoted from the letter (“Justice seeks evidence on Mulroney, Moores: Mulroney denies any connection with alleged payoffs over $1.8-billion Airbus deal”, by Philip Mathias, The Financial Post):

“In letters rogatory sent to Switzerland on Sept. 29, Justice Department senior counsel Kimberly Prost indicates Brian Mulroney received secret commissions from European manufacturers that did business with the government while he was in office.

The letter names French aircraft manufacturer Airbus Industrie SA and German arms manufacturer Thyssen AG. It concludes that there was a “persistent plot/conspiracy by Mr. Mulroney [and others] … who defrauded the Canadian government in the amount of millions of dollars.”

The Justice Department sent the 13-page demand to Switzerland, written in German, at the request of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

A “persistent plot/conspiracy by Mr. Mulroney” – serious accusations.

But according to Mathias, the letter contained no evidence against Mulroney other than what was in the CBC Fifth Estate broadcast in March, which hadn’t named Mulroney or provided evidence of Airbus commissions going into the alleged Swiss bank accounts:

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

On that same day when the Justice Department letter was first quoted in the media as in the above, about a “persistent plot/conspiracy by Mr. Mulroney [and others] … who defrauded the Canadian government in the amount of millions of dollars”, lawyers representing Mulroney held a news conference to announce that Mr. Mulroney was filing a $50 million lawsuit against the Canadian government and several officials:

“In the September 29, 1995 Kimberly Prost letter, Mulroney was accused of “criminal activity” and “conspiracy”, but RCMP provided no concrete evidence, only asking the Swiss to help find it in Switzerland.

The Canadian government didn’t disclose contents of the letter, however The Financial Post’s quoting from it let Mulroney take the public-relations offensive and sue the government and RCMP for $50 million in damages (“Mulroney filing suit against feds, RCMP – Former prime minister will”, November 19, 1995, Times – Colonist):

““Any fair-minded person who knows what happened here will easily see that the rights of Mr. Mulroney and of his family have been gravely violated,” lawyer Harvey Yarosky told a news conference Saturday.

…

Mulroney is seeking $25 million in damages to his reputation and $25 million in punitive damages, said lawyer Gerald Tremblay. Any award for punitive damages will be given to charity, he added.

…

Yarosky said the allegations are ungrounded. “Mr. Mulroney categorically and unequivocally states that he had absolutely nothing to do with Air Canada’s decision to buy Airbus, nor did he receive a cent from anyone. He was simply not part of any conspiracy whatsoever.”

Another lawyer, Roger Tasse – a former deputy justice minister in Ottawa – said the Justice Department and RCMP even refused to listen to Mulroney’s side of the story when he offered to co-operate with them.

The defendants named in the lawsuit are the government of Canada; RCMP Commissioner Phil Murray; Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, the RCMP investigating officer; and Kimberly Prost, the Justice Department lawyer who sent the documents to Switzerland. …

…”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted above, RCMP Commissioner Phil Murray; investigator Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, and Justice Department lawyer Kimberly Prost who wrote the September 29 letter to the Swiss authorities, were named in Mulroney’s lawsuit.

Also as above, several lawyers for Mr. Mulroney, namely Harvey Yarosky, Gerald Tremblay and Roger Tasse, spoke at the November 18 news conference. Tremblay, as discussed in Part 2 of my current article, had represented legal maneuvering, during the 1992 Diane Wilhelmy Affair, attempting to suppress publicity critical of then Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, which happened to be also critical of David Cameron, an Ontario government official and husband of anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron.

As earlier quoted from a November 21 news report by journalist Rosemary Speirs, Tory Senator LeBreton immediately made the allegation that the RCMP investigation of Mulroney was the Chretien government’s “political revenge for the Tory senators’ stalls of the Pearson and gun-control bills”.

Thus, the question of timing coincidence boils down to who had given journalist Philip Mathias a copy of the Justice Department September 29 letter which had named Mulroney, which Mathias then quoted in a news story on November 18, when Mulroney’s lawyers also held a news conference announcing a lawsuit against the government for damages to his reputation.

Subsequently in 1996, testimonies and disclosures in the court proceedings for Mulroney’s $50 million lawsuit revealed that Philip Mathias’s copy of the Justice Department letter was a copy of a German-to-English translation that Karlheinz Schreiber had ordered for Mulroney. Therefore, as I remarked, the source for the journalist Mathias was likely related to Schreiber, who had been given a German copy of the Canadian letter by the Swiss authorities, ordered an English translation for Mulroney in early November, and that version was the one cited by Mathias:

“Mulroney’s testimony in April would explain that he first heard the bad news from Schreiber, and that a quick English translation of the September 29 letter in German was done by Swiss law firm Blum & Partners for Schreiber (“Ottawa targets source of Mulroney story Documents in lawsuit argue leak based on translation prepared for former PM”, by Tu Thanh Ha, August 28, 1996, The Globe and Mail):

“The Financial Post and the reporter who wrote the story, Philip Mathias, say that they have no intention of revealing their source.

“It’s a futile line of inquiry,” Mr. Mathias said in an interview yesterday, maintaining that the documents he used to write his story did not come from “Mr. Mulroney or his entourage.”

…

When he was examined under oath in April, Mr. Mulroney explained that he first learned he was under investigation when Mr. Schreiber called him on Nov. 2, 1995.

Mr. Schreiber had been advised by the Swiss that transactions in his bank accounts would be suspended. He was also given a copy of the RCMP request, written in German.

Because Mr. Mulroney did not speak German, the two agreed to have the Swiss law firm Blum & Partners prepare a summarized translation, a copy of which Mr. Mulroney received within days.

Ottawa’s lawyers will argue that the government is not responsible for the fact that the issue became public because what appeared in the Nov. 18, 1995, issue of the Post wasn’t the RCMP letter but an unauthorized translation.

“The translation obtained by The Financial Post is not the English version of the request prepared and sent by the Justice Department to Swiss authorities on Sept. 29, 1995,” Ottawa’s filing says.

“Rather, it is identical to the Blum translation, made at the request of Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney.”

The filing adds: “The defendants will try to establish how the Blum translation ended up in the hands of Philip Mathias and The Financial Post.”

…

Mr. Mathias said he had a German version of the RCMP letter but not the official English version, forcing him to rely on an unofficial translation.”

It looked possible that Schreiber was the leak source, that in November 1995 when the Swiss police got on his trail he went for immediate publicity to drag Mulroney into the mud – better for himself and likely better for Mulroney.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As above, the Canadian government lawyers essentially argued that if Mulroney’s side had leaked the letter to the media then they were responsible for damages to Mr. Mulroney’s reputation.

As stated by Mr. Mulroney and cited in the above, he learned of the RCMP criminal investigation of him on November 2 when Schreiber phoned him, and the later-leaked German-English translated copy was then produced for him. If as Mathias stated as quoted in the above, that his source wasn’t “Mr. Mulroney or his entourage”, then it likely was related to Schreiber.

One week after the initial news of an RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney and Mulroney’s legal counteroffensive of a $50 million lawsuit, on November 26 the Chretien government’s gun-control legislation passed the Senate – and thus clearing all Parliamentary hurdles – in a rather lopsided vote of 64 to 28:

“Senator Joyce Fairbairn wasn’t certain she’d won, but Senator Ron Ghitter had a gut feeling he’d lost.

Fairbairn, the Lethbridge Liberal, and Ghitter, the Calgary Conservative, had been working behind the scenes for days to convince colleagues to back their respective sides in last week’s crucial gun control vote.

…

The Senate’s public gallery was filled with mothers and friends of people killed in gun violence, sitting shoulder to shoulder next to representatives of law-abiding, albeit angry, gun owners.

And the two Alberta senators were among the main players.

Fairbairn, government house leader in the Senate, pressed for passage of the bill, while Ghitter fought for amendments he’d personally worked on for months.

…

A Tory victory would send the bill back to the House of Commons for further debate, and possibly its demise.

…

Most news media reported the bill passed easily by a margin of 64 to 28. …”

(“Senate vote was closer than it seemed”, by Sheldon Alberts, November 26, 1995, Calgary Herald)

Hence, while the news about Mr. Mulroney was bad on November 18, 1995, it came at a worse time, undermining the morale of the Senators of his old Tory party, most of whom appointed by him years ago, in fighting against the Liberal gun-control legislation.

Mr. Mulroney and his Airbus-connected business friend, Mr. Schreiber, had quite a lot to blame for that bad timing coincidence noted by Tory Senator LeBreton. But at the time, Mulroney’s mind had likely been preoccupied with launching the $50 million lawsuit for personal reputation damages.

Even worse in timing coincidence, at that time there had just been another incident potentially very violent and threatening to the lives of Prime Minister Chretien and his wife, in timeframe two or three days after Mulroney had learned, from Schreiber, of being the target of an RCMP criminal investigation.

As earlier quoted, in her November 21 story journalist Rosemary Speirs noted the Mulroney lawsuit timing coincidence also with a break-in at Prime Minister Chretien’s official residence not long before, and speculated that the RCMP could be mishandling both the criminal investigation of Mulroney and the protection of Chretien:

“WHAT DO you say when the former prime minister of the country sues the government he used to lead for $50 million for defamation of character?

You say you hope the RCMP checked the rumors out very carefully before naming Brian Mulroney as a possible suspect in the Airbus story.

If they did check, they could be on to the scandal of the century.

If they didn’t, the national police force will have disgraced itself even more. RCMP bumbling on the night when Jean Chretien’s wife faced an armed intruder at 24 Sussex will be nothing compared to this potential foul-up.”

Also as earlier quoted, in my September 2013 blog post I mentioned that the media publicity for the Airbus Affair started amid the “media frenzies” of the break-in incident:

“In the weekend of November 11-12, amid the Canadian media frenzies on Chretien residence break-in, French and Swiss media reported that the Swiss justice system was investigating alleged Airbus bribes funnelled into Swiss bank accounts, that unnamed Canadian political leaders received large commissions; …”

The intriguing timings of these politics-related events have never been publicly acknowledged by the Canadian government, or by the police, as of any significance.

The night-time break-in by a jackknife-wielding intruder at the official Prime Minister’s Residence occurred in the early morning of November 5, 1995, just as Chretien was to depart later that day for the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had been assassinated the day before on November 4:

“… On November 4 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, and Chretien had to go to Israel for the funeral and proceed to other overseas visits…

…

In the wee hours of November 5, a knife-wielding intruder, 34-year-old Andre Dallaire from Quebec, slipped inside the Prime Minister’s residence and came face to face with Mrs. Aline Chretien, who quickly retreated to their bedroom, locked the doors and called RCMP guards, who took 10 minutes to arrive and arrest the man holding an open jackknife outside the main bedroom door (“PM says wife kept assailant out of bedroom; Couple waited up to 10 minutes for police arrival”, by Mike Blanchfield, November 6, 1995, The Ottawa Citizen):

““I would like to say that my wife did not panic,” Chretien said before boarding a plane to Israel for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin.

“I think that I’m lucky that she was there. And I’m grateful.”

…

He was not awakened until Aline slammed the door shut and locked it after coming face-to-face with a man wearing glasses and a moustache. She also locked a second bedroom door.

“She called police right away and I could not believe what she was telling me,” he said. The Mounties arrested the man, who was carrying an open jackknife, after responding to the bedroom phone call “within six or 10 minutes, I don’t know,” Chretien added.

Police charged Andre Dallaire, 34, of the Montreal suburb of Longueuil, with several offences, including break and enter and possession of a weapon. He was to appear in court this morning.

Police in Longueuil said Dallaire is a convenience store worker whose family says he has a history of psychiatric problems. His family reported him missing on Wednesday.

…

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As Chretien acknowledged in the above, he was lucky that his wife reacted quickly, locked their bedroom doors and called the RCMP guards, who came and arrested the intruder.

After Rabin’s funeral, Chretien told reporters about his harrowing experience of grabbing an Inuit carving as a defence weapon, in the end not having to fight and noticing, after the intruder’s arrest, that it was “a good-looking guy”:

“Meeting reporters on his way from Rabin’s funeral to a British Commonwealth summit in Auckland, New Zealand, Chretien told a tale of grabbing an Inuit carving as weapon just in case, and maintaining his sense of humor (“PM grabbed carving to use as weapon Intruder ‘was six feet from my bed,’ Chretien says”, by David Vienneau, November 8, 1995, Toronto Star):

““He was about six feet away from my bed,” Chretien said in shedding more light on the 3 a.m. incident.

“It was good, in a way, that he had a knife. It was a good thing he didn’t have a gun. I probably would not have survived to wake up.”

…

Chretien had grabbed a soapstone carving of a bird and he was ready to defend his wife and himself if necessary.

“He’d have had a headache,” Chretien said.

…

“He was a good-looking guy but he had a strange look in his eyes,” Chretien said, explaining that while in his housecoat he went to see the individual after he had been handcuffed and arrested.”

A good-looking guy looking for a headache.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As Chretien reflected in the above, had the intruder had a gun instead of a knife, Chretien himself “probably would not have survived” – just like Rabin the day before.

That was one more intriguing timing coincidence, that the prime minister and his wife suddenly faced a knife-wielding man in their home, without their police security present, just before taking a trip to attend the funeral of an assassinated prime minister of a foreign country.

But that timing, namely immediately following Rabin’s assassination, could be purely coincidental. The intruder’s subsequent media interview did not suggest any Israeli or international link, who instead talked about his unhappiness with the Quebec separatists’ recent loss in a Quebec sovereignty referendum on October 30 – as I reviewed in September 2013:

“Chretien asserted that Quebec separatist verbal attacks on him during the referendum campaign might be to blame for a “deranged” intruder (“I felt my life was in danger during break-in: PM”, by Rob Carrick, November 8, 1995, The Gazette):

“Chretien drew a troubling parallel between the emotions unleashed in the Quebec referendum and the fanaticism that led to the assassination of Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin.

He mused about how he was called a “traitor” during the referendum campaign, just as Rabin was called a traitor by extremists who opposed the Israeli leader’s peace attempts in the Middle East.

“In my case, too, some adjectives were used that might have excited deranged minds.”

Chretien was in Jerusalem on Monday for the funeral of Rabin, who was assassinated by a gunman on Saturday.”

The Quebec separatist dimension was confirmed by Andre Dallaire in a media interview, who was held at Royal Ottawa Hospital undergoing psychiatric assessment, charged with attempted murder (“Sovereigntist leaders too tame — Dallaire”, November 15, 1995, Edmonton Journal):

““I didn’t vote (in the Oct. 30 referendum) because I am an independantist,” Andre Dallaire told the Toronto Sun in a phone interview from the Royal Ottawa Hospital, where he is being held for psychiatric assessment until his next court date.

Dallaire said he felt that Premier Jacques Parizeau’s Parti Quebecois should have moved more strongly toward founding a separate country.

“I am much better than Parizeau,” he said. “I would like an independent state like France or Germany.”

…

He faces charges of attempted murder, breaking and entering, being unlawfully in a dwelling and possession of a weapon.

But said he would be “very surprised” when he offers his explanation of events.

“I’ll speak the truth in the courtroom,” he said. “I am a gentle man and I am a good man.”

Dallaire will plead not guilty to the charge of attempting to kill the prime minister, his lawyer said Monday.

John Hale argued Dallaire did not have the intent to kill, nor did he take steps toward committing murder.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As above, Dallaire’s lawyer argued that he did not have the “intent to kill”.

The Canadian police and justice system apparently agreed that Dallaire did not pose a serious threat to Chretien and his wife; even though he was then convicted of the serious charge of “attempted murder”, Dallaire was declared “not criminally responsible” due to “Paranoid Schizophrenia”, and soon was even allowed to live in the same neighborhood where Chretien’s family lived, i.e., to live not far from the prime minister’s residence he had broken into:

“Later in June 1996 Andre Dallaire was found guilty of attempted murder but declared not criminally responsible due to “Paranoid Schizophrenia”, and Chretien told the media he was satisfied with the outcome (“No jail time for intruder who wanted to kill Chretien”, by Leonard Stern, June 29, 1996, and, “Chretien satisfied with verdict on break-in”, June 30, 1996, Edmonton Journal).

By the spring of 1998 Dallaire had become a neighbor of the Chretiens, living in a house a few blocks away, and it was fine with RCMP (“Sussex Drive intruder now PM’s neighbor”, April 18, 1998, Star – Phoenix):

““We don’t see any more problems with Mr. Dallaire,” said Sgt. Andre Guertin, adding that Dallaire understands he cannot come within 500 metres of the prime minister.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The second last quote above cited Dallaire as saying in November 1995 that he would offer his explanation of events and “speak the truth in the courtroom”. However, when I reviewed the press archives in 2009, I did not find further substantial information about Dallaire’s motives.

The last quote above reported that Dallaire was declared as suffering from “Paranoid Schizophrenia” during his trial in 1996. That could be a reason further press coverage of his thinking was limited.

My own personal experience in the 1990s in political activism, discussed earlier, demonstrated that the police and the justice system could use mental health as a means to suppress certain things from becoming public.

For Chretien, the timing coincidence with Rabin’s assassination must have made the break-in incident especially eerie, given a previous assassination timing coincidence he had experienced in March 1994, reviewed earlier, that just before his arrival in Mexico for his first official foreign visit the Mexican ruling party presidential candidate was assassinated and then Chretien was prevented by an angry mob from paying respect to the slain:

“Safety for the leader of the peaceful Canada was so easily breached just as he was going to pay tribute to the assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin – worse than Chretien’s 1994 visit to Mexico when the ruling party’s presidential candidate was assassinated, which I commented on in May 2009 …:

“… prime minister Chretien’s first official foreign visit – to Mexico instead of traditionally to the U.S. – in March 1994 was marred by the assassination by gunshot of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio (of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that had ruled uninterruptedly for 65 years) just before Chretien’s arrival, by a large and angry mob shouting “out” while Chretien attempted but failed to pay respect to the body of the slain…”

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The following press story in March 1994 indicated that Chretien might have already arrived in Mexico when the assassination occurred on that same day of March 23, and a scheduled next-day meeting with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was then cancelled:

“Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party was shot twice Wednesday during a campaign appearance in the border city of Tijuana.

…

An official at the Tijuana General Hospital said Colosio had been successfully operated on for the abdominal wound and was undergoing surgery for the head wounds. The bullet entered his brain behind the left ear and exited.

Hospital officials described Colosio’s condition as ‘extremely delicate.’

…

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari called the shooting ‘a vile act,’ describing Colosio as a ‘good, noble man who was seeking to serve others and his country.’

Salinas canceled a planned meeting Thursday with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who arrived in Mexico earlier Wednesday on a three-day official visit.”

(“Mexican presidential candidate shot during campaign”, March 23, 1994, United Press International)

I guess the Mexican government would have postponed Chretien’s official visit had he not already arrived in, or at least departed Canada for, Mexico.

The second-time coincidence in November 1995 was much scarier because this time Chretien was specifically targeted in his home, without his venturing into the atmosphere of an emotional crowd.

Also, the November 1995 break-in incident was at least the second time that Chretien was threatened with a deadly weapon, albeit not a gun, in Canada – after a May 1994 incident at the Winnipeg convention centre when Earl Kevin Jans, carrying a crossbow and arrows, wanted to see him as discussed earlier.

Even if these offenders were not deadly serious, I would think that there were reasons for them to make gestures of potentially deadly violence toward the prime minister of the country.

I have mentioned earlier that the break-in incident happened only two or three days after Mulroney had learned from Schreiber, on November 2, that he was under an RCMP criminal investigation.

There was a more specific timing relation between the two events. Several hours before the break-in at Chretien’s residence, Mulroney’s legal team had made its first move, with lawyer Roger Tasse phoning Justice Minister Allan Rock at home to discuss about the RCMP investigation, as I connected these two threads of events in a blog post on January 26, 2014:

“In the Airbus Affair, on November 4 only hours before the intrusion at Chretien’s residence, Brian Mulroney’s side made its first contact with the government regarding the criminal investigation, with Mulroney lawyer Roger Tasse phoning Justice Minister Allan Rock.

…

On behalf of Mulroney, Tasse called Justice Minister Allan Rock at home the night of November 4, Rock did not want to discuss the issue and early next morning Chretien’s residence was broken into – so conspicuous, ‘God forbid’.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 12) — when the elites follow the powers”, January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It was, at least in the timing, “so conspicuous” as I said above; but no actual link between the two has been publicly known as far as I am aware.

As earlier quoted from my September 2013 blog post, referring to the first new conference by Mulroney’s lawyers, Harvey Yarosky, Gerald Tremblay and Roger Tasse, on November 18, 1995, that announced Mulroney’s $50 million lawsuit against the government, Tasse was “a former justice minister in Ottawa”:

“Another lawyer, Roger Tasse – a former deputy justice minister in Ottawa – said the Justice Department and RCMP even refused to listen to Mulroney’s side of the story when he offered to co-operate with them.”

In the above, Tasse probably referred to his phone call to Justice Minister Rock a few hours before Chretien’s residence was broken into, as when the Justice Department refused to listen to him.

Obviously, a former deputy justice minister would have been familiar with the the inner workings of the government, and would be a good person to make contact with the sitting justice minister in November 1995 on behalf of Mulroney.

But Tasse was not the typical former deputy justice minister: he had been the deputy justice minister under Jean Chretien, the justice minister in the government of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and had also been a partner of Chretien’s in private law practice.

As I reviewed in January 2014, a few days after a legal settlement was reached between Mulroney and the Chretien government in January 1997, the above key facts about his lawyer Roger Tasse were proudly discussed by Mulroney’s side in a press story:

“A few days after the legal settlement, an “insider” story from former Mulroney aide L. Ian MacDonald detailed Mulroney’s friendship with Tremblay and revealed “significant” reasons why Yarosky and Tasse had also been hired (“Mulroney’s fight for honor: ‘This is about my place in history,’ former PM tells law partner”, by L. Ian MacDonald, January 11, 1997, The Gazette):

“At a table by the bar of Le Mas des Oliviers, a legendary Montreal hangout of lawyers and pols, Brian Mulroney was finishing a long lunch on Thursday afternoon in the company of Gerald Tremblay, lead counsel in his libel action against the federal government.

“We’ve had a lot of meals together in the last 14 months,” Mulroney said, “and lots of them have had funny moments, and their share of laughter, but none of them have been joyous. This is joyous.”

The former prime minister took a sip of tea, and leaned back in his chair. “Life is good again,” he said. “Life is good.”

Tremblay is chairman of McCarthy Tetrault in Quebec, and its rainmaker. …

…

… Mulroney was the leader of his own Dream Team, composed of Tremblay and his colleague Jacques Jeansonne, noted Montreal civil-rights attorney Harvey Yarosky and, significantly in Ottawa, former deputy justice minister Roger Tasse, later a partner in the private practice of Jean Chretien, who had been his minister at the justice department.”

Aha, in November 1995 when faced with a criminal investigation, Brian Mulroney suddenly saw the need for “civil rights” and Yarosky was hired; and Tasse was hired because he had been not only Chretien’s deputy minister at the Justice Department but also Chretien’s law partner in private practice!

Mr. Mulroney certainly knew the value of the inside track in his “Dream Team”. But did the Canadian public really think in November 1995 that Mulroney could lose his legal battle against the government with a close associate of Prime Minister Chretien on his side?

Most of the public likely weren’t aware of that fact. In the major press archives from the Airbus Affair period before the legal settlement I can find only one mention of a law partner of Tasse’s, and it wasn’t Chretien…

…

So the public was only told that Mulroney lawyer Roger Tasse had been deputy justice minister, a lead civil servant position, under Chretien but was otherwise a law partner of Mulroney-era solicitor general – minister overseeing RCMP – James Kelleher.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As I remarked above, through the duration of Mulroney’s lawsuit against the government and Tasse acting as a lawyer for him, the Canadian media did not mention the special relationship Tasse had previously had with Prime Minister Chretien in private law practice.

There were a few caveats about the private law practice of Chretien and Tasse in Ottawa during the first half of the Mulroney era when John Turner was the Liberal leader, as I reviewed and quoted from the press archives:

“Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stepped down in 1984, handing the reign to John Turner, who was soon defeated in a September election by new Tory leader Brian Mulroney. Despite announcing retirement from active politics in 1986, Jean Chretien was regarded as the most popular politician in Canada…

…

… Prior to political retirement he had returned to law practice, lured Roger Tasse away from the government to his Toronto-based law firm Lang, Michener, Cranston, Farquharson and Wright, and had Tasse and his own political organizer Eddie Goldenberg open a branch in Ottawa for him – not to leave all the spotlights to Mulroney’s circle…

…

By 1988, before the November election, some of the Tory lawyers in Ottawa were feeling pessimistic, but the law office of Chretien, Tasse and Goldenberg were doing extremely well, as Stevie Cameron noted (“PEOPLE WATCH Ottawa’s Tory pastures not lush enough for some big law firms”, by Stevie Cameron, March 17, 1988, The Globe and Mail):

“It will be a sad day tomorrow for Weir and Foulds. After nearly four years of trying to make a go of it, the big Toronto-based law firm is closing its Ottawa office.

Weir and Foulds is one of a dozen law firms with excellent Conservative connections that opened Ottawa offices after the Mulroney Government came to office in September, 1984. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s close friend, Toronto lawyer Sam Wakim, joined Weir and Foulds with a handsome dowry: an estimated $200,000 worth of annual business from the Export Development Corp. Frisky with its good fortune, Weir and Foulds hired two lawyers from Gowling and Henderson, the Ottawa firm that had handled the EDC business, and set up shop in Ottawa.

The EDC business was not enough, however, and the firm did not grow the way it had hoped. It was not alone; Toronto firms Goodman and Carr and Lyons Arbus and Goodman (which had hired Maureen McTeer, the wife of External Affairs Minister Joe Clark) closed their Ottawa offices; so did Calgary’s Burnet Duckworth and Palmer. The Calgary firm also has a Clark connection; Mr. Clark’s brother Peter is a senior partner.

…

… To get an idea how lucrative Government work can be, just look at the money the Government spends helping native groups with their legal bills. In British Columbia, the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en bands have launched a land claims test case in the B.C. Supreme Court and the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development has allocated $4.7-million over three years to help them pay for legal work and research. These bands are using B.C. lawyers, but many other bands have hired lawyers based in Ottawa. The best known is former Liberal justice minister Jean Chretien, a partner at Lang Michener Lash Johnston.

In fact, a mention of Mr. Chretien irks many of the ambitious newcomers to Ottawa because his firm is doing so well. Lang Michener’s Ottawa office opened in 1985 with three partners and has mushroomed to 25 with a broad base of tax, banking and regulatory work. Envious Tories generally consider Lang Michener a Liberal firm because of the presence of Mr. Chretien and his former executive assistant Edward Goldenberg, but they brought in Roger Tasse, former deputy minister of justice, who has never stated his political affiliations, and managing partner Kent Plumley is a well-known local Tory.”

…

As a matter of fact, the Ottawa law office led by Chretien and Tasse did so well that it was dubbed a “Liberal government-in-waiting” in July 1988, with at least 10 of their lawyers recruited from the big law firm Gowling Henderson – even when their own firm Lang Michener Lash Johnson’s Toronto head office was engulfed in a scandal of fraudulent immigration schemes for Hong Kong clients…

…”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As one can see in the above, in 1986 the Liberal Jean Chretien, temporarily retired from politics, was the most popular politician in Canada; and yet his law practice with his former government deputy Roger Tasse employed a well-known Tory, Kent Plumley, as their managing partner, and was so successful in the Mulroney era’s national capital when even some Tory-inclined law firms – in particular some with close links to Mulroney government minister, former Prime Minister Joe Clark – weren’t, that it raised eyebrows in Ottawa and drew the scrutinizing attention of anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron.

In 1987 Tasse also became a legal adviser of Prime Minister Mulroney’s on constitutional law issues – that in a sense set the stage for his later serving as Mulroney’s private lawyer in the Airbus Affair lawsuit – as I reviewed in 2014:

“The opening section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states, concerning the limits of rights and freedoms:

“1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

The phrase “as can be demonstrably justified” was said to be the “brainchild” of deputy justice minister Roger Tasse, one of the 1982 Constitution’s architects working under Justice Minister Jean Chretien in the Pierre Trudeau government…

…

Since 1987 Roger Tasse had also become a legal adviser for Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who was keen at citing the talent and record of someone so distinguished in constitutional law to help him pass the 1987 Meech Lake constitutional accord mentioned in Part 7 (“The Lost Clause: PMO tries to shift blame”, by Paul Gessell, June 10, 1990, The Ottawa Citizen):

“Tasse wrote much of the 1982 Constitution when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister and Jean Chretien the justice minister.

Tasse later became Chretien’s law partner.

But that did not stop Mulroney from turning to him in his hour of need.

…

“Roger Tasse’s views satisfied prime minister Trudeau in 1982,” Mulroney told a Conservative caucus meeting May 4 in Mont-Tremblant, Que.

“His assurances satisfied Prime Minister Mulroney in 1987 and I hope they will assist in satisfying any doubts some premiers may still have in 1990.””

Mulroney showed his political smart using Roger Tasse’s constitutional-law statue to pressure the provincial premiers and his own Tory caucus to go along with his constitutional accord.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

But the cosiness with the Tories in the private law practice of Chretien and Tasse wasn’t even the most delicate caveat in the complicated links between Chretien and Mulroney. That, as I summarized in January 2014, was in the family and business coalesced around Canadian billionaire Paul Demarais and his Power Corporation:

“But it was an even closer “private family affair”when it came to Mulroney, Tasse, Chretien and his Desmarais in-laws. In May 1995 amid the Power DirectTV controversy, the media aired some of it, including that Mulroney was a legal counsel for the Desmarais family’s Power Corp., and that when Chretien was justice minister his future son-in-law worked for him (“Desmarais never far from PM’s office”, by Paul Gessell, May 2, 1995, The Ottawa Citizen):

“One of the few constants in Canadian politics is that regardless of who is prime minister, Paul Desmarais is never far away.

…

These connections include the marriage of Desmarais’ son and right-hand man, Andre, to Chretien’s daughter France. Andre, when still courting France, even worked as press secretary in the early 1980s to then justice minister Jean Chretien.

…

Ian MacDonald, a Mulroney friend and biographer, described Desmarais as “Mulroney’s mentor in the business world.” Desmarais’ biographer, Dave Greber, calls Mulroney “an old Desmarais protege.”

…

Mulroney, now in political retirement, is a hired gun, lobbyist, legal counsel and trophy director for several big corporations, including Power Corp.”

Deputy justice minister Roger Tasse was there, in Andre Desmarais’s courtship of France Chretien by working as press secretary for Justice Minister Jean Chretien.

So “the fix” was even more in, more of a “private family affair”: in November 1995 Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s in-law Paul Desmarais’s old friend and protege, Desmarais family company legal counsel, namely former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, was being investigated by RCMP for possible corruption; and Roger Tasse, an old Justice Department friend of both Chretien and his son-in-law Andre Desmarais, and old mentor and partner of Chretien in law, was made available as a lawyer for Mulroney to deal with RCMP and the Chretien government.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Additionally, the patronage and influence of Demarais and his Power Corp. in the political world went beyond Mulroney and Chretien:

“With Mulroney unhesitant to throw mud or worse at anyone, the omnipresence of Paul Desmarais’s political patronages would be good enough for most politicians to keep mum (“Desmarais never far from PM’s office”, by Paul Gessell, May 2, 1995, The Ottawa Citizen):

“…

Back in 1981, Jim Coutts was Pierre Trudeau’s principal secretary and chief confidant. Coutts made headlines in April that year by accompanying Desmarais on a Power Corp. jet to Washington for a “social” weekend.

The socializing included a round of golf, a theatrical performance at the Kennedy Centre, guest bedrooms at the home of Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Peter Towe, and an embassy dinner party with a guest list including George Bush, vice-president at the time, and several other Washington high rollers.

…

Desmarais pays attention to leadership campaigns. One of his top executives, John Rae, played a key role in both of Chretien’s campaigns to become Liberal leader. John Rae, by the way, is the brother of Ontario’s New Democratic Party premier, Bob Rae.

When Chretien retires and a leadership convention is held to replace him, chances are Desmarais will be on hand. Finance Minister Paul Martin could quite possibly be Chretien’s successor. And who taught Martin how to succeed in business? None other than his former employer, Paul Desmarais.”

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As cited above, the Chretien government’s finance minister Paul Martin in 1995, touted as a possible Chretien successor, had been employed by Desmarais.  As discussed earlier Martin, later a leadership rival, in 2003 would indeed succeed Chretien as Liberal leader and prime minister.

As I reviewed in January 2014, these were pertinent matters back in November 1995 when a key lawyer for one side, handling a legal dispute for former Prime Minister Mulroney against Prime Minister Chretien’s government, was also a close personal confidante of the other side.

Unfortunately, these important relevant facts were not mentioned by the media or by the politicians during the period of Mulroney’s libel lawsuit proceedings against the Chretien government but were in essence avoided, as I noted and lamented:

“… in June 1995 – I note that Paul Palango had published an article on June 1 denouncing the inaction of the Chretien government and the RCMP on the Airbus commissions issue – Tasse was recruited to the law firm Gowling, Strathy and Henderson, as quoted earlier a big law firm Tasse and Chretien had “pirated” 10 lawyers from to their “Liberal government-in-waiting” …

…

As reviewed and discussed, the Canadian media knew of Roger Tasse’s history inside and out but kept silent during the Airbus Affair, identifying him only as a former deputy justice minister under Chretien, and otherwise a law partner of former Mulroney government solicitor general James Kelleher – not noting that it was barely 6 months at Gowling, Strathy and Henderson …

…

I can imagine the media countering my criticisms about its selective reporting along official lines, by pointing out that the media’s first role was to report what others said, that most of the political and legal elites knew of Tasse’s backgrounds and yet they, especially the opposition parties in Parliament, did not sound any alarm in November 1995.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As described in the above in 2014, my review of the press archives shows that, specifically, during the time of Mulroney’s libel lawsuit the media reported his lawyer Roger Tasse’s as a former deputy justice minister under Chretien in the Trudeau government and a law partner of former Mulroney government solicitor general James Kelleher, government minister overseeing the RCMP – even though Tasse had only worked at Kelleher’s law firm for about 6 months since June 1995, but had previously been a close law partner of Chretien’s for several years.

In other words, the Canadian media may have knowingly turned a blind eye to a probable conflict-of-interest situation in the Chretien government’s handling of the lawsuit by Mulroney over the RCMP criminal investigation of him.

To present a fuller picture by taking into account pertinent and important facts that were not given necessary attention in the Airbus Affair, is the reason why in my current review of my first year of blogging in 2009 I have gone beyond the scope of my decade-ago article on Canadian politics, and have been discussing, quite extensively, some of my reviews and analyses in my later blog posts in 2013 and 2014.

In particular, these pertinent and important facts provide strong evidence for why after many years of a criminal investigation the RCMP found no sufficient evidence against former Prime Minister Mulroney and why, as I asserted in my blog post on April 29, 2009, quoted earlier, that still did not substantiate Mr. Mulroney’s innocence because “neither the RCMP nor the Liberal government of Jean Chretien … really went after Mr. Mulroney”:

“… Yet, as have been previously shown, neither the RCMP nor the Liberal government of Jean Chretien during its 10-year tenure from 1993 to 2003 really went after Mr. Mulroney: in public they were merely reacting to, and maintaining a continuing interest in, issues in the Airbus Affair as brought forward by members of a left-leaning Canadian media – particularly by Stevie Cameron and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate – and supported by those in the federal government system opposed to Mr. Mulroney’s rightwing agendas.”

The above was one of the core themes of my 2009 article on Canadian politics.

Now, what I reviewed and presented in 2013-2014, namely the delicate and complicated links between Chretien and Mulroney, by way of mutual and close relationships the two had to some influential and powerful Canadians, and the fact that Mulroney masterfully utilized some of these key links for his libel lawsuit in 1995-1997 against the Chretien government, provides additional strong evidence that, and an explanation why, under Mr. Chretien the Canadian government was unlikely to rigorously pursue Mr. Mulroney’s misdeeds, if any, because the outcome could embarrass the politically active Prime Minister Chretien as much as the already retired Mr. Mulroney.

As I also showed in 2013-2014, during Mulroney’s lawsuit from November 1995 to January 1997 the media, and even the opposition politicians, knowingly and carefully kept silent about these links.

In my above-quoted comment in 2009, I criticized the RCMP in the same breath as I did the Chretien government, about their not pursuing Mr. Mulroney’s possible wrongdoing vigorously. My study posted in 2013-2014 also provided additional strong evidence in this regard.

The RCMP being the federal police agency, its criminal investigation was supposed to be conducted independently of the government leadership. What I uncovered and presented in 2013 and 2014 were not so much about the investigation of Mr. Mulroney per se, but more generally biases on the part of the RCMP – in favoring Prime Minister Mulroney when Mulroney was in power, and then in acting as a thorn in the side of Prime Minister Chretien when the criminal investigation of Mulroney became more serious.

In particular, media reports following the Andre Dallaire break-in incident clearly pointed to the RCMP’s negligence, very likely wilful, that allowed the incident to happen as it did in early November 1995, here I elaborate on what I reviewed in 2013-2014.

Above all, security at the Prime Minister’s residence was extremely lax. Most of the several RCMP officers stationed on the ground, outside the house, had not received training for VIP protection; and they treated warning signals of intrusion as anomalies, as a result allowing the intruder plenty of time to try and finally break into the house undetected, as I reviewed in my September 2013 post:

“According to RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, the intruder was on the house ground for possibly 45 minutes total; Assistant Commissioner Wayne Martel in charge of VIP security would now conduct an internal inquiry…

…

According to Dianne Rinehart’s news report quoted earlier, RCMP guards at Chretien’s residence were not those protecting his travel security, but regular cops:

“…

RCMP officers who guard 24 Sussex Drive are members of a detachment assigned to protect the residences of the prime minister and governor general.

They do not receive intensive training given to the RCMP’s protective service, whose members accompany Chretien when he travels, Inspector Jean St-Cyr said.”

…

In fact, Andre Dallaire tripped an alarm but it was ignored by RCMP guards, who thought it was an animal. With a rock he failed to break the front door, succeeding later at a west-side door, and he even waved at the surveillance cameras, surprised by the lack of police response…

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Then during the incident when Mrs. Aline Chretien, after locking the bedroom doors, phoned the RCMP guards in urgency about an armed intruder in the house, the guards merely surrounded the house, not rushing in as required:

“It was immediately disclosed that RCMP officers did not follow the standard procedure to rush into the house, but surrounded it outside for 6-7 minutes…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It turned out that the RCMP guards had never been inside the house, and they were waiting for their unit commander, stationed at another guard post at the Governor General’s residence, to come over and enter the house alone to confront the intruder, as I reviewed in my January 2014 post:

“… the house ground was guarded by several RCMP Special Constables and Constables, the lowest-ranked members in the force and they, along with guards at the Governor General’s residence and at the Prime Minister’s summer residence outside Ottawa, were together led by a Corporal, at just one rank above, posted at the GG’s residence. Most of the officers guarding the Chretien residence had no training in VIP protection, and none had been inside the house.

When Mrs. Chretien phoned them about an intruder the onsite guards simply surrounded the house and called for help, until the corporal arrived and entered by himself to make an arrest. Fortunately, the 34-year-old intruder Andre Dallaire, a convenience store worker from Longueuil, a suburb of Montreal, Quebec, did not try to break into the bedroom or fight the police.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

If, say, the frontline officers guarding Chretien’s residence did their duty in a ragtag manner, then the senior supervising officers acted like off-duty, or worse, in managing the crisis, and their prior records in policing had been awful.

Firstly, as I noted in my September 2013 post, the senior RCMP officer in charge of VIP protection, Chief Superintendent Al Rivard, had a poor recent prior record of responding to crisis at that job:

“Well, while Capital Ottawa residents were no doubt stunned by what happened so close to the Chretiens, I wonder how many were aware that the security of all top government officials and diplomats had been C/Supt. Al Rivard’s responsibility, and a few months earlier when a homemade bomb had made it into a government office tower, Rivard admitted he was in the dark (“1,800 civil servants flee bomb”, May 25, 1995, Toronto Star):

“Questions about security in federal buildings were raised yesterday after a homemade bomb was smuggled into a Department of Indian Affairs office Tuesday.

Nearly 1,800 bureaucrats were forced to flee their desks around 4 p.m. after a man carried the bomb to the ninth floor of the 28-storey tower.

…

Police later arrested a man from Kuujjuaq, Que., and charged him with illegal possession and use of explosives and mischief.

Pierre Claude Dufresne, 41, entered no plea in a Hull courtroom yesterday and was remanded in custody.

…

Sergeant Yves Martel of Hull police said federal security is generally the responsibility of the RCMP and security branches of individual departments.

…

Several RCMP officers – including a senior officer in charge of protecting the Governor-General, the Prime Minister, cabinet ministers and diplomats – were surprised to learn of the attack.

“If I’m not informed, I can’t comment on that,” said Chief Superintendent Al Rivard, commander of the protective operations branch of the RCMP.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As told above, federal security was the RCMP’s responsibility and yet when a homemade bomb was smuggled into a Department of Indian Affairs office on May 24, 1995, it was the Hull municipal police that handled the incident while Rivard admitted he was “not informed”.

Secondly, learning of C/Supt. Rivard’s gravely dismal prior record working in the province of New Brunswick would make it hard for anyone to believe that he could even have been put in charge of VIP protection.

With a force of over one hundred police officers led by then Superintendent Rivard, it took seven months to hunt down an escaped killer, Allan Legere, in 1989, with Legere hiding in the area of the police search and murdering four more people, and later even writing to the media to taunt Rivard and the RCMP:

“Why Al Rivard had been given that job looks like a mystery given a grave failure in his past record that people in the province of New Brunswick probably all knew. In New Brunswick in 1989, then Superintendent Rivard leading over 100 officers took 7 months to capture escaped killer Allan Legere who was hiding near them in the woods of the Miramichi region, and Legere killed 4 more people during that time and later taunted Rivard in a letter to the media (“Legere says he was never far from police while on the run”, December 10, 1989, Toronto Star):

“Convicted killer Allan Legere – a suspect in four brutal murders – boasts he was never farther than a shout away from police during his seven months as a fugitive.

“All it would take is one good sweep of the forest,” Legere claims in an eight-page handwritten letter sent from his prison cell in Renous, N.B.

…

Legere, who escaped from a Moncton, N.B., hospital in May, was recaptured two weeks ago after one of the biggest manhunts in Canadian history. …

…

In the seven months that followed Legere’s escape, fear and terror grew along the Miramichi River and many residents took to sleeping with firearms at their bedside.

A native of the area, Legere quickly became a prime suspect in four murders that occurred while he was at large. An elderly storeowner, two sisters and a priest were viciously beaten.

In his letter, Legere shows just how closely he followed the news by refuting claims about him and mocking police comments.

“I’ve noticed that RCMP Rivard calls me chicken, etc.,” Legere wrote, referring to comments by Superintendent Al Rivard. “But do tell me, if I am so chicken and dumb, why couldn’t over 100 of Canada’s finest, with dogs, and SWAT teams find little ol’ moi? Hmmmm? . . . They are not the Sergeant Prestons of bygone years.””

…

Chief Superintendent Al Rivard had been a glaring hole in security, a human-safety disaster waiting to happen. Luckily in Canada’s capital in November 1995, it got to the very top without bloodshed – unlike what happened to Yitzhak Rabin in Israel.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It had been “a human-safety disaster waiting to happen”, as I gasped above, wondering why Rivard was later entrusted with protecting Canadian government leaders and foreign diplomats.

Thirdly, as I noted, immediately following the break-in at Chretien’s residence, Chief Superintendent Rivard, a subordinate officer Inspector Jean Dube and a superior officer, RCMP “A” Division commanding officer Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, all failed to act in an acceptable manner, with none attending the incident site or making immediate remedy to increase security for Prime Minister Chretien and his wife:

“Security holes also existed in the systemic ‘acting up’ manner of the RCMP senior officers, not just Al Rivard, shown the night of the Dallaire intrusion (“Break-in probe reaches RCMP brass; One senior officer already suspended, sources say”, by Tim Harper, November 17, 1995, Toronto Star):

“The sources told The Star that one member of a senior management quartet, Inspector Jean Dube, has already been suspended.

But the sources say the probe could be extended to include Chief Superintendent Al Rivard; McConnell, the commanding officer of the RCMP’s A Division; and an unnamed superintendent in charge of Chretien’s bodyguards.

All must bear some responsibility for the snafu that night, the source said, for not taking charge at 24 Sussex but instead going to RCMP headquarters.

Dube is the easiest target because he is the lowest-ranking among the four senior officers.

…

McConnell, as the ranking officer, should have told his subordinate Rivard to get to Sussex Dr. as quickly as possible the night of the break-in, sources say.

Instead, he called to the site and reported Dube was on his way.

But Dube was at least two hours away – even though he was supposed to be within easy response time of 24 Sussex Dr.

Rivard received a call at 3:30 a.m. after the suspect was arrested. He was expected to be at 24 Sussex and call bodyguards to the site to have the Chretiens escorted from the home, sources said.

He stayed at headquarters instead.

“Security had been breached,” a source said. “It’s basic. You don’t leave VIPs on unsecured premises.

“Who knew if there were other people on the grounds? Who knew if a bomb had been planted? That’s one of the first things they teach you at VIP protection.”

…”

Rivard’s spotty record in New Brunswick could be a reason McConnell didn’t call him but the more junior Jean Dube, when told of the intrusion. Dube was 2 hours away while on call, and Rivard when notified afterwards went to the headquarters instead, and so the Chretiens’ security wasn’t immediately beefed up.

But why didn’t McConnell attend the scene himself then?

He went to the RCMP headquarters “to oversee damage control”. …”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In addition to Rivard, Dube and McConnell, the above-quoted news story mentioned “an unnamed superintendent in charge of Chretien’s bodyguards”, as failing in their duty that night.

That superintendent was probably Claude Sweeney, who was in the process of retiring, “taking a government buyout”, according to another news story:

“RCMP management took actions to suspend 4 officers onsite that night, and reassigned 3 of their supervisors, as A/Comm. Bryan McConnell announced…

…

But the media learned 2 of the 4 onsite officers were of the lowest rank, “special constables”, and the reassigned supervisors were already on their way out in pre-planned downsizing (“Mounties’ transfer not tied to break-in; Downsizing explains move at 24 Sussex”, by Leonard Stern, November 16, 1995, The Ottawa Citizen):

“Two of the four Mounties on duty that night were special constables, the lowest rank in the force and the one with the least training.

…

But the three officers — Supt. Claude Sweeney, Insp. Jean Dube and Staff Sgt. Frank Trottier — knew before the break-in that their positions were being eliminated.

Several sources say that, earlier this year, McConnell was involved with a report recommending that Sweeney’s position be downgraded to inspector, and that those of Dube and Trottier be eliminated.

…

Sweeney is taking a government buyout. Dube is the operations officer in the executive and diplomatic protection section. Trottier is in charge of the detachment that includes the prime minister’s and governor general’s residences. Dube and Trottier said questions should be directed to McConnell.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted above, the immediate supervisor of the RCMP guards was Staff Sgt. Frank Trottier, the detachment commander.

Finally, whoever the senior officers on 24-hour call the early morning of November 5, they did not answer their cellphones and, as a result, the lowly-ranked and inexperienced guards improvised the way they did dealing with the intrusion:

“Meeting reporters on his way from Rabin’s funeral to a British Commonwealth summit in Auckland, New Zealand, Chretien told a tale of grabbing an Inuit carving as weapon just in case, and maintaining his sense of humor…

…

Art’s role in this was not only a sculpture as weapon but one RCMP guard being from the famous Musical Ride (“PM’s RCMP guard called unqualified; One officer culled from Musical Ride, none had special training, Reform says”, November 9, 1995, The Globe and Mail):

“Now Reform Party House Leader Deborah Gray has offered a possible explanation for the grave security lapse. Based on a tip that apparently came from inside the force, Ms. Gray said yesterday the three officers on duty on Saturday night were inexperienced, had no special training in security work and one of them “was culled from The Musical Ride.”

Possibly he was waiting for his horse to circle the house before riding to the rescue, she said. Possibly he was waiting for orders from one of the three senior officers who were supposed to be on 24-hour call that night, but according to Ms. Gray, did not answer their cellular telephones.

…”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The appalling performance, or behavior if one can put it that way, by both the frontline and supervising RCMP officers responding to the break-in at Prime Minister Chretien’s residence in November 1995 was especially concerning in light of the revelations afterwards that woeful inadequacy of security for that official residence had been a problem known to, and proposed improvements refused by, the RCMP or the Prime Minister’s Office since 1989:

“Canadian Police Association president Neal Jessop sent a letter to Solicitor General Herb Gray, listing a litany of security problems at the prime minister’s residence and requesting an independent review (“Review of break-in at PM’s home demanded; Full story of incident needed, police association says in letter to Solicitor-General”, November 16, 1995, The Globe and Mail):

“People are not being told the full story of what led to the security breach, Canadian Police Association president Neal Jessop says in a letter to Solicitor-General Herb Gray.

…

The association says it has heard that:

• TV monitors for the security camera system may have been low-quality, providing a picture so poor the officers could not tell the difference between a Mountie and an intruder;
• Officers responsible for security had never been allowed in the house before that night and were therefore unfamiliar with the layout;
• On-site security staff had submitted four reports since 1989 that recommended upgrading security at the residence, but all were ignored or refused by RCMP management or the Prime Minister’s Office.

…”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As above, at least four reports recommending security upgrades had been submitted by on-site security staff since 1989, to no avail.

Before the November 1995 break-in, there had been the assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in March 1994 as Chretien arrived for an official visit and the Mexican crowd’s hostility toward the visiting Chretien who tried to pay tribute, an incident that caused the concern of solicitor general Herb gray, and then the incident of a man with a crossbow and arrows looking for Chretien in May 1994, both incidents, reviewed earlier, were raised by the media in November 1995 in light of the break-in and quoted in my September 2013 blog post.

Then in July 1995, a man actually entered the ground of the Prime Minister’s residence before he was discovered by the RCMP:

“At the Prime Minister’s residence the security hole was in the back of the house ground, a fact the RCMP knew since escaped killer Allan Legere’s era: Andre Dallaire likely entered the ground from there, a scenario alerted to in a 1989 RCMP report and in 1995 after a July 28 incident when a man “wandered onto” the ground from the back …”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Here are more details from a December 1995 news story that I cited in September 2013 about that prior breach of security on July 28, 1995, exposing the area behind the house as a security blind spot:

“An RCMP officer warned a supervisor about a security gap at 24 Sussex Drive months before a knife-wielding intruder broke into the prime minister’s house.

The Canadian Press has also learned that a 1989 RCMP report recommended sweeping improvements to security at 24 Sussex. But it appears only some of the changes were made.

“The level of security at the back of the residence is very low,” says a classified report.

“The likelihood of someone trespassing on the property from the rear is high. The consequences of this could range from insignificant to extremely serious, depending upon the intentions of the intruder(s).”

A man broke into 24 Sussex early on Nov. 5.

…

Other documents show that a few months earlier, on July 28, a Mountie apprehended a man who wandered onto the grounds from behind the house. No charges were laid.

But one constable involved said in a three-page report to a superior, S.Sgt. Frank Trottier, that “this incident has identified a blind area” in the RCMP’s closed-circuit TV — or CCTV — surveillance.

“This area has no CCTV coverage,” says the constable’s report. “A camera in this area would probably assist in coverage.”

Copies may also have gone to other RCMP officials.

Sgt. Andre Guertin, an RCMP official, said Tuesday the July incident was included in an overall review of security conducted after last month’s break-in.

But as recently as this month, RCMP supervisors were unsure whether the constable’s warning had been followed up.

An urgent Dec. 8 memo from Supt. Carl Gallant to an RCMP inspector says: “Please pursue the paper trail on this matter with a view to presenting me with a report as to whether or not the appropriate follow-up was conducted by all members involved.”

An RCMP briefing note to the solicitor general, dated the same day, says the force “is reviewing this matter to determine what action was taken as a result of this intervention by the constable.”

The 22-page 1989 report said the ground-level doors and windows of the residence did not offer much security.”

(“Report cited security flaws before Chretien break-in: The area behind 24 Sussex Drive lacked closed-circuit TV cameras, creating a blind spot, an unnamed officer reported”, by Jim Bronskill, December 20, 1995, The Vancouver Sun)

As told above, on December 8 over a month after the break-in, Superintendent Carl Gallant suddenly sent an “urgent” memo to find out if the security blind spot exposed back in July had been properly dealt with.

With several incidents threatening Chretien or raising concern about inadequate security for him in only about two years since he had become the prime minister, the RCMP management’s apparent apathy, as described above, was troubling; and when a break-in was actually carried out by a knife-wielding man, the RCMP guards and management, as reviewed, did not seem to respond with a sense of emergency and seriousness that the lives of the prime minister and his wife might be in danger. They were clearly negligent.

As I have said earlier, my review in 2013-2014 showed that the RCMP negligence in this case was “very likely wilful”.

No doubt the fact that an officer with a gravely dismal prior record like Chief Superintendent Al Rivard’s was even put in charge of VIP protection influenced my thinking; but the conclusion of ‘wilfulness’ came foremost from my review of the conduct and prior record of Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell – as quoted earlier the highest ranked of the senior officers criticised in the media for their mishandling of the break-in incident.

A/Commissioner McConnell’s response to media questioning in that afternoon after the break-in showed that, as the commanding officer of the RCMP “A” Division responsible for the security of the Capital Ottawa region, he exemplified the belief, or attitude, that there was no real violence toward Chretien and his family:

“On the day after the intrusion, A/Comm. McConnell seemed very matter-of-fact in explaining the RCMP response (“RCMP admit delay in response; Officers secured house before heading for Chretiens’ room”, by Shawn McCarthy, November 7, 1995, Toronto Star):

“Responding to a reporter’s suggestion that the Chretiens could have been murdered, McConnell seemed to downplay the danger.

“The individual was in the house; there’s no question about that. The individual was armed, the individual did not attempt to get into the private quarters,” he said.”

Rational calculations of a veteran cop deciding whether to pull the trigger, whoever it was to protect, or it seemed.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

See, if one followed McConnell’s logic, then back in May 1994 when a man with a crossbow and arrows looked for Chretien at a convention center, the RCMP probably assessed that had he meant real harm he would have gone to an outdoor event where the prime minister met people outside; then in July 1995 when a man wandered onto the ground of the prime minister’s residence, the RCMP probably assessed that had he meant harm he would have carried a weapon; and now, a man wielding a knife broke open a door, got inside the house and came face-to-face with Mrs. Chretien, McConnell said “the individual did not attempt to get into the private quarters” – but that was because Mrs. Chretien ran back into the bedroom and locked its doors.

Had Andre Dallaire broken a bedroom door and entered as well, what would Bryan McConnell’s reasoning be then, that the individual did not actually stab Mr. or Mrs. Chretien? Arguing to the last moment about a doomsday scenario not really happening could be too late for anybody’s protection.

As it had turned out in the early days of my political activism, after my faxing documents to local MP Kim Campbell and RCMP officers taking me to a psychiatric committal at UBC hospital on November 30, 1992, my press releases and a cover note to Campbell found their way to Solicitor General Doug Lewis, and in January 1993 an RCMP British Columbia “E” Division’s reply to me acknowledged receiving a complaint by me, at the internal directive of Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell, RCMP director of enforcement services.

A/Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell defined my documents as a complaint about RCMP’s role in arresting me in a prior academic dispute at UBC, and thus, from my perspective, excluded the issues about Prime Minister Mulroney that I raised in my press releases and in the note to Ms. Campbell. Later in my blogging I discussed this issue in a post on March 25, 2012, and then in the January 2014 post extensively cited earlier, of the same multipart article.

Here are some of what I recalled in March 2012:

“I had never sent any complaint to the Solicitor General who supervised the RCMP, about the July 2 arrest or anything else.

The only things I had sent to the Canadian political high level had all been sent to local Member of Parliament Kim Campbell.

First was the fax on November 30, where the cover note was about my accusations on Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s conduct in the Charlottetown constitutional process and on forthcoming retaliatory political persecution against me…

Then while in psychiatric committal I sent another letter to Kim Campbell complaining also about the RCMP-led psychiatric committal as political persecution, which may have also addressed her as Justice Minister, but this second letter is not among RCMP’s or any organization’s disclosures I have been given so far.

It was quite possible that Campbell forwarded my documents to Solicitor General as a complaint from me, but given that the only RCMP-disclosure copy, received at Campbell’s office, was likely RCMP-processed on November 30, 1992, the person who provided them to Solicitor General could have been inside RCMP.

…

But as A/Comm. McConnell’s letter specified clearly, my complaint was defined only as about my July 2 arrest, even though the attached documents criticized UBC Computer Science Head Maria Klawe much more than RCMP, and most importantly the overwhelming amount of contents were criticisms about Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct, including about upcoming political persecution against me.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 6) — when law and justice reinforce the authorities”, March 25, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

So in my later review in January 2014, I set out to determine that the Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell handling the Chretien residence break-in incident was most likely the same as J. W. B. McConnell – an RCMP leader with a bias in favor of Brian Mulroney.

Firstly, the RCMP director of enforcement services had also been reported in the press as Bryan McConnell:

“In press archives there is an October 2, 1991 reference to the RCMP director of enforcement services as Bryan McConnell, about tackling a serial rapist case…

…

So J. W. B. McConnell was also named Bryan McConnell.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Secondly, the RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell who was commanding officer of the “A” Division in November 1995 responsible for security of the Capital Ottawa region, by February 1997 had retired from the RCMP and become the executive director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, as I reviewed in September 2013:

“It was A/Comm. McConnell’s turn to be let go, again quietly, but it was ‘coincidentally’ marked in the records of the Parliament of Canada (“EVIDENCE Sub-Committee on the DRAFT REGULATIONS ON FIREARMS of the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affair”, Chairman: Russell MacLellan, Meeting No. 13, February 4, 1997, House of Commons, Parliament of Canada):

“The Chairman: We’re ready now to resume our hearings on the proposed regulations under the Firearms Act.

I want to welcome this afternoon our witnesses from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. We have with us Chief Brian Ford from the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police Service; Mr. N.G. Beauchesne, legal adviser to the law amendments committee; and Mr. Bryan McConnell, the executive director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.

…

Chief Ford: …

…

I’m also pleased to introduce Mr. Bryan McConnell, who is the new executive director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. Mr. McConnell is a former assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was commander of the A division here in the national capital, and has now assumed duties as the executive director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police here in Ottawa.

…”

Merely weeks after the Mulroney legal settlement Bryan McConnell was no longer policing the nation’s capital and was out of the RCMP, “not in the true democratic sense”, but chosen by the chiefs nationwide to coordinate police matters across the entire Canada.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

And thirdly, in an online copy of the 2002-2003 membership directory of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, I found one and only one Bryan McConnell: J. W. Bryan McConnell; given that a former executive director of the organization should be among its members, and there was only one such name in the directory and it also perfectly matched that of the former RCMP director of enforcement services, the most likely conclusion is that they were the same person:

“But Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell has in fact identified himself as “J. W. Bryan McConnell” in the directory of the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs. In Part 7 I have cited CACP’s 2002-2003 membership directory to identify RCMP officer P. M. Cummins as “Patrick Cummins”. But after my posting of Part 11 critical of RCMP “A” Division commander Bryan McConnell’s roles in handling the Jean Chretien residence intrusion and the Airbus Affair criminal investigation, the CACP website document has become inaccessible to the public. So here is my downloaded copy, which shows there was one and only one McConnell in that year’s directory: “J. W. Bryan McConnell”.

Given that the former RCMP “A” Division commander Bryan McConnell became CACP Executive Director in early 1997, there was no reason in 2002-03 for that Bryan McConnell not to be in the membership directory if he was alive; and the only McConnell in the directory was “J. W. Bryan McConnell”, i.e., J. W. B. McConnell, the person who in January 1993 directed that the press releases and cover note I had faxed to MP Kim Campbell be treated as a complaint only about low-level RCMP members at UBC, not about Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

So the conclusions are: the two Bryan McConnell’s were almost without a doubt the same person, and it was no coincidence that in my case in January 1993, and then in the Airbus Affair criminal investigation in 1995-97, Mulroney was craftily let off the hook by Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell, or Bryan McConnell; the threat of violence against Prime Minister Jean Chretien through the November 1995 residence intrusion might have also been tolerated by McConnell.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As noted above, my own experience, in political activism criticising former Prime Minister Mulroney’s leadership, with an RCMP decision directed by J. W. B. McConnell already gave me a sense of RCMP bias in favor of Mulroney, i.e., before my studying the Chretien residence break-in incident.

In the above two quotes, I noted that McConnell became the CACP executive director, leaving the RCMP, right after the January 1997 legal settlement in Mulroney’s lawsuit against the government and the RCMP over the criminal investigation of him. The timing was very interesting because as the “A” Division commander, McConnell had supervised not only security of the Capital Ottawa region, in particular of Prime Minister Chretien’s residence, but also the criminal investigation of Mulroney, as RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray’s spokesman, Sgt. Andre Guertin, stated in January 1997 that it had not been the commissioner but the “ranking officer” in the “A” Division who was responsible for the controversial letter to Swiss authorities:

“In January 1997 when the Mulroney lawsuit reached settlement and the media criticized RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray’s performance, his spokesman Sgt. Guertin responded by saying, without naming McConnell, that the responsibility for the letter to the Swiss police had not been in Murray’s hands but in the “A” Division’s, as quoted in Part 11:

“His spokesperson, Sgt. Andre Guertin, said Murray cannot be expected to take a hands-on approach to every criminal investigation undertaken by the force.

…

Guertin later said the letter never made it to RCMP headquarters and the ranking officer to sign off on the accusatory missive would have been in Ottawa’s A Division, someone between chief investigator Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald and deputy commissioner Frank Palmer.”

Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell’s departure from RCMP soon after the Mulroney lawsuit settlement, by February 1997 as in Part 11, suggested a link to the Airbus Affair, much like the reassignment of Chief Superintendent Al Rivard away from VIP security the day after the Chretien residence intrusion in November 1995 – Rivard had been his subordinate.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted in the above, according to Sgt. Guertin, “the letter never made it to RCMP headquarters and the ranking officer to sign off on the accusatory missive would have been in Ottawa’s A Division, someone between chief investigator Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald and deputy commissioner Frank Palmer”.

Deputy Commissioner Frank Palmer cited above was an RCMP leader in rank just under Commissioner Murray in the RCMP headquarters, and above Assistant Commissioner McConnell commanding the “A” Division.

That dual responsibilities shouldered by the RCMP “A” Division for both high-profile events in the fall of 1995 were also reflected by the facts that Inspector Carl Gallant had been one of the RCMP officers visiting investigative journalist Stevie Cameron in January to discuss her book on Mulroney-era corruption, and then in December Superintendent Carl Gallant – most likely the same person, given the uncommon name – sent out an urgent memo to inquire about a past security blind spot at Chretien’s residence.

As quoted earlier, in November 1995 journalist Rosemary Speirs exclaimed about possible RCMP incompetence in both cases:

“WHAT DO you say when the former prime minister of the country sues the government he used to lead for $50 million for defamation of character?

You say you hope the RCMP checked the rumors out very carefully before naming Brian Mulroney as a possible suspect in the Airbus story.

…

If they didn’t, the national police force will have disgraced itself even more. RCMP bumbling on the night when Jean Chretien’s wife faced an armed intruder at 24 Sussex will be nothing compared to this potential foul-up.”

However, my assertion is that the mishandling in each case worked in Mulroney’s favor, putting Chretien’s life at risk while giving Mulroney a better chance in suing the government – this dual responsibilities were especially troubling when that RCMP “A” Division was commanded by Bryan McConnell who had had a role in restraining my activism regarding Mulroney’s leadership conduct:

“Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell’s departure from RCMP soon after the Mulroney lawsuit settlement, by February 1997 as in Part 11, suggested a link to the Airbus Affair, much like the reassignment of Chief Superintendent Al Rivard away from VIP security the day after the Chretien residence intrusion in November 1995 – Rivard had been his subordinate.

If so, i.e., McConnell’s departure was a result of his bad performance during the Chretien residence intrusion and in supervising the Mulroney criminal investigation, as he appeared to have bungled it in each case, then his new appointment as Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police – as in Part 11 recorded in Parliament of Canada records – was a subtle but more troubling sign, namely a vote of confidence in McConnell by the police chiefs across Canada, to have him as an executive in charge for them.

In Part 11 I have pointed out that letting low-level officers be in charge in both cases actually favored Mulroney over Chretien, because when security was lax an armed intruder got through and nearly harmed Mr. & Mrs. Chretien, whereas when a criminal investigation was lax the suspect, i.e., Mr. Mulroney, got away with a government apology and payments for his lawyers.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Moreover, my experience in political activism also suggests that in Deputy Commissioner Palmer, Assistant Commissioner McConnell had a superior in the RCMP headquarters who likely acquiesced with his ways.

That is because back in January 1993 when Commissioner McConnell, then RCMP director of enforcement services, sent a directive to the B.C. “E” Division about my complaint, excluding my criticisms of Mulroney from its scope, that internal letter was sent to the attention of the “E” Division officer in charge of criminal operations, that happened to be Assistant Commissioner Frank Palmer, with a lawyer pedigree and a prior history of stern attitude toward activism, as I reviewed in a blog post dated April 30, 2012:

“The “RCMP assistant commissioner for B.C. Frank Palmer” talking about “great paranoia at the beginning” wasn’t exactly RCMP’s top leader in British Columbia. Nonetheless, A/Comm. Palmer was in charge of Criminal Operations at “E” Division in B.C., i.e., the officer to whose attention my complaint was directed before forwarded to a subordinate, C/Supt. P. M. Cummins.

…

RCMP personal-information disclosures so far have not revealed if he acted oppressively on my case, but Frank Palmer had a law degree so was qualified to handle legal situations, and had been known for a hint of “McCarthyism” since the 1970s, intimidating people on behalf of RCMP…

…

So back in 1977 when Canadians were passionate about investigating RCMP wrongdoing and Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau appointed a royal commission to do so, Canadian Civil Liberties Association counsel Alan Borovoy wanted to prosecute it as crime, and Tory MP Elmer MacKay – father of today’s Defence Minister Peter MacKay and friend of Airbus Affair businessman Karlheinz Schreiber as in Part 1 – wanted parliamentary committee investigations, whereas RCMP Sgt. Frank Palmer wanted to open people’s mail to see if they were foreign spies.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 7) — when legal and judicial prudence means the powerful is right”, April 30, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Palmer was promoted to become the RCMP’s second-in-command when Commissioner Norman Inkster retired in June 1994, which I noted in a blog post dated October 26, 2012:

“Upon Inkster’s retirement The Vancouver Sun instead reported a June 24 RCMP announcement, that Assistant Commissioner Frank Palmer of B.C.’s “E” Division was promoted to Ottawa to fill Comm. Murray’s previous job of second-in-command (“Senior B.C. Mountie promoted to Ottawa”, June 25, 1994, The Vancouver Sun).”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 9) — when individual activism ranks at oblivion”, October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, later in January 1997 it was under Deputy Commissioner Frank Palmer’s supervision that the RCMP lost a court decision in the legal process defending against Mulroney’s lawsuit, and the Chretien government immediately settled with Mulroney, offering him an apology and paying his legal expenses, as I reviewed in my September 29, 2013 post:

“But the government defence for the lawsuit proposed an unusual legal step, one that RCMP would find intrusive for their police investigation. Government lawyers asked and received court approval, despite initial objection from Mulroney’s side, that Swiss police lawyer Pascal Gossin, responsible for handling the Kimberly Prost letter, take part in the trial to explain how the Swiss worked …

…

Mulroney’s lawyers decided to swamp Gossin with many questions, 100 of them; RCMP found it too much for the criminal investigation, and like Commissioner Philip Murray had said invoking the Canada Evidence Act if necessary, Deputy Commissioner Frank Palmer – a lawyer himself – filed RCMP objection to 8 of them, citing international law enforcement “confidentiality” …

…

Mulroney’s spokesman Luc Lavoie noticed the difference:

“Mr. Lavoie said it is obvious that a serious rift has developed between the Justice Department and the RCMP in their defence of the libel action.”

Merely days before the trial’s start, the government’s hope of winning the lawsuit was dashed by Federal Court of Canada’s decision in favor of Mulroney’s appeal against the RCMP objection to 8 of the questions for Pascal Gossin, and by what Mulroney had suspected in his April testimony, that RCMP might have leaked something – Sgt. Fiegenwald had told a reporter Mulroney was named in the letter before The Financial Post quoted from the Schreiber-Mulroney translation on November 18, 1995 …

…

An expensive hoax perhaps. Mulroney’s legal expenses could be $2 million, but Allan Rock’s friend, lawyer Harvey Strosberg was elated (“Taxpayers on hook for $2 million”, by Sarah Scott, January 7, 1997, The Windsor Star):

“Justice Minister Allan Rock is exonerated in the deal, said Strosberg, a longtime friend of Rock who was asked by Rock last spring to help in the defence.”

From the start it was to Mulroney’s advantage to take the offensive with a libel lawsuit, but there were indications that RCMP also provoked Mulroney to do so; in other words, RCMP likely also wanted a media circus focused on an unprecedented lawsuit by an ex-Prime Minister against the government, thus avoiding a harder criminal investigation the German police did in contrast.

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

With the facts and evidence reviewed in several blog posts, in January 2014 my reasoning thus reached the question of whether the RCMP intentionally, or ‘wilfully’ as I have asserted earlier, did what they did in relation to politics of “Brian Mulroney versus Jean Chretien” – putting Chretien’s safety at risk and going easy on Mulroney in the Airbus Affair:

“In Part 11 I have pointed out that letting low-level officers be in charge in both cases actually favored Mulroney over Chretien, because when security was lax an armed intruder got through and nearly harmed Mr. & Mrs. Chretien, whereas when a criminal investigation was lax the suspect, i.e., Mr. Mulroney, got away with a government apology and payments for his lawyers.

A deeper question that needs answering is whether the RCMP mishandlings were intentional, and whether they indeed had to do with ‘Brian Mulroney versus Jean Chretien’.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In my January 2014 post, my review of historical press coverage of politics prior to my activism which began in 1992, revealed that RCMP senior officer J. W. B. McConnell had had a bias in favor of then Prime Minister Mulroney dating back to the 1980s.

J. W. B. McConnell was sometimes also referred to as “Brian McConnell”, particularly when he was in charge of RCMP criminal operations in Quebec, in 1990 and prior:

“One fact that is clear is that J. W. B. McConnell was previously the RCMP officer in charge of criminal operations in Quebec, based in Montreal, cited in that name in April 1990 on the case of Cpl. Michel Boyer, a member of the RCMP national security investigations section charged with 2 counts of corruption, one of drug trafficking and 9 of breach of trust…

…

Besides in The Ottawa Citizen, for this case “Chief Supt. J. W. B. McConnell” was also cited in The Gazette…

…

But my search of the newspaper archives led to the spectre of a possibly different type of “mistaken identity”.

I found only one article referring to J. W. B. McConnell as “Bryan McConnell”, quoted earlier about a serial rapist in 1991 when he was RCMP director of enforcement services – J. W. B. McConnell as in his January 6, 1993 internal letter I obtained via personal-information disclosure.

On the other hand, many newspaper articles in 1989 had referred to the RCMP officer in charge of criminal operations, or criminal investigations, in Montreal as “Brian McConnell”.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The “many newspaper articles” referring to “Brian McConnell”, mentioned above, reported on what became known as the ‘Richard Grise affair’, that was probably the most significant political affair during the Mulroney government era and possibly the biggest scandal relating to Mr. Mulroney prior to the Airbus Affair in November 1995.

In brief, in mid-November 1988 during an RCMP criminal investigation of Richard Grise, a Member of Parliament in Mulroney’s governing party, Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell made the decision of delaying the execution of search warrants against Grise until after the November 21 election, a decision RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster was unaware of until finding out a year later and publicly admitting it on November 21, 1989, making it an instant major scandal:

“Recall as in Part 9, in 1989 Richard Grise, a Member of Parliament in Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s Tory party quit the parliament and pleaded guilty to 11 corruption charges, but other fraud charges against him lingered until June 1994 when RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster was about to retire.

The story had been much worse for RCMP back in November-December 1989, when Inkster had to admit that timing of the Richard Grise affair had been delayed by RCMP to avoid the November 1988 federal election (“Mounties stalled raid on MP’s office until after election”, by Patrick Doyle, November 21, 1989, Toronto Star):

“The Mounties intentionally delayed a probe of a Quebec Tory MP suspected of fraud until after last year’s federal election, RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster admitted today.

…

Until today the RCMP insisted that it was simply coincidence that search warrants were delayed until the day after the Nov.21 election.

Grise was re-elected in that election, but resigned May 30 after pleading guilty of fraud and breach of trust. He was sentenced to one day in jail and a $20,000 fine.”

It was the fault of Chief Superintendent “Brian” McConnell, who decided to postpone a warrant search of Grise for a corruption complaint first filed in the summer, until after the November 21 election so as not to be “unfair” (“Probe of MP delayed until election over”, November 21, 1989, The Vancouver Sun):

“Inkster had told the Commons justice committee last summer that the timing of the investigation of Grise – who later pleaded guilty to 11 charges of fraud and breach of trust and resigned from the House – was purely coincidental.

But Inkster said today that he had been misinformed by aides.

The commissioner said that Chief Supt. Brian McConnell, head of criminal investigations in Montreal, made a decision to delay the execution of search warrants in the case until Nov. 22, 1988, the day after the election.

…

The commissioner said he just found out last night and had not yet had a chance to speak to McConnell and ask him to explain his action.

But he indicated that it appeared the Montreal officer acted on the mistaken belief it would be unfair for the investigation to become public during the election campaign.

Allegations against Grise were raised in the summer of 1988 by Phil Edmondston, a New Democrat candidate who lost the Chambly riding south of Montreal to Grise.

Inkster, testifying on a range of issues, said he is not aware of any improper political influence by the government in any RCMP investigations.”

…

McConnell explained that the decision came up on November 14, a week before the election, because RCMP investigators asked him on that day (“Brass OK’d delaying probe, says Mountie”, by Graham Parley, November 22, 1989, The Ottawa Citizen):

“McConnell said investigators told him on Nov. 14, a week before the election, that they planned to obtain search warrants in both the Hamelin and Grise investigations.

The chief superintendent said he was convinced there was no urgency and “proceeding with these searches less than one week before the federal election could have harmed a number of innocent people, including many having nothing to do with the investigations.””

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As noted above, the complainant against Grise’s corruption activity was a political opponent contesting his parliamentary seat, New Democratic Party candidate Phil Edmonston, who had filed the complaint in August 1988.

It turned out that Prime Minister Mulroney’s principal secretary Peter White had sent a letter to the RCMP about a week before McConnell’s decision on November 14 to postpone the warrant searches, and about two weeks before the November 21 election. Opposition politicians cried foul, accusing the RCMP of playing politics:

“Back in June 1989 Inkster told a parliamentary committee that Mulroney’s principal secretary Peter White had sent a letter to RCMP on November 8 – about a week before McConnell’s decision to postpone the warrant search (“Mountie put off Grise raid to avoid influencing vote”, by William Marsden, November 22, 1989, The Gazette):

“The RCMP received a letter from Peter White, Mulroney’s principal secretary, on Nov. 8, 1988, which discussed accusations against Grise and Hamelin involving an alleged unemployment insurance paycheque scam, Inkster acknowledged to the committee in June.

Inkster refused at the time to make public the letter because, he said, it involved a case still before the courts.

Grise’s complainant Phil Edmonston, New Democrat Party candidate who had filed the complaint in August 1988, called the investigation delay a betrayal by RCMP:

“Allegations against Grise were originally brought to the RCMP in August 1988 by his main opponent in Chambly, New Democratic Party candidate Phil Edmonston. Grise won the election by about 8,000 votes.

Edmonston said in an interview yesterday that he felt “betrayed” by the RCMP decision to delay the searches until after the election.

“They (the RCMP) changed the normal routine for political reasons,” he said. “You are supposed to have blinders in an investigation. You are not there to be affected by outside things.””

Opposition Liberal leader John Turner – not yet Jean Chretien at that time – asked the Mulroney government what was in the PMO letter (“PM aide’s statement to Mounties queried”, by Jim Brown, November 23, 1989, The Vancouver Sun):

“…

Chief Supt. Brian McConnell, the officer who made the decision, has said he feared that carrying out searches during the campaign would have “improperly affected the electoral process.”

Turner rejected that explanation in the Commons, saying “the public interest demands prompt and impartial investigations . . . whether or not there’s an election on.”

Noting that McConnell’s decision came just after the Mounties received White’s document, Turner demanded: “What was in that document?””

Turner viewed it as a part of a wider pattern of government misusing RCMP for political purposes…

…”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The RCMP explained that the letter from the Prime Minister’s principal secretary had helped police prosecute Richard Grise:

“RCMP scoffed at the “big fuss over nothing”, explaining that the info from Peter White had helped police prosecute Richard Grise (“PM’s aide’s letter helped RCMP probe of Grise”, by William Marsden, November 29, 1989, The Gazette):

“Referring to repeated demands in the House of Commons that the government make public the letter, one RCMP source said: “It’s a big fuss over nothing.”

…

A memorandum from the prime minister’s office obtained by The Gazette shows that White initially sent his written statement Nov. 7, 1988, to Ward Elcock, former assistant secretary in the Privy Council and now deputy clerk of intelligence and security. Elcock in turn gave it to then RCMP assistant commissioner Rod Stamler on Nov. 8, 1988, who relayed it that same day to RCMP investigators in Montreal.

The investigators then interviewed White.

Police sources said the essential facts of White’s statement were revealed in four police affidavits that accompanied requests for search warrants for Grise’s home and offices in Longueuil and Ottawa.

According to the affidavits, White told police that Grise confessed he was “worried because he thought he had been implicated in some improprieties in 1985 and 1986.”

White also told the RCMP in his statement that Grise said Hamelin was implicated with him “in contractual arrangements between Grise and a woman connected with Hamelin.” About a week earlier, the woman had alleged to police that Grise and Hamelin had used her to commit fraud.

The warrants also state that Grise confessed that a company called “Les Consultants Sorig International Inc. was involved in the improprieties.” Grise was the president of this company.

White’s statement was used to support demands for four search warrants obtained Nov. 21, 1988, and Jan. 16, 1989.

Timing of the Nov. 21 warrant became an issue in Ottawa last week when RCMP Chief Supt. Brian McConnell said he delayed the execution of the warrant until after the election.”

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As indicated in a press article quoted above, White’s letter, dated November 7, 1988, had not been sent directly to the RCMP but through Ward Elcock, who at the time had been assistant secretary in the Privy Council but when the scandal broke in November 1989 was deputy clerk of intelligence and security of the Council – a job timeline that can be independently verified (“Ward Elcock”, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa)

Analyzing the sequence and timings of the relevant 1988 events, I concluded that it likely had been Mulroney himself who delayed giving the incriminating info to the RCMP until two weeks before the election, and McConnell in turn delayed the police searches until after the election:

“In a nutshell, Grise confessed to Mulroney’s office about “improprieties” in business practice, and that info was relayed to RCMP which, in turn, decided to prosecute the case only after the election.

To be fair, RCMP did get a concession from Mulroney’s side. However, it wasn’t clear when the RCMP request for info was first made for a complaint filed in August, that it took the PMO until just 2 weeks before the November 21 election to reply.

My guess is that Prime Minister Mulroney wouldn’t risk incurring public condemnation by dragging the matter to post-election but also wouldn’t want to give the political oppositions an election opportunity, so the incriminating info was given to RCMP with a very short, 2-week window of time, and C/Supt. Brian McConnell was there to let the time run out.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The delay was critical because at two weeks before the election, opposition Liberal leader John Turner was leading in a major nationwide polling, and so new corruption revelations about this Mulroney party politician, Richard Grise, could have sustained the temporary Liberal lead toward a majority victory instead of the loss that actually occurred. But McConnell stressed, a year later, that it had been his decision without interference from politicians, and approved by an RCMP superior in Ottawa, Assistant Commissioner Marcel Coutu:

“C/Supt. Brian McConnell nearly contradicted Inkster, stating that he had informed superiors in RCMP headquarters ahead of time and received approval. On an official visit in the Soviet Union, Mulroney asserted that no one should even question RCMP’s independence on a matter like this (“Probe delay was okayed, Mountie says”, by Stephen Bindman, November 22, 1989, The Vancouver Sun):

“… McConnell told Southam News he informed assistant commissioner Marcel Coutu last Nov. 14, the same day he decided to postpone the search.

“I made my decision and then I advised Ottawa of a decision I had already taken,” McConnell said in an interview.

“The decision was accepted at that time. The decision was made, the searches were delayed and that was that.”

…

“The RCMP is an independent agency run by an independent career officer,” Mulroney said.

“It is a profound disservice by the opposition to even suggest anything to the contrary.”

Mulroney is on an official visit to the Soviet Union.”

…

McConnell disclosed that the investigation delay in November 1988 also applied to Tory politician Joseph Hamelin…

…

Commissioner Inkster reacted to McConnell’s explanation by saying that he had not been informed (“Mountie put off Grise raid to avoid influencing vote”, by William Marsden, November 22, 1989, The Gazette):

“McConnell said he immediately relayed his decision to Marcel Coutu, acting deputy commissioner of criminal investigations in Ottawa. He said Coutu told him “he had no problem” with the delay.

Informed later of McConnell’s comments, Inkster said: “This is news to me.””

McConnell reassured that no politician had tried to contact him about the matter:

“Yesterday, McConnell told The Gazette he was never contacted by any political official during the Grise and Hamelin investigations.

He said he made the decision to delay the searches at a meeting with chief investigating officer Yves Berube and two senior officers.

He said everyone at the meeting agreed “nothing would be lost to delay the searches for a few days.”

“But, on the other hand, proceeding with those searches in less than one week before a federal election … perhaps could have influenced the election on a local and national level,” McConnell said.”

Brian McConnell was right that the Tory corruption bad news at that time “could have influenced the election on a local and national level”; two weeks before the election, a major national poll had shown that the opposition Liberal party would win a majority (“Business worry: Can Mulroney win election and save free trade?”, by Larry Walsh, November 21, 1988, Toronto Star):

“The Toronto stock market tumbled more than 75 points in one day after a Gallup poll released two weeks ago showed the Liberals had enough support to win a majority government if the election were held then.”

Instead, Mulroney won his second majority in a row…”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

C/Supt. Brian McConnell made the decision in November 1988 and RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster did not know until a year later; but as McConnell explained as quoted above, a superior in the RCMP headquarters did accept his decision at the time.

Did it not look like the same situation again in 1995 when the Justice Department letter to the Swiss authorities for the criminal investigation of Mulroney was approved at the “A” Division and RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray had no role in it? From my vantage point knowing the RCMP’s earlier handling my political activism, I would think that the RCMP second-in-command, Deputy Commissioner Frank Palmer noted earlier, likely was informed of, and accepted, what the “A” Division did under McConnell in this regard.

Thus, as represented by J. W. B. McConnell, certain RCMP bias in favor of Mulroney dated back to the Prime Minister Mulroney era and lasted to well into the Prime Minister Chretien era; and in the Chretien era there was also, in addition, negligence in the security for Chretien and his wife.

I should note an interesting closeness in timeline, that the Richard Grise affair became major national news starting on November 21, 1989, with Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell, the Montreal-based senior officer in charge of RCMP criminal operations in Quebec, as a central figure in the highly political controversy, and about two weeks later on December 6 the Montreal Massacre occurred.

Nevertheless, as reviewed earlier, that mass murder took place within the jurisdiction of the Montreal Police and was handled by that municipal police force.

Reading my current review to this point, a serious reader could become very sceptical that in November 1995 the Canadian media did not even question it, i.e., if the Assistant Commissioner McConnell speaking for the RCMP over the Chretien residence intrusion might not be the controversial Chief Superintendent McConnell of the Richard Grise affair in 1988-1989.

But why should the media question, when the earlier one had been “Brian” and the recent one was “Bryan”?

At first, I was quite taken aback when I verified the two senior RCMP figures to be most likely the same person, that in November 1995 the media didn’t even have a healthy degree of scepticism as to do some fact-checking and questioning.

But then I thought about that, two weeks after the Chretien residence incident when the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney became news and Roger Tasse, a former close friend and private law partner of Chretien’s showed up in public as one of the top lawyers for Mulroney’s lawsuit against the Chretien government and the RCMP, the media did not bother to say anything about that history of Tasse’s even though it had been reported in the past.

So, the problem might not be the lack of fact-checking, but rather, that the Canadian media was not as free-reporting as it seemed. And if so, the “Brian” vs. “Bryan” difference in the names of these two seemingly different senior officers as presented by the RCMP was convenient for those in the media who chose not to take the risk of finding out and reporting the truth.

In fact, I noted in January 2014 that while in the 1989 Richard Grise affair McConnell was always reported in the press as “Brian”, on the 1995 Chretien residence incident there were two press reports I found, both in The Globe and Mail newspaper, that used the name “Brian”, instead of “Bryan”:

But the second time some in the media likely knew “Bryan” McConnell was “Brian” McConnell. As noted in Part 11, amid the intense media coverage of the Chretien residence break-in in late 1995, The Globe and Mail referred to Assistant Commissioner McConnell as “Brian”, twice, in a November 17 report by Hugh Winsor, and in the following year-end summary of annual events, about who’s hot and who’s not (“Here’s looking at who’s hot, who’s not; Brian Tobin, who raised up turbots by their fingernails; ticked off taxpayers; the humbled Montreal Canadiens; a feisty British Columbia: These are among the year’s newsmakers as compiled by The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa bureau staff”, December 30, 1995, The Globe and Mail):

“Really hot – Aline Chretien, who remains calm and collected, locking doors and phoning police.

Cold – RCMP Assistant Commissioner Brian McConnell, who as head of A Division is responsible for 24 Sussex Dr. security, went to RCMP headquarters to oversee damage control rather than to the Prime Minister’s residence to oversee security.”

Mrs. Chretien’s bravery when confronted by the armed intruder earned her a “really hot” accolade, while “Brian” McConnell wasn’t even “not”, but “cold”.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As I had noted in an earlier post of the same multipart article as the above, dated November 22, 2010, “The Globe and Mail… had long considered itself “Canada’s National Newspaper””. (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 2) – when violence is politically organized”, November 22, 2010, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

So when such a most venerable and influential Canadian media venue reported Bryan McConnell, the leading RCMP officer handling an unprecedented incident dangerous to the prime minister’s life, as Brian McConnell, chances would be that this media venue knew about this person also by the other name.

In this case, I found that The Globe and Mail had itself in 1988 done something similar to C/Supt. Brian McConnell; the newspaper had a news story to report on the Richard Grise corruption matter, but decided to postpone it until after the November 21 election:

“If some at The Globe and Mail knew Brian McConnell of 1988-89 and Bryan McConnell were the same person, then they likely were aware of things worse than reported to the public.

If so, then it had to do with the fact that back in November 1988 The Globe and Mail had acted the same way as C/Supt. Brian McConnell in the Richard Grise affair, delaying reporting until after the November 21 election. Paul Palango described in his book, Above the Law: The Crooks, the Politicians, the Mounties, and Rod Stamler, published by McClelland & Stewart in 1994 over a year before November 1995:

“… During the days leading up to the election, the Economic Crime police were investigating the case of Tory backbencher Richard Grise. On November 15 – six days before the election – investigators in Montreal determined that there was enough evidence to seek a search warrant against Grise for fraud and breach of trust involving his duties as a parliamentarian. At the time, most of the RCMP brass, including [assistant commissioner Rod] Stamler, were out of the office, Jensen and Inkster in Thailand at an Interpol meeting. The assistant commissioner sitting in for Jensen that day, Marcel Coutu, decided to sit on the application for a search warrant until November 21, the day of the election. Jensen didn’t learn about Coutu’s decision until two weeks after the election.

The fear of being accused of political interference on the one hand, and of angering or embarrassing the Mulroney government on the other, seemed to extend to the media, as well. The Globe and Mail, which had been in the forefront of writing about the petty and not-so-petty corruptions of the Tories, had its own Grise story ready for publication prior to the election. However, after much internal wrangling, the paper made the decision to hold off until after the election, on the grounds that it didn’t want to influence unduly the outcome of the campaign in Grise’s riding by providing an unfair advantage to his opponents.”

Unfortunately, in his 1994 book Paul Palango neglected to refresh his readers the name of RCMP officer Brian McConnell from the 1988 events.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As I remarked above, author Paul Palango’s book on corruption in the Mulroney era and the RCMP, which mentioned the Richard Grise affair as well as The Globe and Mail’s similar decision to postpone action until after the November 1988 election, did not even mention McConnell; it was published in 1994, i.e., not that long before the events of November 1995, and had it done so could have refreshed its readership about that controversial RCMP figure.

And so, as I opined above, some in the media “likely were aware of things worse than reported to the public”.

Besides RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell of November 1995 being the same person as Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell of the Richard Grise affair in 1988-1989, an intriguing sign of something worse, more complex and unexplained in the break-in incident at Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s residence, was in a key background of the intruder Andre Dallaire that matched the Richard Grise affair.

In 1988 Richard Grise was a Mulroney government party Member of Parliament based in Longueuil, Quebec, where his office was searched by the RCMP, here as reported in a The Gazette news story dated November 29, 1989, previously quoted from my January 26, 2014 post:

“…

Police sources said the essential facts of White’s statement were revealed in four police affidavits that accompanied requests for search warrants for Grise’s home and offices in Longueuil and Ottawa.

…”

In November 1995 right after the Chretien residence break-in, the media reported that the intruder Andre Dallaire was a convenience store worker in Longueuil, Quebec, with a psychiatric history and recently reported missing by his family, here as reported in a The Ottawa Citizen news story dated November 6, 1995, previously quoted from my September 29, 2013 post:

“…

Police charged Andre Dallaire, 34, of the Montreal suburb of Longueuil, with several offences, including break and enter and possession of a weapon. He was to appear in court this morning.

Police in Longueuil said Dallaire is a convenience store worker whose family says he has a history of psychiatric problems. His family reported him missing on Wednesday.

…”

So, this armed intruder who came out of nowhere was actually from the town of the Richard Grise affair fame, when the RCMP commanding officer supervising both the Airbus Affair criminal investigation of Mulroney and the security of Capital Ottawa and especially Prime Minister Chretien’s residence, had previously in the Richard Grise affair favored Prime Minister Mulroney.

Was Andre Dallaire really a “paranoid schizophrenic”, or he knew, and got into, some things that others didn’t?

While one needs not be too ‘conspiracy theory’-minded, this case is a good example showing that one cannot always count on the police to solve a crime, because the police might have something to hide.

J. W. B. McConnell’s RCMP history may have been even more elaborate.

In my January 26, 2014 blog post, I pieced together some facts previously reported in the media before November 1995, on some “worse” things in crime and policing that were revealing about McConnell – outside of the Chretien residence break-in incident and the Airbus Affair.

Here, I discuss some of the key facts presented in that blog post.

First of all, McConnell’s intriguing key RCMP history timeline was most likely more than Brain McConnell in Montreal and then Bryan McConnell in Ottawa.

In the archives of press coverage there was an RCMP Inspector Bryan McConnell in 1982-1986, whose duties ranged from prosecuting misappropriation of government funds to heading RCMP’s National Capital drug squad; that was prior to the 1988-1990 press reports of Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell and J. W. B. McConnell in Quebec, and then the press appearances of Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell in Ottawa from 1991 onward. There was no overlap of times in these different McConnell appearances to indicate the presence of more than one person.

Since Quebec was Prime Minister Mulroney’s home region and Montreal his main power base, who had won his first election in 1984, my view is that Bryan McConnell’s move from the national capital to Quebec, with a rapid rise in his RCMP rank before Mulroney’s 1988 second election campaign and with his handling of related corruption politics as Brian McConnell, and then his return to the national capital after the Richard Grise affair and into the leadership echelon of the RCMP as Bryan McConnell again, together provide a fuller picture of McConnell’s RCMP role playing politics in favor of Mulroney.

Secondly, in supervising RCMP criminal work dealing with street-level crimes in Ottawa, including drug trafficking, Insp. McConnell had grossly under-reported to the media the severity of certain crimes, thus giving the public a false sense of what the RCMP were dealing with.

Some of the street-level crimes involved “Allan” Strong, originally from Cantley, Quebec, a man wanted in 1986 by McConnell’s Ottawa RCMP drug squad for trafficking “the amphetamine speed”, who had sold some to an undercover agent and then disappeared out of the RCMP’s reach, according to McConnell telling the media.

But Allan Strong was actually a leader of the infamous Montreal West End Gang, and a fugitive from Canada living in Florida and wanted for a murder there in 1985, and was eventually arrested in the Netherlands in 1993, as reported in other media stories.

In my January 2014 post, I quoted the December 1986 news story that cited Inspector Bryan McConnell about Allan Strong wanted for trafficking “an estimated $75,000 worth of the amphetamine speed”:

“One of the suspects who slipped out of RCMP’s arm in 1986 was 40-year-old Allan Strong of Cantley, Quebec, who according to Inspector Bryan McConnell had sold a pound of the narcotic stimulant “amphetamine speed” to an RCMP undercover agent but when RCMP looked for him again Strong had disappeared (“Police want Cantley man on drug charges”, by Ian MacLeod, December 15, 1986, The Ottawa Citizen):

“Crime Stoppers is appealing for public help in finding a former Cantley, Que. man named in an RCMP warrant for trafficking in an estimated $75,000 worth of the amphetamine speed.

RCMP Insp. Bryan McConnell, head of the force’s national capital drug squad, says an undercover agent bought about one pound of the narcotic stimulant from a man in the summer of 1984.

Police say they were planning to make another purchase from the man later in an attempt to catch other people suspected of working with him, when he disappeared.

Wanted is Allan Strong, 40. He is five foot, 11 inches, about 240 pounds, with brown hair and eyes and possibly a moustache. He has a heart-shaped tattoo on his upper left arm.

Since the arrest warrant was issued, McConnell said Strong is reported to have been seen in the Ottawa and Montreal areas.”

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In a glaring contrast, here is a May 1992 news story cited in my January 2014 post, about a U.S. trial on drug smuggling into the United States by the Montreal gang, referring to the scope of the gang’s drug trafficking as, “more than 10,000 kilograms of cocaine and more than 300 tonnes of marijuana from 1975 to 1991 into the United States”, also mentioning a 1985 murder for which an Allan Strong was a fugitive:

“Lawyers for one of Montreal’s most notorious mobsters, Alan (the Weasel) Ross, announced yesterday they will present no evidence in their client’s defence.

After three weeks of fast-track testimony from a parade of more than 100 prosecution witnesses, defence lawyer Robert Sheketoff told U.S. federal judge Maurice Paul he would not be calling any witnesses.

…

Jurors will be considering testimony by Ross’s former associates that, among other things, Ross smuggled 6,000 kilograms of cocaine in one shipment through the Port of Montreal.

The close of the government’s case brought to an end one of the most complex investigations ever worked on by the Montreal Urban Community police in conjunction with law-enforcement agencies in the United States.

“Nowhere will you find a case where law enforcement from so many places has got together with one common goal,” Det.-Sgt. Michel Amyot, of the MUC anti-gang squad, said outside the courtroom.

His partner, Det.-Sgt. Kevin McGarr, noted that 11 law-enforcement agencies took part in the investigation.

These included the RCMP, Surete du Quebec, FBI, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the U.S. Marshal Service, and police from the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

Amyot said that while he has always believed Ross was involved in criminal activities that were international in scope, this case has suggested enormous quantities of drugs have been smuggled since 1975.

Ross is charged with leading a continuing criminal enterprise that imported more than 10,000 kilograms of cocaine and more than 300 tonnes of marijuana from 1975 to 1991 into the United States.

If he is convicted, he could be sentenced to life imprisonment.

He is also awaiting trial on the murder of associate David Singer in Florida in 1985. Florida practices capital punishment.

…

Allan Strong, who is also alleged to have taken part in the murder, is a fugitive.

…”

(“Lawyers to offer no evidence in Ross’s defence”, by William Marsden, May 13, 1992, The Gazette)

Wow, really ‘day and night’, what McConnell said of Allan Strong and what the Allan Strong in this Montreal gang was involved in!

But where is the evidence that the two Allan Strongs were the same person?

I could not find any in the press archives; however, I found a crucial piece of it in a more recently published, 2011 book on the Montreal West End Gang:

“In most likelihood Allan Strong was no longer in Canada, but had fled to Florida in the United States and had already been a murderer, as told in writer D’Arcy O’Connor’s 2011 book, Montreal’s Irish Mafia: The True Story of the Infamous West End Gang (March 2011, John Wiley & Sons):

“Following the murders of Ryan and Phillips, Singer, now living in Pompano Beach, Florida, was the next witness targeted for elimination. On May 12, 1985, he was found shot dead at the age of thirty-one with three .38-caliber bullets to his head and chest, his body sprawled across the back seat of a stolen car that had been abandoned in Tigertail Like Park in Dania, Florida, just south of Fort Lauderdale.

…

Two days before his body was found, Singer had been “taken for a ride” in the stolen car by two West End Gang hoods, Allan Strong and Raymond Desfosses. Their mission, which allegedly was ordered by Alan Ross, was to get rid of the first-hand witness to the murder of  Eddie Phillips.

Strong, who also went under the Aliases of Jean-Guy Trepanier and Yvan-Jacques Rousseau, was originally from Cantley, Quebec. He’d been serving a 10-year sentence for armed robbery at the Cowansville penitentiary until his escape on May 9, 1973. He was next arrested, at the age of twenty-seven, during a gun battle with police following an aborted Montreal bank robbery on March 15, 1974, during which an innocent bystander was shot and killed by a stray bullet. His accomplices were William Lydon, twenty-nine, and William White, twenty-three, both of whom were prison escapees from the Massachusetts Correctional Institute. After his release in 1984, Strong became an international drug trafficker with ties to Colombia’s Cali cartel, and was second in command to Alan Ross, who had taken over as leader of the West End Gang following Ryan’s assassination. Shortly after that, Strong fled to Florida.”

The place of origin and age of the two Allan Strongs’ were so alike I would have to think they were the same person. A big-time Montreal West End Gang leader and murderer had slipped out from under his watch, and RCMP Inspector Bryan McConnell wanted the public to think it was only about some stimulant drug.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In short, both McConnell’s “amphetamine speed” dealer Allan Strong and the Montreal West End Gang’s No. 2 leader and wanted murderer Allan Strong were originally from Cantley, Quebec, and were of about the same age as reported, one at 40 in December 1986 according to Insp. McConnell quoted earlier, and the other at 27 in March 1974 as in the above.

Though not unquestionably conclusive, this evidence is very convincing.

That was horrible! The No. 2 leader of one of Montreal’s most notorious gangs, a former convicted armed robber and gun battler with police resulting in a bystander death, and an international drug trafficker with ties to Colombia’s Cali cartel, after his 1984 prison release escaped the RCMP’s watch; and looking for this dangerous man in December 1986, who by this time had murdered another gang member in May 1985, Insp. Bryan McConnell told the media it was a person wanted by the police for selling some “amphetamine speed”.

And thirdly, regarding “worse” things in crime and policing that were revealing of McConnell, the Allan Strong case was also an instance in which the person was reported in the media by different versions of his given name, “Allan” or “Alain” depending on the story, with the result of misleading others – just like McConnell himself as “Brian” or “Bryan”.

This misrepresentation, as described next, is perhaps a piece of potentially incriminating evidence, given certain RCMP involvement with the Montreal West End Gang, that Assistant Commissioner McConnell by this time in 1992-1993, possibly again resorted to the ‘different name’ gimmick to avoid media scrutiny into his role in certain RCMP misconduct.

The crisis-like situation arose in December 1992, when RCMP Inspector Claude Savoie committed suicide in his office, at a time when he was under investigation for having leaked police information to the Montreal West End Gang, and was to be the subject of a CBC The Fifth Estate investigative story:

“Then starting on December 22, 1992, the murder suspect was reported as “Alain Strong” in the media, with the reported suicide of RCMP Inspector Claude Savoie – an underling of A/Comm. McConnell – while under investigation for ties to the West End Gang (“RCMP ex-drug-squad head kills self; Thought to have links to Allan (Weasel) Ross”, by William Marsden, Mike Boone, Eddie Collister and Charles Lewis, December 22, 1992, The Gazette):

“The assistant director of the RCMP’s criminal-intelligence service in Ottawa, who killed himself in his office yesterday, was under investigation for leaking information to a former Montreal crime boss.

Inspector Claude Savoie, 49, who was head of the Montreal drug squad from 1989 to 1991 before being transferred to the intelligence department in Ottawa, shot himself with his service pistol at 9:15 a.m., the RCMP said.

Savoie was alone in his office at the time and all indications point to suicide, Ottawa coroner James Dickson confirmed.

One source said Savoie had been under investigation for a year for leaking information to convicted drug dealer Allan (The Weasel) Ross, former head of Montreal’s West End Gang. But the official RCMP statement said the investigation was several months old.

…

Savoie shot himself a day before the CBC current-affairs show, the Fifth Estate, was about to air a segment on Ross and the West End Gang.

…

It also airs a widely held belief that Ross was never prosecuted in Canada because he had high-placed informants within Canadian police departments.

The Fifth Estate reports private meetings between Ross and Savoie at a downtown restaurant and in the offices of Ross’s lawyer, Sidney Leithman, who was murdered in 1990.

The report, titled The Weasel, was ready for broadcast when producer Julian Sher heard about Savoie’s suicide.

…

The RCMP would not allow the Fifth Estate to interview Savoie on camera and would not authorize anyone to discuss the Ross case which, Sher was told, was still under RCMP investigation.

…

Ross’s main pilot was veteran U.S. smuggler Bert Gordon. …

…

Gordon and another Ross associate, Alain Strong, were supposed to handle the shipment when it arrived. (Strong, also known as Jean- Guy Trepanier, is a fugitive charged in the U.S. with the Singer slaying and with drug dealing.) But the shipment was seized by Portuguese police and U.S. narcotics agents.”

The ‘name change’ to Alain Strong had the effect that future media publicity would not be linked to the Allan Strong that had slipped out of Insp. Bryan McConnell’s grip in 1986.

What other reason could it be? J. W. B. McConnell’s loyal lieutenant in Montreal, promoted to follow him to RCMP national headquarters I presume, had helped a big-time gang leader escape?

Quite possibly.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The above news story on RCMP Insp. Claude Savoie’s cosiness with the infamous Montreal criminal and international drug-trafficking gang did not mention McConnell. But as above, it reported “a widely held belief” that the West End Gang leader Allan Ross was never prosecuted in Canada because he had “high-placed informants within Canadian police departments”.

Was it not already evidence more than “belief”, that, as reviewed earlier, back in December 1986 Insp. McConnell minimized to the media the seriousness of the fugitive his RCMP drug squad was looking for, Allan Strong who sold “about one pound” of “amphetamine speed”, not disclosing that the fugitive was the Number 2 leader of the Montreal West End Gang under Allan (The Weasel)Ross?

But now in what had become national news in December 1992 with an investigative story by the CBC’s The Fifth Estate and with Insp. Savoie’s unexpected death, “Allan” Strong was reported as “Alain” Strong as in the above-quoted news story; as a result, the public would not link the person to the one A/Commissioner McConnell had dealt with back in December 1986.

As told in the above, Savoie had been head of the RCMP Montreal drug squad in 1989-1991 before his transfer to Ottawa, and was assistant director of RCMP criminal-intelligence service when he died; while it is unclear if in Ottawa Savoie worked under McConnell, director of enforcement services, it is obvious that back in 1989-1990 Savoie had been an “underling” – as I called him in the above quote – of Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell in charge of criminal operations in Montreal.

The public never knew that Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, later of the Prime Minister Chretien residence break-in publicity in November 1995, was the same as the Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell in the 1988-1989 Richard Grise affair protecting the electoral prospect of Prime Minister Mulroney’s party.

However, in the press archives there was a The Ottawa Citizen story dated December 15, 1986, quoted earlier from my January 2014 post, reporting that RCMP Inspector Bryan McConnell wanted to arrest “amphetamine speed” dealer Allan Strong, who somehow disappeared.

Now, if the media’s investigative effort expanded further from December 1992, it could go beyond the relationship between Insp. Claude Savoie and the Montreal West End Gang, and into the roles of even more, and more senior, RCMP persons in that regard, such as by this time Assistant Commissioner McConnell.

But then in December 1992 the West End Gang’s No.2 leader Allan Strong became known to the media as “Alain” Strong, obviously not “Allan” Strong, just like later in November 1995 “Bryan” McConnell not “Brian” McConnell, the media presumably would not make any connection between the two.

“Worse” things really had happened, as later the media reported in February 1994 when “Alain” Strong was arrested in Europe, that “between 1988 and 1991” – thus under C/Supt. Brian McConnell’s watch in Montreal most of the time – Insp. Savoie leaked criminal investigation information to and received $200,000 payment from the West End Gang:

“Alain Strong was eventually arrested in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in February 1994 after a 3-year search, and RCMP was reportedly anxious to learn from him more about the dead Claude Savoie (“Police manhunt nabs suspected drug dealer; Three-year search by RCMP, MUC police ends with arrest in Amsterdam”, by William Marsden, February 16, 1994, The Gazette):

“The RCMP also are eager to talk to Strong about the corruption of police officers and specifically Inspector Claude Savoie, former head of the RCMP’s Montreal drug squad who committed suicide in 1992.

The RCMP says Savoie received about $200,000 between 1988 and 1991 from the West End Gang for information about police investigations.”

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The RCMP Quebec regional drug squad boss had it both ways.

As quoted above from a Montreal The Gazette story dated February 16, 1994, it was “the corruption of police officers and specifically Inspector Claude Savoie” – presumably not Insp. Savoie alone, but he was already dead.

Just days before in early February 1994, RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster’s resignation was announced by Prime Minister Chretien, and at the time the media reported a comment by Inkster about low points in his tenure, referring to Savoie’s suicide as one of them, here as previously quoted from my October 2012 post:

“Among the low points, Inkster said, was the political storm he created on Parliament Hill in 1989 when he revealed more than a dozen MPs and senators were under RCMP investigation.

Another was last year’s suicide of Insp. Claude Savoie, who was under investigation for leaking information to a Montreal drug kingpin.

“We will never know why he chose to be his own judge and jury. It was a very sad point for all members. We all suffer and we all lose a little bit if one of our own gets into that sort of difficulty.””

On a personal note, I noticed that Claude Savoie’s suicide on December 21, 1992, occurred on the same day when I was released from my very first psychiatric committal, that had begun on November 30 when I had faxed documents to local MP and Justice Minister Kim Campbell and within a few hours RCMP officer Brian Cotton and another had come to take me to UBC hospital:

“At the time of the Savoie suicide story before Christmas 1992 I had just been discharged from my first psychiatric committal, on December 21 – the day of Claude Savoie’s death – as in Part 6, having been taken to UBC Hospital on November 30 by RCMP Sgt. Brian Cotton. A/Comm. McConnell’s internal letter forwarding my complaint to “E” Division would not be issued until January 6, 1993, and none of the The Vancouver Sun articles on the Savoie story mentioned Alain Strong…”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

I should note that, in my case, I wasn’t let go by UBC hospital but by an independent mental-health review panel, which ordered my release after a hearing on the day of December 21. In the same multipart article as the above, I discussed some of that history in my blog post dated March 25, 2012, noting that the supervising psychiatrist, Dr. Laura Chapman, opposed my release even though there was no real medical symptom of a psychiatric illness:

“…

A delayed Review Panel hearing was held on December 21 and the decision was for my discharge. Psychiatrist Dr. Laura Chapman prepared a discharge report, which contained interesting details.

The evidence in it showed that I was in fact quite normal:

“Feng was quite cooperative and reasonably accessible. He had quite a forthright manner and talked with great conviction about his concerns of corruption in the government and the university. There were no abnormalities of speech, eye contact, or psychomotor activity. … As mentioned, he expressed persecutory delusional ideas for which there was no evidence in reality. There was no perceptual disturbance and he had minimal insight and somewhat impaired judgment.”

…”

(March 25, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As discussed earlier, soon on January 6, 1993, A/Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell sent a directive to the British Columbia “E” Division, specifying the documents I had sent to Kim Campbell and forwarded to Solicitor General Doug Lewis as only a complaint about RCMP in regard to academic politics at UBC.

When the Chretien residence intrusion occurred in November 1995, the prior record of Chief Superintendent Al Rivard, as previously discussed, was unsettling, that despite his inability leading a 100-strong police force to search for an escaped killer during a period of seven months in 1989, resulting in four more deaths, Rivard was given the responsibility of protecting the safety of Canadian government leaders and foreign diplomats and was in that role at the time of the Chretien residence break-in.

On the other hand, the prior record of Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell was so much more masterfully and deceptively crafted, both at a political level and at a criminal-operations level, such that, whatever he had been up to – while some within the RCMP under him, such as Inspector Claude Savoie, had been up to not good – by November 1995 he was entrusted with the security of the Capital Ottawa region, including with handling the Chretien residence break-in incident and supervising the criminal investigation of Mulroney.

Therefore, it was most likely not a coincidence that the armed breach at Prime Minister Chretien’s residence could, and did, happen, whether or not one agrees with my use of the word “wilful” to describe the RCMP negligence.

Earlier, I have discussed a prior violent threat against Prime Minister Chretien, in May 1994 by Earl Kevin Jans who openly carried a crossbow and arrows wanting to see Chretien at a Liberal fundraiser at the Winnipeg Convention Centre, and also reviewed a high-profile deadly crossbow-and arrow precedent, namely the November 1991 crossbow killing of Revenue Canada lawyer Patricia Allen by her estranged husband Colin McGregor, where Allen happened to be the daughter of retired RCMP Assistant Commissioner George Allen.

As earlier reviewed, the Patricia Allen murder was known as a case of domestic violence, without apparent links to a possible corruption matter like the Airbus Affair because her professional specialty was on the Goods-and-Services Tax, not income tax or property tax that would be more relevant to criminal fraud cases such as Karlheinz Schreiber’s, and her father George Allen had already retired from the RCMP in 1987 and become Commissioner of Canada Elections in January 1988 – the year the Airbus sale to Air Canada was made that would result in around $20 million commissions privately distributed by Schreiber, a figure previously cited.

Now, in light of the fact that electoral politics had been a matter of contention between then Prime Minister Mulroney and the opposition parties in the November 1988 election, in the form of the “Richard Grise affair” that became public a year later in November 1989, I would have to consider if the Patricia Allen murder had a political dimension, given that her father was at the time a top Elections Canada official, “in charge of election law compliance and enforcement” as quoted earlier.

Elections Canada was and is the independent and non-partisan parliamentary agency administering federal elections. (“The Role and Structure of Elections Canada”, Elections Canada)

A 1988 press article cited earlier about George Allen’s role at Elections Canada mentioned prosecution of “collusion” in electoral advertising as a part of it:

“Anti-abortionists, right-wingers, free-trade advocates and any other special interest groups will be allowed to spend any amount they like to support or oppose candidates in the upcoming federal election, Canada’s chief electoral
officer said Wednesday.

And the money will not be counted as spending by either candidates or parties, he added.

Jean-Marc Hamel said in a Vancouver interview the ruling is based on an Alberta court case deemed applicable across the country.

…

George Allen, Elections Canada commissioner in charge of election law compliance and enforcement, said it has been reported already that the right-wing National Citizens Coalition has raised $250,000 to oppose the New
Democratic Party.

He said he expects spending also from anti-abortionists and those for or against free trade with the U.S.

He said any complaints of spending by third-party groups will be investigated with a view to prosecution if any collusion or connection with candidates or parties is indicated.”

(Jes Odam, August 11, 1988, The Vancouver Sun)

As told above, even though a new Alberta court ruling allowed any special interest group to spend as much as it wanted on advertisements supporting or opposing an electoral candidate, they could do so only independently of the candidate – or would be considered in “collusion” and could face prosecution according to Commissioner Allen.

Clearly, if any of the opposition parties or politicians brought the “Richard Grise affair” matter to Elections Canada, the agency would likely have had to review and investigate any illegal or unlawful aspects of it, i.e., whether the RCMP “colluded” with the Prime Minister’s Office in delaying a corruption investigation for an election, and George Allen would have been the top official supervising the review and investigation.

With that scenario in mind, here I note a curious similarity between former RCMP Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell and former RCMP Assistant Commissioner George Allen: for McConnell, sometime in 1986-1988 he was transferred from Ottawa to Montreal, promoted from Inspector in charge of the Capital Region drug squad to Chief Superintendent in charge of criminal operations in Quebec, such that he was there to make decisions when the Richard Grise corruption case came up before the November 1988 election; and for Allen, he retired from the RCMP in 1987 and became Commissioner of Canada Elections in early 1988, such that he was the official in charge of enforcing the election rules when the November 1988 election arrived.

Given what McConnell then did in favor of Prime Minister Mulroney for that election, I would not be too optimistic about how Allen had gotten there and what he would do in a similar political situation.

Indeed, in the press archives the Elections Canada cases George Allen was known for handling and prosecuting, in the aftermath of the November 1988 election, showed consistent favors for Prime Minister Mulroney and members of his party but little or no tolerance for members of the opposition parties.

In late November 1989, about a week after the Richard Grise affair had become news, there was another controversy reported by the media, about leaked Elections Canada internal memos that showed George Allen forgiving several November 1988 election over-spending violations committed by senior Tory MPs who were government officials, including Prime Minister Mulroney:

“Elections Canada did not investigate two Quebec Conservative MPs even though internal memos leaked to the news media allege they overspent their legal limit in the Nov. 21, 1988, general election.

George Allen, Commissioner for Elections Canada, said he did not order an investigation because he did not have a case that would stand up in court.

Yesterday the Quebec daily newspaper Le Soleil reported that it had obtained an exchange of internal memos from the officials at Elections Canada which examined the election spending reports of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Transport Minister Benoit Bouchard – who was reported as being $9,244.59 above his limit – and Pierre Vincent, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Finance, who was reported as being $6,763.14 above his limit.

The director of Election Financing, Frederick (Bud) Slattery, whose staff is responsible for examining the election spending reports of every candidate, wrote to Mr. Allen that Mr. Mulroney was $739.33 above his limit.

Mr. Allen interpreted the controversial election law in another way and by his figuring Mr. Mulroney came in at $614 under his limit of $53,942.95. Mr. Mulroney told reporters yesterday that the Elections Canada report had completely absolved him of any wrongdoing.

The memos are authentic, Mr. Allen confirmed in an interview yesterday.”

(“Allegations of overspending not probed by elections body”, by Richard Cleroux, November 28, 1989, The Globe and Mail)

So you see, with Chief Superintendent McConnell ‘guarding the scene’ ahead of time and Commissioner Allen ‘whitewashing’ it afterwards, Prime Minister Mulroney could do no wrong but win the November 1988 election flawlessly.

Furthermore, the reasons Allen cited for his decisions on Mulroney’s case were especially favorable, compared to on the cases of Transport Minister Benoit Bouchard and Pierre Vincent, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Finance.

Allen redid the official analysis and concluded that Mulroney’s $739.33 overspending, as discovered by the director of Election Financing Frederick (Bud) Slattery, was actually still $614 under limit; in other words, there was nothing wrong at all with Prime Minister Mulroney.

In the other two cases, Allen did not disagree with the conclusions of other Elections Canada officials but decided not to prosecute because he felt the agency could not win the cases in court.

So no need to even try in court, if Commissioner of Canada Elections George Allen decided that the cases could not be won.

But would Commissioner Allen be as generous when the offenders were from the opposition parties? Not at all, but quite the opposite.

Soon it was announced that four other MPs were under investigation for violations in the November 1988 election and one of them, a Liberal MP, would be prosecuted; Allen felt obliged to enforce the law despite admitting that, “there was no chance of getting a conviction”:

“Angry MPs have summoned Canada’s elections commissioner to explain why he ordered charges against a Liberal member.

A special committee of the Commons studying MPs’ duties and privileges will cross-examine George Allen on Tuesday about the charge laid against Montreal MP David Berger.

The committee will also ask whether three other MPs under investigation for alleged infractions of the Canada Elections Act will be charged.

Allen told the committee Jan. 17 that “there was no chance of getting a conviction” against four MPs under investigation for Elections Act violations. He based the comment on a recent Alberta court ruling which acquitted candidates charged under the act.

But despite the court setbacks, Allen said he is obliged to enforce the law, and declared MPs won’t get any special favors from him.

“Some of them seem to think there should be another set of rules for members of Parliament,” he said in an interview. “If that’s what they’re saying, I think they’re wrong.”

The Alberta case, now under appeal, involved the advertising blackout period before an election.

Berger has been charged under the same blackout provision. He is to appear in Quebec Superior Court March 1.”

(“MPs angered by charge; Elections commissioner summoned before committee”, by Iain Hunter, February 2, 1990, The Ottawa Citizen)

As above, identities of the other three MPs were not disclosed because they were not charged. But it was revealing to know that the MP charged, David Berger, was an opposition Liberal.

David Berger at first pleaded “not guilty” to the criminal charges of violating the Canada Elections Act. (“ACROSS CANADA MP pleads not guilty to Elections Act charges”, March 2, 1990, The Globe and Mail)

Nevertheless, eventually Berger changed his pleas to “guilty”, and he received an absolute discharge by the judge:

“St. Henri-Westmount Liberal MP David Berger received an absolute discharge after pleading guilty yesterday to three charges of contravening the Canada Elections Act.

The charges stemmed from three advertisements placed in local weekly newspapers at the start of the 1988 federal election campaign before the permitted date.

Quebec Court Judge Jean-Charles Hamelin said a royal commission is reviewing the law under which Berger was charged, and such technical infractions may be removed from the Criminal Code. He noted the advertisments were placed without Berger’s knowledge by a campaign worker.”

(“MP Berger gets absolute discharge”, June 16, 1990, The Gazette)

As above, the Quebec judge, Jean-Charles Hamelin, noted that the law was being reviewed by a royal commission and so in the future such “technical infractions” – placing electoral advertisement too early, in this case done by a campaign worker without Berger’s knowledge – might not be treated as criminal.

In any case, George Allen’s rigorous prosecution of Liberal MP David Berger succeeded in winning a “guilty” plea from Berger for Elections Canada, even though Allen had publicly stated that “there was no chance of getting a conviction”.

As in the February 2, 1990 The Ottawa Citizen story quoted above, Allen had discussed Berger’s case in the context of a similar violation in Alberta where the court had ruled in favor of the person being prosecuted; still, Allen continued to appeal that case to the higher court.

That case was against an opposition Reform party candidate, Ken Copithorne; Allen acknowledged publicly that the offence was “a relatively silly thing”, but still emphasized that the electoral candidates had an “absolute liability” under the law:

“The acquittal of a Reform Party candidate charged with federal campaign violations is being appealed by Canada’s elections commissioner.

Ken Copithorne, Reform candidate in Macleod in the Nov. 21, 1988, election, was found not guilty of violating the Canada Elections Act in provincial court in High River last fall.

But an appeal has been set for a hearing before the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench on May 3, says Copithorne’s lawyer, John Davison of Calgary.

The Reform candidate was charged with violating the advertising blackout in the early stages of the 1988 campaign. His supporters had bought an ad in the Nanton Times to publicize a meeting.

The judge found the candidate couldn’t be held responsible for actions of his supporters that he was unaware of.

The case has caused a stir on a House committee examining MPs’ duties and privileges. Committee members were upset that MPs remain under investigation for similar actions after the Alberta judge issued the acquittal.

The committee has asked Elections Commissioner George Allen to appear before it next week to explain why a charge was laid against Montreal Liberal MP David Berger for an apparently similar blackout violation.

Allen told the committee on Jan. 17 that the charge against Copithorne was “for a relatively silly thing, really.

“The party knew there was a blackout period. The candidate knew . . . . The official agent knew. All the top brass knew. But they did not tell the person in a particular area who was responsible for publicity.”

Yet the act is written so that there is an “absolute liability” of candidates, and they must be held responsible for the actions of their supporters, Allen said.”

(“Elections boss appeals acquittal of Reformer”, by Geoff White, February 3, 1990, Calgary Herald)

The several cases reviewed above, namely the cases of Progressive Conservative MPs and government officials Brian Mulroney, Benoit Bouchard and Pierre Vincent, Liberal MP David Berger and Reform candidate Ken Copithorne, are what I have found in the major press archives directly reflecting George Allen’s handling of the November 1988 election rule-violation cases.

Commissioner Allen’s unrelenting prosecution of an opposition Liberal MP and an opposition Reform candidate stood in sharp contrast to his decision not to prosecute two Mulroney government senior MPs and government officials, not to mention his ‘altering’ official Elections Canada analysis in a way such that Prime Minister Mulroney’s violation wasn’t wrong at all.

When it comes to the November 1988 election-related Richard Grise affair, I have not found any press coverage or public information on whether the affair was scrutinized by Elections Canada.

Given the enforcement record of the Commissioner of Canada Elections at the time as reviewed above, namely that no one in Mulroney’s governing party was prosecuted for violations in the election, I seriously doubt that anything would have been done if the matter was indeed raised to Elections Canada – especially when the matter involved not only a Tory government MP as well as Prime Minister Mulroney’s principal secretary, but also senior RCMP officers like Brian McConnell who were George Allen’s former colleagues.

Regardless of the truth, when Colin McGregor killed Patricia Allen with a crossbow-and-arrow several years later in November 1991, his mind was filled likely not only with rage against his wife but also fury about her father’s stand – whatever that might be – on the Richard Grise affair, as a Montreal The Gazette news story extensively quoted earlier in reviewing the incident, written by Claude Arpin and dated November 23, 1991, contained some intriguingly revealing information:

“Brian Todd, now a political aide to Phil Edmonston, the New Democratic Party MP for Chambly, remembers that McGregor loved to debate issues.

“I knew him at McGill as a right-leaning contrarian” – someone who says black is white just for argument’s sake.

“He was a professional debunker, always picking fights in print with various lobby groups,” Todd said.

But McGregor didn’t seem a violent fellow “in any way,” he said.”

Wow! One of the persons interviewed by the media in the wake of the savage and heartless murder, who had known the killer Colin McGregor since the McGill university days and gave the media some insightful info about the killer’s personality and professional profile, was at the time of the incident a political aide to Phil Edmonston, “the New Democratic Party MP for Chambly”.

As discussed and quoted earlier about the Richard Grise affair, the corruption complaint against Tory MP Grise was filed by his “main opponent in Chambly, New Democratic Party candidate Phil Edmonston”, in August 1988; subsequently, Grise won the November 21 election, but later due to the RCMP prosecution resigned on May 30, 1989, “after pleading guilty of fraud and breach of trust”.

So by November 1991, the complainant Edmonston had won that parliamentary seat vacated by Grise and was the MP.

Given that McGregor, as described by his acquaintance Brian Todd, was a fierce debater and prolific reporter of politics-related issues, that this acquaintance who had known him well and spoke to the media in considerable details about him was now Edmonston’s political aide, and that the father of his estranged wife whom he had just murdered was the top Elections Canada official “in charge of election law compliance and enforcement”, almost without a doubt the Grise affair issue had been an issue of discussion between McGregor and his old acquaintance Todd, and very likely an issue of debate between McGregor and his father-in-law.

Why then, did the media not investigate such possible political facets to the Patricia Allen murder?

I notice that the detailed The Gazette story I have quoted did not refer to George Allen as an Elections Canada official, only “a retired RCMP assistant commissioner”.

Perhaps in November 1991 the media, just like around the time of the November 1988 election and later in the publicities of the Chretien residence intrusion and the Airbus Affair in November 1995 as I have reviewed, pointedly avoided certain sensitive political matters.

Another news story, written by Mike Blanchfield and published on several newspapers two days after the murder, i.e., days earlier than the above-quoted story, mentioned George Allen also as “former chairman of Canada Elections”:

“Patricia Allen graduated from law school the intellectual superior of her peers, and moved on to a life of emotional degradation, and finally death.

Allen, 31, was shot to death with a crossbow on an Ottawa street Wednesday morning. Her estranged husband, Colin McGregor, 30, has been charged with first-degree murder.

Her friends say there was nothing that could have prevented the fate she met on Argyle Street.

“We can’t come to terms with this. It is so violent and so brutal,” said Cheryl Buckley, a Montreal lawyer who graduated from McGill University law school in 1988 with Allen. “One friend cried for four hours. We’re all having a hard time.”

“None of us could keep up with her. She was brilliant,” said Janet Henchey, another classmate who is now a Toronto lawyer.

Allen graduated at the top of her class in 1988, winning the Caron Prize for the highest achievement in civil law courses.

But Henchey and Buckley said Allen’s life took a downturn when she married in the summer of 1988. It marked the beginning of degradation and emotional abuse. She planned to get a divorce, but delayed leaving until a few months ago in an effort to convince her husband that a separation was the best thing.

“The marriage was a nightmare from the beginning,” said Henchey. “I’m sure we would have all broken down after the treatment . . . it was mental cruelty.”

…

Allen was the daughter of George Allen, a retired RCMP assistant commissioner and former chairman of Canada Elections.

Allen and her husband separated Aug. 20, said Sgt. Robert Campbell, an Ottawa police homicide detective.”

(“Brilliant woman, brutal death”, by Mike Blanchfield, November 15, 1991, The Ottawa Citizen)

That was a misquote of George Allen’s job title, as “chairman” rather than “commissioner” of Canada Elections. But the word “former” suggested that by mid-November 1991 he had left that job, although, unlike with his former RCMP title, it was not described as “retired”.

Or perhaps not quite “retired” yet, but definitely on the way out if not already out, because in a later, year 2000 document of Elections Canada I find the term of George M. Allen described as “1988-1991”, and his successor Raymond A. Landry’s starting date as April 13, 1992. (“SPECIAL INVESTIGATORS’ MANUAL”, June 2000, Commissioner of Canada Elections)

Whether it was already “former” in November 1991, the year 1991 was a very sad ‘double ending’ for retired RCMP assistant commissioner George Allen, i.e., end of his job and end of his daughter’s life!

It was actually a ‘triple ending’ but in a broader sense, i.e., also in relation to the RCMP.

In history before George Allen, the first Commissioner of Canada Elections, then called Commissioner of Election Expenses, was John P. Dewis, 1974-1976, appointed directly from his position as Assistant Chief Electoral Officer of Canada; Dewis was succeeded by Joseph Gorman, 1976-1987, a former RCMP assistant commissioner with 33 years of RCMP service, similar to his successor Allen, 1988-1991, a former RCMP assistant commissioner with 35 years of RCMP service. After Allen, his successor Raymond Landry continued in that capacity as of the time of the above-cited Elections Canada document in year 2000; but Landry was not known for any RCMP background, but as a former University of Ottawa law professor and Dean, and a former Canadian Superintendent of Bankruptcy. (“Election Law Takes Effect”, by Peter Lloyd, August 1, 1974, Winnipeg Free Press; “Special Voting Rules, SOR/78-148, CANADA ELECTIONS ACT”, February 14, 1978, Government of Canada; “M. RAYMOND LANDRY, C.M., LL.L.”, Order of Canada, The Governor General of Canada; “Compliance Agreements as an Alternative Enforcement Mechanism in Canada’s Federal Election Law”, by David M. Brock, June 1-4, 2005, Paper for Canadian Political Science Association Annual Meetings, Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities; December 20, 2005, Obituaries, Ottawa Citizen; “Joseph Gorman, November 16, 1920 –”, August 24, 2011, Ottawa Citizen; and, “Obituaries”, October 2, 2011, Ottawa Citizen)

Hence, the end of Allen’s short term of only three years – longer only than the term of the very first person in history at this position and much shorter than the terms of the others – also ended a long period spanning most of this position’s history up to that point, when former senior RCMP officers were appointed as Commissioner of Canada Elections.

Unfortunately, as I have reviewed, George Allen’s flawed record as Commissioner of Canada Elections coincided with his being the last former RCMP assistant commissioner to serve in that role.

And as reviewed, it was also a sorrowful end for George Allen personally, losing his intellectually brilliant lawyer daughter Patricia to murder in the year his job ended, and in circumstances that may have been related to his possible mishandling of election violations.

In a delicate contrast to George Allen, who passed away at 71 according to his obituary of December 20, 2005 cited above, his predecessor Joseph Gorman, who lived to 90 as per his obituary of August 24, 2011 cited above, had earned a unique distinction in RCMP protective service for Royal and preeminent visitors to Canada, such as none other than Queen Elizabeth the Monarch and also French President Charles de Gaulle, during the historically glorious times of the 1960s:

“Gorman, a former assistant RCMP commissioner, was one of the bodyguards for the Queen on her visits to Canada, in 1964 and 1967, Canada’s Centennial Year. It’s believed that he so impressed Buckingham Palace on the Queen’s Royal visit in 1964 that they asked for him again for her 1967 visit.

“My father would never say a word, he was pretty tight-lipped,” said his daughter Lucy Gorman. She said the family learned about the special request only after the Queen’s visits.

“But I’m sure it is true because other people spoke about it afterwards,” she said.

She said her father enjoyed shadowing Queen Elizabeth and expressed great admiration for her, but French president Charles de Gaulle was another matter. The French president caused a diplomatic stir in 1967 when from the balcony of Montreal City Hall he shouted the famous words: “Vive le Quebec libre” to the large crowd.

“He had much more trouble with Charles de Gaulle,” said Gorman, about her father’s time with the RCMP in the ’60s during the time of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec.”

(October 2, 2011, The Ottawa Citizen)

Another retired RCMP assistant commissioner who passed away in a December and in his 70s, like George Allen, was none other than J. W. B. McConnell, who along with Allen had been a highly-positioned protector of Prime Minister Mulroney for the 1988 election, and who died recently in December 2017 at 74:

“MCCONNELL, Bryan Ass’t Commissioner RCMP (ret) The McConnell family is saddened to announce the passing of Bryan on Friday, December 22, 2017 at the age of 74. … Bryan has left a legacy of family, community and service before self. From his first RCMP post in Penticton where he met Beverly, Bryan quickly rose through the ranks to his final position as Assistant Commissioner and Commanding Officer at ‘A Div’ in Ottawa. After retirement, Bryan became the Executive Director for the CACP where he continued to have an impact on policing across Canada. …”

(“Bryan McConnell”, December 22, 2017, Obituaries, Ottawa Citizen)

For the proud Royal Canadian Mounted Police, not all ended well.

But as my current review has illustrated, the Canadian media tended to appear oblivious to what really happened with the RCMP – perhaps other than on the case of Inspector Claude Savoie, who then suddenly died just when the media got to a major gang story he was in.

When the Chretien government took over power in late 1993, the records of the RCMP senior officers who would be responsible for his security, as I have reviewed Chief Superintendent Al Rivard and Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell especially, including their handlings of various law-enforcement situations, must have been known among the RCMP top management, and thus would, or at least should, not be a secret to the new government leadership – at least not to Prime Minister Chretien, a former justice minister.

Therefore, it is unclear why Chretien tolerated such a unfriendly security arrangement before the residence break-in scare – especially in light of the Earl Kevin Jans incident prior, that would be a reminder about the Patricia Allen murder.

But how Chretien responded to the break-in incident and its aftermath showed a ‘pacifist’, or perhaps even ‘appeasing’, posture toward the real and potential antagonists.

A revealing moment of Chretien trying to handle the personal crisis situation in the early morning of November 5, 1995, was told by Chretien himself, here as reported by journalist David Vienneau in a November 8 Toronto Star story, earlier quoted from my September 2013 post:

““He was about six feet away from my bed,” Chretien said in shedding more light on the 3 a.m. incident.

…

Chretien had grabbed a soapstone carving of a bird and he was ready to defend his wife and himself if necessary.

“He’d have had a headache,” Chretien said.

…

“He was a good-looking guy but he had a strange look in his eyes,” Chretien said, explaining that while in his housecoat he went to see the individual after he had been handcuffed and arrested.”

As told, Chretien had taken up an art sculpture as defence weapon in case the knife-wielding intruder broke into the bedroom, but after the intruder was arrested and handcuffed Chretien went to “see the individual” and later said to  reporters, “he was a good-looking guy …”.

Rather than expressing outrage for the violent threat to the personal safety of him and his wife, and denunciation befitting his statue as the country’s leader, Chretien made a personal gesture to calm the situation and not escalate any animosity on the part of the intruder. It should be considered a ‘pacifist’ gesture compatible with, at the governing level, his government’s ongoing legislative efforts to ban military-style assault weapons and institute stricter gun control.

But there was a historical context to Chretien’s joke of “a good-looking guy”, here as discussed in my September 2013 post:

“In the wee hours of November 5, a knife-wielding intruder, 34-year-old Andre Dallaire from Quebec, slipped inside the Prime Minister’s residence and came face to face with Mrs. Aline Chretien, who quickly retreated to their bedroom, locked the doors and called RCMP guards, who took 10 minutes to arrive and arrest the man holding an open jackknife outside the main bedroom door (“PM says wife kept assailant out of bedroom; Couple waited up to 10 minutes for police arrival”, by Mike Blanchfield, November 6, 1995, The Ottawa Citizen):

“…

One former resident, Margaret Kemper, the ex-wife of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, said it didn’t surprise her to hear someone had got inside the house without being detected.

“I can see it happening easily. There are all kinds of ways to get into the house,” she said Sunday, recounting that, in 1969, a woman got into the house without the RCMP knowing about it. Trudeau, she said, found the woman locked in his bedroom closet.

Kemper, who married Trudeau in 1971 and separated from him in 1977, speculated the intruder got into the house through either a side door or a door at the rear of the house. …

…”

As Pierre Trudeau’s ex-wife Margaret Kemper said, an undetected intrusion at 24 Sussex Drive had happened before but that intruder meant romance with Trudeau.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As told, an intrusion had taken place when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife Margaret lived there but that intruder, a woman, went to hide in Trudeau’s bedroom closet waiting for romance.

Perhaps, given the Chretien government’s parallel legislative efforts to also bring in an anti-hate crime law to protect minority rights, including homosexual rights, Chretien’s joke to the reporters could be interpreted as intimating that this man could have been looking for him for a sexual tryst – “a good-looking guy” being quite complimentary in a homosexual-friendly context.

On the other hand, when this intruding man had held “an open jackknife” in his hand, the “good-looking guy” flattery might just be beyond ‘pacifist’ but on the ‘appeasist’, namely appeasing, side – with or without the homosexual intimation.

Dealing with the RCMP’s lax security for his residence, Chretien took a similarly non-confrontational approach, expecting his security to be adequately improved but otherwise conciliatory toward the police force regardless of malfeasances there might have been in their negligence, as my review of the follow-up events would show, as described below.

After the incident, there were some serious complaints by an RCMP employee representative about the RCMP senior management’s handling afterwards:

“RCMP management took actions to suspend 4 officers onsite that night, and reassigned 3 of their supervisors, as A/Comm. Bryan McConnell announced…

…

An RCMP employee representative, Staff Sergeant Joe Brennan, complained that the disciplinary actions favored the senior officers…

…

Criticisms of RCMP management by S/Sgt. Joe Brennan, “the elected staff representative for A Division”, prompted RCMP “A” Division commander, A/Comm. Bryan McConnell, to issue a formal statement that the 3 supervisors’ transfers were taking place 4 months sooner due to the incident; but Brennan still felt the onsite junior cops shouldn’t be blamed (“RCMP boss disputes Mountie’s version of disciplinary action; Assistant commissioner admits reassigned supervisors’ jobs were to be abolished but says severe punishment was in ending positions early”, by Hugh Winsor, November 17, 1995, The Globe and Mail):

“Assistant Commissioner Brian McConnell, commander of the RCMP’s A Division, which includes responsibility for security at 24 Sussex Drive, issued a statement yesterday disputing an accusation from a Mountie employee suggesting that the force has been fibbing about disciplinary measures taken.

…

…

When he announced last week that four officers on duty at 24 Sussex Drive had been suspended and three of their supervisors had been reassigned, Mr. McConnell said the reassignments were made “because supervisors must be accountable for the actions of their units.” He also said the action taken was severe, “but given the serious errors of judgment that led to the incident, I believe these actions are justified.” But yesterday, following Staff Sgt. Brennan’s intervention, Mr. McConnell admitted the three supervisory positions were being abolished on April 1 as part of an overall restructuring of A Division that had been decided before the break-in. But he said the reassignments had been moved ahead by four months as a direct result of the incident at the Prime Minister’s residence.

…

Staff Sgt. Brennan is the elected staff representative for A Division, responsible for taking members’ grievances to senior management and acting as an advocate on staff relations’ matters. RCMP members are not allowed to have a union.

He has interviewed the four suspended officers and analyzed past security assessments and the picture he presents of what happened at the Prime Minister’s residence is quite different from that painted in earlier reports.

…”

…

According to S/Sgt. Brennan, the RCMP corporal in charge onsite went in and made the arrest on his own within 4 minutes, not 7-10 minutes.

…

A day later an RCMP decision was made to suspend one of the 3 supervisors, to upgrade security equipment and to require all guards to have VIP training (“Fallout from break-in moves through ranks: Senior mountie suspended over breach of security at prime minister’s residence”, by Leonard Stern, November 18, 1995, The Vancouver Sun):

“At Friday’s news conference, the RCMP announced that one of the senior officers now has been suspended indefinitely with pay. Insp. Cindy Villeneuve also said that the four junior members have been given an additional seven days to prepare their explanations.

…

Brennan believes the four junior members were partly vindicated Friday when the RCMP said that the electronic monitoring equipment at 24 Sussex has been upgraded and that all Mounties posted at the house will now receive specialized VIP training.

…

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As above, an open disagreement emerged on November 16 between “A” Division commander Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell and “A” Division elected staff representative Staff Sergeant Joe Brennan, over the disciplinary measures against the junior versus senior officers.

S/Sgt. Brennan’s criticisms led to an RCMP announcement of security personnel improvement on November 17, most likely a decision by the RCMP leadership, that included not only the reassignment of some senior officers such as C/Supt. Al Rivard as in the above, but also the transfer of security supervision for Chretien’s residences away from the “A” Division – commanded by Bryan McConnell – and to the national headquarters; immediately on November 18, Chretien expressed satisfaction with the changes and announced, “There’s no need for a public inquiry into that matter”:

“The latest remedies and policy changes were likely from “A” Division commander’s superiors, as the changes upgraded the Prime Minister’s residence security to VIP-protection level and RCMP headquarters’ direct supervision:

“The RCMP announced tighter security measures Friday for the prime minister:

* Security for prime minister and his residences (24 Sussex Drive and nearby Harrington Lake) put under one unit, reporting to national headquarters.

* Levels of supervision reduced to three from five, shortening chain of command.

* RCMP responsible for PM’s personal protection now guard residences on rotating basis.

* Unit to be comprised of Mounties with specialized VIP training.

…”

Now Chretien’s security everywhere was overseen by A/Comm. Wayne Martel, presumably.

The next day at an Asia Pacific summit in Osaka, Japan, Chretien said the RCMP was now doing enough and a public inquiry was not needed (“Chretien rejects inquiry into security breach”, by Les Whittington, November 19, 1995, The Ottawa Citizen):

““There’s no need for a public inquiry into that matter. The RCMP is responsible for security at 24 Sussex and they apparently are changing the procedures and the equipment and it’s for them to decide.”

Chretien made the statement in Osaka, Japan, where the prime minister and leaders of 17 other countries are giving formal approval today to an agreement that is to significantly reduce trade barriers in the Asia-Pacific region over the next 20 years.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Without initiating any measure to uncover and resolve problems in the RCMP that let this violent security breach and nearly violent personal encounter happen, Chretien made the gesture of personally thanking the RCMP corporal who had come over from the Governor General’s residence and acted alone to arrest the armed intruder:

“Rather than ordering an inquiry, Chretien personally thanked the RCMP corporal in charge that night as it became known that the corporal had come over from the Governor General’s residence to arrest the intruder, within 4 minutes and with no help – an incredibly heroic tale in a debacle (“Mountie thanked by PM, brass told”, by Tim Harper, November 24, 1995, Toronto Star):

“An RCMP corporal facing dismissal from the force was personally thanked by Jean Chretien for thwarting a potential attack on the Prime Minister and his wife earlier this month, according to information provided to his superiors.

The information was given to RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell by Staff-Sergeant Joe Brennan yesterday. It was contained in a written submission in an attempt to have the corporal’s suspension lifted.

…

According to Brennan’s investigation, the corporal was in charge of three security operations that night – 24 Sussex, the Governor-General’s residence and the Prime Minister’s summer home at Harrington Lake, Que.

He was at the Governor-General’s when alerted to the break-in. The staff association says he entered the premises and made the arrest without waiting for back-up.

The staff association alleges the four senior officers erred that night and none came to the scene to take charge.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The November 24 news story by Tim Harper, quoted in the above, showed that Chretien did not go through the RCMP senior management to express his gratitude to the corporal, and the “A” Division commander, A/Commissioner Bryan McConnell, was informed of Chretien’s gesture only later by the employee representative, S/Sgt. Joe Brennan, as evidence of the corporal’s good conduct in a bid to end his suspension reprimand.

In doing so, the politically active Prime Minister Chretien opted for a ‘people-oriented’ populist gesture praising the heroism of an exemplary junior police officer, as a stand-in for accountability, i.e., not dealing with the negligence shown by almost everyone else responsible for security, as I commented:

“How low and how sad had the RCMP sunk to in this saga: a Corporal, ranked just above Constables, was put in charge of protecting all head-of-state and head-of-government official residences; and when the intrusion occurred he had to go from one place to another, enter an unfamiliar place and make the arrest, while the special and regular constables under him didn’t follow and his superiors wouldn’t bother to show up.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Of course, to Prime Minister Chretien’s expressed satisfaction, RCMP security measures for him and his wife had just been improved as described earlier. However, accountability would have been meant, at least in its objective, to improve security not only for the leader but for the country.

Nevertheless, other major stories in the news by this time, November 17-19 as reviewed earlier, namely coming out of the RCMP criminal investigation of former Prime Minister Mulroney over possible Airbus sale kickbacks, and Mulroney’s legal counteraction suing the government and RCMP, were taking Chretien’s Liberal populism to a magical new height – without most of the public even being aware that one of Mulroney’s top lawyers in the media spotlight for his lawsuit, Roger Tasse, was actually Prime Minister Chretien’s long-time close friend and former private law partner.

Thus, as I have shown, the more detailed reviews and analyses I have conducted and posted after 2009, particularly from 2012 to 2014, were able to validate major issues about the Airbus Affair and possible corruption of former Prime Minister Mulroney, first studied during my first year of blogging in 2009, and place them in broader political and longer historical contexts – including the history of political contests between Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative party on the political right and the Liberal and New Democratic parties on the left, as well as certain political roles the Royal Canadian Mounted Police played.

In particular, with some elaboration in my current review, a number of links I have analyzed since 2009 about several incidents of violence, especially the crossbow-and-arrow murder of Patricia Allen and the knife-armed intrusion of Prime Minister Chretien’s residence, revealed that it was a real possibility violence and violent threat had been involved in relation with politics in the Mulroney and Chretien eras – including the politics of the Airbus Affair and of the criminal investigation of Mulroney.

I especially reasoned as follows in my January 2014 post, about the RCMP’s possible, critical role in relation to the links I uncovered between the criminal investigation of Mulroney and the break-in at Chretien’s residence:

“In the Airbus Affair, on November 4 only hours before the intrusion at Chretien’s residence, Brian Mulroney’s side made its first contact with the government regarding the criminal investigation, with Mulroney lawyer Roger Tasse phoning Justice Minister Allan Rock.

Such simultaneous timing would normally have been unrelated, but in this instance it appeared conspicuous and suggestive of a possible connection, for several reasons.

Firstly, Mulroney’s Tory party and Chretien’s Liberal party had been the only governing contenders and the main political foes in Canadian history, Mulroney’s party under Kim Campbell had been nearly wiped out by Chretien’s party in the 1993 election, and now the Airbus Affair criminal investigation and the Prime Minister’s residence intrusion mutually targeted the two men personally.

…

Secondly, by letting low-level personnel be in charge with the Chretien residence security and with the Mulroney criminal investigation, RCMP left rooms for confusions and incidents while maintaining deniability by senior management.

The RCMP spokesman Sgt. Guertin who said in 1998 that the freed Dallaire understood he could not come within 500 metres of the prime minister, had been RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray’s spokesman in early 1997 regarding the legal settlement with Mulroney in the Airbus Affair. That could be a subtle indication that in the intrusion case the RCMP’s highest level knew what RCMP was dealing with, that the probability of real violence was low; when a little intimidation of Chretien was tolerated, Mulroney could be a beneficiary.

And thirdly, the two cases appeared conspicuously related because, as I have identified in Part 11, there was one RCMP senior leader figure likely responsible for supervising both events, and when the residence break-in occurred in the early morning of November 5 he chose to oversee “damage control”, i.e., public relations, rather than the Chretiens’ safety: then RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, commanding officer of the Capital Ottawa “A” Division with jurisdiction for guarding the Prime Minister’s residence and for the Airbus Affair criminal investigation.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

That and more having been illustrated, I should acknowledge that my past reviews and analyses have not really dug into the international dimensions of these high-profile Canadian events of political relevance.

In particular, the recurring theme that worse political violence in which foreign political leaders were gunned down coincided in timing with something about Jean Chretien the Canadian prime minister, is not yet understood.

These included, as previously discussed: the assassination of Mexican ruling party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio on March 23, 1994, the day when Chretien arrived in Mexico for his first official foreign visit, and Chretien then encountered an emotional mob when trying to pay tribute at the funeral home; and Andre Dallaire’s knife-armed break-in of Chretien’s residence in the early-morning darkness of November 5, 1995, after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated the day before and Chretien would leave for the funeral later that day.

The expansion in my current review, on the history of the International Criminal Police Organization and some of its former presidents, first touched on by me in 2009 regarding the November 1992 ascent of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster to the leadership of international policing at a time when I was starting my activism in Canadian politics and Prime Minister Mulroney was maneuvering to protect his rule and legacies, has come across a small, seemingly random, coincidence between violent assassination in foreign land and violent threat in Canada: the name of the man carrying a crossbow and three arrows looking for Prime Minister Chretien in May 1994, Earl Kevin Jans, had some similarities to that of Jan Kubiš, one of the heroic Czechoslovakian resistance agents attempting to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, German Nazi police leader, overseer of “Germanization” in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and president of the Nazi-controlled Interpol, in May 1942.

If Jans’s name is taken as a ‘hint’, i.e., someone of his name might have been inspired or stimulated by that part of history, then Commissioner Inkster’s unfinished Interpol presidency, which he left in September 1994 less than two years into an elected 4-year term, after the Chretien Liberals’ trouncing of the former Mulroney ruling party under Kim Campbell in an October 1993 election and Prime Minister Chretien’s announcing in February 1994 his RCMP resignation to take effect in June, may have been a result of relevant politics.

As already reviewed, in November 1992 when Inkster was acclaimed Interpol president after the opposing candidate proposed by China withdrew in favor of him, the Canadian media mentioned some controversial Interpol history in reporting Inkster’s ascent, citing RCMP Inspector Claude Sweeney, head of Interpol’s Canadian branch, here as quoted earlier:

“Imagine what kind of clout in the international law-and-order arena the new Chretien government would lose with the departure of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, whose Interpol appointment had been praised by the RCMP as “a great honour for Canada” and for the RCMP, even if within the RCMP there were different opinions about the Interpol: while Inspector Claude Sweeney, head of Interpol’s Canadian branch, was enthusiastic about the benefit of computerized information hook-up in the plan, others pointed to examples of concern, such as in Venezuela where Interpol was expected to help track dissidents as criminals, or former Interpol drugs committee chairman Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader indicted in 1988 in the United States on narcotics charges, or former Interpol president Jolly Bugarin, crony of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, widely accused of a cover-up in the killing of Marcos opponent Benigno Aquino in 1983. ¹⁷³”

As told, in November 1992 the RCMP praised Inkster’s new Interpol presidency as “a great honour for Canada” and Insp. Claude Sweeney was enthusiastic about computerized information the Interpol would bring about, but others expressed caution due to certain Interpol history involving oppression, narcotics and corruption.

Here are more of the details of the RCMP’s praises about Inkster’s elevation to the top of international policing and Insp. Sweeney’s enthusiasm about the Interpol, from the news story I had cited in my May 27, 2009 blog post:

“The election of Mr. Inkster, who will continue to head the RCMP, came by acclamation at Interpol’s 61st general assembly in Senegal, where 124 of the 158 member states were represented.

“It’s a great honour for Canada, for the RCMP and for Commissioner Inkster,” said RCMP Inspector Yves Juteau, who co-ordinated Interpol’s 59th general assembly in Ottawa two years ago. “And it’s testimony to the credibility of all three.”

Solicitor-General Doug Lewis praised Mr. Inkster as “an outstanding police officer whose expertise and experience will be of benefit to police forces around the world.”

Contrary to popular myth, Interpol – an acronym for International Criminal Police Organization – does not conduct investigations or make arrests. Rather, its approximately $100-million budget provides an international information conduit from its base in Lyon.

… Mr. Inkster will work closely with Interpol’s secretary-general, Raymond Kendall of Britain.

Mr. Kendall has been candid about Interpol, which dates back to 1914. Three years ago, he told an international policing symposium in Kentucky that “it’s difficult to get even two countries to exchange information on an agency basis.” As an example, he cited the trouble that investigators had in tracing the route of the handgun used in the assassination attempt against the Pope in 1980. The gun had been bought and sold in several countries.

Many of those obstacles may disappear next year when a computerized linkup is to connect Interpol members, not only to the approximately 260 staff members in Lyon, but to each other. Written material, fingerprints, pictures of suspects and a host of other data will be available at the push of a button.

RCMP Inspector Claude Sweeney, whose staff of 35 work at Interpol’s Canadian branch in Ottawa, is enthusiastic about the hookup, which he hopes will happen by April. “It’s going to make a big difference.” About 12,000 requests for information currently flow back and forth between Ottawa and Lyon every year, compared with a million-plus checks between U.S. and Canadian police computers.

What may not alter, however, is a widespread wariness about dropping too much data into the Interpol pool, police say.

…

Insp. Sweeney agreed. “There’s concern all the time, so it’s done on a need-to-know basis.” In some instances, he said, a member will communicate directly with a particular country, or with a select few, bypassing Interpol.

At other times, Insp. Sweeney said, the RCMP will make inquiries through one of its own officers scattered in 18 countries around the world.”

(“Inkster acclaimed as Interpol head; RCMP leader takes over troubled agency trying to combat global crime”, by Timothy Appleby, November 11, 1992, The Globe and Mail)

As reported above, Inkster was acclaimed Interpol president at the organization’s 61st general assembly in Senegal where 124 of the 158 member states attended, and his ascent was praised by RCMP Inspector Yves Juteau who had coordinated Interpol’s 59th general assembly hosted by Canada in Ottawa, and by Solicitor General Doug Lewis, the Canadian government official overseeing the RCMP.

Also as described above, the Interpol did not practise law enforcement but was the official venue of information sharing and exchange for police agencies around the world. Its secretary-general, Raymond Kendall, had previously remarked that it was difficult for police agencies to exchange information directly due to the international nature of certain activities: e.g., the gun used in the 1980 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II had been bought and sold in several countries.

It was in this context that Insp. Claude Sweeney, who headed Canada’s Interpol branch of 35 staff members, expressed his enthusiasm about the computerized information hookup in the works with the Interpol, that would allow law-enforcement data such as “written material, fingerprints, pictures of suspects”, etc., to be made available to Interpol members around the world “at the push of a button”.

“It’s going to make a big difference”, as Insp. Sweeney said.

In my review of the Chretien residence intrusion incident, as previously quoted from my September 29, 2013 post, there was an “unnamed superintendent in charge of Chretien’s bodyguards”, who was one of the senior RCMP officers failing to fulfill their duties the night of the break-in:

“Security holes also existed in the systemic ‘acting up’ manner of the RCMP senior officers, not just Al Rivard, shown the night of the Dallaire intrusion (“Break-in probe reaches RCMP brass; One senior officer already suspended, sources say”, by Tim Harper, November 17, 1995, Toronto Star):

“The sources told The Star that one member of a senior management quartet, Inspector Jean Dube, has already been suspended.

But the sources say the probe could be extended to include Chief Superintendent Al Rivard; McConnell, the commanding officer of the RCMP’s A Division; and an unnamed superintendent in charge of Chretien’s bodyguards.

All must bear some responsibility for the snafu that night, the source said, for not taking charge at 24 Sussex but instead going to RCMP headquarters.

…

”

As previously quoted from my same blog post, that “unnamed superintendent” was Claude Sweeney according to a different news story:

“RCMP management took actions to suspend 4 officers onsite that night, and reassigned 3 of their supervisors, as A/Comm. Bryan McConnell announced…

…

But the media learned 2 of the 4 onsite officers were of the lowest rank, “special constables”, and the reassigned supervisors were already on their way out in pre-planned downsizing (“Mounties’ transfer not tied to break-in; Downsizing explains move at 24 Sussex”, by Leonard Stern, November 16, 1995, The Ottawa Citizen):

“Two of the four Mounties on duty that night were special constables, the lowest rank in the force and the one with the least training.

…

But the three officers — Supt. Claude Sweeney, Insp. Jean Dube and Staff Sgt. Frank Trottier — knew before the break-in that their positions were being eliminated.

Several sources say that, earlier this year, McConnell was involved with a report recommending that Sweeney’s position be downgraded to inspector, and that those of Dube and Trottier be eliminated.

…

Sweeney is taking a government buyout. …”

”

Now, the intriguing question is: was Superintendent Claude Sweeney in charge of Chretien’s bodyguards in November 1995 the same person as Inspector Claude Sweeney heading the Canadian Interpol branch in November 1992?

I did not know and am still not sure. Unlike with Al Rivard, whose name was rare and so most likely unique among the senior management of the RCMP, or with Brian, J. W. B. or Bryan McConnell, whose name history I was able to trace through the press archives, I have not found sufficient information to determine whether the two Claude Sweeneys were the same person.

As a result, I have not included more discussions of Claude Sweeney in my reviews, that is, until now.

Now that I have reviewed old Interpol history with Reinhard Heydrich as president, and noticed that the man using crossbow-and-arrow as a gesture of potential violence toward Prime Minister Chretien in 1994, Earl Kevin Jans, had name similarities to one of Heydrich’s assassins, Jan Kubiš in 1942, I can at least guess that there may have been an Interpol-related facet in the break-in incident, and therefore, there is a real possibility that the two Claude Sweeneys were the same RCMP officer.

If that’s true, then besides Al Rivard who epitomized lack of diligence and lack of competence on the part of the RCMP, and J. W. B. McConnell who epitomized certain hidden political, and perhaps even criminal, agendas within the RCMP, there was Claude Sweeney who most likely symbolized the unhappiness of those RCMP members who saw that Chretien’s takeover of the government led to the premature loss of “a great honour for Canada, for the RCMP and for Commissioner Inkster”.

For Sweeney personally, his Interpol involvement went beyond involving with the 59th general assembly in Ottawa in 1990 and helping the organization modernize, and dated back to his working at the Interpol headquarters in the mid-1980s when Norman Inkster was still Deputy Commissioner of the RCMP:

“History compounds its image problem: Interpol was once Nazi-controlled. It later refused to hunt war criminals.

Until recent years, it has been in a technological backwater. Many of the organization’s files at its European headquarters had to be retrieved manually by clerks stationed in front of antiquated rotating storage racks. Morse code is still the only way to communicate with some of the agency’s more far-flung outposts, from Addis Ababa to Yaounde. …

As a result, Interpol has had to modernize quickly to survive. It recently built a multi-million-dollar headquarters in Lyon, France, automated and updated its data-processing and communications network, formed an anti-terrorist unit and trimmed its two million-odd criminal files to 250,000 — more than half of those related to drug traffickers  and money launderers.

And the 67-year-old agency, a co-operative comprising representatives of 150 national police forces, is struggling to get police to flex the long arm of the law in a world where criminals increasingly operate on a planetary scale.

“We’ve been going to all the police colleges in Canada to demystify the organization,” says RCMP Supt. Claude Sweeney, chief of Interpol Canada’s operations. …

About 500 members of the world’s most elite constabulary, including first-time observers from the Soviet Union and Poland, will come to Ottawa in late September for a week-long Interpol general assembly at the city’s Congress Centre and the Government Conference Centre. Planning for the assembly is being handled by a special task force at RCMP headquarters. A similar, but much smaller, gathering was held here in 1971.

The issues delegates will debate are expected to help chart the destiny of the global police body, as well as bolster Canada’s already prestigious image in the international police community.

…

“Interpol’s potential is tremendous,” says Sweeney.

While the organization’s aura of international intrigue is somewhat misleading, it has survived some momentous incidents.

In 1986, members of the French extreme leftist group, Direct Action, attacked Interpol’s former headquarters in St. Cloud, a Paris suburb, where Sweeney was then working as head of organizational development.

The building was sprayed with bullets, injuring one police officer, and a powerful bomb was detonated on the floor above Sweeney’s office.

Although no one was inside the office at the time, the bomb blew a large hole in the cement and steel-reinforced ceiling.

Days earlier, RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, then deputy commissioner of criminal operations for the RCMP, had been standing in the same spot during a visit.”

(“Interpol: Dealing with an identity crisis”, by Ian MacLeod, June 18, 1990, The Ottawa Citizen)

Remarkably as told above, when Claude Sweeney was the head of organizational development at then Interpol headquarters in St. Cloud in the suburb of Paris, there was a French extreme leftist group Direct Action attack, and a bomb blew a large hole in the ceiling at a spot where Inkster had stood in a visit days before.

As I had commented in 2009, quoted earlier, the RCMP resignation of Inkster in 1994 and the subsequent loss of the Interpol presidency for Canada was merely a part of the Chretien Liberals’ retreat from parts of the international arena:

“While Inkster’s resignation in 1994 was expected to give the Liberal government a fresh start in gun control at home, it also took place amid the Liberals’ retreat from its election promise of higher priority for international human rights, to focus on the economy and business…”

In contrast to Supt. Claude Sweeney’s long and significant service improving Interpol and Canada’s “prestigious image in the international police community”, as quoted from the 1990 news story above on the Interpol, in November 1995 – if it was indeed the same Claude Sweeney – he found himself at the critical job of supervising the bodyguards of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, a recently elected, ‘people-oriented’ populist political leader within Canada.

Somehow, Sweeney wasn’t that enamoured by his latest uniquely “prestigious” and all-important job, and as previously discussed was “taking a government buyout”, i.e., taking incentivized early retirement.

So imagine, for whatever reasons, that some of these senior RCMP officers found themselves facing an unpleasant scenario of “direct action” – to borrow the terminology of the French militant group Sweeney had had experience with in 1986 in St. Cloud, France – namely that certain figures wanted to give Prime Minister Chretien a lesson in Canada, a much more peaceful country. In that scenario, from his professional perspective Sweeney might not be that dead set against it – if real personal harm did not occur to the Chretiens.

But could Sweeney be really confident in such a scenario, with his many RCMP years focused on the modest number of files going through the Interpol system compared to the huge number of crimes the Canadian police regularly handled? For instance, if an underling of Assistant Commissioner McConnell knew of some local “amphetamine speed” seller wanting “direct action”, could Superintendent Sweeney let him pass?

The above question is not a far-fetched imagination, considering that Yigal Amir, who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, just one day before the Chretien residence intrusion, was a Israeli political extremist with security intelligence links, and that as reviewed earlier Andre Dallaire professed to be an hardline Quebec separatist. (“Israeli security services under scrutiny after Rabin’s death”, by Walter Rodgers, November 21, 1995, CNN)

Therefore, whatever the real truth, in the early morning of November 5, 1995, Prime Minister Chretien found his best protection to be his wife Aline who, when confronted by a knife-wielding intruder, quickly retreated into the bedroom, locked the doors from inside and phoned security, as later The Globe and Mail complimented her while chiding McConnell, quoted earlier:

“Really hot – Aline Chretien, who remains calm and collected, locking doors and phoning police.

Cold – RCMP Assistant Commissioner Brian McConnell, who as head of A Division is responsible for 24 Sussex Dr. security, went to RCMP headquarters to oversee damage control rather than to the Prime Minister’s residence to oversee security.”

A very relevant truth, emerging from my reviews and analyses up to this point, could be that the unwillingness on the part of the Chretien government to get to the bottom of the Airbus Affair, through the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney, had been a major factor for Canada’s premature loss of “a great honour for Canada, for the RCMP and for Commissioner Inkster”.

As earlier reviewed, when his departure from the RCMP was announced in February 1994, Inkster hoped that he might not have to relinquish the Interpol presidency, and planned to discuss “with his replacement as commissioner and the world body’s executive” about the prospect of staying on, but then he quit in September; I have also noted that the previous Interpol president from Canada, William Higgitt, served out the remainder of his 4-year Interpol presidency after retiring from the RCMP in the early 1970s; and I have commented on the timing of Inkster’s Interpol resignation, that Stevie Cameron’s book on corruption in the Mulroney era, with some discussion on the Airbus Affair, was coming out in October 1994.

Now imagine that former RCMP Commissioner Inkster had continued as Interpol president to the end of his elected term in late 1996; and in September 1995, instead of sending a letter directly to the Swiss authorities requesting cooperation to investigate “criminal activities” on the part of Mr. Brian Mulroney, the former Canadian Prime Minister who had promoted Inkster to the RCMP’s helm and helped his ascent to the Interpol’s helm, the Canadian government and the RCMP had sent the letter through the Interpol, and the information had been quickly communicated and become “available at the push of a button” – as quoted earlier, about the modernized international police information exchange, from a November 11, 1992 The Globe and Mail story reporting on Inkster’s acclamation as the Interpol president.

Or would the Canadian government and the RCMP have done as above?

As reported, Canadian police worried – and no doubt persons in criminal activities worried even more – and Inspector Claude Sweeney agreed with their concerns, as earlier quoted:

“What may not alter, however, is a widespread wariness about dropping too much data into the Interpol pool, police say.

…

Insp. Sweeney agreed. “There’s concern all the time, so it’s done on a need-to-know basis.” In some instances, he said, a member will communicate directly with a particular country, or with a select few, bypassing Interpol.”

So, Canada might just bypass Interpol on the Mulroney file in any case, with or without Inkster at its helm at the time, as the Canadian government in fact did, sending the letter to only “a particular country”, the very select and prestigious Switzerland.

But had Inkster been at Interpol’s helm at the time, bypassing the organization most likely would have drawn international criticisms for him and the Canadian government, that the Canadian guidance for modernization of the Interpol would not apply to this important Canadian police criminal case, and that neither would the new Chretien government leadership’s ‘people-oriented’ populism apply in this instance.

In a less optimistic scenario, this could even turn Inkster’s tenure at Interpol into a failure by public perception, especially considering that he had been promoted to the top by Mr. Mulroney. Alternatively, the Chretien government could delay its major law-and-order agendas for a significant period of time, i.e., from 1994 to the end of Inkster’s normal 4-year term at the Interpol in late 1996, and endure lost political momentum and growing public doubts wondering why the new government did not take major steps on law and order.

Hence, Inkster’s 1994 departure from the helm of not only the RCMP but also the Interpol preempted potential international and domestic political and public-relations problems for the Chretien government – as long as all was quiet, i.e., the Canadian media did not dig deeper into his departure, which as it turned out the media did not, almost not reporting his Interpol departure at all.

The remaining two years of Inkster’s term, 1994-1996, was then taken over by Swedish police commissioner and Interpol vice president Björn Eriksson, who was a former budget director of the Swedish Ministry of Finance, former head of the Swedish Customs Service and of the Swedish Coast Guard, and former Chairman of the World Customs Organization. After successfully completing the job left early by Inkster, Eriksson became the first-ever Honorary President of the Interpol. (“Björn Eriksson (civil servant)”, Wikipedia)

What a ‘greater honor’ for Sweden and Björn Eriksson that Canada and Norman Inkster did not get, what a stellar prior record of accomplishments Mr. Eriksson had that could have been a help in the investigation of Mr. Mulroney’s “criminal activities”, and what a ‘quitter’ Mr. Inkster was!

Nevertheless, Canadians may argue that in Mulroney’s case the Interpol did not really matter because Karlheinz Schreiber had funnelled the Airbus commissions through a specific bank in a specific country, Switzerland, to which the Canadian government did send a letter to request investigative assistance.

That was what the media spotlights focused on in November 1995, and also in the years afterwards when it came to the Airbus Affair. But that was only because the media dutifully focused on the RCMP investigation.

Not unlike the gun used to shoot Pope John Paul II, Schreiber was actually a widely travelled international businessman and international arms dealer, i.e., operating in quite a few countries, and Mulroney’s close circle of friends also travelled internationally in pursue of opportunities.

The following review of the broader international links to the Airbus Affair is from my September 29, 2013 post, citing reports on German investigations into Schreiber and his activities, particularly surrounding commissions for the sale of German armoured carriers to Saudi Arabia during the 1990-91 Gulf War:

“German police targeted Schreiber directly. A December 1995 search at his home found a list related to Airbus money, with personal identities coded; police then searched the homes of several prominent figures connected to Schreiber (“Schreiber called target of $40-million bribery probe: German tax officials investigating businessman with Airbus links, newspaper says”, by William Marsden, May 12, 1996, The Gazette):

“German tax authorities are investigating German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber for what they claim is a spectacular kickback and tax evasion scheme involving more than $40 million in bribes to important German and Canadian political figures, according to a German newspaper.

…

The RCMP and German investigations were sparked by information from Pelossi that Schreiber had paid commissions to German and Canadian politicians through bank accounts in Liechtenstein, Panama and Switzerland.

The newspaper claims Schreiber was a member of a close circle of friends connected to the late Franz-Josef Strauss, the former flamboyant German defence minister, premier of Bavaria and chairman of the board of Airbus.

…

The paper claims his commissions were funneled through three companies: ATG Investments in Panama, Kensington-Anstadt and International Aircraft Leasing (IAL), both in Liechtenstein.

…

Investigators raided the residence of Holger Pfahl, 53, a former state secretary in Germany’s defence ministry and leader of the secret service. He is suspected of receiving about $3.5 million in bribes from ATG in Panama.

…”

…

Pfahls was jailed for $2.5 million bribes taken, and taxes unpaid, for the sale of Thyssen armoured carriers to Saudi Arabia during the 1990-91 Gulf War, a project initiated by then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the behest of then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker…

Executed by Pfahls in a swap, 36 out-of-stock Fuchs-type tanks in German army service were shipped to the Saudis on the Thyssen company’s promise of 36 new ones for the army later; for the 226 million DM deal, Thyssen was paid 446 million DM by Saudi Arabia, an astonishing 220 million DM of it as commissions – far above the typical 10% – from which Pfahls got a share via Karlheinz Schreiber (“Pfahls/ Kiep/ Luethje/ Weyrauch”, Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative, The World Bank):

“Thyssen paid 24.4 million DM into a Swiss account with the Swiss Bank Corporation held by Schreiber’s Panama registered firm “ATG”.””

…

An important facet of the Pfahls story is the Panamanian link, that his bribes received via the Swiss Bank Corporation came from Schreiber’s company ATG in Panama.

…

Not until after the 1995-97 Airbus Affair dominated by Mulroney’s lawsuit was over that it was disclosed to the public through Stevie Cameron’s 1998 book Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money, that while Mulroney was Prime Minister, Bruce Verchere, a board director of Swiss Bank Corp., was his financial trustee and lawyer, and that Verchere also had a company in Panama – I have commented in Part 8 that it looked like “an extravagant spy tale”.

As Stevie Cameron explained, Verchere had moved money from Panama to Switzerland for his family and for some clients…

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As reviewed above, Schreiber’s international companies were based in Liechtenstein and Panama, with some of the bank accounts in Switzerland; and Mulroney’s financial trustee and lawyer Bruce Verchere also had a company in Panama, and moved money from there to Switzerland.

As above, the German arms sale of 36 Fuchs-type tanks in German army service to Saudi Arabia, for which Schreiber distributed commissions, had been initiated by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl during the 1990-1991 Gulf War, a subject previously discussed in Part 1 of my current article – in the context of that war’s origin and the controversial involvement of an underling of Secretary Baker, Canadian-born U.S. diplomat and senior Arabist April Catherine Glaspie.

Also as above, the German government and justice system then investigated the arms deal and prosecuted the related financial crimes accordingly, and Holger Pfahl, former German state secretary for defence and head of the secret service, was found guilty and jailed for taking bribes.

In contrast, in the Airbus Affair the Canadian government and RCMP wrote a letter to Switzerland, only, and then Mr. Mulroney’s libel lawsuit took more of the spotlights.

As already reviewed, in the end the RCMP did not even uncover the $300,000 cash Schreiber gave Mulroney – unrelated to Airbus commissions according to Schreiber – from one of his Swiss bank accounts.

Like the Airbus Affair, the German prosecution of Holger Pfahl was discussed from the start of my political blogging, in the Notes of my first blog post reviewing Canadian politics, dated February 20, 2009, about its timing proximate to the passing of my father and also Mulroney’s friend Frank Moores. The reference to the deaths was partially quoted in Part 2 of my current review, and here now is the reference to Pfahl:

“21. The time around the liver-cancer death of Mr. Frank Moores and the announcement of Justice John Major’s retirement would happen to be also a very difficult time in my personal life: … The several days around my father’s death were also turbulent in Canadian and international human affairs of relevant interest: three days prior on August 7 Peter Jennings, ABC News anchor and probably the most recognizable Canadian in the world, who had just celebrated his 67^thbirthday on July 29, died of lung cancer; one day prior on August 9 Dana Reeve, widow of ‘Superman’ actor Christopher Reeve who had died of paralysis from a 1995 horse-riding accident, announced her recent lung-cancer diagnosis as well despite being a non-smoker (she would died of it in March 2006); and two days afterward on August 12 Ludwig-Holger Pfahls, former head of West German domestic intelligence and junior defence minister under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, was sentenced to jail for accepting bribes from Karlheinz Schreiber in an arms sale to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War, after being on the lam from authorities for several years in Hong Kong, Jakarta, Madrid, Montreal and Paris, and despite court testimonies in favor of him from former Chancellor Kohl and former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher…”

(February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Of the various international subjects broached in my current review, the Interpol dimension seemed to have the most direct relevance to the Canadian incidents involving Earl Kevin Jans and Andre Dallaire, i.e., hostile violent threats toward Prime Minister Chretien, that were likely partly related to the Chretien government’s handling of Inkster’s Interpol position. In particular, the Interpol facet probably factored into Dallaire’s act of intrusion into Chretien’s residence, and its timing – barely a day after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in Israel, and only hours after Mulroney’s lawyer Roger Tasse phoned Justice Minister Allan Rock at home over the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney.

Nonetheless, I should point out that the Interpol dimension as I have reviewed did not seem to exhibit clear relevance to the harder violence in foreign countries, or their timings. In particular, it has not shed light on whether the timings of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio’s assassination and Chretien’s arrival in Mexico for his first official foreign visit were related.

I have not studied the harder topics in-depth. Still, here I would comment further on some of the Mexican sentiments noted in my May 2009 blog post, when I wrote, as previously quoted:

“… prime minister Chretien’s first official foreign visit – to Mexico instead of traditionally to the U.S. – in March 1994 was marred by the assassination by gunshot of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio (of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that had ruled uninterruptedly for 65 years) just before Chretien’s arrival, by a large and angry mob shouting “out” while Chretien attempted but failed to pay respect to the body of the slain, and by a rare type of rebuttal of Chretien’s notion that Mexican democracy and Canadian democracy were just different types – from Subcomandante Marcos of the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in a jungle interview in Chiapas, Mexico. ²⁰¹”

Instead of officially visiting the United States first as new Canadian prime ministers had traditionally done, Chretien chose Mexico, which I note was and still is a Third-World developing country, and so he had good reasons to anticipate friendliness toward him by his hosts.

But to his shock no doubt, Chretien’s visit ran into an assassination of a top Mexican leader, then for his mourning gesture he was instead booted out by an angry crowd, and his notion of democracy was also criticized, through the media, by the Mexican rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

Here are further details from the press report I cited on the Mexican funeral home crowd’s hostility toward Chretien and his Canadian entourage:

“Prime Minister Jean Chretien was jostled and driven away from a funeral home by a mob of angry Mexicans yesterday as he attempted to pay his respects to slain presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.

The Prime Minister, on a three-day visit to Mexico, was confronted by thousands of angry and mourning Mexicans when he tried to view Colosio’s body in a gesture of sympathy.

Chretien tried to bypass a giant lineup and was rebuffed by the emotional crowd.

“Out, out, out,” some in the crowd shouted as Chretien’s entourage pushed through a packed hallway.

The Prime Minister finally retreated, shaken but unharmed, without reaching the coffin.

A Canadian Press photographer, Fred Chartrand, was knocked to the ground but was unhurt except for a scraped knee.

Chretien’s aides said they had expected more Mexican security at the funeral home.”

(“PM jostled by Mexican mourners: Angry crowd mobs Chretien at funeral home”, by Shawn McCarthy, March 25, 1994, Toronto Star)

As told, it was a crowd of thousands of angry and emotional mourners who shouted “Out, out, out” and blocked Chretien’s entourage from getting past a hallway to reach the dead, and Canadian Press photographer Fred Chartrand was knocked to the ground and suffered a craped knee.

I would imagine that Chretien was only one of many government and foreign dignitaries who showed up at the funeral home to mourn the dead without waiting in the long line. But why were the Mexicans especially hostile toward the Canadian leader who skipped the United States to visit them, even knocking to the ground Fred Chartrand, a photographer in his entourage?

And here are further details from the press report I cited on Subcomandante Marcos’s criticisms, even ridicules, of Chretien’s notion of democracy, after Chretien’s Mexican visit when Marcos met the media in the rebels’ jungle base:

“Mexican guerrilla leader Subcomandante Marcos wants Prime Minister Jean Chretien to explain what democracy means in Canada, and why he thinks it should be different in Mexico.

And he says Canadian politicians and business people who think trade and human rights can be separated are sitting on a “time bomb” that will blow up in their faces.

Marcos, who believes Mexico is on the brink of civil war, led the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in a New Year’s Day uprising against the government in the southern state of Chiapas.

He made the comments in a jungle interview last week after being told of recent remarks by Chretien in Mexico City. The prime minister was there to meet with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and to promote Canadian business in the wake of the recent North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and the U.S.

Chretien’s comments came shortly after the assassination of presidential election frontrunner Luis Donaldo Colosio. Colosio represented the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRI), which has ruled Mexico for the past 65 years.

Chretien said Canada cant do much to ensure the August elections are clean. “They have a democracy that is not our type of democracy in many ways,” he said.

In the jungle, Marcos asked: “How many kinds of democracy are there? (That) is my question to the prime minister.

“Democracy that looks like democracy but is not democracy? That is democracy in Mexico: It looks like democracy but nobody believes in it.”

He laughed, and added: “I love the political people.

“Democracy means government of the people for the people by the people

…”

(“Marcos has a few words for Chretien”, April 16, 1994, The Vancouver Sun)

In reference to Subcomandante Marcos’s remarks, I would comment that my reviews reveal Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to have understood the importance of people in a democracy: that is why he worked masterfully to cultivate his ‘people-oriented’ populist image.

In this sense, Chretien’s statement, that Canada couldn’t do much to ensure Mexican elections were clean because the Mexicans “have a democracy that is not our type of democracy in many ways”, in my view could be a tacit admission, i.e., a concession to the Mexican ways of thinking, that while as the leader of Canadian democracy he was much more ‘pacifist’, even he would not be that easy when it invovled the interests of his political party or of his own, be it political, economic, financial or family-related – facets that my current review has touched on.

Whatever Chretien’s ‘maverick’ thinking was to attain political populism, his straying away from the Canadian tradition of keeping a uniquely close relationship with the United States could be another factor underlying some of the violent threats displayed toward him that I have reviewed.

There were some press materials, published in the Winnipeg Free Press following the May 1994 crossbow-and-arrows threat incident, that, for whatever reasons, I have not found in the main press archives I utilized, the ProQuest Canadian Major Dailies and Canadian Newsstream, and were thus missed in my 2009 review of Canadian politics and are only now coming to light from my standpoint.

Earl Kevin Jans, the man who openly carried the unusual but deadly weapon to the Winnipeg convention centre wanting to see Prime Minister Chretien, claimed that he was linked to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, here as in the May 21, 1994 Winnipeg Free Press article in its entirety:

“A psychiatric examination has been ordered after a man carried a crossbow to a speech by Prime Minister Chretien and claimed a connection with the Central Intelligence Agency.

A man with a crossbow was arrested Thursday at the Winnipeg Convention Centre before Chretien arrived to speak at a Liberal party fundraiser.

“‘When the CIA finds out police are holding me you’ll find out how many laws you’ve broken’,” Crown attorney Janice LeMaistre said the man told police.

Yesterday morning, as LeMaistre sought a psychiatric exam for Earl Kevin Jans, 29, Jans beseeched provincial court Judge Charles Newcombe to dial a long-distance phone number and ask for James Olson, who would put him through to a Col. Masterson.

When a reporter dialled the number, a Virginia-based CIA switchboard operator answered.

Seconds later, James Olson came on the line.

“I have no idea how he would have gotten my number and name,” said Olson, who wouldn’t say what position he holds in the American spy organization. Olson said he has no idea who Jans is. He would not say if he knew a Col. Masterson.

“Our phone number isn’t hard to get,” David French, a CIA spokesman said later. “We don’t confirm or deny employment here to reporters. But I can tell you, we’ve been used this way before by people of sound or unsound mind.”

Newcombe ordered Jans to see a psychiatrist and appear in court again next week.

LeMaistre said Jans first came to police attention when a man began harassing Premier Gary Filmon’s assistants two weeks ago.

The Crown said a man phoned the RCMP, warning them to stay away from the legislature because “something big was going to happen,” and claimed he had plastic explosives. Jans, of no fixed address, is charged with possessing a dangerous weapon and carrying a weapon to a public meeting.”

(“Crossbow toter claims link to CIA; judge orders a psychiatric exam”, by Kevin Roliason, May 21, 1994, Winnipeg Free Press)

At first glance, Jans’s claim appeared a tall tale, pleading with the judge to call a long-distance phone number that would connect to CIA persons; and the Crown prosecution sought a psychiatric exam for him.

That could be a reason why the above storyline did not seem to get reported by the rest of the major Canadian newspapers, even though the date of this story, May 21, was the same as the other news stories I have earlier quoted – from the Montreal Gazette and the Hamilton Spectator – reporting on the Jans incident of May 19.

Inspecting the above reported facts carefully, I would infer that when Jans gave the judge a phone number claiming it to be a CIA number at which a “James Olson” could be reached who could redirect to a “Col. Masterson”, verification of these pieces of information would mean a degree of credibility for his claim: it would mean that Jans had at least some indirect links to the CIA, even if they might not be as important as he claimed – after all, how else could such information come to his mind?

Indeed, as reported above, when a reporter dialled that phone number the call reached a Virginia, U.S.-based CIA switchboard operator and “seconds later, James Olson came on the line”.

However, when reached at that CIA phone number Olson refused to say if he knew a “Col. Masterson”, and so only two of the three pieces of information Jans had given to the judge were verified. Olson also said he had no idea who Jans was and how Jans had gotten his name and phone number.

If Olson was truthful, then Jans probably had some link to the CIA that was only indirect, in my reasoning: the information was probably passed on to Jans indirectly, such as through a network of persons where some had direct CIA connections and some were helping Jans; as a result, the CIA person Jans cited to prove his own credibility did not know who he was.

On the other hand, denying knowledge of someone or something must be quite common for those in the intelligence arena I would imagine, and so some of Jans’s direct connections could actually be involved with that agency.

As noted earlier, the Earl Kevin Jans incident and the Andre Dallaire incident involved, and probably had intended to be, threats of violence rather than actual violence, and thus were likely meant to ‘send a message’ to Prime Minister Chretien. Therefore, one can deduce that whoever initiated furnishing the CIA information to Jans had a purpose of ‘sending a message’ in mind.

A prior incident cited in the above-quoted story also corroborated a send-a-message scenario: Jans had recently harassed Manitoba Premier Gary Filmon’s assistants, and phoned the RCMP to warned them to “stay away” from the provincial legislature because “something big was going to happen”, claiming to possess plastic explosives; but the story did not report any real explosives found, and most importantly, had Jans wanted to launch a real attack he likely would not have warned the police beforehand, or would not have carried the crossbow and arrows in open view – as discussed earlier – while seeking to see Chretien.

An interesting piece of the puzzle would have been who James Olson was within the CIA organization, which he refused to disclose. My guess is that Olson wasn’t an unimportant person, given that he and Col. Masterson were very important to Jans’s efforts at the Manitoba provincial court to prove his credibility, and the Colonel rank is a senior one in the military.

Currently known to the public there is a high-profile former CIA officer of the name Pearl Kevin Jans had raised, James M. Olson, a Professor of The Practice at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, who has the following descriptions of his former CIA work in his online academic resume:

“Born in Le Mars, Iowa. B.A. (mathematics and economics), University of Iowa. J.D. (international law), University of Iowa. Member of Iowa Bar. U.S. Navy (attained rank of Lieutenant Commander, USNR).

Career officer in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, serving mostly overseas in clandestine operations. Served as Chief of Counterintelligence at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Overseas assignments in the U.S.S.R., Austria, and Mexico. Foreign languages: French, German, Russian, and Spanish.

Recipient of the Intelligence Medal of Merit, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the Counterintelligence Excellence Medal, the Donovan Award, and several distinguished achievement awards. Awarded the Silver Star Award at the Bush School for excellence in teaching.

Experience in international affairs, economics, trade negotiations, intelligence support to the military and the law enforcement community, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and technical collection systems; senior intelligence advisor to several U.S. ambassadors; extensive liaison with the State Department, Treasury Department, FBI, Pentagon, NSC, NSA, DEA, INS, and U.S. Congress.”

(“James M. Olson”, by James Olson, Professor of The Practice, The Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University)

As in the above, Prof. James Olson’s resume described his CIA time as “serving mostly overseas in clandestine operations”, listing only one job at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia: “Served as Chief of Counterintelligence at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.”

Oh my gosh! Could it have been the CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James M. Olson that the Winnipeg Free Press reporter reached in May 1994, dialling a phone number and asking for James Olson as demanded by the arrested Earl Kevin Jans?

Prof. Olson’s resume did not provide a job timeline on when he held the Chief of Counterintelligence position at the CIA headquarters.

In a newly published book by him, James M. Olson mentioned a general timeframe of his “active duty in the CIA”, which was, “in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s”:

“… When I was on active duty in the CIA in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, I had no illusions about the nature of our main counterintelligence adversary. The KGB (which translates as “Committee for State Security”) was a ruthless and vicious organization that oppressed its own people, crushed religion, sent political dissidents to gulags or psychiatric hospitals, and killed its enemies.¹”

(James M. Olson, To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, 2019, Georgetown University Press)

The 1990s were the senior years of this James Olson’s active CIA duty. Thus, the most distinguished CIA job on his academic resume, “Chief of Counterintelligence”, likely fell into this period – a potential match with Jans’s James Olson.

As an aside, I comment that, in the above quote from his book, Prof. Olson pointed to psychiatric hospitals as one of the main tools of oppression by the KGB against political dissidents in the former Soviet Union, and that interestingly in my Canadian political activism I was also sent to psychiatric committals, as earlier discussed, except that each time the independent mental-health review mechanism allowed me to get released before long.

Prof. Olson’s resume outlined the time when he began teaching, which in my inference would likely be when he moved out of “active duty in the CIA”. It was 1997-2000:

“Senior faculty member at the Joint Military Intelligence College, Washington, D.C, 1997; taught courses on counterintelligence and military intelligence.

Assigned by the CIA to the George Bush School of Government and Public Service in College Station, Texas, as an officer-in-residence in December 1997. Teaching courses on Cold War Intelligence, U.S. National Security, and International Crisis Management. Frequent guest lecturer at other courses, conferences, and symposia. Appointed a permanent faculty member of the Bush School in August 2000.

Author of “The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence” and “Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying.””

(James Olson, Professor of The Practice, The Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University)

As above, in August 2000 Prof. Olson became a permanent faculty member of the Bush School at Texas A&M University. So, his departure from active CIA duty would have been no later than 2000.

Also as above, Olson began teaching in 1997 at the Joint Military Intelligence College as a senior faculty member, and in December of that year became an officer-in-residence at the Bush School. Because Chief of Counterintelligence was unquestionably a key CIA executive position, when he started his teaching faculty role Olson likely was moving out of real counterintelligence work.

1997 was about three years past May 1994, the time of the Earl Kevin Jans incident. James M. Olson should normally be at the top of his active CIA career, i.e., working as Chief of Counterintelligence at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, shortly before moving on to his teaching career. The question is if he had reached his highest point in May 1994.

“The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence”, a publication by Prof. Olson listed in his academic resume quoted above, stated that he had been appointed to that position in 1991:

“When I joined the CIA, one of my first interim assignments was with the old CI Staff.  I found it fascinating.  I was assigned to write a history of the Rote Kapelle, the Soviet espionage network in Nazi-occupied Western Europe during World War II.

With its expanded computer power, NSA was breaking out the actual messages sent between the NKVD center in Moscow and the clandestine radios of the various cells in Western Europe.  Incredibly, these messages came to me.

There I was, a brand new junior officer, literally the first person in the CIA to see the day-to-day traffic from these life-and-death operations.  I was deeply affected by the fear, heroism, and drama in these messages.  Above all, I felt privileged to have been given such an opportunity.

Building on an earlier study of the Rote Kapelle by the CI Staff, I completed a draft several months later that incorporated the new material.  To my great surprise, this study was well received by my immediate superiors, and I was told that I was to be rewarded with a personal interview and congratulations from James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of the CI Staff from 1954 to 1974.

…

I nervously briefed Angleton on my study, and he listened without interrupting, just nodding from time to time.  When I finished, he methodically attacked every one of my conclusions.  Didn’t I know the traffic was a deception?  Hadn’t it occurred to me that Leopold Trepper, the leader of the Rote Kapelle, was a German double?  He went on and on, getting further and further out.

Even I, as a brand new officer, could tell that this great mind, this CI genius, had lost it.  I thought he was around the bend.  It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my career.

When the meeting was over, I was glad to get out of there, and I vowed to myself that I would never go anywhere near CI again.  I did not keep that vow.  In my overseas assignments with the Agency, I found myself drawn toward Soviet CI operations.  Nothing seemed to quicken my pulse more, and I was delighted when I was called back to Headquarters in 1989 to join the new Counterintelligence Center (CIC) as Ted Price’s deputy.  When Ted moved upstairs in early 1991 to become the Associate Deputy Director for Operations, I was named chief of the Center.

Today, many years after that initial disagreeable encounter with CI, I find it hard to believe that it is actually my picture on the wall of the CIC conference room at CIA Headquarters, where the photos of all former CIA counterintelligence chiefs are displayed.  There I am, number seven in a row that begins with Angleton.”

(“The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence: A Never-Ending Necessity”, by James M. Olson, Fall-Winter 2001, Studies in Intelligence, Center for the Study of Intelligence, United States Central Intelligence Agency)

As recalled by James M. Olson in the CIA publication above, he was the 7th Chief of Counterintelligence in CIA’s history, appointed in early 1991, after he had become Deputy Chief in 1989 helping then Chief Ted Price start the new Counterintelligence Center; as Olson recalled, back when he first joined the CIA it was called the Counterintelligence Staff, and his early unpleasant experience with the first Chief in history, James Jesus Angleton, led to his leaving the CI field until returning in 1989.

The facts pieced together thus far suggest that, almost surely, James M. Olson was the CIA’s Chief of Counterintelligence in Langley, Virginia in May 1994, at the time of the Earl Kevin Jans incident.

The critical question here is if the CIA person James Olson whose phone number Jans provided to the court after his arrest was James M. Olson.

In my assessment, there is a real likelihood, and I would think it was a fairly high one, that Jans’s James Olson was someone at a quite senior level within the CIA like James M. Olson: Jans implored Manitoba provincial court Judge Charles Newcombe to dial that phone number – not the reporter, who then dialled on his/her own initiative – and ask for James Olson, stating that Olson would put him through to Col. Masterson; the caller was supposed to be an important senior person, namely a court judge, and the end person to be reached was also a senior figure, of the Colonel rank in the U.S. military, and so the specific person in-between was very likely also a senior figure, either Counterintelligence Chief James M. Olson or another James Olson of a considerably senior role in the CIA.

If Jans’s James Olson was indeed James M. Olson, then the fact itself was intriguing, that someone of his senior CIA position would come to answer when the Winnipeg Free Press reporter phoned: the call reached an CIA switchboard operator first, and so Olson had the option of personally taking or not taking the call; now, if as he asserted he had no idea who Jans was and what it was about, he likely would not have answered such a call from a newspaper reporter; as the original news story quoted earlier suggested, such media enquiries normally would be forwarded to a CIA public-relations person, in this case CIA spokesman David French who spoke with the reporter later.

So, the scenario of CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James M. Olson taking the phone call from a newspaper reporter at a Canadian courtroom would put into doubt his denial of knowing anything about Earl Kevin Jans, and raise the question of what kind of ‘message’ he was sending through such a seemingly unintentional and almost unnoticed appearance.

According to Prof. Olson’s academic resume quoted earlier, he had spent most of his CIA career “overseas in clandestine operations”. For someone of his background, Olson must have known well in May 1994 that a CIA connection channel to anyone in Canada, a foreign country, was “clandestine” and should not be easily admitted to the media; hence, the CIA Counterintelligence Chief’s answering a phone call and having a conversation with the Canadian reporter, even though Olson did not disclose his CIA position at the time, would itself be a ‘message’ of seriousness meant for Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien – if that was a main objective of the Earl Kevin Jans incident.

An irony of the above serious and quite probable scenario, in my view, is that the CIA used a “clandestine”, intelligence operation-like incident to send a “counterintelligence” reminder to the Canadian government. It was, if only in principle, a threat of potentially deadly violence to a foreign leader, and so I would guess that the CIA apparatus treated what concerned them on Chretien’s part as at least a serious intelligence threat to them.

Within the scopes of my 2009 review and my current review, a logical inference would be, if the Jans incident indeed involved a CIA gesture, that it was related to Chretien’s official foreign-visit initiative to befriend Mexico in a manner downgrading Canada’s traditional special relationship with the United States, to do with the concern that it could lead to some hostile elements in Mexico gaining a foothold in Canada – such as through the NAFTA mechanism – which enjoyed much better access to the U.S. than Mexico did.

However, something else Jans said to police, reported in the original Winnipeg Free Press story quoted earlier, suggested that it could be about more: “When the CIA finds out police are holding me you’ll find out how many laws you’ve broken”.

It was clearly appropriate police response to arrest Jans when he carried a weapon to want to see the prime minister. So, Jans’s accusing the police of breaking “many laws” raised the spectre of whether he was “of a sound or unsound mind”, a phrase coined by CIA spokesman David French, quoted earlier.

But Jans could, alternatively, be referring to something broader and prior to his threatening action, such as, ‘the CIA would tell you that you have broken many laws of the CIA’s concerns’.

That would have been about the new Chretien government’s policies more generally than with respect to Mexico, most of which have not been covered in depth, if at all, by my reviews.

But in May 1994 the Chretien government had been in power for less than seven months since the late October 1993 election. So how many laws could it have already broken?

On the other hand, as has been noted in various contexts in my current review, in 1994 Jean Chretien already had a long and distinguished prior history working in the government, particularly as the justice minister under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

I note that compared to the Mulroney government, both the Trudeau government before and the Chretien government after have shown to be more independent of U.S. interests. In March 1994 when Chretien was going to Mexico instead of the U.S. for his first official foreign visit, the Canadian parliament led by the majority Chretien Liberals was also launching a broad review of Canadian foreign policy, “the most comprehensive review since Pierre Trudeau”, aiming for Canada to be “more active, independent, internationalist” in foreign affairs:

“How does Canada protect its interests in the new world disorder? That’s the key question as Ottawa launches a sweeping review of our foreign policy, as well as defence and aid programs.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s Liberals are making good on their election pledge to chart a “more active, independent, internationalist” role in foreign affairs – by consulting with the public.

Canadians will get a chance to air their views on how best to:

* Safeguard our cultural, economic and territorial sovereignty.

* Define our political ties with other countries and regions.

* Shape our armed forces.

* Organize foreign aid.

* Promote global security.

Two special parliamentary committees, one on foreign affairs and aid, the other on defence, will travel the country over the summer, and report their findings in the fall.

The public should make itself heard. The issues are too important to be left to the entrenched interests in the defence, foreign affairs and aid communities. This, after all, is the most comprehensive review since Pierre Trudeau struck an independent policy by cutting our military presence in Europe and recognizing China.

…

Foreign policy: In addressing the perennial question of Canada-U.S. relations, we need to debate what policies can best preserve Canada’s culture, social programs and industry, as well as our territorial sovereignty.

Abroad, we need to ensure that our promotion of global security through democracy, good government and human rights is consistent and not sacrificed for either trade or powerful lobbies at home. And, going beyond our traditional links to the U.S. and Europe, we need to forge closer ties to Latin America, Asia and the former Soviet states.

Defence: Is NORAD, the Canada-U.S. defence pact, still relevant? And what should be our role in NATO, now that we’re pulling our forces out of Germany? Do we need to maintain an army, navy and air force ready for a major shooting war? Does defence need $11.5 billion a year in this post-Cold War world?

…”

(“How does Canada protect its interests in the new world . . .”, March 18, 1994, Toronto Star)

As characterized above, it was “the most comprehensive review since Pierre Trudeau struck an independent policy by cutting our military presence in Europe and recognizing China”.

Though Jean Chretien hadn’t supervised foreign policy in the Pierre Trudeau government, when it came to Trudeau’s China policy the Canadian business tycoon Paul Desmarais had played a leading role in the business arena; even the marriage of of his son Andre, then Justice Minister Chretien’s press secretary as discussed earlier, to Chretien’s daughter France had the blessing of, among others, the Chinese officialdom as I reviewed in a blog post dated June 7, 2014:

“There should be no question that the rise of China’s economic reform leader Deng Xiaoping after the 1976 deaths of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and the corresponding China trade impetus from the Canadian business community with Paul Desmarais as a prominent leader – founding chairman of the Canada China Business Council in 1978 as in Part 12 – had much to do with the real trade growth that was good for Canada.

But as the Chinese said to the visiting Pierre Trudeau in 1973, “most-favoured-nation” trade status was “possible only when one had the desire”. That kind of desire must not lie only within the business community but be shared by the political circles as well.

Indeed, from an early stage the Chinese Communist officialdom invested high hopes in Paul Desmarais’s patronage of the Canadian politicians.

In Part 12, the in-law relationship between Desmarais and Jean Chretien has been shown to be at the center of intricate Canadian political events during the 1990s. In fact, when that relationship was first forged in 1981, there was media talk of a “new political dynasty” (“THE OTTAWA SCENE Wedding may found new dynasty”, January 26, 1981, The Globe and Mail):

“An early contender for Ottawa’s marriage of the year, and perhaps even the start of a new political dynasty, takes place on May 23 when Andre Desmarais, younger son of Power Corp. chairman Paul Desmarais and press secretary to Justice Minister Jean Chretien, marries the boss’s only daughter, France. The marriage links the families of two of French Canada’s most conspicuous achievers – Jean Chretien, the “petit gars de Shawinigan” who has held a series of top Cabinet posts and may yet climb to the top job, and Paul Desmarais, who went from a small Sudbury bus company and built one of the country’s giant conglomerates.

…

Andre, the second Desmarais son to work briefly in Mr. Chretien’s Cabinet office, had hoped to keep the engagement and wedding quiet, so there has been no formal announcement. But proud papa Jean is letting word slip out whenever he can. Andre plans to quit his job as press secretary after the wedding. It wouldn’t do to have to call the minister “Dad.””

As the report disclosed, Andre was but the second of Paul Desmarais’s sons sent to work at Justice Minister Chretien’s office, and he was the lucky one winning the hand of France, the political boss’s only daughter.

China was there, too, represented by one of only 3 foreign ambassadors to Canada – from Morocco, Venezuela and China – at the wedding of Andre Desmarais and France Chretien, a glamorous event attended by 320 guests (“Desmarais newlyweds honeymoon in Europe”, by Zena Cherry, May 29, 1981, The Globe and Mail):

“…

It was a black-tie 5:30 ceremony in the Notre-Dame Roman Catholic Cathedral in Ottawa and the officiant was the Very Rev. Georges-Henri Levesque of Montreal.

Maureen Forrester sang Meine Glaubiges Herzen by Bach, Ave Maria by Bach-Gounod, Agnus Dei by Georges Bizet and Notre Pere by Malotte.

There were 320 guests, including three Ambassadors to Canada: Nourreddine Hasnaoui from Morocco; Francisco Paparoni of Venezuela and Wang Tung from China. Also two former U.S. ambassadors, James Atkins, who was in Saudi Arabia, and Thomas Enders, former ambassador to Canada.

”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 13) — when power politics angles for monopoly”, June 7, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

With the above broader contexts brought into the picture, I can say that the Earl Kevin Jans case, about a crossbow-and-arrows threat displayed in public intended for Chretien, may have indeed involved certain reactions on the part of the U.S. CIA apparatus to Chretien’s independent foreign policy streak, concerned that it could weaken the dominant position of the U.S. and its close allies in the world.

That CIA-link possibility was probed to some degree, albeit in a very limited context, by the Winnipeg Free Press as reported in its May 21, 1994 story quoted earlier.

However, I have not seen the potential CIA-link storyline in the Jans incident news coverage by other major Canadian press venues, and so I would conclude that, probably due to lack of interest since it appeared like the bravados of a local ‘weirdo’ in Winnipeg, one who not only had no explosives that he had bragged to police about but walked around with only a crossbow and arrows – not even a gun that could have made him a trendier news topic given the Chretien government’s new gun-control initiative.

Whether the reasons were like I speculate, the fact that the major media venues outside Winnipeg did not pick up the CIA-link storyline was in rather odd contrast to what some of them had reported four years earlier in May 1990, a ridiculously minor story about Earl Kevin Jans and his pitbull terrier:

“WINNIPEG (CP) — A Winnipeg man has been charged with theft after a pitbull terrier was taken from the city pound.

Earl Kevin Jans, 25, was charged with theft under $1,000 after his pitbull disappeared after a Sunday visit.

The two apparently scaled a two-metre fence topped with barbed wire. Jans was arrested Monday night.

Hector will be destroyed if a June 15 appeal is denied. In September, a provincial judge ordered the dog killed, a month after he bit a man’s cheek. The man required plastic surgery.

The pound is reviewing its policy of allowing owners to exercise condemned dogs.

Credit: CP”

(“Owner charged in pitbull’s pound-break”, May 30, 1990, The Ottawa Citizen)

In addition to the Ottawa Citizen story fully quoted as above, the Montreal Gazette also did a similar story on the same day of May 30, 1990.

Uh oh! Jans’s nasty dog had bitten a man’s cheek, been condemned to death by a Manitoba provincial court judge and then helped by Jans to escape, and it was news-worthy for the major newspapers in Ottawa and Montreal, but not Jans’s talking about his CIA connection four years later.

A sad early omen, wasn’t it? Back in May 1990, Brian Mulroney was still the prime minister, and Patricia Allen of Capital Ottawa and Montreal was still alive and well, not yet falling victim to the November 1991 crossbow-and-arrow murder, which then became a deadly precedent to the May 1994 Earl Kevin Jans threat to Jean Chretien.

I would question why the Winnipeg Free Press story of May 21, 1994, with a seemingly unbelievable claim of CIA connection but not without some decent circumstantial substantiation by Jans, not of broader national reader interest than his act of rescuing his condemned pitbull terrier.

Regardless, even this Winnipeg Free Press story may have omitted a key piece of what Earl Kevin Jans said, presumably, I would guess, after the reporter called the CIA phone number brought up by Jans in court and reached a CIA person named James Olson, but not a Col. Masterson about whom Olson refused to disclose anything.

The intriguing missing information was later mentioned in that newspaper in a much less noticeable way. The Manitoba provincial court apparently decided that Jans had a psychiatric problem, or “unsound mind” in CIA spokesman David French’s words as previously quoted, and he was sent to a psychiatric committal. Months later in January 1995, Winnipeg Free Press columnist Gordon Sinclair, Jr. reported the missing piece of detail:

“Now, some memorable words about the most important local story of Crime and punishment, Winnipeg style.

…

“When the CIA finds out police are holding me you’ll find out how many laws you’ve broken.” – Psychiatric patient Earl Kevin Jans after telling police he took a crossbow to the Convention Centre because he was under orders from the American military to arrest Prime Minister Chretien.”

(“Now, a few words about justice”, by Gordon Sinclair, Jr., January 2, 1995, Winnipeg Free Press)

Aha! It had not been the CIA apparatus but the American military, hence a “Col. Masterson”, presumably acting with CIA information and assistance, that wanted to “arrest Prime Minister Chretien”.

That would mean, if Jans wasn’t insane, that from the U.S. military’s point of view some of what Chretien had done posed an armed violent threat, on a military scale, to the United States.

That would be an incredibly tall tale indeed, given my current review so far indicating that Chretien was very much a ‘pacifist’ in his approach to potentially violent conflicts – as I have commented several times – even if his independent foreign policy streak could potentially weaken the unity of the U.S. and its close allies.

But, as I have also noted, some of Chretien’s ‘pacifist’ gestures in his efforts striving to become an even greater political “populist”, or sometimes just to avoid more danger, exhibited a tendency toward ‘appeasement’.

Maybe, just maybe, could that cause potential problems involving violent-conflict threats for others?

Consider the case of the Andre Dallaire intrusion into Chretien’s official residence, about which I have commented that Chretien reacted more than “pacifist” but “appeasist” in his later words describing Dallaire to reporters, “He was a good-looking guy but he had a strange look in his eyes”.

A pacifist more likely would have said, ‘he did not look like a bad person …’. The praise “good-looking guy” from the Prime Minister, on the other hand, could really increase the offender’s sense of confidence while decreasing the offender’s particular aggression toward Chretien who turned out to be so ‘nice’ to him.

Consider another case discussed earlier, where the officially visiting Chretien unexpectedly encountered an “emotional mob” at a funeral home blocking him from paying respect to the assassinated Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio; afterwards, Solicitor General Herb Gray expressed concern to the media and stated he would review Chretien’s security arrangements with RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster and foreign minister Andre Ouellet; but a rather cheeky Chretien said, “I was close to the people. I didn’t feel in danger a minute.”

No doubt Chretien enjoyed being a populist close to the people, but in practice was there not a difference whether the people around him were angry towards him? Of course there was, and that was why Chretien and his entourage then retreated from the funeral home without succeeding in paying proper tribute.

If Chretien really believed it was about being “close to the people” and thus feeling safe regardless of the crowd’s attitudes, then he was lucky to be in Mexico for only a few days of visiting – unlike the Mexican politicians, including Colosio who had been alive and “close to the people” in his presidential political campaign just one or two days ago.

While the two cases above reflected Chretien’s attitude using political populism as a way forward and out of danger, to the point of appeasing those showing threats, hostility or angers toward him, the political positions he took in March 1994 on democracy in Mexico, amidst violence, was a much more major case and illustrated his taking the same tack at the foreign policy level.

As reviewed earlier, in March 1994 in Mexico City explaining why Canada could not ensure the Mexican election to be clean, Chretien said, “They have a democracy that is not our type of democracy in many ways”, which then drew scolding questioning from Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista rebels, “How many kinds of democracy are there? (That) is my question to the prime minister.”

Indeed, for a country where elections had not led to a change of the ruling political party for 65 years by that time, where the ongoing presidential election was marred by extreme violence that Chretien had just had a close encounter with, and where serious human-rights problems persisted as shown by the heavy government forces response to the Zapatista uprising, killing hundreds of poor peasants of indigenous Mayan heritage, Chretien’s simply calling Mexico’s political system another “type of democracy” compromised a great deal in the principles of democracy.

No doubt, the Canadian government’s interests in trade with Mexico were very important as evidenced by, discussed earlier, the $1.9 million Canada Expo ’94 in Mexico, “the largest export trade fair” organized by the Canadian government. But I would reason that as the leader of Canada, Jean Chretien’s motive in making the above-noted controversial statement was in politics more than in trade per se.

As reviewed earlier, a prime objective of the Chretien Liberals in foreign policy was for Canada to take a “more active, independent, internationalist” role in foreign affairs. Therefore, as the leader of the Canadian democracy, Chretien’s showing a generous stance accepting Mexico’s political system as another “type of democracy” could potentially propel him to the rank of an “internationalist” leader of democracy.

In fact, in his Mexico visit Chretien expressed an independent foreign policy desire to his hosts, emphasizing their differences from the Americans:

“Prime Minister Jean Chretien used every opportunity he could during a three-day trade-promotion tour to tell Mexicans that they share with Canadians a certain wariness about dealings with the United States.

…

Mexico and Canada can pull together as a counterweight to their enormous U.S. neighbour in trying to improve the functioning of the North American free-trade agreement, Mr. Chretien said at a news conference before his departure for an Easter-week holiday break in the Caribbean.

“There is always the problem that the very friendly Americans are so big,” he said.

…

The fact that Canadians haven’t had bad relations with Mexico, in contrast with sometimes hostile Mexican-U.S. relations, may well be an advantage for Canadians trying to do business in this growing market, he said.

“When I have an advantage, I will use it. . . . We’ve decided to be aggressive.”

A senior aide to the Prime Minister said Mr. Chretien pressed Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari hard on three possible business deals to help reduce the huge trade imbalance that favours Mexico by a 4-to-1 ratio. Mr. Chretien wanted the President’s support for the sale of Canadian de Havilland Dash 8 aircraft to Aeromexico, the Mexican flag carrier; the opening of an equipment and technology purchasing office in Calgary by Pemex, the state oil company; and the purchase of nuclear fuel from Saskatchewan for a power reactor. The fuel sale can go ahead if the Mexican government signs safeguard agreements to guarantee that the spent uranium will not be used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Chretien was greeted at city hall yesterday morning by municipal officials, who complained that their city has major problems with air pollution and street crime. He then laid a wreath at a national monument.

Even the wreath-laying ceremony provided symbolic punctuation to Mr. Chretien’s message about the importance for Mexicans to remember Canadians are different from Americans.

The monument commemorates a low point in U.S.-Mexican relations, a battle in 1847 between American invaders and Mexican patriots. During the battle, a group of children jumped to their deaths from a castle wall rather than surrender.

…

Mr. Chretien drew attention several times to the French fact in Canada, which distinguishes Canadians from Americans. He joked yesterday that maybe it is common “Latin blood” that helped him get on so well with his Mexican hosts.

It might also have been that he said exactly the right things in public to bolster the prestige of a Mexican government that has been shaken by the assassination of Mr. Colosio.

…

Mr. Chretien said that he is sure Mexicans will come through this tragic period of mourning renewed and that Mexican political and economic reforms will not be turned back.

The Prime Minister said he raised the issue of human rights with Mr. Salinas, particularly the rights of aboriginal insurgents in the poor southern state of Chiapas. The Zapatista rebels staged an uprising in January to coincide with the implementation of NAFTA, but have since negotiated a peace agreement with the central government that includes promises of improved economic and social conditions.

Mr. Chretien seemed satisfied with what Mr. Salinas had to say about the government’s efforts to assist the aboriginal people.

He said he offered to send Canadian observers to monitor the Mexican election in August, but received no response to the offer. Allegations of vote fraud have been a hallmark of Mexican elections.

…”

(“PM calls for united front with Mexico: Both countries need each other to deal with U.S., Chretien says”, by Jeff Sallot, March 26, 1994, The Globe and Mail)

One can determine from what he said and did as above, that if he could Prime Minister Chretien would not mind to have his Canada displace, or at least counterbalance, the U.S. in an international role; even the select Canadian technologies and materials he tried hard personally to market to Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari illustrated the competitiveness.

Of course it was very business and trade minded; but being politically friendly with Mexico in its self-image as well as its reality, diplomatically saying what he had to say and graciously accepting his Mexican hosts’ replies, was Chretien’s approach to forge closer bilateral relations independent of the U.S.

Jean Chretien’s diplomatic adventure to Mexico as the new Canadian prime minister at the beginning of the NAFTA era demonstrated that he was interested in and capable of charting “more active, independent, internationalist” foreign policy courses, moving Canada to not only becoming more independent of the United States but also acting as an “internationalist” counterweight to the U.S. if that worked to Canada’s interests.

In doing so, Chretien showed that as the national leader he was willing to be not only an active political populist but more “aggressive” than a ‘pacifist’ type, to flex his muscles in an independent way, and to appease internationally those in political realities very dissimilar to Canada’s – especially those with common “Latin blood” as he said jokingly in Mexico.

Nonetheless, the Mexico visit example, and other cases studied within the scopes of my blogging and reviews since 2009, have not revealed any obvious indication of Prime Minister Chretien and his Liberal government in active, independent and internationalist foreign policy adventures that posed, implied or could lead to military-level armed-conflict threats to the United States – presumably threats by some of the foreign or international players in the adventures.

Hence, what Earl Kevin Jans alleged in May 1994 was the U.S. military’s intent to arrest Jean Chretien, if the CIA and U.S. military connections he claimed indeed had some credibility, remains an intriguing mystery from the perspectives of my analyses in my blogging on politics thus far.

Given that Chretien and the Liberal government, and Canada in general, were largely ‘pacifist’ rather than a cause of international conflicts, whether certain foreign policy adventures ‘appeased’ and abetted the violent-conflict intent on the part of others is more of the issue here, and is relevant also in relation to the history of Nazism and the Second World War, particularly Nazi Germany’s conquer of Czechoslovakia, that my current review has touched upon.

In the history of modern democracy, the best-recognized example of “appeasement” to international aggression was Britain’s diplomacy toward Nazi Germany during the 1930s prior to World War II:

“APPEASEMENT
Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War
By Tim Bouverie

Three months after Hitler came to power in Germany, the British ambassador in Berlin dispatched a prescient 5,000-word report to London. Having just read “Mein Kampf,” Sir Horace Rumbold correctly saw the book as Hitler’s master plan for the conquest of Europe. To his superiors, Rumbold outlined how the German leader planned to pick off countries one by one, all the while promising that his latest victim would be his last.

In “Appeasement,” Tim Bouverie notes that Rumbold’s April 1933 dispatch caused a momentary stir in the Foreign Office. But the ambassador’s warning, like later admonitions from Winston Churchill and others, made no dent in the British government’s unflagging commitment to come to terms with Hitler, no matter the consequences.

Bouverie, a former British television journalist, offers few fresh details or insights into Britain’s disastrous appeasement policy — a subject that has been exhaustively mined in a plethora of previous books. Nonetheless, living as we do in an era with uncomfortable parallels to the political turmoil of the 1930s, “Appeasement” is valuable as an exploration of the often catastrophic consequences of failing to stand up to threats to freedom, whether at home or abroad. Particularly timely is the book’s examination of Neville Chamberlain. It highlights the dangers to a democracy of a leader who comes to power knowing little or nothing about foreign policy, yet imagines himself an expert and bypasses the other branches of government to further his aims.

Throughout his minutely detailed survey, Bouverie rightly rejects the arguments of revisionist historians who claim that Britain’s lack of military preparedness, as well as the strength of pacifist public opinion, justified its determination to offer repeated concessions to Hitler. In fact, from the early 1930s, British leaders, fearful of further damaging their Depression-afflicted economy, fought to keep military spending to a minimum. They then used the country’s military deficiencies as an excuse to turn a blind eye to Germany’s increasing aggression and explosive rearmament, a flagrant violation of the 1919 Versailles Treaty.”

(“Neville Chamberlain: A Failed Leader in a Time of Crisis”, by Lynne Olson, June 10, 2019, The New York Times)

As summarized above, from the early 1930s on British leaders, fearful of further damaging their Great Depression-afflicted economy, kept military spending to a minimum and then used Britain’s military deficiencies as an excuse to turn a blind eye to Nazi Germany’s increasing aggression and explosive rearmament.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain practiced the appeasement policy  personally and publicly, reaching its climax with the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, proclaimed by him as “peace for our time”, that forced Czechoslovakia to accept the Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler’s demand of ceding the Sudetenland, an ethnic German region, to Germany; subsequently in only six months, Germany broke the agreement and occupied the entire Czechoslovakia:

“On 30 September 1938, Germany, Britain, France and Italy reached a settlement that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. The area contained about three million people of German origin and in May 1938 it became known that Hitler and his generals planned to occupy the country.

The Czechoslovak government hoped that Britain and France would come to its assistance in the event of an invasion, but British Prime Minister Chamberlain was intent on averting war. Between 15 and 30 September he made three trips to Germany to see Hitler. The final one in Munich resulted in large swathes of Czechoslovakia coming under Nazi rule. Britain and France would not support any Czech resistance.

Returning from Munich, Chamberlain told an excited crowd at Heston Airport, ‘It is peace for our time’, and waved the agreement he had signed with Hitler. This was the climax of the appeasement policy. Six months later, Hitler reneged on his promises and ordered his armies to march into Prague. Within a year, Britain and France were at war with Germany.”

(“The Munich Agreement – archive, September 1938”, September 21, 2018, The Guardian)

As described above, the Czechoslovakian government had hoped that Britain and France would come to its assistance in the event of a German invasion, but Chamberlain was intent on averting war.

In timeline, the September 1938 Munich Agreement came after Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in March, and before the widespread anti-Jewish Kristallnacht campaign in November when the violence also occurred in the annexed Sudetenland – both other events discussed earlier.

Most notably, the agreement by Britain and France with Germany – and Italy – was a betrayal of the only democracy in Eastern Europe, a nation willing and ready, and in fact mobilized its army, to defend itself against Nazi German military aggression:

“Although Britain’s appeasement toward Germany began before Chamberlain became prime minister in 1937, he was its high priest throughout. As chancellor of the Exchequer for most of the 1930s, he oversaw the government’s strict budgetary limits on rearmament. According to one associate, Chamberlain, a former businessman who had spent two years as mayor of Birmingham, thought of Europe as simply “a bigger Birmingham.” He convinced himself that if he dealt with Hitler in a “practical and businesslike” way, he could convince the Führer of the efficacy of peace and bring him to heel.

Chamberlain clung to that delusion even as Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 and, two months later, demanded that Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe’s only democracy, surrender the Sudetenland, a vital area containing most of the country’s formidable defense fortifications and major centers of industry. Czechoslovakia refused and mobilized its highly trained, well-equipped army to counter a German invasion; France, which had a military treaty with the Czechs, did the same.

But when Chamberlain refused to join the French premier, Édouard Daladier, in confronting Hitler, Daladier fell into line. At the Munich conference in September 1938, the British and French leaders strong-armed the Czechs to give in to German demands. In defense of his betrayal of a fellow democracy, Chamberlain, like later defenders of appeasement, argued that Britain was not ready to fight a major war at the time. True enough, but as Bouverie points out, neither was Germany. When asked at his postwar trial whether German forces could have defeated a united front of Britain, France and Czechoslovakia in 1938, Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German Army, replied, “It was out of the question.””

(Lynne Olson, June 10, 2019, The New York Times)

As has been reviewed in the context of Interpol history, later during World War II the courageous and proud Czechoslovakian resistance achieved a remarkable feat that no others accomplished, namely assassinating a senior German Nazi leader, Interpol president Reinhard Heydrich.

In pursuing his appeasement policy, Chamberlain forced the government to go along, used his Conservative majority to crush dissent in the British Parliament, and pressured the media to follow the government line and keep the British public in the dark:

“In his handling of the Sudetenland crisis, Chamberlain steamrollered his own government just as he had the Czechs. The prime minister did not inform his cabinet or seek its approval before making plans to negotiate personally with Hitler — an action that flouted the conventions of the British governmental system. Nor did he ever consult Parliament.

For his part, Hitler took advantage of the year after Munich to accelerate his country’s rearmament. Urged by members of his government to do the same, Chamberlain retorted, “But don’t you see, I have brought back peace.”

The British people, meanwhile, knew virtually nothing about the deplorable state of British rearmament or their government’s behind-the-scenes activities. Using tactics that have striking resonance today, Chamberlain and his men badgered the BBC and newspapers to follow the government’s lead on appeasement, restricted journalists’ access to government sources and claimed that critics of Chamberlain’s policies were disloyal to him and to Britain. Most of the news media did what the prime minister demanded. The BBC barred Winston Churchill and other opponents of appeasement from the airwaves, while newspaper editors refused to print articles on Britain’s unpreparedness and letters to the editor critical of the government’s concessions to Germany.

Bolstered by his Conservative Party’s huge majority in the House of Commons, Chamberlain also worked to crush dissent in Parliament. “To question his authority was treason: to deny his inspiration was almost blasphemy,” recalled Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister and one of a small band of Conservative M.P.s who, like Churchill, strongly opposed appeasement. The Conservative Party, in its efforts to silence Chamberlain’s parliamentary opponents, was “even stronger than the Nazi party machine,” a member of Chamberlain’s cabinet commented. “It may have a different aim, but it is similarly callous and ruthless.””

(Lynne Olson, June 10, 2019, The New York Times)

Even after Germany’s full occupation of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain continued with a passive defence policy until the start of Western Europe’s full fall to Nazi Germany when he then resigned:

“When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Chamberlain had no choice but to declare war against Germany, but he remained committed to finding a peaceful way out. During the next seven months of “phony war,” there was little sense of national emergency in the country. Britain launched no military offensives against Germany, nor did it show much interest in mobilization.

In April 1940, however, Germany invaded Norway and Denmark, and Chamberlain’s campaign of secrecy and misinformation finally rebounded on him. Caught off guard by the surprise attacks, the British government scrambled to dispatch troops to aid the Norwegians. Barely two weeks later, Chamberlain made a stunning admission to Parliament and the nation: The badly armed and equipped British forces had been routed by the enemy and were being evacuated from Norway.

…

On May 10, Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became prime minister. That same day, Hitler launched his blitzkrieg of Western Europe. …”

(Lynne Olson, June 10, 2019, The New York Times)

Clearly, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s “more active, independent, internationalist” foreign policy approach cannot be easily compared to the historic British diplomatic failure under Neville Chamberlain, for at least two reasons: there were no apparent signs of Chretien appeasing a foreign or international entity in regard to it military strength and aggression toward Canada, or toward the United States for that matter, whatever the Earl Kevin Jans intrigue might be related to in this context; on the other hand, Chretien had thoughtfully planned foreign policy objectives, beyond merely peace like in Chamberlain’s imagination and beyond Chretien’s own acts of populism, as rationalization where standards of democracy might be compromised – compromised they were even in Canadian parliamentary politics under Chretien as earlier reviewed.

Another significant example of “appeasement”, which has been discussed at considerable length in Part 1 of my current article, was the conduct of April Catherine Glaspie, the Canadian-born American diplomat and senior Arabist whose conveyance of continuing U.S. noninterventionism in Arab-Arab conflicts to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, in the face of massive Iraqi military mobilisation against Kuwait, emboldened Hussein to carry out his objective of conquering Kuwait.

In the case of Kuwait-Iraq conflict, though, the American diplomacy was conducted in private and therefore unknown to the public, until nearly two months later after Iraqi forces had completed the occupation of Kuwait, when a Iraqi government transcript of the Glaspie-Hussein meeting was supplied to the American media and published.

Hopefully, future information disclosures by governments, agency and institutions may shed light on the relevance, with respect to Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his Liberal government relating to possible violent-conflict threats to the United States, of any CIA and U.S. military connections in the Earl Kevin Jans intrigue in May 1994 in Winnipeg, Canada.

Returning to my review of the Chretien government’s domestic law-and-order legislative efforts, as earlier noted that about a week after the RCMP criminal investigation of former Prime Minister Mulroney became news in November 1995, the stricter gun-control legislation passed the Senate in a lopsided vote of 64 to 28.

Also noted earlier, Jean Charest, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party that by this time had only two MPs but still more Senators – most of them appointed by Mulroney – than the Liberal Party, had said they would try to make some changes to the legislation.

The Tory senators did make a real attempt to make amendments to the legislation, failing in a tight vote of 53 to 46, before many of them then followed the unelected Senate’s tradition and voted for the legislation already passed by the House, here as from a press story cited earlier describing the political intrigues:

“Senator Joyce Fairbairn wasn’t certain she’d won, but Senator Ron Ghitter had a gut feeling he’d lost.

Fairbairn, the Lethbridge Liberal, and Ghitter, the Calgary Conservative, had been working behind the scenes for days to convince colleagues to back their respective sides in last week’s crucial gun control vote.

…

Most news media reported the bill passed easily by a margin of 64 to 28. True, but those reports are deceiving, because there was more than one vote that night.

The real vote, on the proposed Conservative amendments, was held moments earlier and was much closer. The Conservatives lost narrowly, 53 to 46.

“In some calculations, even two or three days before, it looked like it could be a tie,” Fairbairn admits. “Until the vote was actually called, I wasn’t certain.”

So what turned the tide?

Ghitter tips his hat to Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Justice Minister Allan Rock, who used personal influence to persuade Liberal and Tory senators.

“Some of our senators were getting calls from Rock. I know of some senators who got called by Chretien,” says Ghitter. “There was a full-court press on.”

The Senate, on paper, is almost evenly divided between Grits and Tories.

The Tories now have 51, the Liberals 50, and there are three independents.

The Liberals managed in the final hours to sway the few undecided Tories and to get as many people in their own Senate seats as possible, Ghitter says.

“One of the Liberal senators, I’d never seen before. They dragged everybody out that they could.”

Liberal insiders suggest the Tory loss had less to do with Liberal pressure than internal bickering in the Conservative caucus.

Ghitter was shocked when Senator Gerald Beaudoin voted against the Tory amendments. Beaudoin is chairman of the Senate’s legal and constitutional committee and had worked with Ghitter on the amendments.

“(Beaudoin) was in favor of them,” Ghitter says.

“It was disappointing that the chairman of a Senate committee — who tabled the report and signed the report — votes against it. I don’t know why.”

Beaudoin said his conscience told him to support the bill unamended.

…

The Liberals were missing only one senator for the vote — Calgary Senator Earl Hastings, who is recuperating from an illness.

The Tories had three absentees, including 89-year-old John Michael Macdonald, the Senate’s oldest member.

Seven Tories ultimately voted the Liberal position, but only four Liberals broke ranks and voted with the Conservative majority.

Four of the renegade Tories were from Quebec and three others were women. “I don’t think (the women) had a sense or understanding of the other side of the gun culture issue that’s out there and had a natural abhorrence to guns, which I understand,” Ghitter says. “From the Quebec point of view, I still think the (1989 L’Ecole Polytechnique) tragedy in Montreal has a strong impact.”

Once the amendments were defeated, the lopsided final vote was inevitable. It reflects the general belief among senators that they should not veto legislation approved by the elected members of the House of Commons.

“If four people on our side had voted differently, we would have won the amendments,” says Ghitter who “didn’t shed any tears” over the loss. He does not own a gun, but he does not believe the bill — particularly its requirement for universal registration — will help reduce crime.”

(Sheldon Alberts, November 26, 1995, Calgary Herald)

As discussed earlier, among the Liberal MPs in the House of Commons there was serious internal dissent, especially from MPs representing rural regions, over the gun-control legislation. As above, so was there Liberal internal dissent in the Senate vote on Tory amendments, with four Liberals voting for them.

What made the difference for the Liberals, as described above, was their winning over seven Tory Senators who had been emotionally affected by the 1989 Montreal Massacre – four from Quebec and three additional women – with intense persuasion including by Chretien and Justice Minister Rock personally.

As a result, the four Senators appointed by Chretien back in September to fill all Senate vacancies with Liberals, three of them women as earlier discussed, turned out to be only an insurance, i.e., not necessarily needed in the vote tally of 53-46 defeating the Tory amendments.

In my June 2009 post reviewing this part of history on the Chretien government’s gun-control legislative work, I then certain prior history in the Mulroney era, when the table had been set the other way round between the Tories and the Liberals.

In 1988 and 1990, the Liberal Senate majority previously appointed by Pierre Trudeau fought hard to block the Mulroney government’s legislations on Canada-U.S. free trade and on the Goods and Services Tax:

“In September 1995 Prime Minister Chretien did not think unelected senators should thwart the will of the elected government, but in recent history it had been the Liberals, under John Turner in 1988 and Chretien in 1990, who used the Senate controlled by Trudeau appointees to ferociously block the 1988 U.S.-Canada free trade pact and the 1990 Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill that would replace the old manufacturers’ tax with a national sales tax. ²⁶⁷”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The problem in 1990 when Chretien was the opposition Liberal leader, as I commented in 2009, was that he and his Liberals were not so much against the GST but playing politics against it to gain electoral popularity; that prompted Prime Minister Mulroney to not only fill all the Senate vacancies with Tories, but invoke a rare rule to get the British Monarch’s approval for him to appoint eight extra ones to ‘overload’ the Senate, at a wrong time as his government was considering constitutional reform of the Senate; then after their 1993 election victory, the Chretien Liberals just kept the GST despite their prior fight against it and their promise to abolish or replace it:

“When Chretien was contesting the Liberal leadership in early 1990 he was noncommittal on the GST, believing that some sort of national consumption tax would not be bad; but later in the year when the prospect presented to him that the tax was unpopular and he might be able to use the Senate to block it to force prime minister Mulroney to call an election, something Turner had done in 1988 with the free-trade bill, Chretien led his Senators down that path – with Mulroney the one railing against “the undemocratic practice of appointed senators thwarting the will of the elected government” but his popularity low after recent failure of the Meech Lake constitutional accord. ²⁶⁸

With only two years into his second majority term and low poll numbers, Mulroney did not want an election; instead, he abandoned the prudence of leaving vacant Senate seats untouched while pursuing Senate reform – the Meech Lake accord would have required Senate appointments be made from lists of candidates submitted by the provincial governments although the candidates need not be elected – and over several weeks added 15 new senators to fill the Senate to its full size of 104. ²⁶⁹

At that point in late September 1990 it was still a Liberal-controlled Senate, so Mulroney invoked a never used section of the Constitution to ‘overload’ the Senate, namely getting approval from the Constitutional Monarch to add 8 more senators for a majority in an oversized Senate, in order to break the logjam between the elected Commons and the unelected Senate; the PM’s wish was readily granted by Queen Elizabeth II via Governor General Ray Hnatyshyn, even though the last time when prime minister Alexander MacKenzie requested in 1874 it was denied by Queen Victoria. ²⁷⁰

…

Indeed, after the Senate fight the Liberals never put forth a plan to deal with the GST, until January 28, 1993 when Chretien said Canadians had to wait till after he won power to find out how he would replace it; subsequently during that election year Chretien or someone under him would float an idea or two from time to time as if a real change might be in the works. ²⁷⁶

After the 1993 election Chretien talked about replacing the GST for several years, and then told others he liked the tax. ²⁷⁷

In 1996 deputy prime minister Sheila Copps, the Liberal MP who in 1990 had put the most pressure on Chretien to fight the GST, resigned and ran for her MP seat one more time in a by-election to make up for her brash 1993 promise to abolish the GST or quit. ²⁷⁸”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The purpose of comparing the two historical periods of Senate legislative fights, in the Mulroney era and then in the Chretien era, as I have done is to highlight its being cycles of heightened political maneuvering that, at each turn, justified the governing party’s cramming the Senate with its partisan, if not patronage, appointees.

In 2009 concluding my review of these partisan Senate appointments in history, at the start of Part 7 of my article on Canadian politics I marvelled at the exemplary record of British Columbia Tory MP Stan Wilbee in speaking his mind publicly, whose opposition to Mulroney’s leadership in late 1992 had significantly influenced the press releases I sent out to begin my political activism as previously reviewed.

Two years earlier in 1990, Wilbee had spoken out against a controversial Senate patronage appointment by Mulroney:

“When Mulroney appointed 15 senators during August-September 1990 on his way to acquire a Tory majority in the Senate in order to defeat Liberal resistance to his unpopular GST bill, in typical Mulroney style some of his patronage appointments caused not just controversies but outrage.

Leading the patronage controversies was the appointment of then Nova Scotia premier John Buchanan, (not because Buchanan was the first-ever sitting provincial premier to be appointed senator but) because the Buchanan government was under active RCMP investigation for his alleged accepting kickbacks and giving government work to his friends. ²⁷⁹

One politician who came out strongly against Mulroney on the Buchanan appointment was, surprisingly, rookie Tory MP Stan Wilbee – two years before his 1992 leadership-review call when by that time he would be B.C. Tory caucus chair and chair of the Commons committee on health issues (as previously discussed). Wilbee said in 1990: ²⁸⁰

“… this (Buchanan’s appointment) is a flouting of a tradition of Canadian government and just a throwback to the days of (former Liberal prime minister Pierre Elliott) Trudeau, who had complete disregard for the people of Canada.”

”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Aha! taking into account Wilbee’s view expressed in 1990, quoted above, the partisan cycles of Senate appointments went back further in history, to the Pierre Trudeau era.

Wilbee then announced that he would quit the Tory party and become an independent, but he was personally persuaded to stay as a Tory by Prime Minister Mulroney; despite that, as already reviewed, two years later Wilbee publicly demanded a party leadership review:

“Prior to attending a Tory caucus meeting in September 1990, Wilbee had announced he was ready to quit the party over the Buchanan issue and sit in the Commons as an independent; but Mulroney held a meeting with him and Wilbee backed down, stating that he realized the difficulty of getting re-elected as an independent and that he could be more effective working within the Tory caucus.²⁸¹

So by the time when I got involved in the issue of Mulroney’s leadership in November 1992, being a B.C. MP and a medical doctor Stan Wilbee was actually sitting in pretty good parliamentary positions, albeit outside the government, considering his previous, highly publicized intent to quit the Tory party; and he was for a second time speaking out against Mulroney (not counting his opposition of the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional accord).”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Dr. Stan Wilbee was a good parliamentarian, and a good medical doctor – as was Dr. Gary Romalis who refused to be intimidated into abandoning the work he believed in as earlier discussed, and so, in that relation, was my physician Dr. James K. Lai.

After 2009, in my later multipart article expanding my review of the Airbus Affair and Canadian politics, extensively quoted earlier, I also discussed more issues related to and details about my political activism.

In particular, in a blog post dated July 6, 2012, cited earlier, I recalled a meeting I was given with an elected politician and British Columbia provincial cabinet minister. It was in August 1993 with B.C. Advanced Education Minister Thomas Perry, also a medical doctor, to discuss some academic politics and my grievances on some management issues with the University of British Columbia, where I had been a faculty member:

“In August prior to meeting UBC law students at OASIS, I had been given a meeting with Tom Perry, New Democrat Member of B.C. Legislature and Minister of Advanced Education, in whose Vancouver-Little Mountain riding my former apartment was located.

In my 1992 UBC internal grievance I had raised the spectre of taking it to “the Office of the Minister of Advanced Education of British Columbia”; then at the end of July 1993 I read a news story that prompted me to do so, when Minister Perry also happened to be local MLA. The story reported an open disagreement and dispute between Advanced Education Minister Tom Perry and UBC President David Strangway over the setup of a UBC research institute, a project Strangway alleged had been killed by B.C. government “with the stroke of a pen” …

Tom Perry, and Hedy Fry who would defeat Kim Campbell as federal MP, were medical doctors as was Stan Wilbee, former Tory MP for Delta whose challenge of Mulroney’s continuing leadership I had highlighted in my November 1992 press releases discussed in Part 6.

Dr. Perry was kind enough to meet with me and listen to my presentation on the documents I provided him, most of which I had sent to former MP Kim Campbell in November-December 1992.

Elected in 1989, after our meeting Perry would soon lose his Minister of Advanced Education job in a September cabinet shuffle by Premier Mike Harcourt, and would retire from electoral politics altogether in 1996 – with a few other NDP MLAs including Harcourt himself… By this later time Maria Klawe was already UBC Vice President as mentioned in Part 4.

After Hedy Fry’s defeat of Campbell in October, in November 1993 I also sent the documents to Dr. Fry’s constituency office.

No known positive result has come out of these political lobbying efforts by me.

On the other hand as in Part 5, in 2004 Jean Chretien, Maria Klawe and Brian Mulroney’s in-law, Harper’s Magazine editor Lewis Lapham, all received honorary degrees at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, with Klawe on June 4.”

(July 6, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The UBC Vice President Maria Klawe mentioned above was my former boss with whom I had disputes in academic politics about her management, before I got into Canadian political issues regarding then Prime Minister Mulroney. The above multipart blog article, started in 2010, discussed some details of that earlier academic politics which in 2009 I had not focused on.

Dr. Tom Perry, the B.C. Advanced Education Minister who met with me and listened to my grievances was, in fact, the only elected politician who bothered to do so in my experience of political activism in the 1990s. But no result came out of it, he soon lost his cabinet position and left electoral politics in 1996.

In contrast, as cited above, Maria Klawe who had been the UBC Computer Science Department head at the time of our dispute in 1992 became a vice president in 1995, and later in the same year of 2004 she, Jean Chretien and Brian Mulroney’s in-law Lewis Lapham received honorary degrees from Canada’s Queen’s University in Kingston.

But there was some intriguing prior history about Dr. Perry, the B.C. elected politician and cabinet minister whom I met in August 1993; he had been a UBC faculty member and medical doctor at UBC hospital, entered electoral politics for the New Democratic Party in 1989 to win the B.C. legislative seat vacated by none other than Kim Campbell, formerly a provincial conservative Social Credit politician who had just moved to federal politics and become a Mulroney government cabinet minister:

“In upper-middle-class Point Grey, which had been a Social Credit stronghold from 1975 until the NDP’s Darlene Marzari captured one of its two seats in the 1986 provincial election, Dr. Thomas Perry, 37, polled more than twice the votes of Socred Michael Levy. The seat had belonged to Socred Kim Campbell, who ran successfully as a Conservative in the Nov. 21 federal election and is now minister of state for Indian affairs and northern development. In the industrial, working-class riding of Nanaimo, a University of Victoria graduate student of history, Jan Pullinger, 42, defeated Socred Larry McNabb by more than 5,000 votes to hold the seat vacated by New Democrat David Stupich, elected on Nov. 21 as the MP for NanaimoCowichan. Perry, an attending physician at Vancouver’s University Hospital and lecturer at the University of British Columbia, said that the byelections were part of a trend. Said the father of two: “It will culminate in the defeat of the Social Credit government, which is perhaps the most incompetent, most corrupt and dishonest, and the least compassionate government this wonderful province has ever seen.””

(“A New Democrat sweep: Byelection losses feed B.C. Socred dismay”, by Hal Quinn, March 27, 1989, Maclean’s)

That was interesting, wasn’t it? As already reviewed, Ms. Campbell was the first elected politician whom I brought my political activist issues to, in November 1992 but, RCMP officers came instead to take me to UBC hospital for a psychiatric committal; then months later, it was the elected politician from the political opposite who had taken over Campbell’s provincial legislative seat,  who held a meeting with me.

Also interesting was the fact that, after retiring from politics, Dr. Perry returned to teaching medicine at UBC but not practising medicine at UBC hospital as before; instead, he now practised medicine at Vancouver General Hospital, i.e., where Dr. Gary Romalis did. Here is a short profile of Dr. Thomas Perry in the press in July 2013, mentioning his history as a Member of Legislative Assembly and cabinet minister, as well as a one-year Canadian Medical Research Council fellowship with which he studied at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden:

“Thomas Perry Jr., M.D., FRCP

Chair, education working group

• Clinical assistant professor, department of medicine, UBC

• Clinical pharmacologist, general internist, Vancouver Hospital

• One year Medical Research Council fellowship to study metabolism of tricyclic antidepressants at the Karolinska Institute’s department of clinical pharmacology in Stockholm, Sweden.

• Practice focuses on pharmacological treatment of chronic pain and high blood pressure.

• Involved in many of the TI drug-review letters sent to doctors.

• NDP MLA from 1989 to 1996, serving as advanced education, training and technology minister.”

(“The lead researchers and scientists at the Therapeutics Initiative”, July 12, 2013, The Vancouver Sun)

Ironically, as indicated by his profile above, after leaving politics, back at UBC Dr. Perry was only an assistant professor not unlike what I had been, where the president was David Strangway whom he had publicly disputed, and where Maria Klawe was a vice president.

Like Dr. Stan Wilbee, Dr. Tom Perry was a good parliamentarian and a good medical doctor with whom my political activism had some connections to.

As reviewed earlier, in April 1995 when the Chretien Liberal government’s gun-control legislation was put to the first vote in the House of Commons, there was a lone “yes” vote from the opposition Reform Party by MP Stephen Harper on the basis of his constituents’ wishes; but Harper later cast a “no” in the final vote in June 1995, on the ground that though most of his constituents supported the legislation, a majority did not like a potential 10-year penalty in it for failure to register guns.

Here are more details of what Harper said in the House of Commons on June 12, 1995, on the eve of the final vote, regarding his constituents’ and his own concerns about universal gun registration:

“It is my intention to oppose the bill at report stage and at final reading unless substantive amendments are made. I have mentioned before that in the last election I made certain commitments to represent Calgary West in the House of Commons and to do so on the basis of Reform principles and policies. All Reformers ran on those principles.

Among those principles and policies is a commitment to ascertain the views of our constituents and to vote those views where they can be ascertained. Specifically, on moral issues and on the issue of gun control, I have made a particular commitment to discover and to vote the wishes of my constituents. I have followed a process in attempting to do that.

…

While some elements of the bill remain strongly supported by the population I should say that both my householder survey and the scientific survey I have conducted have indicated that there is still broad support for the general principles of the bill. However there are some very severe concerns about specific matters, about some of the penalties for non-registration, the confiscatory elements of the legislation and the cost concerns.

…

From my own personal standpoint I believe there are elements of gun control and specifically of this bill that could be helpful. The government has over reached in a number of areas of the bill and it is unfortunate that we cannot get a more modest package.

…

My own feeling, having talked to many people in my riding about this, people who own guns and do not own guns, people who are for the bill and who are against the bill, gun owners who are for and gun owners who are against, non-gun owners who are for the bill and non-gun owners who are against it, is that there is a fairly broad consensus on the kind of gun and crime control that is needed.

Many citizens would be more than willing to register their weapons and co-operate with police if they felt that in so doing this would affirm the legitimacy and respect for their responsibly used property rights and for responsible gun ownership.

Unfortunately there has been a pattern of legislation in the past decade where registration has been followed by increased regulation, ultimately by restriction, prohibition and then by confiscation, often without compensation. This has led to fears that some may say are unfounded but which do have their grounding in people’s experience with gun laws.

…

I will be the first to admit that it is very difficult to measure public opinion on this bill. Certainly when this bill was originally brought before the House my constituents were overwhelmingly in favour of its general direction. There has been a shift in public opinion. That shift has been away. The fact of the matter is that no clear consensus now exists for many of the measures in this bill. I will be supporting a wide range of the amendments to the bill, and if those amendments are not adopted I will oppose the bill on the final vote.”

(“Debates (Hansard)”, June 12, 1995, House of Commons Canada)

As quoted, Harper had pledged that on gun control his vote would reflect “the wishes of his constituents”, which I note was a reason he had voted “yes” in the first vote because “when this bill was originally brought before the House my constituents were overwhelmingly in favour of its general direction”.

But Harper noted that as it evolved, there was no longer “clear consensus” for many parts of the bill, and the shift of public opinion was away from supporting the bill.

On the basis of the above reasons as he explained, for the final vote Harper would take into account more of his view on universal gun registration, stating that there had been increasingly restrictive legislated rules on guns in the past decade, “where registration has been followed by increased regulation, ultimately by restriction, prohibition and then by confiscation, often without compensation”, which caused “fears” among gun owners for the latest gun-control measures.

Harper concluded that the government had “over reached in a number of areas of the bill”,  and declared that “I will be supporting a wide range of the amendments to the bill, and if those amendments are not adopted I will oppose the bill on the final vote.”

Certain particular statements Harper made, “I believe there are elements of gun control and specifically of this bill that could be helpful”, and, “it is unfortunate that we cannot get a more modest package”, clearly showed that he was not against gun registration in principle.

As reviewed in Part 2 of my current article, by the early 2000s Harper was leader of the Canadian Alliance and in 2009 at the height of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair he was the prime minister.

So, did the Harper government propose changes, i.e., belated amendments in a sense, to address those concerns Harper expressed in June 1995? Harper could do this so that he and his constituents, much larger as he now led a Conservative national government, could support some of the “helpful” “elements” of gun registration.

I commented in April 2009 that, by that time, there was indeed a cost overrun with the universal gun registry – a concern, as in the quote above, Harper had expressed back in June 1995:

“Time and again in the surveys in this blog article, the controversy about the long and fruitless RCMP Airbus Affair investigation has come down not to why it took so long when the RCMP found nothing incriminating, but to why it took so long with the RCMP not disclosing what it really did or found. The investigation appeared to have run its course in the same vein as the Liberal gun-control drive: initially in 1994 then justice minister Allan Rock wanted a full handgun ban, but by 1995 it became only a gun registry, and by 2007 the running cost of the national registration topped $2 billion. ¹⁶⁸”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But to answer my own question earlier, no, Prime Minister Harper did not introduce modifications so that gun control would become acceptable as he viewed it in June 1995.

Rather, it was now Harper’s turn to “over reach” – to borrow his old words – by simply undoing the entire Chretien government gun registration, here as reported in a February 15, 2012 news story just hours before the deciding House vote on ending the universal gun registry:

“Public Safety Minister Vic Toews told reporters Wednesday, hours before the vote, that the government’s actions are long overdue.

“It does nothing to help put an end to gun crimes, nor has it saved one Canadian life,” he said.

“It criminalizes hard-working and law-abiding citizens such as farmers and sport shooters, and it has been a billion-dollar boondoggle left to us by the previous Liberal government.”

…

Meanwhile, opposition MPs and supporters of the registry are expected to say the government’s actions are a step backwards, because the registry has been useful in keeping the country’s streets safe.

Bill C-19, the Ending the Long Gun Registry Act, is guaranteed to pass through the House of Commons, thanks to the Conservative government’s majority, but more political wrangling is expected to follow.

…

Gun control has been ferociously debated in Canada for decades, particularly since the Montreal massacre of 1989, when a gunman shot and killed 14 women with a rifle. This event prompted the Liberal government of Jean Chretien to tighten gun controls and create Canada’s first mandatory long-gun registry in 1995.

Hunters and sport shooters reviled the registry, and dismantling it became a central plank of Reform, and later, Conservative party policy.

…

The Harper Conservatives now have a commanding majority in the Senate, so while Liberal senators may succeed in slowing down the passage of C-19, it will ultimately pass.

According to Bill C-19, all data pertaining to non-restricted firearms will be deleted.”

(“Conservatives and enthusiasts cheer the end of the long-gun registry”, by Jeff Davis, February 15, 2012, National Post)

As above, the universal gun registry brought in by the Chretien government was sometimes called the “long-gun registry”, because prior to it there had been a registry for handguns and restricted weapons, as mentioned earlier. It was the Chretien government’s expansion of registration, i.e., for the long guns, that would be terminated by the Harper government, and the existing registry data on these firearms would be deleted.

One can call it a further step of a public-opinion“shift”, “away” from gun control, that the “scientific” Harper had observed in June 1995 and spoken about; or call it “a step backwards” as the opposition MPs, no doubt the Liberals included, now asserted in February 2012.

From my vantage point of observation, it was another public flip-flop by Mr. Harper on gun control, the first time in 1995 from the only ‘dove’ among Reform parliamentary opposition ‘hawks’ against universal gun registration to a moderate opponent willing to accept some elements of it, and now the second time further to the Conservative government leader set to fully dismantle the expanded registration.

In any case, one of the Chretien Liberal government’s major achievements on law and order as earlier reviewed, and indeed of the Chretien era overall, would be abolished and no longer.

I should note that any legislation needed to pass the Senate, and back in late November 1995 the Chretien Liberals had been in power for only two years whereas in February 2012 the Harper Conservatives had been in power for six years, thus having had plenty more time to appoint partisan, i.e., Conservative senators.

Therefore, one can compare the news story quoted above to the news story dated November 26, 1995, quoted earlier: Harper had a “commanding majority in the Senate”, in contrast to the tireless work of persuasion the Chretien government had had to do to eventually win over, from among the Tory senators, four Quebecers and three more women who had emotional memories of the 1989 Montreal Massacre.

As reviewed and commented on earlier about the Canadian political system, a parliamentary majority commanded by a prime minister less committed to democratic practice made all things easier for the government’s objectives.

But there was always the court, and so legal recourses, in a democratic system with the rule of law.

In this case, the province of Quebec wanted to create its own gun registry. The federal government was set to destroy all old records for firearms that no longer needed registration, the Quebec government legally challenged that decision but ultimately lost in the Supreme Court of Canada; and this time, even more emotionally symbolic than in the Senate in November 1995, all Supreme Court Justices from Quebec dissented on the decision that sided with the federal government:

“By a 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court upheld an earlier Quebec Court of Appeal ruling that sided with the government on its controversial decision to abolish the federal registry for long guns in 2011.

…

In a dramatic show of solidarity, all three Quebec judges on the Supreme Court — Clement Gascon, Richard Wagner and Louis LeBel — put their names on a dissenting opinion.

With Ontario’s Rosalie Abella concurring, the minority of four upheld the legal right of the provinces to make laws in relation to property and civil rights.

They lost to the majority, which ruled that the order to destroy the data was a lawful exercise of Parliament’s legislative power to make criminal law under the Constitution.

“In our view, the decision to dismantle the long-gun registry and destroy the data that it contains is a policy choice that Parliament was constitutionally entitled to make,” wrote Thomas Cromwell and Andromache Karakastanis for the majority, a group that included Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.

…

The Harper government abolished the registry for long guns in 2011 as part of a long-standing campaign promise — a controversial political move that also emphasized Canada’s rural-urban divide.

The federal government ordered the provinces to destroy all the data they collected for the registry, something the Quebec government challenged in the courts.

…

The issue of firearm registration is a political hot potato for the Harper Conservatives, who see rural long-gun gun owners as a core political base.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently created a stir when he said guns provide “a certain level of security” to rural residents who live far from police stations.

The Liberal government created the gun registry in 1998 in response to the murder of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. They were targeted by a gunman because of their gender.”

(“Supreme Court rules Ottawa can destroy Quebec’s gun registry data”, The Canadian Press, March 27, 2015, The Record)

As cited above, Harper’s comment seemed to suggest, though the press story did not interpret it that way, that for rural residents living in remote places, the guns that they had that the government and police did not know about could make them feel more secure.

Studying the list of Supreme Court of Canada judicial appointments and retirements, I can determine that by the time of the above final court decision in March 2015 on Quebec’s challenge of the federal government’s order to destroy gun registry data, Prime Minister Harper had appointed seven of the nine sitting justices on the high court – starting with Justice Marshall Rothstein in March 2006 and ending with Justice Suzanne Côté in Decmeber 2014 – including three from Quebec but the last of them replacing the recently retired Justice Louis LeBel who had already been involved in this legal case as reported above. (“Current and Former Judges”, Supreme Court of Canada)

Thus, the four non-Quebecers appointed by Harper, together with Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, were exactly the court majority protecting the Harper government’s right to not only abolish the long-gun registry but destroy all existent data.

That was a perfect example showing that, as reviewed earlier, when the judiciary was also appointed by the prime minister the Canadian political system was, in political commentator William Thorsell’s words, “one of the world’s most centralized political power structures”.

All wasn’t lost, though, in this case. It turned out that during that time, the Canadian Information Commissioner was conducting a related investigation, and copies of the gun registry data as it existed on April 3, 2015, were provided courtesy of the RCMP and the Harper government; after the end of the Harper era, under a Liberal government – of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre Trudeau – it was disclosed that those copies were being utilized for that particular, limited purpose; pro-gun groups expressed their outrage against the RCMP:

“Canada’s gun registry isn’t gone after all.

Despite a clear vote in Parliament to destroy it, despite a Supreme Court ruling that it could be destroyed and despite assurances from politicians and top bureaucrats – including a senior Mountie – that the data was all destroyed, it turns out there are two copies left of the Quebec portion of the registry.

Questions about the existence of backup copies of the registry surfaced last week after Liberal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale tabled a bill that would give the Quebec government all the records that existed from the registry on April 3, 2015. The bill would also allow the Information Commissioner to review the records in order to settle an outstanding claim.

…

Goodale’s press secretary, Scott Bardsley, confirmed to me via email that two copies of the registry still exist all thanks to Harper era Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney.

“Under the previous administration, a complete copy of Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) from April 3, 2015 was maintained by the RCMP in a secure location due to an investigation by the Information Commissioner into an Access to Information request received in March 2012,” Bardsley said.

Another copy, this one just containing the Quebec gun registry records requested by the Information Commissioner is kept under seal by the court while the case is being heard.

…

Groups representing gun owners are furious.

Canada’s National Firearms Association, which is suing to block a Quebec registry, said this goes against a law passed by Parliament.

“It is disturbing that the records of the Quebec portion of the firearms registry have remained intact despite the clear will of Parliament to have them destroyed,” president Sheldon Clare of the NFA said.

“It is outrageous that this type of behaviour by the RCMP is tolerated in a modern democracy,” said Tony Bernardo of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association.”

(“The gun registry still exists, despite a vote to destroy it”, by Brian Lilley, June 15, 2017, Toronto Sun)

Well, a hardline prime minister who had once claimed to be a moderate could still show courtesy deferment to the democratic system.

In regard to the other major law-and-order issue of the Chretien Liberal government that I have reviewed, namely the investigation of possible corrupt, criminal activities on the part of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, as discussed in Part 2 of my current article, in 2008 Prime Minister Harper ordered the first-ever public inquiry into matters of a former or sitting prime minister, over Mulroney’s business dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber, which officially concluded that Mr. Mulroney’s conduct had been “inappropriate”.

Small that it was, or to borrow Harper’s old words, “a more modest package”, the verdict of “inappropriate” prime-ministerial conduct should stand the test of time following a long and fruitless criminal investigation under the Chretien government lasting many years into Mulroney and Airbus money.

I should also note that, at the time of Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant’s 2009-2010 inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, Harper had only a government of a parliamentary minority, and its stability was sometimes shaky; but as discussed in Part 2, Prime Minister Harper found Dr. David Johnston, President of the University of Waterloo, to advise him on the scope of the inquiry, it worked for him and Johnston was later appointed as the next Governor General of Canada.

Right after becoming the new Governor General, Dr. Johnston spoke with the media about his relationship with Prime Minister Harper:

“Canada’s new Governor General says he needs to foster a certain compatibility with the prime minister in order to fulfil his duties.

For David Johnston, the governor general is not a referee who makes calls on every play in the game, he says, but a thoughtful, apolitical adviser with a keen appreciation for Canada’s political history.

In order for his advice to be heard and heeded, he says he needs to maintain a solid relationship with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

“It does require a rapport of a kind, between the prime minister and the cabinet and the governor general,” Johnston said in a wide-ranging interview at Rideau Hall Wednesday.

Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament rather than face certain defeat of his government in December 2008 compelled former governor general Michaelle Jean to make a precedent-setting decision that led to the survival of the Conservative government a scant few weeks after it had been elected to a minority mandate.

…

Johnston was installed as the Queen’s representative in Canada last Friday. He was most recently the president of the University of Waterloo, and has spent most of his adult life in academia.

The 69-year-old was friendly and relaxed while chatting in a small, formal sitting room in Rideau Hall for his first interview with print media on Wednesday. He made frequent references to his main sources of inspiration: his family and his books.

…

Johnston was selected by a committee of constitutional experts chosen by the prime minister – a new process meant to ensure the viceregal is not directly beholden to the country’s top politician.

Still, Johnston has worked close to Harper in the past. The prime minister named him to define the terms of the politically charged inquiry into Brian Mulroney’s relationship with German businessman Karlheinz Schreiber – terms that many observers argue were favourable to the Conservatives.

With his long list of academic accomplishments, his youth spent playing hockey, his background in law and his contacts in government, Johnston might be exceedingly well-prepared for the life of a viceregal.”

(“‘Not a referee, but a thoughtful, apolitical adviser’: Governor General opens up about his plans for his new role to the media”, by Heather Scoffield, October 7, 2010, The Record)

As above, Johnston considered the governor general to be “a thoughtful, apolitical adviser with a keen appreciation for Canada’s political history”, emphasizing that “he needs to maintain a solid relationship with Prime Minister Stephen Harper”, but many observers argued that the terms he had defined for the Oliphant inquiry were “favourable to the Conservatives”.

The most notable fact about Dr. Johnston’s recommended terms for the Oliphant inquiry being favourable to Mr. Mulroney and the Harper government, as discussed in Part 2, was the exclusion of the much more serious Airbus Affair from the scope of the inquiry, leaving its focus on the modest Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

Dr. David Johnston was an accomplished legal academic with a “thoughtful” and “favourable” sense of modesty, and a talented hockey player, albeit not a medical doctor.

(Continuing to Next Part)

Who could have murdered billionaire Barry Sherman and wife Honey, two of Canada’s leading philanthropists? – Part 2: antagonists in the family and community circles

 

(Continued from Part 1)

Of the brand-name pharmaceutical companies that have tussled with businessman Barry Sherman and his generic drug maker Apotex, Canada’s largest pharmaceutical company, the Canadian company Deprenyl Research stood out in my review in Part 1 for the reasons that their conflicts highlighted the aggressive competitiveness of Sherman and Apotex in wrestling market share from a small Canadian company – as opposed to from international Big Pharma as in the public-relations image Sherman and Apotex carefully projected.

The case of Deprenyl Research stood out also because of the unique predicament and character of its owner, Dr. Morton Shulman, a former Ontario provincial Chief Coroner, member of the legislature and media personality, and Parkinson’s disease sufferer who used the drug deprenyl, obtained its Canadian rights and started the company to sell it under the name Eldepryl. Shulman engaged in very public, but ultimately futile, personal and legal struggles to try to fend off the aggressive drive by Sherman to take the deprenyl market through a much cheaper generic version developed by Apotex.

As cited in Part 1, Shulman became so critical of Sherman that he once described Sherman as, “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever”, cited from an April 2018 Maclean’s magazine article investigating the unsolved December 2017 double murder of Sherman and his wife.

That comment was in fact made in a media interview in the early 1990s in relation to Shulman’s dispute with Sherman, here quoted from a news story not long after:

“Sherman contends that the Eldepryl rights held by Deprenyl Research Ltd., the company Shulman founded in 1987, are invalid. Sherman expects federal approval early this year to sell his copycat version.

Shulman, having retired from Deprenyl Research, has had to resort to guerrilla tactics to get back at Sherman. When writing prescriptions last year he began to specify that Apotex medicines could not be used to fill them. Apotex sued for $1 million for defamation. Shulman then modified his manoeuvre so that his prescriptions could be filled only by brand-name or drugs made by Apotex’s rival, Novopharm. But Shulman quit doing even that because of the lawsuit. While a recent settlement forbids him to talk about Sherman, he made his feelings clear in an earlier interview. “Barry Sherman,” he said, “is the only person I’ve ever met with no redeeming features.””

(“A hard pill to swallow”, by Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

Shulman also hurled an even more demeaning expression at Sherman, referring to Barry Sherman’s initials:

“Just ask Morton Shulman, the Toronto multimillionaire physician, investor and drug entrepreneur. He has viewed Sherman as the sum of his initials since tangling with him over Eldepryl, a treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Shulman, who suffers from the illness, bought the Canadian rights from the the patent-holder in Hungary seven years ago. Sherman wants to copy it. “Let me tell you why I’m upset,” Shulman said last year. “I took five years of my life to bring this drug in. Saved my life, saved the lives of tens of thousands of others. And then this son of a bitch comes along.””

(Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

Now, while the notion of Sherman having “no redeeming features” was personally offensive but understandable – as reviewed in Part 1, in his drive to take the deprenyl market Sherman made aggressive threats to Shulman and escalated the dispute in manners that were degrading toward Shulman – the “son of a bitch” invective, for someone of Shulman’s cultural creed and social achievements – both he and Sherman were distinguished members of the Jewish community and the Canadian society – was rather off-base.

Barry Sherman, in fact, had a shy and reserved personality since childhood, in contrast to his aggressiveness in business. Joel Ulster, a friend from his high school days who at Sherman’s funeral in December 2017 called himself Sherman’s “oldest friend” as in Part 1, had known it well and talked about it decades ago in 1992:

““It’s always been remarkable for me to see him speaking in public or in business, because socially he’s so much different,” said Joel Ulster, Sherman’s oldest and closest friend. The two met in high school.

Sherman, the younger of two children, was born in 1942 in Toronto and grew up near Bathurst north of St. Clair.

His parents wanted to call him Barry, but thinking that didn’t sound formal enough, registered his name as Bernard.

“He was shy. That’s still true of him today. He’s always very intense, hard-working, highly focused, the most intelligent person I’ve ever come across,” Ulster said in an interview.

And other acquaintances confirm that the same Barry Sherman who now regularly bites the heads off government bureaucrats will show up at a party and stand by himself, barely speaking unless spoken to.

“But in business he didn’t care if it were 1,000 people against one, as long as he thought he was right. He has supreme confidence . . . and there has been personal animosity toward him because he’s direct, aggressive and confident.””

(“One in an occasional series: Brash upstart builds firm into generic drug empire”, by Allan Thompson, February 11, 1992, Toronto Star)

As Ulster said, Sherman had a personality of “supreme confidence” and became aggressive when he thought he was right.

That “supreme confidence” had been validated and boosted early by Sherman’s own experience.

Sherman had graduated from high school as the Ontario province’s top student:

“Not every kid is so fortunate, as Sherman well knows. Look up his picture in the 1959 – ’60 yearbook of Forest Hill Collegiate Institute in Toronto, and you see a shy, studious teenager who listed his activities as the electronics club and the camera club. Even then, though, he was driven to succeed, graduating as the province’s top student.”

(Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

Such a pinnacle of achievement at high school was attained by Sherman despite having lost his father when he was only 10 years old and having to earn his living during his school years:

“Where did his ambition come from? Let Sherman take a stab at answering: “If you asked a psychologist, they would look into my background. And one thing that stands out is that my father died suddenly when I was 10 years old, [leaving] our family in a quite insecure position.”

In fact, their provider’s heart attack left Sherman, his older sister and his mother with virtually nothing, he recalls, except the mortgage on the house they had moved into a few years earlier in Upper Forest Hill Village, a well-off neighborhood in Toronto. After the death, “my mother went to work right away and I got part-time jobs and my mother took boarders into the house,” Sherman says. “We had someone living in the basement and in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and it was all my mother could manage to hold onto the house and try to put us through school.”

Sherman worked as a stockboy at Honest Ed’s, a discount retail emporium that is Toronto’s contribution to global kitsch. During the summers, he helped out at his Uncle Lou Winter’s small generic-drug company, Empire Laboratories Inc. With this money and scholarships, “I was not a financial burden to my mother,” he says.”

(Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

The most notable of Sherman’s teenage odd jobs mentioned above was at Empire Laboratories Inc., a small generic drug company owned by his uncle Lou winter, where Sherman worked during the summers.

It shows that Sherman’s generic drug business success had early family influences.

Next, the academically exceling Sherman graduated top of his class in engineering physics from the University of Toronto, and then in only two-and-a-half years completed both a Master’s degree in astronautics and a Ph.D. degree in systems engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before returning to Toronto and became an owner of Empire Laboratories at only 25 years old, prior to founding his own Apotex:

“SHERMAN WAS A VERY BRIGHT student. He went to the University of Toronto to study engineering physics and again graduated first in his class. Then he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a master’s in astronautics and a PhD in systems engineering. He earned both degrees in two and a half years — about half the normal time.

In the meantime, Uncle Lou had died and Empire Labs was up for sale. The 25-year-old Sherman teamed up with a group of investors to buy it in 1967.  They sold out in 1973, and a year later Sherman founded Apotex.”

(Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

Now one may wonder: why did the young Barry Sherman, with a bright scientific and engineering future ahead of him, return home to take over a small generic drug company that had been his uncle’s and where he had only done summer work as teenager?

Surely his excellent performances in years of engineering science studies and his graduate degrees from a world-leading academic institution must have opened up a whole new world in his horizon.

Precisely. Decades later in 1996 Sherman began to write an autobiography, and he recalled his impressive academic achievements in considerable details:

“I did not excel as a student either in primary school or in the earlier years of high school. However, as time went on, not only did I become more motivated and competitive, but I discovered that I had unusually strong skills in mathematics and the sciences. When in grade 13, I won first place in a national physics contest for high school students, and I graduated from high school with thirteen “firsts” (i.e., subjects with an “A” grade), more than any other student in the province of Ontario. …

…

In September 1960, I began undergraduate studies in Engineering Physics (now Engineering Science) at the University of Toronto. I specifically chose Engineering Physics because it was reputed to be the most difficult of programs related to mathematics and the physical sciences.

Grade averages of all students were published annually by the University. Among all students in the Faculty of Engineering, I ranked fourth in first year, third in second year, second in third year, and first in the fourth and final year. Upon graduation, I was thus awarded the Wilson Medal for standing first in Engineering Physics and the Gold Medal of the Association of Professional Engineers for standing first in the entire faculty. It seems that the tougher the going got, the better I did.

…

In 1963, while in my third year of Engineering Physics, I was one of two Canadian students selected by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for its summer program for promising undergraduates. I spent several weeks in classes at Columbia University in New York City, followed by a several week tour of major NASA installations throughout the U.S., including the launch facility at Cape Canaveral.

After completing the fourth and final year of Engineering Physics in May 1994, I went to work for the summer at the Spar Aerospace Division of DeHavilland Aircraft in Toronto. My assignment related to analysis of the vibrational dynamics of the ISIS satellite, which was then being designed.

My first choice of a university for graduate work was M.I.T. (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology). I was accepted into the graduate program in M.I.T.’s Department of Aeronautics of Astronautics and was awarded a fellowship which covered both tuition and living costs. I thus set out for Boston and M.I.T. in September 1964.

I had expected that graduate work at M.I.T. would be much more challenging than undergraduate studies at the U. of T., and that competition would be much tougher. I was surprised to find otherwise.

… My gradepoint average on leaving M.I.T. was a perfect 5.0.

My Ph.D. thesis was entitled Precision Gravity Gradient Satellite Altitude Control.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, A Legacy of Thought, Preface dated December 27, 1996, posted online by The Globe and Mail)

I especially note that Sherman earned his achievements in exceptional precision and remarkable progression: winning a national physics contest in Grade 13 and graduating high school with a province-leading 13 “firsts”; and ranking 4th in 1st year, 3rd in 2nd year, 2nd in 3rd year and first in final year at university, winning 2 medals and being one of 2 Canadian students selected to travel U.S.-wide with NASA.

More importantly, to understand why he then left the academics to take over a small business back home, I note that Sherman had thought MIT studies would be tough but it turned out to be easy for him. This meant that the aura of aerospace science and engineering was not that “challenging” anymore for Sherman once he had breezed through MIT.

Add to the above point the fact that doing summer work for his Uncle Lou Winter years earlier had given the young boy a taste of ‘business success’, an experience he later told in his memoir in more vivid details than about any of his academic achievements, describing his work there as “of critical importance in my future career”:

“The summer of 1960, 1961 and 1962 were spent working for my mother’s younger brother, Louis Winter. Uncle Lou was a biochemist. He had, some years earlier, founded Winter Laboratories which was a medical testing laboratory, located on Barton Street in Toronto, the bulk of its work being pregnancy tests done on urine samples picked up from drug stores. He had also more recently started Empire Laboratories, which was a small distributor of generic prescription drugs. Empire Laboratories operated out of a converted house on Ossington Avenue. The operation at that location consisted of the repackaging of tablets and capsules purchased in bulk from American generic manufacturers.

I spent the summer of 1960 and 1961 as a driver, picking up urine samples from and delivering pharmaceuticals to pharmacies.

In 1962, Lou established his first pharmaceutical manufacturing operation at 77 Florence St. That summer, I worked at the plant helping set up operations.

Earlier that year Lou’s wife, Beverly, had been diagnosed as having leukemia, and he decided to take off several weeks for a vacation with her in Bermuda. The staff was small and Lou left no one in particular in charge. He was also unreachable by telephone. Before he left, Empire had been awarded a contract to supply ASA tablets under the private label of the recently established Towers Department Stores. Lou had arranged the production of what he thought was ample inventory, but, a few days after he left, the Towers office phoned to advise that sales were larger than expected to ask us to supply much larger quantities.

I took it upon myself to phone Mrs. Pani Relle, at Atlantic Chemicals, who was the supplier of ASA, and negotiated with her purchase a substantially increased quantity at a substantially lower price. I also organized around-the-clock production to fill the orders. Upon his return, Uncle Lou was very pleased with what I had done.

Although I did not know it at the time, these summers at Empire Laboratories would later prove to be of critical importance to my future career.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As recalled above, even though Empire Laboratories was only a small generic drug company, working his summer job there Sherman had taken part in starting its manufacturing operation, and then when his Uncle Louis Winter and sick wife Beverly was away on vacation and an opportunity arose for substantially increasing production for a major contract, the young man took charge to lead all the necessary work, successfully.

And so, after completing his MIT Ph.D., at which time his Uncle Lou and wife Beverley had both died, Sherman found it more alluring to give up astronautical engineering and explore the prospect of taking over Empire Labs, which he referred to as “a scientific business”:

“In the first week of November 1965, during my second year at M.I.T., I received a phone call in the middle of the night. On hearing the phone ring, I expected that it would be a call to tell me that Beverly Winter, my Uncle Lou’s wife, had died, as she was then terminally ill with Leukemia. I was astounded to be told by my sister, Sandra, not that Beverly had died, but that Lou, who was then forty-one years of age had died. He had suffered a heart attack at his office and been taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital where he died soon after arrival. St. Joseph’s was the very hospital in which his wife, Beverly, lay terminally ill. I went to Toronto for Lou’s funeral, and I visited Beverly at St. Joseph’s Hospital. … Three weeks later, I had to return to Toronto again for Beverly’s funeral.

Lou and Beverley Winter left behind four sons, all of whom were subsequently adopted by Dr. Martin Barkin and his wife, Carole.

In their wills Lou and Beverly had appointed as executors and trustees of their estates the Royal Trust Company and two lawyers, David Ward and Martin O’Brien. By the time I obtained my Ph.D. in January 1967, I had decided that I did not want to seek employment as an astronautical engineer. I was interested in both science and business, and I also wanted to return to Toronto to live. Thus, in January 1967, I returned to Toronto to seek out an opportunity in a scientific business.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As one can see, his early family influence and experience were important. Without his Uncle Lou’s business, Sherman might not have had the idea of a generic drug business future in his mind when he completed his academic studies and began his working career.

Going beyond the narrative of Sherman’s memoir  A Legacy of Thoughts, a 2008 Toronto Life magazine story republished in December 2017 after the unexpected deaths of Barry Sherman and wife Honey, quoted in Part 1, intimated that Sherman had been made his Uncle Lou Winter’s legal heir until the Winters’ own children came along – adopted son Tim in 1958, and sons Jeffery, Kerry and Dana respectively in 1960, 1961 and 1962:

“If there’s a science gene, Barry inherited it. Two of his mother’s brothers were doctors. A third, Lou Winter, a biochemist with a keen business sense, was the relative he most resembled. After Herbert Sherman’s death, Lou became Barry’s father figure and mentor, bringing him into his drug business, Empire Laboratories, when he was 18.

Barry was made his uncle’s legal heir when it seemed that Lou and his wife, Beverley, couldn’t have children. Then, in 1958, Lou and Beverley adopted a baby boy, Tim, and, as sometimes happens, Beverley became pregnant. She gave birth to Jeffrey in 1960, Kerry in 1961 and Dana in 1962. Shortly after the last birth, Beverley was diagnosed with leukemia, and the couple escaped to Bermuda for a last vacation. Barry, still an undergrad, took charge of the plant. He did an admirable job.”

(“Bitter Pill”, by Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

With that pre-history of having at one time been the Winter family heir, after the deaths of Uncle Lou and his wife Empire Laboratories was, in a sense, a ‘family business’ Sherman could feel entitled to.

But Sherman, by this time an MIT Ph.D., considered Empire Labs a “scientific business” that he had working knowledge of, one that in 1967 he and his friend Joel Ulster wanted to acquire:

“When I returned to Toronto in early 1967, Joel Ulster was working toward Certification as a Chartered Accountant and was employed at a firm of accountants. We had an understanding that, if we could arrange and finance a suitable acquisition, he would leave accounting and join me as my partner.

The obvious target was Empire Laboratories, the generic pharmaceutical firm which had been founded by my Uncle Lou. Not only was it a scientific business, but I had knowledge of it, having worked for Lou in the summers of 1960, 1961 and 1962.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

I note the curious coincidence that the three years when Sherman worked the summer for his Uncle Lou’s Empire Labs, 1960-1962, were also the years when the Winters’ biological sons were born.

The perspective above, “a scientific business”, was from Sherman’s 1996 memoir.

Ten years later, in an interview for a January 29, 2007 The Globe and Mail story, Sherman recalled a different perspective in his efforts to take over Empire Labs, one that was quite ‘family special’:

“On Nov. 5, 1965, Mr. Winter died suddenly at the age of 41. His wife, Beverley, died a few days later. Their four young children — Dana, Kerry, Paul, Jeffery — were adopted by another family, the Barkins. Royal Trust was appointed executor of Mr. Winter’s estate and took control of Empire.

Shortly after Mr. Winter’s death, Mr. Sherman offered to buy the company but Royal Trust turned him down. Two years later Royal Trust put the business up for sale, and Mr. Sherman and a partner submitted an offer. “I said if you are going to sell it and there are other buyers, I suggest you give me first right of refusal because that’s something my uncle would have wanted,” Mr. Sherman recalled in an interview, adding that the company was facing insolvency. Royal Trust received two offers, according to court filings, and Mr. Sherman’s bid won.”

(“At Apotex, a family feud comes to the fore”, by Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

In the above, one of the Winter sons, the adopted “Tim”, was referred to as “Paul”.

As above, “that’s something my uncle would have wanted”, was an argument that Sherman recalled in 2007 he had made in 1967 to Royal Trust which oversaw his late Uncle Lou Winter’s estate, on why he should be given preference over other suitors of Empire Laboratories.

In other words, when he saw the need, Sherman did not hesitate to emphasize his special family relationship with the deceased owner of that “scientific business”.

Similarly to his knowledge of generic drug business, Sherman’s interest in using lawyers and legal litigation to sustain and further his business – critical for Apotex’s success as reviewed in Part 1 – was also acquired early when he was an owner of Empire Labs.

In his memoir, Sherman detailed two critical legal episodes during that time.

The first was a criminal prosecution of Empire Labs that needed to be fought off.

It came as Empire Labs had just entered a rapid expansion period following the 1969 enactment of a legislation by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government to let generic drug companies compete more easily with the brand-name drug companies:

“Another major step forward for the generic industry came in 1969. Prior to that time, Section 41 of the Canadian Patent Act provide for compulsory licensing under pharmaceutical patents, only if the licensee produced the chemical in Canada. Few licenses had been issued, because the costs of setting up chemical synthesis were high and the potential generic sales in the Canadian market were relatively small.

In 1969, the Liberal Party was in power in Ottawa, and Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister. Bill C-102 was introduced by John Turner as Minister of Consumer Affairs. When the Bill was passed and given royal assent, Ron Bassford was Minister of Consumer Affairs and Turner has been moved to Justice. Pursuant to Bill C-102, Section 41 was amended to provide that compulsory licenses could now be obtained for importation of pharmaceuticals.

We promptly incorporated S & U Chemicals Limited as a subsidiary of Sherman and Ulster Limited, and, through that subsidiary, we applied for and obtained numerous compulsory licenses.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

In Sherman’s recollection above, the passing of Bill C-102 by the Trudeau government was a “major step forward” for the Canadian generic industry.

In light of this earlier history, it was natural that decades later in 2015 Barry Sherman played a prominent role in Toronto hosting election campaign fundraising for Liberal Party Leader Justin Trudeau, the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s son who would win and become also prime minister.

Back in the Empire Labs days, the criminal charge the company soon faced in 1970 resulted from a complaint that some of the generic ampicillin capsules newly marketed by the company were subpotent, i.e., they did not contain a sufficient amount of the required active ingredient:

“It turned out that getting the licenses was the easy part.

Pursuant to the Regulations under the federal Food and Drugs Act, it was unlawful to sell a “new drug” without first filing a submission with the Food and Drugs Directorate (“FDD”) to satisfy the Directorate as to safety and effectiveness. A “new drug” was defined as one that had not been sold in Canada for long enough and in sufficient quantity to be generally accepted as safe and effective.

The Directorate began to take the position, somewhat arbitrarily, that if a brandname product was on the market before 1963, a generic equivalent would not be considered to be a new drug, but, if the original brandname product had been introduced more recently, a generic product could not be sold unless the generic manufacturer filed and obtained approval of its own New Drug Submission.

The most significant patented product which was not then considered to be New Drug was ampicillin capsules, sold under the brandname Ampicin and Penbrittin by two brandname manufacturers pursuant to an agreement between them.

At Empire Laboratories we worked quickly to ensure that we could be the first to launch generic ampicillin capsules, and we succeeded to do so in 1970.

A few months later we received a visit by an inspector from the FDD. He advised us that one of the brandname manufacturers had purchased and tested several lots of our ampicillin capsules and found one to be subpotent, the minimum acceptable potency being ninety percent of the amount per capsule stated on the label. The FDD laboratory had confirmed the low potency. The inspector suggested that we recall the lot from all pharmacies to which it had been shipped. We asked the inspector to give us one day to retest the product ourselves. Our retesting indicated the potency to be within the required limits. We so advised the inspector, but he stated that, nevertheless, we would be well advised to recall this lot in view of the low result found by the FDD laboratory and the “politically sensitive” nature of this product, which was the first introduced under the new expanded compulsory licensing provisions.

The inspector assured us, although not in writing, that, if we did the recall, there would be no action against us by FDD. In any event, recalls were commonly done when some problem was detected after sale, and there had never been a prosecution in such a case so long as the manufacturer acted responsibly.

A few weeks later, an RCMP officer served us with a summons informing us that Sherman and Ulster Limited, operating as Empire Laboratories, had been charged with a criminal offence under the Food and Drugs Act for having sold a subpotent product.

It became clear that, notwithstanding the passage of Bill C-102, the brandname companies still had strong influence over the workings of government.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As told, the allegation had originated from a brand-name drug company, and according to Sherman the incident showed that the enactment of Bill C-102 was an exception in a government regulatory system otherwise still strongly influenced by the brand-name drug companies.

On the other hand, I note that, as reviewed in Part 1, lacking sufficient active ingredients has been a repeated deficiency of Apotex generic drugs as found by government health regulators and noted by the court over the years. In the above case in the earlier Empire Labs days, it was also alleged to be a problem and led to a rare criminal charge.

In this case, the legal defence representing Empire Labs was able to prove the prosecutorial evidence’s weakness and win an acquittal, thanks to Willard (“Bud”) Estey, a prominent attorney the company retained:

“To defend us, we retained Willard (“Bud”) Estey, a prominent attorney who subsequently became a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. When the matter eventually came to court we were acquitted. The Crown had relied on a single test by a junior chemist, who was shown on cross-examination to have made several errors.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

The second major legal case fought by Empire Labs under Sherman was a lawsuit the company launched against a government agency in order to stay in business.

At the time in the early 1970s, the province of Ontario had a PARCOST program, instituted under the leadership of Assistant Deputy Health Minister Dr. Alan E. Dyer in 1968 – a year before the federal government’s enactment of Bill C-102 – allowing generic drugs to be used as substitutes for brand-name drugs:

“Prior to 1968, in every province except Alberta, when a prescription was written by a physician using a brandname, a pharmacist was required by law to use only the brand as written, and could not substitute an equivalent generic product.

In 1968, Dr. Alan E. Dyer was an Assistant Deputy Minister in the Ontario Ministry of Health, and responsible for pharmaceutical policy. Dr. Dyer understood that drug prices of brandname products were excessive, and that, if they were to be reduced, it would be necessary to substitute generic products for brandname products.

However, there was substantial concern about whether or not all generic products were of good quality, as the regulations under the Federal Food and Drugs Act were weak, and did not include sufficient requirements to ensure good manufacturing practices.

Dr. Dyer designed a program entitled PARCOST, which was an acronym for Prescriptions at Reasonable Cost. The Ontario Ministry of Health would establish an expert committee, entitled the Drug Quality and Therapeutics Committee. The Committee would inspect all manufacturers, review product documents and test results, and decide which brandname and generic products were of satisfactory quality. The products meeting the requirements would be listed in a Parcost Formulary. Pharmacists would be entitled to use any product listed in the Formulary in place of an equivalent brandname product, unless the physician specified “no substitution”.

The necessary amendments to the Pharmacy Act were passed by the Ontario Legislature in 1968.

Dr. Dyer and his Committee came to inspect Empire Laboratories. …

…

Despite my apparent gaffe, the first edition of the Parcost Formulary included most of our products, as well as some from Novopharm, along with most brandname products. The products of several generic manufacturers, not deemed to have adequate quality controls, were excluded. Some brandname products were also excluded by reason of inadequate quality control.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

A serious problem arose for Empire Labs in 1971 when a large number of complaints against it lodged to a federal government Department led to a government board decision to delist the company’s products from the Ontario Parcost Formulary, and Sherman’s attempt to try to resolve the problem with the official in charge, Dr. G. Showalter, did not help:

“Our most significant crisis in the “the Empire Years” arose on January 25, 1971. On that date, we received a letter from Dr. G. Showalter, an employee of the federal Department of Supplies and Services, who purported to act as Chairman of a board which selected drug suppliers acceptable to his Department. Dr. Showalter’s letter included a list of about fifteen complaints about Empire products that had been received by the Board, and stated that the Board had reviewed the complaints and found them to be valid, and that for this reason and “other reasons”, the Board had removed Empire Laboratories from the list of approved suppliers. The letter further stated that notice of our delisting had already been sent to all users of the list.

It appeared that Dr. Showalter and his Board had never heard of the principles of natural justice with which, according to common law, all judicial and quasi-judicial bodies must comply.

…

We immediately panicked. Listing by the Showalter’s Board was a prerequisite for becoming and remaining listed in the Ontario Parcost Formulary, and was also a prerequisite to being a supplier to most hospitals and other major customers.

Dr. Showalter had already left his office for the day. I obtained his home phone number from Ottawa Information and phoned him at home. … He told me that the decision would not be changed by threats from me and he hung up the phone.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Empire Labs again retained the prominent attorney Willard Estey, launched legal court proceedings, and was able to force the government board to back down from its decision against the company:

“The next day we met with Willard Estey and instructed him to initiate legal action against Dr. Showalter of the Board. Within a few days, Estey filed in the appropriate Court an application for a Writ of Certiorari quashing the Board’s decision and a Writ of Mandamus compelling relisting.

Estey also drafted for us a letter to Dr. Dyer at the Ontario Ministry of Health cautioning him not to delist our products on the basis of the Board’s decision as the validity of that decision was before the Courts. Dr. Dyer agreed to refrain from any steps pending the outcome of our attack on the Board’s decision.

Within two weeks, and before the matter could come to a hearing in the Court, Dr. Showalter and his Board backed down and relisted our company. Dr. Showalter and the Board did not bother us again thereafter.

This was the first time in my career that I found it necessary to initiate a legal action. It was to be the first of many.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As recalled by Sherman, the above case was the first that he found necessary to initiate a legal action, and would become “the fist of many”.

In this critical case, as in the previous case of defending against a criminal charge, the lawyer whom Sherman’s Empire Labs relied on to fight the legal battles was Willard (“Bud”) Estey, described in an earlier quote from Sherman’s memoir as “a prominent attorney who subsequently became a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada”.

Sherman wasn’t quite accurate in that description, though.

Here is a chronology of Justice Willard Estey’s academic pedigree, law practices and judgeships quoted from his Supreme Court of Canada biography:

“… He studied at the University of Saskatchewan, obtaining a B.A. in 1940 and an LL.B. two years later. In 1942 he was called to the bar of Saskatchewan but served with the armed forces during the Second World War rather than practising law. He then went to Harvard Law School and completed an LL.M. in 1946. He taught law at the University of Saskatchewan for a year then was called to the bar of Ontario in 1947 and joined the Toronto firm of Robertson, Fleury & Lane, later named Robertson, Lane, Parrett & Estey. In 1973 he was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal and two years later was named Chief Justice of the High Court of Justice of Ontario. He became Chief Justice of Ontario in 1976 and was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada on September 29, 1977. In 1985 he chaired the Commission of Inquiry into the Collapse of the CCB and Northland Bank. Justice Estey served on the Supreme Court for 10 years and retired on April 22, 1988. …”

(“The Honourable Willard Zebedee Estey”, September 4, 2008, Supreme Court of Canada)

More precisely, in 1970-1971 working on the Empire Labs cases Mr. Estey was a prominent attorney in law practice, and he “subsequently” became a Justice in Ontario in 1973, then became Chief Justice in two Ontario courts successively, before being appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in September 1977 – a full six years after representing Empire Labs in its two cases against the government.

But I also notice that Justice Estey was actually the son of an earlier Supreme Court of Canada Justice, James Wilfred Estey:

“Willard Zebedee Estey was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on October 10, 1919. He is the son of James Wilfred Estey, a Supreme Court of Canada justice, and Muriel Baldwin. …”

(September 4, 2008, Supreme Court of Canada)

Thus, at the time when Barry Sherman utilized Willard Estey’s legal expertise in Empire Labs’ critical legal disputes with the government, Estey was not close to becoming a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

On the other hand, Estey was prominent in the legal field no doubt not only as an attorney but also as a son of a former justice of Canada’s highest court.

Therefore, Morton Shulman who in the early 1990s had fierce disputes with Barry Sherman, as reviewed in Part 1 and refreshed at the start of Part 2 of this blog article, was quite unapt airing his anger by calling Sherman “son of a bitch”, not only because Sherman’s aggression did not come from bad behaviour per se but rather from his competitiveness when he believed he was right – as discussed earlier.

That invective by Shulman was unapt also because, as the above review of history reveals, shrouded behind Sherman’s intellectual brilliance was considerable attention to preference for family distinction, be it that of his generic drug company founder uncle, that of a former Justice of the Court of the land, or that of a former Prime Minister of the nation.

The other contemptuous expression Shulman used to describe Sherman, “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever”, that I deem more reasonable given Shulman’s experience with Sherman as reviewed in Part 1, is quoted there from Maclean’s investigative article in April 2018 on the Shermans’ deaths. Here is a fuller quote in the context of Sherman’s reputation in general:

“… A renowned risk-taker, disruptor and pitbull professionally, Sherman was a polarizing figure—regarded as a softie with a heart of gold by those in his proximity and loathed by those who claim they were outfoxed or betrayed by him. The man who learned weeks before his death of his nomination to the Order of Canada was also called out as unethical in business dealings. The late physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Morton Shulman, who did battle with Sherman, called him “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever.””

(“The other side of Barry Sherman”, by Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As described, Sherman was “regarded as a softie with a heart of gold by those in his proximity and loathed by those who claim they were outfoxed or betrayed by him”.

As a general characterization, such could suggest a personality relying on nepotism and favouritism to operate like in a tight-knit cult, but using deception and manipulation to deal with others more generally, and that Shulman’s impression came as a result of having been met with intransigent deception and manipulation.

I have commented in Part 1 that the media coverage of Shulman’s pharmaceutical business disputes with Sherman in the 1990s was like a “beacon of light” – a well-documented example of Sherman’s behaviour in business dealings with others, which has been criticised like in the above quote but usually not reported in details.

Right after the Shermans’ deaths in December 2017, Toronto Life magazine’s republished article, previously appearing in July 2008, noted that in his autobiography, i.e., the 1996 memoir quoted extensively earlier, Sherman described his “logical” views on morality, asserting that it isn’t an intrinsic human value:

“In his autobiography, he described himself as recognizing no God and rejecting religion and free will in favour of “logical deduction.” He wrote about the instinct to co-operate with others, particularly relatives, when it was to “mutual advantage.” There can be no such thing as “altruism, kindness, generosity or morality,” he says, because humans act only in pursuit of their own happiness.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

As cited above, the view that there can be no “altruism, kindness, generosity or morality” could well be Sherman’s justification of his own personality and behaviour that incurred others’ criticisms and hostility.

So let’s look at what exactly Sherman wrote in his memoir:

“I cannot see that human behaviour differs in any fundamental way from that of numerous species on the savannahs of Serengeti. We are all driven by our instincts to eat, drink, copulate, protect ourselves and our young, and cooperate with others, particularly those most closely related to us, if and when it is to our mutual advantage. Happiness is, I believe, best defined as satisfaction of these drives, and it is that which we all pursue.

…

Although we all share the same drives, it is clear that individuals exhibited these drives in different proportions, be it as a result of genetic differences, differing environmental influences, and differing opportunities.

Individuals who help others to an unusual extent, are considered to be “kind”, “moral” or “generous”, although, if my thesis that everything is done in pursue of happiness is correct, then there can be no such thing as altruistic, kindness, generosity or morality.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Sherman’s thesis in the above was that personality attributes such as altruism, kindness, generosity and morality, namely unusual extents of willingness to help others, are actually driven by the person’s pursue of happiness.

In his memoir, following the above quoted passages Sherman immediately trained his unsparing criticism on organized religion, and on the notion of “salvation” through religious practice:

“I have always felt disdain for organized religion and for the foolishness or hypocrisy of clergymen who sell religion as a source of morality or everlasting life. Undoubtedly, there are many persons who are both committed to religion and generous, but I see no general correlation. Indeed, countless clergymen and others who espouse religion live in relative opulence while much of humanity languishes in squalor. If anything, from my experience in fundraising for charitable organizations, I have sensed a reverse correlation. Atheists often are enormously more generous than persons obsessively committed to seemingly absurd religious rituals. It may be that persons who believe that they get salvation from observance of rituals feel less need to derive happiness from helping others.

Voltaire said that: “Nobless Oblige”; with power and wealth comes obligation. I do not see any rational basis for that pronouncement. There is no objective basis to hold that anyone is obligated to do anything not required by law. Each person can be expected only to pursue personal happiness in whatever manner he sees best from his own perspective.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

In reading the above, I find that Sherman’s “logical deduction” did not quite explain why the atheists’ generosity was “enormously more” than the religiously committed, and hence did not quite rule out that their generosity came, if only partly, from “obligation” – even if he did not view that as necessary.

Nevertheless, in his philosophizing in the two quotes above was, I find, Sherman’s answer to Shulman’s proclamation that Sherman was “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever”.

Simply put, Sherman did not need to show “kindness” in the concrete toward Shulman’s predicament nor did he need redemption, but like everyone else only needed to be law-abiding – I should however point out that, as in Part 1, Sherman’s mail marketing of drugs into the U.S. market was viewed illegal by Shulman and confirmed so by an FBI criminal investigation in 1993-1995.

For Sherman, his greater pursue of personal happiness led him to become one of the “leading”, “most active” and “most generous” philanthropists in Canada – praises of Sherman, quoted in Part 1, by some top politicians and community leaders after his death – in contrast to the many clergymen and others who pursued salvation through religious observance.

These philosophical musings by Barry Sherman in his unfinished memoir, the preface of which was marked as written in Serengeti, Tanzania, on December 27, 1996, could indeed have begun as an intellectual response to the moral contempt and dismissive publicly aired by his nemesis Morton Shulman just a few years earlier around 1993 at the height of their business disputes.

As quoted earlier, the memoir also extensively recalled Sherman’s academic years and his early years in the pharmaceutical industry.

From what I have found in the press archives, it was about ten years later in 2006 that Barry Sherman began to tell the media about this unfinished and unpublished memoir of his, which he envisioned to be turned into a full account of his history but that had yet to be done.

At the time, Sherman was preoccupied with a major legal fight with the international Big Pharma companies Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, over Apotex’s push in the U.S. market for its generic version of the heart drug Plavix as detailed in Part 1; and so Sherman mentioned his memoir in this context, stating that a chapter on the present could include “certain things” that would “end them up in prison”:

“The opening chapters of a draft autobiography sit amid the hundreds of pill bottles and mound of legal documents in Dr. Bernard Sherman’s office. It will be the story of a brainy kid born in Toronto who becomes Canada’s richest generic drug mogul.

Though a work in progress, it has the makings of a page turner. One chapter will recount how an employee from a brand-name drug company offered to sell him secret files. Another, he says, will describe how Dr. Sherman caught a rival stealing the recipe for a blockbuster generic developed by his company, Apotex.

But what promises to be the book’s most riveting chapter is still unfolding. It is the part where Dr. Sherman seemingly outsmarts two big drug companies, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, to market the first generic form of the big-selling heart drug Plavix five years before its patent expires. And it could conceivably end with someone in jail.

“They couldn’t see that maybe certain things were going to end them up in prison,” Dr. Sherman said during an interview in the Toronto building where his generic Plavix copy is being made.”

(“Generic drug, specific issue: Apotex fights Plavix”, by Stephanie Saul, August 16, 2006, National Post)

Such a vindicating victory envisioned above did not happen for Sherman, at least not to the extent of Part 1’s review on the Plavix dispute.

Neither did Sherman memoir’s chapters for his recent history actually happen: a total of 13 chapters were planned but only the first five have been fully or partially written.

The year after in 2007, Sherman submitted his unfinished memoir as a part of legal files for a civil lawsuit case in his family, and it received some media attention on its contents. The media wondered who Barry Sherman really was, “a cutthroat businessman?”, “a strings-attached benefactor?”, etc., as in a November 24, 2007 The Globe and Mail story:

“So who, exactly, is Barry Sherman? Is he a cutthroat businessman? A strings-attached benefactor? Or just a munificent, self-confessed workaholic?

In 1996, the drug baron asked himself some of those same questions. During a family trip to the Serengeti, he stepped back for a moment of reflection and
started writing a memoir called A Legacy of Thoughts. It has never been published – in fact, it sat in his desk until it surfaced in the family’s recent legal fight. But his biographical notes shed light on one of the country’s more reclusive business icons.”

(“The real Barry Sherman”, by Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Citing from the memoir, the above news story reported Sherman’s childhood experience and academic excellence – some of it discussed earlier quoting from his memoir:

“Barry Sherman’s mother named him Bernard, thinking that it sounded distinguished. But he was so slow, his Grade 5 teachers called him “grandpa.”

The shy, awkward child, born in 1942, also had few friends growing up and difficulty keeping up with students in the classroom. Summer camp wasn’t much better – he hated it so much that one year he enrolled in a military program instead, only to find he loathed the mindless drills.

But, according to his memoir, there were early flashes of the future tycoon’s work ethic.

The only son of a zipper manufacturer, Barry would occasionally join his father at the factory. One Saturday, as his dad, Herbert, worked in his office, the 10-year-old packed so many more zippers into boxes than the paid employees that his father actually checked each box to make sure he had counted correctly.

While this impressed Barry’s father, there wasn’t much time to brag. He had a heart attack at work later that year and died instantly.

This forced his mother, Sara, back to work. A trained occupational therapist, she was now the sole support for Barry and his older sister, Sandra. It also fundamentally changed “grandpa.” Young Barry threw himself into his studies. And he discovered that his skill at mathematics and logic extended well beyond efficiently packing zippers into boxes.

By the end of high school, he had won a national physics contest and graduated with more A’s than any other student in Ontario. He enrolled in engineering physics at the University of Toronto and did a summer program at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

This led to a fascination with space. So, after working briefly on a satellite project in Toronto, he headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study aeronautics on scholarship.

His PhD thesis was a 200-page mathematical analysis of a system he invented that could control satellites in orbit. The invention so captivated him that he took out a patent on it.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

There were more interesting details, about Sherman’s special relationship with his uncle Louis Winter, reported not from his memoir but from an interview with Sherman:

“Louis Winter trained in biochemistry, but he was a born entrepreneur. By the 1960s, he had built a $1-million business called Empire Laboratories by churning out cheaper versions of Aspirin, saccharin and Valium.

Mr. Winter was not a big spender. But he did well enough to afford a house in a fashionable part of Toronto, a used Rolls-Royce and even a small fleet of
sailboats.

After his brother-in-law died, Lou took his nephew under his wing, occasionally taking him out on the water.

Mr. Sherman says he “got seasick easily.” But he did better behind the wheel of a car. His uncle hired him to drive his company’s truck, picking up urine samples and delivering drugs to pharmacies. And he soon showed the same devotion to work and attention to detail on the job that Lou saw in himself.

“He was so impressed with Barry’s intelligence,” says Wayne Rockcliffe, Mr. Winter’s brother-in-law.

By the time Mr. Sherman was in university, he would take charge when his uncle was away. When one huge order came in, the 20-year-old not only filled it but negotiated a lower price from a supplier. This duly impressed Mr. Winter, and family members speculate that he saw his nephew as his successor.

“We had a small family and I was close to him. He was sort of a father figure to me,” Mr. Sherman said in an interview. “I think he considered me to be a son.”

Still, he returned to university that year. Which is where he was when his uncle, waiting for a colleague in his office, felt a sharp pain in his head. He collapsed and was rushed to the hospital.

He died the next morning – the same month Barry’s father had passed away 13 years earlier – of an apparent aneurysm. His wife, Beverley, who had been
fighting leukemia in the hospital, died 17 days later.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As above, “I think he considered me to be a son”, was how Sherman described his relationship with his Uncle Lou in an interview cited in the November 24, 2007 The Globe and Mail story. In contrast to in his 1996 memoir, Sherman placed greater emphasis on the special family relationship between him and his Uncle Lou.

This was much like in a January 29 The Globe and Mail story in the same year 2007, where Sherman recalled what he had said to Royal Trust in 1967 in his effort to acquire Empire Labs from his late uncle’s estate, as quoted earlier:

“… “I said if you are going to sell it and there are other buyers, I suggest you give me first right of refusal because that’s something my uncle would have wanted,” Mr. Sherman recalled in an interview…”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

In the interview for the November 24 story, Sherman said something further, that he had told Royal Trust his uncle would have wanted him to own the company so that he could help his uncle’s young sons:

““You know, if all things are equal, you ought to give me first right because I am the boys’ natural cousin and my uncle would have wanted it,” he told the
trustee. “These are my cousins, and if some day these boys want an opportunity or need help, I will be there.””

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Why did Sherman in 2007 suddenly emphasize his special family relationship with his Uncle Lou and what he had said to Uncle Lou’s estate trustee about taking over Empire Labs for that reason, and not just for it being this familiar “scientific business” as in his 1996 memoir?

That is because his uncle’s sons, now grown up, in early 2007 filed a lawsuit alleging that Sherman denied them 20% of business ownership they were entitled to. The media interviews Sherman did at this time was in response to their lawsuit, besides including his unpublished memoir with the legal documents.

The January 29, 2007 The Globe and Mail story was the first major media report that I have found on this family feud that came in the form of a $1.5 billion lawsuit filed by Sherman’s Winter cousins:

“Barry Sherman has spent a long career building a multibillion-dollar drug firm, becoming one of Canada’s wealthiest men and keeping his personal life private.

But a simmering family feud has erupted in court, and a group of relatives is suing Mr. Sherman, alleging he violated a 40-year-old agreement that entitled them to 20 per cent of his company, Apotex Inc. , Canada’s largest generic drug-maker.

The relatives, who are Mr. Sherman’s cousins, say they found out about the agreement only a few years ago and when they started asking Mr. Sherman questions about it, he stopped supporting them financially. They are seeking $1.5-billion in damages from Mr. Sherman and Royal Trust Co., which was involved in drafting the agreement.

In an interview, Mr. Sherman called the allegations “bizarre” and said the lawsuit “has no substantive basis whatsoever.”

“I’ve spent millions of dollars trying to help these kids but they’ve got a lawyer who smells money, it seems,” he said. “It’s just an unbelievable story. It’s actually very distressing to me.”

“I’m saddened that it has come to this,” said Kerry Winter, one of the cousins who is suing. “It’s a tragedy.””

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Strictly speaking, the 40-year-old agreement cited above, between Royal Trust and Sherman when Sherman acquired Empire Labs, involved a possible 5% of Empire Labs’ ownership for each of the Winter sons:

“The terms of the sale included a provision to give Mr. Winter’s four children an opportunity to work for the company once they turned 21. And, after two years employment, they could buy 5 per cent of the business.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

From the Winter sons’ point of view, Sherman owed them 20% of Apotex ownership because Sherman’s business success at Apotex had originated from their father’s Empire Labs, which they were owed when Sherman later sold the company and started Apotex:

“Kerry and Tim claim their father’s company made Barry’s success possible. But with the sale of Empire, they lost any interest they might have had in it. Or did they? They maintain that without Empire there could be no Apotex, therefore Barry has a legal obligation to hand over five per cent of his present assets to each of Lou’s sons or heirs. That’s what he promised when he bought Empire Labs. They claim that Barry sold it to weasel out of his commitment to them.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

To put it simply, family business would have family obligations: as discussed, a key argument Sherman used to sway his Uncle Lou’s estate trustee Royal Trust was, “These are my cousins, and if some day these boys want an opportunity or need help, I will be there”; and so the above agreement became a provision for his ownership of Empire Labs.

Two years earlier in 1965 right after the death of Uncle Lou, Sherman had pitched the same argument to Lou Winter’s wife Beverley, about taking over Empire Labs to “protect its value for the benefit of the children”; but she did not make a decision before her own death days later:

“… Barry attended Lou’s funeral, then visited Beverley in the hospital, where they talked about what might happen to Empire and the children’s future interests. He said that if she and the executors wished, he would take over the business and protect its value for the benefit of the children. In return, they would have to grant him the right to purchase the company if it came up for sale. Beverley discussed the idea but made no decision. Seventeen days later, she was dead.

Three days after her death, Barry made the same proposal to trustees of the Winter estate. They said no, that they would continue to run the business. And so the children’s legacy—Empire Labs and a trust fund—remained in the hands of two lawyers, an accountant and Royal Trust.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Instead, what could have become Sherman’s family obligation became a business ownership provision to protect the Winter children’s future interests when two years later he and Joel Ulster acquired Empire Labs on their own efforts – but using the same ‘special relationship’ argument to persuade Royal Trust:

“The pitch worked. Mr. Sherman and Mr. Ulster bought Empire for about $250,000 – thanks, in part, to a $100,000 bank loan secured by everything Mr. Sherman’s mother owned.

…

The purchase agreement also included specific provisions for the four Winter boys: They had the right to work at Empire as soon as they turned 21 and they could buy a 5-per-cent stake after two years of employment – as long as Mr. Sherman was still in charge.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

The provision was that each of the four Winter sons be given employment at Empire Labs starting at the age of 21, and after two years of employment be given the option to purchase 5% of the ownership. That would be a potential 20% total.

Here is a more accurate summary, from the Toronto Life story first published in July 2008:

“Two options were added to protect the Orphan Children—the phrase that the surviving sons, now in their late 40s, still use to describe themselves. The first states that all of Lou Winter’s sons would be given the opportunity to become “responsible full-time employees” once they turned 21 or completed their formal education. Second, any employed child who worked two years with the company would “have the right to purchase five per cent of the issued shares of the company or companies owning the purchased business.” However, the option could be exercised only if Sherman, Ulster or Ulster’s father kept control of the business.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Agreeing to such a provision would matter, because at the time there was at least one competitor bidding for Empire Labs, as also quoted earlier:

“… Royal Trust received two offers, according to court filings, and Mr. Sherman’s bid won.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

However, the provision had conditions. It was enforceable only if the company was under family control and only if a Winter son was capable of “being a responsible employee”, as Royal Trust pointed out in 2007 in response to the Winter sons’ lawsuit:

“However, in court filings, Royal Trust alleges the agreement included several conditions. For example, it was only enforceable so long as the company remained under family control and provided each of the children was capable of “being a responsible employee.”

In 1972, Mr. Sherman sold the company to ICN Canada, a subsidiary of a U.S. company that was publicly traded. A year later, Mr. Sherman started Apotex.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As in the above, a few years later in 1972 Sherman sold the company before the Winter children reaching their adulthood, and a year later started Apotex.

In his court filing and disposition in response to the lawsuit, Sherman asserted that the provision became “unenforceable” when he sold Empire Labs in 1972, and that at that time he expressed the willingness to help his cousins:

“The Winters had four children; one son has died, his widow and two sons are suing Mr. Sherman, and one son has stayed out of the battle altogether. The children were raised by another family and Mr. Sherman bought their father’s drug business shortly after his death.

The cousins allege the purchase included a provision giving them an opportunity to work in the business when they were older as well as an ownership interest.

They allege Mr. Sherman never told them about the provision and they only discovered it a few years ago.

Mr. Sherman said in his filings that the arrangement concerning the children contained a number of conditions that became unenforceable when he sold the Winter business in 1972. Apotex was a completely separate entity, he added.

However, he vowed at the time to help the others. “I said also, ‘These are my cousins, and if some day if these boys want an opportunity or need help, I will be there,’” Mr. Sherman said in a deposition.”

(“Apotex founder hits hard in legal family feud”, by Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

I note that Sherman’s 1996 memoir had emphasized his interest in Empire Labs because it was a familiar “scientific business”, and it did take a lot of work and skills on the part of Sherman and his partner Ulster to efficiently operate Empire Labs.

More of the efforts needed and risks involved in acquiring and owning Empire Labs were discussed in Sherman’s memoir, and are reviewed here next.

Sherman began by looking into Empire Labs’ operation and product sales, found that the company had declined since Lou Winter’s death, and argued that the decline was due to mismanagement under Royal Trust, before Royal Trust became willing to sell and to consider a low-price offer from Sherman and Ulster:

“I phone the Royal Trust Company, which was one of the executors and had been allowed by the other two executors, David Ward and Martin O’Brien, a free hand in managing the estate. They told me that they were not yet interested in selling.

Because the acquisition appeared ideal, I did not back off. I went to visit the offices of Empire Laboratories to talk to some of the staff. The operations were now located in a five storey building, at 301 Lansdowne Ave. in Toronto, to which the company had moved before Lou Winter’s death in 1965. I learned that the Royal Trust Company had appointed as president on a part-time basis Dr. George Wright, who was a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto and had previously been a consultant to Lou Winter. I learned from the staff that they considered Dr. Wright to be incompetent to manage the business, that sales had declined from over a million dollars per year in 1965 to about eight hundred thousand dollars per year, and that the company would likely soon be insolvent.

I phoned David Ward and Martin O’Brien to tell them what I had learned, to suggest that the trust company might be more interested in continuing to manage Empire Laboratories to earn fees than in a prudent sale, and to point out that, if the company went insolvent, Lou’s children might some day hold them liable for negligence as executors and trustees.

Within days I received a phone call from the Royal Trust Company advising that they were ready to negotiate a sale. We were given full access to the books and records, as a result of which our suspicions of imminent insolvency were confirmed. We offered to purchase the assets at net book value, which would require payment of about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars after deduction of the liabilities to be assumed.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As Sherman recalled, since Lou Winter’s death in 1965 the annual drug sales of Empire Labs had declined from $1 million to about $800,000 in 1967, and the company might be near insolvency. As a result of his finding out about the decline, the trustees agreed to consider selling the company and Sherman and Ulster offered a price for the value of the assets, which came to about $250,000 plus assumption of the company’s liabilities.

The offer, which I note was more like in a liquidation sale, was too low for the trustees because when Lou Winter had just died in 1965 there were much higher offers; so Royal Trust decided to look around for other potential buyers:

“Royal Trust was reluctant to accept. There had been eager buyers at much higher prices upon Lou’s death in 1965, and Royal Trust thus now franticly sought out other potential buyers.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Around this time, two distinguished Toronto generic drug business owners sought out Sherman for discussions.

One of them, Jules Gilbert, advised Sherman of the potential risks in owning Empire Labs, and suggested that Sherman instead purchase a minority ownership in his company:

“While awaiting an answer from Royal Trust, I received a phone call from Jules Gilbert. Jules was the founder and owner of Jules R. Gilbert Limited, another generic manufacturer that he had founded in the mid 1950s. Jules is considered to be one of the fathers, if not the father, of the Canadian generic drug industry. Jules asked that I visit with him at his offices and factory on Dundas Street in West Toronto, and I obliged.

He gave me a tour of the premises and introduced me to his son-in-law, Fred Klapp, who was then endeavouring to expand sales through telemarketing.

Jules told me that he had heard that Joel and I were negotiating to buy Empire Laboratories, and he wanted to warn me that the purchase would be a great mistake. He said that he had just completed formulating a new plan that would make his company very successful and would put Empire Laboratories out of business within months. He told me that he required some further funding for his new plan and thought it would be best for both of us if I were to purchase a minority position in his company instead of buying Empire Laboratories. He said: “If you do so, I will be the king, but you will be the crown prince.”

…

It appeared to me that Jules Gilbert, although a very nice gentleman and very knowledgeable, could not distinguish between what was practical and what was not.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As told, was considered one of the fathers of the Canadian generic drug industry, and he called himself “the king” and wanted Barry Sherman to be “the crown prince” if Sherman would join him.

Jules Gilbert was foresightful, wasn’t he, in light of Barry Sherman’s eventual great success in his own right?

The other generic drug businessman, Lou Craig, advised Sherman not to get into the generic drug industry, at all, because of the risks:

“Within days after that meeting, Ben Ulster, Joel’s father, told us that his friend Lou Craig wanted to have lunch with Ben, Joe and me, to also try to talk us out of proceeding with the purchase.

Lou Craig was a brother-in-law of Jules Gilbert. They had originally been in business together but had parted company some years later. At lunch, Lou Craig explained that he had recently sold his generic drug company, which he had operated under the name Bell-Craig, to an American company, Denver Laboratories. He said that the generic drug business was a commodity business that was and always would be highly competitive. He said he was glad to be out and that if we proceeded to buy Empire Laboratories we would inevitably fail and lose our investment.

He also advised us against investing with Jules Gilbert, and stated that we should entirely refrain from investing in this industry.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Both Gilbert and Lou Craig, who each invited Sherman for a discussion, warned that this field was highly competitive and Sherman could lose.

Jules Gilbert was leading the Canadian generic drug industry’s lobbying for the Canadian government’s help to reduce American drug companies’ dominance, and his efforts led to the enactment of Bill C-102, with the introduction of “compulsory licensing”, by Prime Minister Trudeau’s government in 1969 – as in Sherman’s memoir it was a major boost for the nascent Canadian generic drug industry, including for Empire Labs under Sherman and Ulster. That history was recalled recently in a 2014 book by another pioneering Canadian generic drug businessman, Morris Goodman:

“A little-known fact about the generic industry in Canada – it had an American father. Jules R. Gilbert, then in Toronto, … on his own, set out to have the patent laws governing drug manufacture and distribution changed in Canada. At that time, American drug firms dominated the Canadian market and eventually Canada’s federal government, lobbied in large part by Gilbert, looked into drug distribution in this country. The government report … led to the passage, in 1969, of Bill C-102, which introduced “compulsory licensing.” New legislation made it possible for any company in Canada to produce a patented drug, paying a royalty of four percent to the company that had introduced the drug. In other words, it was compulsory for a company that introduced a new drug to license its distribution as a generic drug to a Canadian company that was prepared to pay the royalty. Suddenly, generic drugs were not only legal and protected by the Canadian government, companies like mine were being encouraged to delve into the generic market. This change dramatically altered the situation for Winley-Morris. …

The passing of Bill C-102 also had a dramatic impact on how much Canadians paid for many of their medications, which proved to be much less than their neighbours south of the border were paying. Bill C-102 gave Canadian a break on prescription costs and opened the door for considerable growth among companies producing generic drugs in this country. This legislation made it possible for Canadian-owned generic companies not only to exist but to thrive.”

(Morris Goodman, To Make a Difference: A Prescription for a Good Life, 2014, McGill-Queen’s University Press)

However, Gilbert’s own company later went bankrupt due to the large number of patent infringement lawsuits it faced from international brand-name drug companies:

“In June 1958, I contacted Jules Gilbert and Winley-Morris became his distributor in Quebec and Newfoundland. I eventually formed a company to handle Gilbert’s generic products, calling it Julius R. Gilbert (Quebec) Limited. … But while we did very well, Gilbert was kept busy and broke, pouring his income into fees for patent lawyers. The multinationals bled him dry with patent infringement lawsuits and eventually his company went bankrupt. Gilbert’s son-in-law, Fred Klapp, bought up the assets and ran a successful business developing creams and ointments under the label K-Line Pharmaceuticals. Later, he sold to Taro, …

Jules Gilbert lost his business, but, in the end, his cause was not lost. He was a bright, aggressive man, who changed the patent laws in Canada. He also paid the price for a number of us – Lesley Dan of Novapharm, Barry Sherman of Apotex, and me at Winley-Morris, ICN, and finally Pharmascience, not to mention all the other generic companies. Gilbert was a crusader and the Canadian public owes him a great debt because of his efforts to ensure that Canadians benefit from lower drug prices. The entire Canadian generic industry is also beholden to him for his unrivalled leadership. He opened the door for all of us. …

(Morris Goodman, 2014, McGill-Queen’s University Press)

Here, a larger and longer cautionary tale seems to emerge from my review of the history up to this point, including in Part 1.

Like the pioneering Jules Gilbert described above, Barry Sherman was also a “bright, aggressive man”, whom in 1967 Gilbert tried to recruit to become “the crown prince” for “the king”; Gilbert’s lobbying of the government soon led to major changes in the Canadian patent laws in 1969, but his company later went bankrupt because too much money was spent on patent lawyers to fight the international brand-name drug companies; in 1967 Sherman bought Empire Labs, went on to found and grow Apotex to be Canada’s leading pharmaceutical company and compete with Big Pharma internationally, but unlike Gilbert’s, Sherman’s company was big enough to sustain the huge legal expenses on patent lawyers.

Nonetheless, in the end, Sherman and his wife were brutally killed in a double homicide, and the scenario of brand-name drug companies having a role in it cannot be ruled out – as concluded in Part 1.

In any case, in 1967 Sherman and Ulster used the opportunity offered by Gilbert as a leverage in his negotiation to acquire Empire Labs, and won Royal Trust’s acceptance of their offer, as told in Sherman’s memoir:

“Despite the warnings of Jules Gilbert and Lou Craig, Joel Ulster and I decided to proceed to try to complete the purchase, although not without substantial trepidation.

…

I phoned David Ward and Martin O’Brien again. I told them that we were about to pursue another opportunity, and that if our offer to purchase Empire were not accepted within two days it would be withdrawn. Within the two days Royal Trust advised that they would accept our offer, and our solicitors began to draw up the formal agreements.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

While Sherman got a good deal for Empire Labs – paying only for the value of its assets – it was still a lot of money for someone who was fresh out of graduate school and whose family had been of modest means ever since his father’s death when he was in his early teens.

To raise the $250,000 to purchase the company, Sherman’s mother put up all her assets as collateral to obtain a $100, 000 bank loan, and his partner Joel Ulster’s father Ben provided a $150,000 loan and arranged a line of bank credit for the company’s operating use:

“It remained to arrange the financing. We required about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to complete the purchase, plus an operating line of credit.

At that time, my mother had investments totalling about one hundred thousand dollars. She offered to put up all of her assets as security for a bank loan. The Bank of Montreal, at which my mother and I both banked, agreed to lend me one hundred thousand dollars against my mother’s assets, which was the full face value. It still seems surprising that both my mother and the Bank were prepared to take that risk, as we easily could have failed. Fortunately, we did not fail.

The remaining one hundred and fifty thousand dollars was advanced by Ben Ulster, Joel’s father. Ben also arranged for an operating line of credit at Toronto-Dominion Bank.

We completed the asset purchase in September 1967. For that purpose, we incorporated Sherman and Ulster Ltd., so that the business became Empire Laboratories, a division of Sherman and Ulster Limited.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As told, by the time of writing his memoir in December 1996 Sherman still felt surprised that his mother and Bank of Montreal had taken the risk to do the $100,000 loan in 1967 – in fact, it was really his mother’s risk to lose all her investments to the bank while the bank would lose only the loan interests.

And the risk of losing was real, as Sherman recalled in 2007:

“… Mr. Sherman and Mr. Ulster bought Empire for about $250,000 – thanks, in part, to a $100,000 bank loan secured by everything Mr. Sherman’s mother owned.

“It was a crazy thing to do. We almost went broke in the first few months,” Mr. Sherman says. “I’m an entrepreneur and one has to take risks to get ahead. I was lucky.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

When one learns of the efforts and risks undertaken, as extensively told in his memoir and I have reviewed, for the acquisition and owning of a “family business” that had belonged to none other than a brother of Sherman’s own mother, one can see that it indeed was about business – except for the close-family factor as a favour in agreeing to consider Sherman’s takeover pitch and eventually accepting the offer of assets value he estimated from the company’s books and records.

More importantly, even at that favourable price the business venture risked the life savings of Sherman’s mother, who could have lost all had her son not turned out to be so bright, diligent and industrious, and a little lucky, too.

That business reality, despite his special relationship with his late Uncle Lou that he cited to sway the Winter estate trustees, in my analysis probably made Sherman less straightforward and less willing later when it came to materializing the ownership-share provision for his Uncle Lou’s sons.

As already reviewed, the enactment of Bill C-102 by the Pierre Trudeau government in 1969 gave a major boost to the Canadian generic drug industry, and in particular to Empire Labs, which under Sherman’s leadership worked hard to produce generic drug products sooner and better than many other companies.

But furthering the risks in this process of progress were the drug quality-related legal problems the company encountered; fortunately, they were expertly resolved in Empire Labs’ favour by the prominent attorney Willard Estey, son of a former Supreme Court of Canada Justice and later a justice himself in that high court.

According to some media reports, in 1969 two years after acquiring Empire Labs, Sherman swapped its shares with its largest customer, so that the customer rather than he and Ulster became the company’s controlling shareholder:

“The agreement protecting Winter’s sons didn’t survive. A 1969 share swap initiated by Sherman gave control of Empire to its largest customer…”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

However, Sherman’s memoir did not mention such a share swap.

Instead, it referred to Sherman and Ulster Limited as the owner of Empire Labs in 1973 at the time of its acquisition by a large U.S. pharmaceutical company; under Sherman and Ulster, by the end of 1972 Empire Labs had more than doubled its annual sales from the 1967 level, and attracted the interest of takeover from ICN Pharmaceuticals:

“In the years 1971 and 1972, the sales of Empire continued to grow, and by the end of 1972 sales had reached a level of a little under two million dollars a year.

In early 1973, we received a phone call from a young man named Gil LeVasseur. He was a Harvard MBA type who was working on acquisitions for ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc., a public U.S. company, of which the founder and chairman was Milan Panic.

ICN had recently purchased Winley-Morris, another small generic drug company located in Montreal, from Morris Goodman. Winley-Morris had been renamed ICN Canada Limited, and Morris Goodman had stayed on as president. LeVasseur told us that ICN wanted to buy Empire Laboratories (i.e., Sherman and Ulster Limited) and to merge it into ICN Canada Limited.

Joel Ulster and I were ambivalent about selling, but decided to let ICN evaluate out company and make an offer to us.

Although we had done reasonably well over the previous few years, we had concerns…

…

We were able to negotiate a selling price of a little under two million dollars, which we decided to accept.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

That was a big success, receiving an acquisition offer of “a little under two million dollars” after five years of ownership and more doubling Empire Labs’ annual sales to “a little under two million dollars” – from about $800,000 when Sherman and Ulster took over in 1967, as cited earlier.

The offer figure was at the same level as the company’s annual sales, compared to when Sherman and Ulster bought it for the assets value of $250,000 on annual sales of $800,000.

Also fortunate was the fact that, as told above, the purchaser was not only a U.S. drug company and thus had American financial strength, but also had patriotic Canadian leadership as ICN Pharmaceuticals had recently acquired Morris Goodman’s Winley-Morris and renamed it ICN Canada Limited with Goodman as president; as quoted earlier from his 2014 book, Goodman was a Canadian generic drug pioneer and had worked with Jules Gilbert, “father” of the Canadian generic drug industry who had tried to recruit Sherman in 1967 and whose lobbying had led to the passage of Bill C-102 in 1969.

However, American finance had its ‘proverbial’ risk, if it can be said that way, which Sherman could not help but tell a tale about.

The nearly $2 million offered to Sherman and Ulster by ICN was not in cash but in ICN stock shares, and it took much agonizing for Sherman and Ulster to decide to take the chance, and then, during a required waiting period of about six months watched the stock value went up and then down, and finally hurriedly cashed in just before the stock price crashed:

“There were only two flies in the ointment (pun intended).

…

The second was that ICN was prepared to pay only with ICN share and not cash. Moreover, we would have to agree to hold the shares until they were registered, which would take up to six months, before we could sell them. We considered the ICN shares to be a hot potato. They were priced at about twenty U.S. dollars per share, having risen from only a few dollars per share a year or two earlier on the strength of a string of acquisitions all using shares. The net book value per share and earnings per share clearly did not justify the price of ICN’s stock.

After much agonizing, we decided to take the risk and make the deal. The transaction closed in September 1973. In the following few months while we were holding the ICN shares, the share price continued to climb to about forty U.S. dollars per share, and we were, of course, ecstatic. However, the price then began to fall just as rapidly. By the time our shares were freed for sale, the price was down to U.S. twenty dollars per share again, and we quickly sold all our shares at about that price. The price then continued to tumble down to about U.S. two dollars per share. We were very fortunate, indeed, to have gotten out in time. After payment of relevant taxes and all of our debts, Joel and I each netted several hundred thousand dollars.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

The scenario of losing their worth from selling their company would have been unbearable. But Sherman and Ulster were lucky and netted several hundred thousand dollars each in profit.

In the second previous quote above, Sherman named the founder and chairman of ICN that bought Empire Labs by offering only its stocks was Milan Panic.

The risk taken by Sherman and Ulster was probably quite common for those doing business with Panic, a former Yugoslavian Olympic athlete and defector to the West, and a famous character who rode the wave of ICN acquisitions to become, by 1992, Serbia’s richest man and Prime Minister, with his wealth on roller-coaster rides with the ICN stock value:

“As with many such transient figures on the world scene, there are fresh-minted official biographies, and Mr Panic’s is largely supplied by himself. Born in 1930, of poor parents; peddled vegetables in the Thirties; joined Tito’s partisans in 1944 (when he would have been all of 14); trained as a chemist (at an unspecified university); became national cycling hero, depicted variously as Yugoslav champion and as an Olympic competitor (he was actually an reserve); defected to the West in 1956 on the way to a race in the Netherlands, finding his way, with his family, to the United States in 1960.

…

… His entire past is anything but free of difficulties with the law, not to speak of his stockholders. He is widely described as ‘Serbia’s richest man’; there cannot have been much competition, except for the likes of the noted New York publisher Bill Jovanovich, of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Mr Panic’s company’s current worth, on which his own personal fortune – dollars 101.6m ( pounds 53m) on 3 July – is based, is, depending on the value of its stock and assets, dollars 460m. …

His company, founded in 1966, was originally called International Chemical and Nuclear, and was recently described by Business Week in America as being ‘mostly a ragtag collection of acquisitions, selling everything from generics to laboratory supplies’. ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc, as it became, is basically a holding company with subsidiaries, some profitable, some not.

The difficulty for Mr Panic and for the company is that its most profitable part is Yugoslav – the result of a deal a year ago when ICN’s drug and marketing subsidiary, SPI Pharmaceuticals Inc, bought 75 per cent of the country’s biggest drug company, Galenika. In six months, Galenika was accounting for 61 per cent of all of SPI’s revenues of dollars 364m, and 96 per cent of its dollars 53m net profit. Cynics on Wall Street, with access to Mr Panic’s long record of optimistic forecasts and spirited marketing, believe he may well have accepted his Yugoslav post at least partly to bolster Galenika, for the company, which, for instance supplies Yugoslavia with its penicillin, is dependent on the United States for two-thirds of its raw materials – supplies that are currently blocked by the sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia.

Galenika is part of a long-term plan to acquire pharmaceutical plants in Russia, Poland, Hungary and Czechslovakia. But there, too, there are problems, because (a) many Eastern European drug companies are operating on pirated clones of international pharmaceuticals, and (b) all of them have, to date, operated in a controlled economic environment, meaning that there is no way to ascertain their profitability, nor to know whether they will be allowed, in a market economy, to continue with their pirated drugs.

Even then, all might be well were it not for other troubles facing Mr Panic, who has a long record of stockholder revolts and battles with the government, not to speak of his company’s long-range debt, which requires some dollars 19m a year just to service.

These troubles go back a long way, and suggest that Mr Panic is stronger on salesmanship, acquisition, wheeling-and-dealing and political contacts than on research and development. His first failure was in 1970 with L-dopa, the Parkinson’s disease ‘miracle drug’ – until its severe side-effects became known. ICN invested heavily, and its stock price (which has varied between dollars 72 a share and dollars 1.50, highly volatile even for pharmaceutical stocks) fell sharply.

…

This is not to say that he is considered dishonest. Rather, he is described as ‘visionary’, ‘creative’ and a ‘juggler’. In many ways, then, Mr Panic is as American (an American of the Eighties) as he says. He is one of the many who seem to have parlayed something out of nothing. And in the primitive form of capitalism now obtaining in Eastern Europe, he may do the same again. Not too many of his stockholders, and not too many Wall Street analysts, however, would bet on it.”

(“Who is this man Milan Panic?: How did an American millionaire become Prime Minister of Yugoslavia? And what’s in it for him? Keith Botsford reports”, by Keith Botsford, July 23, 1992, The Independent)

As reported in the above July 1992 story, ICN stock had varied between a high of $72 U.S. and a low of $1.5 U.S. over the years, and not many of Milan Panic’s shareholders or Wall Street analysts would easily bet on him winning in business in his native home of Eastern Europe.

But Barry Sherman bet on Milan Panic for six months in 1973-1974, and with some luck came away with several hundred thousand dollars – after paying Empire Labs loans and debts – that he could use to start Apotex, and the rest is history.

Just after Sherman had cashed in his ICN stocks, ICN Canada president Morris Goodman fired him. In his memoir Sherman said Goodman was the “only person ever to fire me from a job”, but after Sherman’s death in December 2917 Goodman recalled Sherman once saying that the firing was “the best thing that ever happened to him”:

““He was a force by himself. Is it possible to replace Barry Sherman? Not in 24 hours,” said Morris Goodman, 86, who founded Pharmascience Inc. in Montreal in 1983 and has competed with Sherman ever since.

“He was a fierce competitor in the marketplace. And he was more aggressive in fighting Canadian patents and disqualifying them than I was.”

…

Goodman remembers being Sherman’s boss after his employer at the time, California-based ICN Pharmaceuticals, bought Empire from Sherman in the early 1970s. After about six months, he was ordered to fire Sherman and reluctantly did so.

“I fired him. He would tell me later that was the best thing that ever happened to him,” said Goodman. “He says, ‘Don’t worry about it, Morris, I was planning to quit anyhow.’ And he started Apotex (in 1974).”

“So we stayed competitors and more or less friends. He was a very competitive guy.””

(“Competitors and critics agree Apotex founder Barry Sherman will be tough to replace”, by Dan Healing, December 21, 2017, Toronto Star)

Well, not that simple for Sherman just to start a new company.

Sherman would have had to wait for five years before starting another generic drug company, had he not cleverly evaded ICN’s attention to a detail of his Empire Labs – namely Sherman and Ulster Limited – ownership. Sherman later boasted about his foresight and shrewdness in his memoir:

“There were only two flies in the ointment (pun intended).

The first was that the contracts drafted by ICN required that the vending shareholders agree to not compete for five years. I wanted to be free to go back into the same business. Fortunately for me, I was not a shareholder directly, but only through my holding company, Berman C. Sherman Limited. I hoped that, if we withheld the schedule of shareholders until the last minute, ICN would not pick up this technicality and I would thus not be personally bound not to compete. This worked out exactly as I hoped.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

That was when Sherman sold Empire Labs, hiding a key piece of info about his ownership – he did not own directly but Bernard C. Sherman Limited did – “until the last minute”, so that ICN would not realize that the five-year ban on “the vending shareholders” could not prohibit Sherman personally from returning to generic drug business right away.

This is an important point, because it seemed that there was similar shrewdness on Sherman’s part in handling the Empire Labs ownership provision for protecting the Winter children’ future interests described earlier.

Not only did Sherman sell Empire Labs within a few years so that the company was no longer under family control, but for many decades he did not tell his Winter cousins about this historical provision between him and Royal Trust, “until the last minute” in the sense that by the time they found out it might be too late for them to resort to legal means.

Sherman’s cousins “waited far too long to sue”,  was what Royal Trust asserted in 2007 when their lawsuit was filed:

“In court filings, Toronto-based Royal Trust denied the allegations and said the agreement expired long ago. The company added that the cousins have waited far too long to sue.

…

In their lawsuit, the cousins allege Mr. Sherman never told them about the agreement and “turned his back on the orphaned children.” They claim that the roots of Toronto-based Apotex can be traced back to Empire and that Mr. Sherman owed them royalties on products Mr. Winter developed.

In an interview, Mr. Sherman said the sale to ICN was straightforward and that he did not use Mr. Winter’s products at Apotex. Royal Trust said in court filings that since the sale involved a public company, ICN, the agreement relating to the children couldn’t be enforced. And none of the children were 21 at the time.

…

Around 2000, the cousins allege they first became aware of the sale agreement and began asking Mr. Sherman questions. In 2001, they went to court and won an order requiring Royal Trust to turn over documents relating to the deal.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As they alleged in their lawsuit, as above, Sherman’s Winter cousins were never told of the provision protecting their interests, until they became aware of it in around 2000 – by this time they were all around 40 years old, nearly doubling the age of 21 when they would have become eligible to work at Empire Labs.

And even at this later time, they still had to go to court to force the former Winter family estate trustee Royal Trust to give them the relevant documents.

But I should say that, other than the deceptive and everlasting avoidance of the Winter children protection provision – thus denying them the opportunity to build a better financial future through their late father’s former company, or another related to it – Barry Sherman did work hard and diligently in acquiring Empire Labs, developing generic drugs, increasing product sales, and later selling it to an American firm, along the way taking considerable risks as did his mother, i.e., the Winter boys’ aunt, in helping finance the venture – even though it was her late brother’s business and her son had once been a legal heir.

In other words, Sherman, and to some degree his mother, worked hard and risked much to make the success happen.

Sherman also began Apotex in a hard-working and well-planned manner, this time without Joel Ulster who would not take part further, and with only the several hundred thousand dollars he made from the Empire Labs sale; accordingly, he devised a ‘minimalist’ business plan:

“When I set out in late 1973 to found a new generic pharmaceutical company, I was acutely aware of the possibility of failure.

…

As the intended products were the very ones being sold by Empire Laboratories, Novopharm and others, there was no doubt that the market size was adequate to support a viable business.

As to efficiency, I was now, as a result of my experience at Empire, well qualified to design and manage an efficient pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprise. …

Joel Ulster had declined to join me in the new venture. Unless I was to take in other partners, which I did not wish to do, the only available funds would be the several hundred thousand dollars of profit that I had made on the sale of Empire to ICN.

I needed to design a business that would get to break-even with minimum equipment, minimum floor space, minimum personnel, and in minimum time. …

….

I estimated that it would be possible to have the initial product line developed, the required stability studies done, and sales initiated within a year of start up.

Phase 2, would be initiated when and only when significant sales were achieved. In Phase 2, all revenues derived from sales as well as borrowed funds would be invested in expansion of capacity and development of the new generic products requiring New Drug Submissions to FDD. The development of these new products would be done as aggressively as possible in order to build the company rapidly.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Following his “minimum” start-up plan, Sherman began Apotex with only two employees and 5,000 square feet of space, making only compressed tablets for a dozen or so generic versions of established drugs that could be sold cheaply by mail order and telemarketing:

“Business boomed, thanks to a combination of lucky timing and entrepreneurial savvy. Barry started with 5,000 square feet, employed two people and made only compressed tablets. He selected about a dozen established products with an eye to getting them to market quickly, then sold them cheaply by mail order and telemarketing. …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

By the 1990s, Apotex had grown to become Canada’s biggest generic drug company:

“… Further changes in the law during the Trudeau years allowed greater scope and removed some advantages of brand name companies. By the ’90s, there were a dozen generic drug companies in Canada. Apotex was the biggest.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

But the first two years of Apotex were actually quite difficult, as Sherman recalled in 1992 about “seeing bankruptcy on the horizon” after a couple of years; he credited Apotex’s eventual success to – just like the media and others have described him as, reviewed in Part 1 – being “very aggressive”:

“In 1974, Sherman founded Apotex with two employees in a 5,000-square-foot building on Ormont Dr. in Weston, right around the corner from today’s corporate headquarters on Signet Rd.

As Sherman recalled, the company that now employs more than 1,000 people in several locations had a rocky start.

“I remember after a couple of years in business we still weren’t selling anything,” Sherman said.

“Losses were getting up to $10,000 a month and I was seeing bankruptcy on the horizon. But just before we got to the end of our resources, we got some acceptances.”

The real breakthrough came with Propranolol, a generic version of the blood pressure treatment Indaral. Propranolol was approved in 1980.

More than a decade later, Apotex revenues are upwards of $250 million and with Sherman’s other companies, top $500 million, he said.

Sherman credits a corporate aggressiveness that mirrors his business personality.

“One of my primary strategies was to be very aggressive . . . We had to find some major products that we could do the research on quickly and be the first generic (producer), so we could convince pharmacies to stock our products.””

(Allan Thompson, February 11, 1992, Toronto Star)

The picture for the other side in Sherman’s family legal dispute had been much bleaker, and rather sad.

While Sherman was working hard to grow Empire Labs and then found and grow Apotex to national success, his late Uncle Louis Winter’s much younger sons fell into troubled lives at young ages.

After the deaths of their parents in 1965, following their late mother Beverley’s wish the Winter boys were adopted by a Jewish family:

“Before she died, Beverley Winter left instructions that her children not be adopted by any relatives. Her brother, Wayne Rockcliffe, still wonders why she didn’t choose him and his wife. At that time they had no children. They were willing to move into the Winter home and send the boys to Upper Canada College. But Beverley, a convert to Judaism, wanted her sons to be raised as Jews. Rockcliffe thinks that his sister “just didn’t want us to have what was hers. What a shame that was!” Beverley’s rabbi found a home for the boys with Martin Barkin, a highly regarded urologist, and his wife, Carol, a schoolteacher.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Beverley Winter’s brother Wayne Rockcliffe, as cited above, felt the Jewish adoption of the Winter sons was a sign of social snobbery toward him, was “a shame”.

Kerry and Dana became unhappy with their adoptive parents beginning in their early teens; they later turned to living life with illegal narcotic use and narcotic drug dealing; and Jeffrey suffered from bipolar mental problems:

“By 1973, the year Sherman sold Empire, Kerry, then 12 years old, and his closest brother, 11-year-old Dana, were extremely un­happy. They found Barkin difficult and their adoptive mother cold. By age 15, Kerry had left home and moved into a rooming house. He continued to attend school, where he was arrested for selling hash and marijuana and sentenced to six months in the Mimico Correctional Centre. In what would become a recurring theme, a relative came to his rescue. Uncle Wayne used his connections to get Kerry accepted into Ottawa’s tony Ashbury College. He graduated and took honours English at Richmond College in London, England, with fees paid by the family trust. He enrolled in San Diego State University for a masters but never finished. Instead, he travelled around the world; while in Peru, he began to experiment with crack cocaine and heroin.

Two of Lou’s other sons had their own problems. Jeffrey was diagnosed as bipolar and was in and out of treatment. And Dana, like Kerry, got into drugs. …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Recall that the provision for the sale of Empire Labs to Sherman and Ulster, reached with Royal Trust in 1967 to protect the Winter children’s interests, had two conditions that each of them had to meet in order to get the options of working at the company and acquiring 5% ownership: if the company was still under family control, and if each was capable of “being a responsible employee”.

In 2007 when the Winter sons launched the $1.5 billion lawsuit against Barry Sherman and Royal Trust, Royal Trust responded that the Winter children’s “significant personal issues”, including “criminal activity”, made them unsuitable to be involved in Apotex:

“Court filings and interviews with relatives reveal a bitterly divided family that has been beset by a series of troubles. One cousin, Dana, died of a heroin overdose in 1995 shortly after being charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Royal Trust alleges in court filings that one reason the cousins could never become involved in Apotex was because of “significant personal issues, which included criminal activity, incarceration, serious drug addictions and mental health issues.””

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Uh, Dana died of a heroin overdose in 1995 after being charged with “conspiracy to commit murder”. That was clearly totally contrary to good behaviours expected of a “responsible employee”.

In his legal deposition on the lawsuit, Sherman also stated a similar point, namely that their troubled lives meant that none of the Winter sons could have become “a suitable employee at Apotex Inc.”:

“Mr. Sherman said in his filings that the arrangement concerning the children contained a number of conditions that became unenforceable when he sold the Winter business in 1972. Apotex was a completely separate entity, he added.

However, he vowed at the time to help the others. “I said also, ‘These are my cousins, and if some day if these boys want an opportunity or need help, I will be there,’” Mr. Sherman said in a deposition.

Mr. Sherman said in the deposition the children led troubled lives. “There is no way that any of these boys would have ended up being a suitable employee at Apotex Inc., but I have tried to just help them do what they wanted to do.””

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

After the Shermans’ deaths, in an media interview in early 2018 Kerry Winter also admitted that the brothers all led troubled lives at one point or another, Tim being an alcoholic and others similar to earlier mentioned:

“Winter’s childhood would prove abusive and damaging and though he has reconciled with his adoptive family, neither he nor his siblings emerged unscathed.

Eldest brother Tim is an alcoholic, Jeffery has been diagnosed bi-polar, Winter is open about his struggles with addiction to heroin and crack and Dana, died of a heroin overdose at 33.”

(“EXCLUSIVE: ‘My gut tells me he killed her. He asked me twice to whack her. He hated his wife.’ Billionaire and wife found hanged beside their pool was murder-suicide NOT a targeted hit their cousin tells DailyMailTV”, by Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

What a sad and disappointing, but perhaps not unfamiliar tale: an academically brilliant, business goal-driven and socially high-achieving Barry Sherman had these younger cousins, sons of his business-founder uncle and mentor, Louis Winter; after their parents’ early deaths, the cousins were made to live unhappily with a “difficult” and “cold” adoptive family, and their future went downhill ever since and even became unsalvageable, all the while when their cousin Sherman went from one success to another.

The Winter sons’ misery happened despite their late mother’s best intention, wanting her children raised as Jews; as quoted earlier from the Toronto Life article, the appropriate adoptive parents, “Martin Barkin, a highly regarded urologist, and his wife, Carol, a schoolteacher”, were found by her rabbi – despite her brother Wayne Rockcliffe’s feeling of it being ‘social snobbery’ toward him.

But wait. The name of the “highly regarded urologist” adoptive father, Martin Barkin, sounds a little familiar in my review thus far.

Sherman’s memoir had a mention the couple, quoted earlier:

“Lou and Beverley Winter left behind four sons, all of whom were subsequently adopted by Dr. Martin Barkin and his wife, Carole.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

There have been earlier instances of this name. In Part 1, a Dr. Martin Barkin, had been brought into the management of his company Deprenyl Research in 1992 by Morton Shulman, and ran the company in 1993 while Shulman was in bitter legal disputes with Barry Sherman and Apotex, here partially quoted again:

“Dr. Morton Shulman, officially retired but still proud father of Deprenyl Research Ltd., and Barry Sherman, president and owner of Apotex Ltd., are doing battle, armed with legal briefs, affidavits and reports from private investigators.

…

“This is a true crusade,” Shulman said in an interview in his Roncesvalles Ave. office. “I’ve got nothing to do (but fight with Sherman.) I’m delighted. It was a godsend that this came along.”

The battle started this spring, about the same time Shulman, 68, was being eased into retirement from Deprenyl Research, the company he founded to import a drug to combat Parkinson’s disease.

…

Shulman became his company’s best advertisement as the drug alleviated his symptoms for years. Now, his condition is deteriorating and his speech is slurred and movements are jerky.

Shulman’s son Geoffrey and Dr. Martin Barkin, who was brought in last year to run Deprenyl, now manage the company as it tries to expand its range of products and defend its Eldepryl turf.”

(“Shulman vs. Sherman; The drug entrepreneurs face off”, by Art Chamberlain, July 11, 1993, Toronto Star)

That couldn’t be the same person, could it, that the adoptive father of Barry Sherman’s Winter family cousins was also a top manager for the company of Morton Shulman, Sherman’s bitter public nemesis?

This Dr. Barkin was then the president of Shulman’s company, in 1994 changing its name to Draxis Health as well as its focus – away from the Parkinson’s disease drug Eldepryl as its Canadian market was threatened by Sherman’s aggressive push for a generic version, here partially as quoted in Part 1:

“Deprenyl Research Ltd. has taken some final steps to put the Morton Shulman era behind it.

The company emerged from its annual meeting yesterday with a new name – Draxis Health Inc. – a new corporate structure and a new share option program for senior management.

President Martin Barkin said the name change reflects the company’s new focus on products other than Eldepryl, a treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

Draxis recently lost a court battle and expects generic drug maker Apotex Ltd. to have a cheaper version of Draxis’s main product on the market later this year.”

(“Deprenyl change ends Shulman era; Company to be called Draxis and get new focus”, by Art Chamberlain, May 27, 1994, Toronto Star)

Then, in a 1997 news story about Draxis’s new drug for treating dogs for Cushing’s disease, this Dr. Martin Barkin was cited as its president and CEO, and as a “former Ontario deputy minister of health”, here again partially as in Part 1:

““We are very excited to have received the FDA approval,” said Martin Barkin, company president and chief executive officer.

…

“The United States is one-third of the worldwide pharmaceuticals market,” said Dr. Barkin, a former Ontario deputy minister of health. He sees Anipryl as Draxis’s first big step into the U.S. market.”

(“Stock in the news: Analysis Draxis looks to U.S. market for sales; Canine drug Anipryl launched south of border following FDA approval”, by Andrew Poon, June 11, 1997, The Globe and Mail)

Perhaps there were two Dr. Martin Barkins, namesakes, in the healthcare field in Toronto, Ontario. I should either confirm or disprove it.

Let’s see who Shulman company’s Dr. Martin Barkin was, per Shulman’s autobiography, Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up? – a book previously extensively cited in Part 1:

“Barkin is a Toronto urologist and medical academic whose CV rolls richly off the page: President and CEO of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, vice-chairman of the Ontario Hospital Association, president of the Ontario Council of Teaching Hospitals. Deputy minister of health for the Province of Ontario from 1987 to 1991, where he established, and was secretary of, the premier’s council on Health Strategy, and chaired the deputy cabinet committee on social policy.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

That Martin Barkin was also a Toronto urologist, like the Winter sons’ adoptive father. Well, the likelihood that they were the same person is high.

A prominent University of Toronto urologist Dr. Martin Barkin died on January 21, 2018 – a little over a month after the unexpected double murder of Barry and Honey Sherman. This is the one associated with Morton Shulman, because the long and distinguished record cited includes “President and Chief Executive Officer of DRAXIS Health Inc.”, and reads just like above from Shulman’s book – it also includes endowing the “Martin Barkin Chair in the Division of Urology at the University of Toronto”:

“Faculty of Medicine is remembering Dr. Martin Barkin, who passed away January 21, 2018 after a brief illness.

Dr. Barkin was a leader in academia, medical administration and business. He held the rank of Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto in both the Departments of Surgery and Health Administration. He also endowed the Martin Barkin Chair in the Division of Urology at the University of Toronto.

He was President and Chief Executive Officer of DRAXIS Health Inc., and served on the Boards of Viventia Biotech Inc. and Bone Care International, Inc. Dr. Barkin went to DRAXIS in 1992 from KPMG where he served as Partner and National Practice Leader for Health Care. Before that, he was Deputy Minister of Health for the Province of Ontario, Secretary of the Premier’s Council on Health and Chair of the Deputies’ Cabinet Committee on Social Policy for the Province of Ontario.

Dr. Barkin was President and Chief Executive Officer of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Vice Chair of the Ontario Hospital Association and President of the Ontario Council of Teaching Hospitals.

He served as Chief of the Division of Urology, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Professor of Surgery (Urology) at U of T and Project Director at the Research Institute of the Hospital for Sick Children as well as a member of the Grants Review Committee of the Medical Research Council of Canada.”

(“Remembering Dr. Martin Barkin”, March 2, 2018, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto)

There was an obituary in the National Post newspaper for a Martin Barkin, who died on that same day January 21, 2018. This Martin Barkin’s family profile fits that of the Winter sons’ adoptive father, namely he was a Jewish man, with his wife named Carol, and two of his sons named Tim and Jeffrey – as discussed, the other two Winter sons Kerry and Dana were unhappy with their adoptive family, Kerry left home at 15 and Dana died in 1995. At the same time, this Martin Barkin’s medical profile has a match with the other Martin Barkin in “the Martin Barkin Chair in Urological Research at U of T”:

“BARKIN, Martin

On Sunday, January 21, 2018 at Toronto General Hospital. Beloved husband of Carol. Loving father and father-in-law of Tim and Nancy Barkin, Jeffrey and Karen Barkin, Risa Barkin Worth, and Robert and Lisa Barkin. Dear brother and brother-in-law of Miriam Marks, and Sharon and Mel Shiffman. Dear brother-in-law of Joel and Catherine Kohm. Devoted grandfather of Jack, Ethan, Daniel, Slater, Jake, Halle, and the late Eden Worth. At Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel, 2401 Steeles Avenue West (3 lights west of Dufferin) for service on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 at 1:00 p.m. Interment in the Temple Sinai section of Pardes Shalom Cemetery. Shiva 54 Old Forest Hill Road, Toronto. Memorial donations may be made to the Martin Barkin Chair in Urological Research at U of T, 416-978-4296, Sunnybrook Hospital Foundation, 416-480-4483 or to a charity of your choice.”

(“Martin BARKIN Obituary”, January 23, 2018, National Post)

Without a doubt, the two  Dr. Martin Barkin were the same man.

Wow, 15 years before a “family feud” between Barry Sherman and his late Uncle Louis Winter’s sons went public with their $1.5 billion lawsuit against him and former Winter family estate trustee Royal Trust – over his denying them an alleged 20% business ownership by reneging on an agreement reached 40 years earlier with Royal Trust – the Winter sons’ adoptive father had already become a top executive in the company of Morton Shulman, Sherman’s public nemesis in bitter legal disputes with him.

Dr. Barkin was much more than just a “highly regarded urologist” as the Toronto Life story said in the context of the Winter sons’ adoption. He was a pillar of the medical professional community and a leader in the field of healthcare in the city of  Toronto, the province of Ontario, and even nationally in Canada.

But Dr. Barkin’s record of adoptive parenting was rather disappointing, to say the least, and even terrible. Several of his adoptive Winter sons were very unhappy with him and his wife, one leaving home while in the mid-teen, and all descended into troubled lives.

Morton Shulman’s 1993 autobiography coauthored with writer Susan Kastner, while boasting much about his own achievements, mentioned Martin Barkin quite extensively and thus can be a source of information for understanding Barkin’s personality that could be relevant to the adopted sons’ experiences.

Shulman noted that Martin Barkin was known for his ego and temper:

“… Martin Barkin is a tall, portly and dignified 54-year-old with a distinguished background in medicine and health administration, and a tendency to flush dark red in temper. His interest in the business of medicine is as broad, and his ego as wide, as that of his diminutive new boss.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Barkin’s ego and temper could be one reason that some of his adopted sons found him “difficult” – as described in the Toronto Life story quoted earlier.

There is also an issue of possible parental negligence, on the part of someone with such an exceptionally high professional standard – negligence with serious and long-lasting ramifications for those adversely affected.

The provision reached between the Winter estate trustee Royal Trust and Barry Sherman in 1967, for the protection of the Winter children’s interests once each of them reached adulthood, would have been, and definitely should have been, made known to the adoptive parents, though it did not seem to have been conveyed to the adopted sons at any time – until they learned of it approaching their middle age in around 2000.

As quoted earlier from the Toronto Life story, some of the Winter sons’ unhappiness with the adoptive Barkin family began in their early-mid teens, as early as 1973. That was the time when Barry Sherman and his partner Joel Ulster were selling their company to the American firm ICN Pharmaceuticals following their successful run of Empire Labs taken over from the Winter estate, and Sherman was then about to start Apotex.

At that time, if those Winter boys were not well behaved from an adult’s standpoint, their prospect with Empire Labs, and subsequently Apotex, would not have looked good.

In any case, not long afterwards Sherman no longer kept in touch with them. What led to their losing touch, besides his late Uncle Lou’s old company no longer in the picture, was the passing of his mother, i.e., the Winter boys’ aunt who while alive, along with her son, had regularly visited them at the Barkins’ home:

“In her will, Mrs. Winter specified that she did not want the boys raised by relatives. She had converted to Judaism after marrying Lou and insisted that her four sons – Tim, Kerry, Jeffrey and Dana – be taken in by a Jewish family.

Within a year, Martin Barkin and his wife, Carol, became the boys’ guardians. Mr. Barkin was still studying to be a doctor, but the couple had already adopted two children, had a house in Toronto and the support of family, so they added the boys to their household.

…

… During his time at Empire, Mr. Sherman had dropped in on the Barkins with his mother – who used to give each boy crisp dollar bills for his birthday. But in the early 1970s, after the ICN deal closed and Mrs. Sherman died, the families lost touch.

“I wanted to help with the transition, so I visited them frequently when they were first adopted,” Mr. Sherman recalls. “We drifted apart. I had no reason to contact them. They were young and with their new family.”

And Mr. Sherman was about to have a family of his own. Just before selling Empire, he had met Honey Reich on a blind date. The attraction was almost
immediate – “call it love at second sight,” Mr. Sherman says – and the two were soon married by a judge.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Sherman and the Winter sons lost touch for over a decade until 1988 – I note that by this time they were all in their late 20s:

“The cousins and Mr. Sherman lost touch for more than 10 years after he started Apotex. It wasn’t until 1988 that contact was re-established. …”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Regardless of the fallacy of their adoptive father Martin Barkin, let’s see how Sherman related to his cousins after re-establishing contact at a time of, after all, their prime age for starting a working career.

Here is an account from the July 2008 Toronto Life story republished in December 2017:

“… One night in 1988, while eating at Bemelmans on Bloor, Dana bumped into a man named Stan Garden, who struck up a conversation. It happened that Garden had greatly admired Dana’s mother, Beverley (“beautiful, like Lana Turner”). At her deathbed, she asked Garden to keep an eye on the boys, but he’d lost touch. Now he could make amends. He got Barry’s number from someone he knew and phoned him. He told him about Dana’s situation and was invited to bring him to the Apotex office the following Saturday.

Until then, Barry knew nothing of the cousins’ struggles. Now he became involved in the lives of Dana, Jeff and Kerry, providing money and moral support. (Tim Winter, now a chef, never asked for help.) His motives? If you believe Barry, he was just trying to help Lou’s children. If you believe Kerry and Tim, he intended to make them dependent. That way, if they ever discovered the option agreement that could make them rich, they’d be too incapacitated or beholden to Barry to sue.

For whatever reasons, Barry bankrolled three of the Winter children in their ventures. Dana started a jewellery business; Jeff moved from a travel company into custom CDs; Kerry launched a construction company. Barry bought them homes and cottages, paid Visa bills and gave out allowances, lending millions on dubious security. Behind his back, Dana called him “Bank Sherman.””

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

A told above, a former family friend Stan Garden happened to meet Dana at a Toronto restaurant, Bemelmans, and reconnected him to Sherman. As told above, at that point Sherman “knew nothing of the cousins’ struggles”, i.e., troubles, and now he began to provide “money and moral support” to all of them – except the Winter adopted Tim who did not ask for help.

There was no mention of getting any of them a job at Apotex, which could be a start to potential ownership shares if Sherman had wanted to honour the old provision in some way.

Here is another account about their reconnecting, from the January 29, 2007 The Globe and Mail story:

“The cousins and Mr. Sherman lost touch for more than 10 years after he started Apotex. It wasn’t until 1988 that contact was re-established. Dana was facing trouble and turned to Mr. Sherman for financial help. Mr. Sherman gave him money, bailed him out of jail and helped him land various jobs. But Dana’s drug problem worsened and he died seven years later.

Soon Mr. Sherman was providing substantial support to the other children. Apotex had become a major generic drug company with roughly $1-billion in annual sales and Mr. Sherman, married with four children, was a billionaire.

He bought his cousins homes, cottages, financed various business ventures and gave them millions of dollars, according to court filings. Kerry received up to $15,000 a month for years, according to court filings. After Dana died, Mr. Sherman bought his widow a home and sent monthly cheques to her two children.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Whatever mention of the help Sherman provided, for getting out of trouble or for making a substantially better living, none was about any of them being offered a job at Apotex – even though they reconnected through Dana being brought to Sherman’s Apotex office by mutual family friend Stan Garden.

But I note that the state of life Dana was in when reconnected with Sherman was problematic, that his facing criminal trouble and wanting help in that context may have easily made Sherman determine the prospect to be dismal for someone like that to work in his company.

What Sherman did beginning in 1988 was consistent with his later statement in in a 2007 court deposition over the Winter cousins’ lawsuit, previously quoted:

“There is no way that any of these boys would have ended up being a suitable employee at Apotex Inc., but I have tried to just help them do what they wanted to do.”

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

In any case, at this time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the now grown-up Winter sons were unaware of the old Empire Labs provision that Sherman had agreed with Royal Trust in 1967 for their future benefits. As quoted earlier, years later after they found out, they alleged that the financial help from Sherman was intended to make them less likely to pursue the Empire Labs ownership matter, as earlier quoted:

“… His motives? If you believe Barry, he was just trying to help Lou’s children. If you believe Kerry and Tim, he intended to make them dependent. That way, if they ever discovered the option agreement that could make them rich, they’d be too incapacitated or beholden to Barry to sue.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

But there may have been another motive, one not yet probed by the media, in Sherman’s being so helpful and generous toward his Winter cousins – short of putting them on a path toward possible Apotex ownership interests.

They were the adopted sons of Dr. Martin Barkin who, according to Morton Shulman’s 1993 autobiography quoted earlier, was Ontario Deputy Minister of Health from 1987 to 1991 – during the time when Dana and Sherman reconnected in 1988.

My quite extensive review of his 1996 memoir has shown that Sherman had a sharp mind when it came to how persons in positions influential in or with the government could help and hurt businesses: he marvelled about the crucial legislative role of the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, about the expert legal help he repeatedly sought from the prominent attorney Willard Estey, a future Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada – at that point the son of a former Justice of that Court – and about Dr. Alan E. Dyer, Ontario Assistant Deputy Minister of Health who established the PARCOST (Prescriptions at Reasonable Cost) program in 1968.

There is no reason that in 1988 Sherman would have overlooked that point when his Winter cousins’ adoptive father, Dr. Martin Barkin whom he had known back in the years when at whose home he and his mother regularly visited the boys, was now Ontario’s Deputy Minister of Health, the second-highest official in the government health ministry – just below the Minister who must be a member of the legislature in the Canadian government systems.

That could be a valuable connection far outweighing any hassle from Dana’s criminal trouble, one that Sherman only needed to revive. As a comparison, during the early 1990s Morton Shulman was also trying to connect to Deputy Health Minister Dr. Martin Barkin to obtain government approval for his “Hungarian wonder drug” – a term quoted in Part 1 referring to deprenyl which he named Eldepryl – for treating Canadian Parkinson’s disease patients. Shulman made eight phone calls to Barkin, and Barkin “didn’t even return a single call”:

“Through the whole Deprenyl approval thing with Ontario I never met him. I kept phoning him and he wouldn’t return my phone calls. I phoned him eight times. He didn’t even return a single call. Finally I got pissed off and I wrote him and said, “Come on down, let’s fix this damned thing up.” He wouldn’t. Even at that point I didn’t meet him.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As recalled by Shulman, during the years when Barkin was the deputy health minister, Shulman contacted him many times and Barkin never bothered to respond.

During this period, Barry Sherman was ‘luckier’ in the sense that he had the opportunity to, and did, shower Barkin’s adopted sons with all kinds of help, worth “millions of dollars” as quoted earlier.

But unlike Shulman eventually, Sherman did not recruit Barkin to work for his company, or if he did it did not happen and that I can understand: Barkin’s gong to Apotex could revive the decades-old, conveniently forgotten issue of the Empire Labs ownership provision and potentially cost Sherman up to 20% of his now billion-dollar company Apotex.

Barry Sherman’s holding back was Morton Shulman’s gain.

But one may say that Shulman’s small brand-name drug company Deprenyl Research was no Canada-leading generic drug maker Apotex, which could be too challenging a pharmaceutical giant for Martin Barkin.

The answer, besides in the different types of management positions there exist in a large corporation, is that Barkin’s academic and professional reputation was no inferior to Sherman’s – even if as a billionaire Sherman was much wealthier.

Be it in his academic study years or in his professional career, Barkin was excellent like Sherman, here as quoted from a 1990 article by Dr. Brian Goldman:

“… Now in his 30th year as a physician, his career accomplishments are impressive. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 1960 – he shared the Gold Medal that goes to the top student with a classmate – Barkin specialized in urology, completing his postgraduate training at Harvard University and in England. He returned to Canada to practise urology at Sunnybrook, where he quickly rose to the top of his field.

As a researcher, he developed innovative techniques for correcting anatomical abnormalities of the genitourinary system. An expert in this relatively narrow and highly specialized field, he was courted internationally as a consultant, author and lecturer.

His career as an administrator moved on a parallel path.

While serving as CEO at Sunnybrook he turned the hospital’s annual operating deficit into a surplus within 1 year. Earlier, he was a well-connected member of Ontario’s medical elite, serving as chairman of the Ontario Council of Teaching Hospitals and on several committees of the OMA and the District Health Council of Metropolitan Toronto. Somewhere in the middle of these career twists and turns, Barkin found time to own and operate a company that developed computer software for physicians’ offices.”

(“What makes Martin Barkin run?”, by Brian Goldman, MD, 1990, 142 (6), Canadian Medical Association Journal)

As cited above and earlier, whereas Sherman won a Wilson Medal and a Gold Medal from the University of Toronto, Barkin, a few years more senior, won a Gold Medal as well; and whereas Sherman excelled at his graduate studies at MIT, Barkin did so not only at Harvard – also a world-leading academic institution in Boston in the United States – but also in England; and whereas Sherman led his Apotex to become the leading generic drug company in Canada, Barkin rose to the top of his medical field of Urology internationally, in addition to holding various leadership positions in the healthcare field in Toronto and Ontario, and even owned and operated a computer software company for medical applications.

Besides working at the helm of the healthcare field in Ontario, Barkin also had an influential reputation in the healthcare field in North America, here – like the previous quote – as reported in 1990 by Dr. Goldman in the Canadian Medical Association Journal:

“It was yet another juicy rumour. Once again, Dr. Martin Barkin was supposed to be quitting his job as Ontario’s deputy minister of health to head for greener pastures south of the border. There have long been rumours that Barkin, perhaps the province’s most controversial physician, would be tapped to head Humana, the giant American health care conglomerate.

In typical fashion, he outdid the rumour. CMAJ has learned that George Bush, the president of the United States, has spoken to Barkin. The topic? Would Barkin help him create a national health insurance plan for Americans.

Doctors at the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) and hospital administrators across the province listen to the Barkin rumours with interest. They wonder if the man who brought the saying “Just say no!” to hospital budgets is finally going to go away and leave them alone.

At least for now he won’t be, but some say it took a last-minute plea from Premier David Peterson to keep Barkin in Ontario. In any case, the game of rumour and denial continues. Love him or hate him – they all respect him – Barkin watchers across the country agree that he is the most fascinating character to enter the Canadian health care scene in years.”

(Brian Goldman, MD, 1990, Canadian Medical Association Journal)

See, according to rumours circulating among medical professionals, the American healthcare giant Humana wanted to recruit Barkin to be its top leader, and according to information obtained by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, then U.S. President George Bush had spoken with Barkin about helping him “create a national health insurance plan for Americans”.

Wow, anything was possible for Dr. Martin Barkin, “the most fascinating character to enter the Canadian health care scene in years”!

But what were rumoured or even spoken were not necessarily what happened. Soon President Bush was out of a job and there has been no ‘Bush Healthcare’ for Americans; and in the end, Dr. Barkin did not go to the American giant Humana but the small Canadian Deprenyl Research.

In any case, Barkin’s joining Deprenyl Research was a major coup, a steal, for Morton Shulman.

But what made it happen, besides Barkin having left his government post, was Shulman’s offering Barkin stock options worth potentially multi-million dollars:

“I pursued Martin Barkin for three years, then persuaded him to come to work for me in half an hour. I told him in a year I would make him very, very rich.

…

He got stock to come into the company, and an option on a million shares at $7. He’ll get very rich from this. I think in five years he’ll be a multi-millionaire.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

In addition to the large stock option offer Barkin was given the job of executive vice president, and he came only after reaching agreement that he would be promoted to president and Chief Operating Officer in three months; that was at a great time in March 1992, when the stock price of Shulman’s Deprenyl Research had recently had a record high, and old and new media glories came upon Shulman:

“Well then. Can 1992 possibly be anything but even purer gold than the year before?

Surely not.

In the beginning, all augurs well. Canguard backs off – drops plans for its undercutting generic. The stock cruises at the $21 mark; before the month is out, it will hit a psychedelic high of $23.50 Canadian. And the company has expanded. There’s a series of brand new horses racing for profit carrying the colors of Deprenyl Research. There is DAHI: Deprenyl Animal Health; and there is Bone Health, with a new be-all and end-all osteoporosis medication in trials – both US subsidiaries of Deprenyl Research. There is another subsidiary, Memorial, conducting trials for Alzene, for treatment of Alzheimer’s. And soon there will be Deprenyl USA – DUSA – with its 5-ALA PDT; a new photodynamic treatment being tested for skin cancer, quietly rumoured to have spectacular possibilities for other cancer treatment as well.

And a lengthy negotiation is on the point of paying off – with a gold-plated Dr. Respectable to head up the burgeoning company and counterbalance Dr. MortyMouth.

Morty woos and wins as executive vice president of Deprenyl Research Dr. Martin Barkin, the eminent ex-deputy minister of health for Ontario.

…

In March, 1992, Barkin agrees to join the jolly ship Deprenyl as second officer if he is moved up to president and chief operating officer in June. it is a fascinating – not to say demonically inspired – joining of forces. …

…

When Morty first began his recruiting campaign, Barkin had moved from government to the very bosom of the private sector as partner at the heavyweight brokerage firm of Peat Marwick Stevenson and Kellogg, as National Practice Leader for Health Care.

While at Deprenyl he will continue to chair Peat Marwick’s Health Care Advisory Committee. He is frequently called upon by the editorial boards of both the Star and The Globe & Mail to expound on questions of health management, policy and marketing.

…

Remembers Barkin: “He called my partner at Peat Marwick and told him, ‘I want to hire him as president of my company.’” …

…

On March 14 the stock closes up 25 cents, at $17.50. On March 15 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation announces Wojeck is back on TV, in a new two-hour special.

That day brings a major newspaper profile of Shulman, with a glowing account of Deprenyl’s profit picture: shares that have “gone up 18 times and split twice, despite the naysaying of skeptics,” a company which with its subsidiaries has a market value of “almost half a billion dollars.” A pipeline of exciting products, including Alzene, and the exciting new Canadian discovery ALA PDT, the new photodynamic therapy for skin cancer uncovered by Geoff at that dermatology conference in Kingston.

…

So mesmerized is the reporter that she hurries back to her office to persuade all her friends to snap up the DUSA, quicker than quick. …”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As told, Deprenyl Research’s stock price reached a record high of $23.50 Canadian dollars in late January 1992, and was at $17.50 on March 14, in the month when Martin Barkin joined the company, with the option to buy one million shares of the stock at $7 – it meant Barkin could make $10.50 per share or a total of $10.50 million if he could purchase and sell those stocks right away.

Also as told, on March 15 the CBC announced a TV re-airing of the show Wojeck – as mentioned in Part 1 it was a TV drama inspired by Shulman’s past work as the chief coroner of Ontario and Toronto – and a major newspaper profile of Shulman also appeared, in which he boasted that his company and its subsidiaries now had a market value of “almost half a billion dollars.”

“Almost half a billion dollars” was not quite Apotex and Barry Sherman’s billionaire status, but Morton Shulman’s company was very promising in its market showing, even though it had only one proven drug deprenyl, named Eldepryl, for treating Parkinson’s disease – discussed in details in Part 1 – and other drugs only at various planning and research stages within the company’s subsidiaries – the person Geoff mentioned in the above story was Shulman’s son Geoffrey Shulman.

Very exciting, and even the reporter doing the newspaper profile of Shulman went to “persuade all her friends” to buy the stock shares of Deprenyl Research’s U.S. subsidiary DUSA.

But as it has been shown in the story of Sherman’s getting ICN Pharmaceuticals stocks for selling Empire Labs and holding them for six months in 1973-1974, and in the story of the volatile ventures of ICN’s owner, Serbian-American tycoon Milan Panic, these stocks were not cash and anything could happen to their value over a period of time.

Like those businesses, Deprenyl Research’s business was also volatile.

Shulman’s propensity for publicly bragging about his business soon led to serious media criticisms of Eldepryl’s high brand-name price; the company’s stock value went into rapid decline soon after Barkin’s joining:

“… But underneath it all, the ground is crumbling away, and the January cloudlet builds to a thunderhead.

…

Indeed, in the third week of March, seemingly out of the blue, James Reynolds, key West Coast analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, had flown in the face of his New York vice president David Saks’ unabated devotion to all things Morty. Reynolds issued a sell advisory on Deprenyl stock.

Morty announces he is furious, hints Deprenyl may take the West Coast guy before the regulatory authorities.

It doesn’t happen. Deprenyl stock sinks $2.62 to $15.25, flutters back up to $16.50. The ever-faithful David Saks continues to recommend Deprenyl.

But by the beginning of April, there has been a $10 slide from the January heights, and things start to get nasty.

A huge front-page Toronto Star piece in mid-April luridly paints Morty as Dr. Venal: rich, greedy and scamming the poor with unconscionable pill profits.

“Angry Parkinson’s patients pay $2.31 for 6c pill” the headline shouts. Morty is said to be shamelessly blocking production of cheaper generic versions while sitting on “a whopping $10-million before-tax profit” and displaying hypocritical hypersensitivity to criticism, “repeating over and over again he isn’t in the drug business to make money but to help people, followed with several phone calls and faxes of documents showing evidence of his good works.”

A Newfoundland Parkinson’s sufferer is found to have complained about Eldepryl’s price to the Patent Medicine Prices Review Board. “Why,” the lady rages, “should we have to beg some rich man in Toronto for something that shouldn’t be that expensive anyway?”

…

Here, the reporter briefly explains that Deprenyl is only doing exactly the same as every other pharmaceutical company. The difference is that the big private companies can keep it secret.

…

“The only thing different about Deprenyl is that the true costs – and true profits – have slipped into the public eye. It’s only because Deprenyl Research was a new company with a single product that the factors behind the price of Eldepryl could be deduced by patients – and reporters.”

The message in all this: you might say that Morty was once again paying the price he has paid all his life, for the same reason he has always paid it. He’s getting zapped for letting it all hang out.

…

The newspaper is obliged to print first a correction, then a retraction and an apology for two major factual errors which alter the thrust of the whole story: “… Those figures were incorrect. The company says the 36c it pays for a deprenyl pill does not include its overhead and administration costs. According to the company’s annual report, the after-tax profit on pharmaceuticals is only 15%. The Star regrets the errors and apologizes to Dr. Shulman.”

Yes, the bloom is off.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As cited above, in March 1992 just one week after a major newspaper profile citing Shulman’s company as having a market value of “almost half a billion dollars”, a key West Coast stock market analyst recommended that investors sell – instead of buy – the stock, and by the beginning of April his company’s stock price had a “$10 slide” from its January heights – its record high in late January being $23.50 as cited earlier, and so the stock price by early April was only around $13.50.

Then, as told above, in mid-April in a Toronto Star story both a Parkinson’s disease patient and the reporter accused Shulman of making excessive profit on a cheap drug: “patients pay $2.31 for 6c pill”. It turned out to be inaccurate, because the cost was 36 cents/pill buying from the foreign manufacturer but that still did not include the company’s operating costs.

Still, at $2.31/pill a drug was being sold at a high price over 6.416 times of its purchase cost of 36 cents/pill; the real costs for the company depended on how much the operating costs were, as the profit was as reported, “a whopping $10-million before-tax profit”.

On the other hand, the above story also shows that there was something too ‘lofty’, if one can put it that way, that a company cheaply importing a foreign drug to sell and getting a “$10-million before-tax profit” – as surprising as the number was – while its other drug projects were not yet productive, could be worth “almost half a billion dollars”.

Also significant in the Toronto Star story was the accusation of Shulman “shamelessly blocking production of cheaper generic versions”. As reviewed in detail in Part 1, Shulman and his company would soon be in fierce legal battles in 1993 against Barry Sherman and Apotex, who wanted to introduce a much cheaper generic version of Shulman’s brand-name drug.

As told in Shulman’s autobiography, in 1992 after joining Deprenyl Research, Martin Barkin immediately played a sobering role to provide clarity over business publicity, trying to calm down the volatility:

“There is news of another major breakthrough. On April 22 Eldepryl is approved by HPB for treatment of early Parkinson’s; it is no longer officially restricted, as in the past, to be prescribed in conjunction with other anti-Parkinson’s drugs for advanced stages of the disease.

This marks several large steps forward. …

Martin Barkin projects a doubling of revenue over next 24 months. He announces revenues of $13.9 million for the year ended December 31, 1991, and a profit of $6.5 million.

In May, the company announces the launch of its new star project. Bone Health, its new Massachusetts-based drug subsidiary, has begun a major clinical trial of its osteoporis drug One-Alpha D(2).

Results will be published in September. But the prognosis is so promising that, on May 22, Deprenyl Research issues to its investors a dividend in the form of one Bone Health warrant for each Deprenyl share. The warrant is good for the purchase of one Bone Health share for 30 cents, from March 1, 1993 to May 7, 1993; or may be traded at that time for 20 cents cash.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As in the above, there was good news in late April 1992, that the company’s main drug Eldepryl was approved for broader use, the new U.S.-based subsidiary Bone Health showed early promise in its drug trial, and Deprenyl shareholders were issued options to buy the new Bone Health shares or get cash dividends.

The company’s 1991 revenue and profit figures announced by Barkin, in my understanding, clarified over the newspaper reported “a whopping $10-million before-tax profit” and the company’s correction that “the after-tax profit on pharmaceuticals is only 15%” – as in the second last quote above.

I note that $6.5m profit on $13.9m revenue was much higher profit than the 15% after-tax profit “on pharmaceuticals” on a revenue that was not large.

The seemingly conflicting figures would imply that part of the revenue, and more importantly most of the profit, did not come from pharmaceuticals.

As quoted earlier, as planned Barkin would soon become president and COO in June 1992.

Shulman’s 1993 autobiography continued to describe more media criticisms in August 1992.

One critical story, in the Wall Street Journal, reported that Shulman’s company were selling a new Alzheimer’s drug Alzene that had not been officially approved, by mail to the U.S.:

“And now, the storm begins to break.

The Wall Street Journal returns to the scene with a vengeance, turning both barrels on Alzene, and Morty, in the last week of August, 1992.

 

PROBLEMATIC PILLS

An unapproved drug for Alzheimer’s gets a big marketing push. Proof Alzene helps is scant but that doesn’t deter Deprenyl Research Ltd. Promoters defend methods.

Many Alzheimer’s researchers doubt that Alzene, which hasn’t been approved for sale in the U.S., helps the dozens of U.S. families who buy it by mail through a crack in U.S. import laws. But nobody doubts the promotional prowess of two young drug companies, a flamboyant Canadian entrepreneur and an obscure Israeli inventor that are touting the drug and investments in its prospects.

. . . Most users buy the pills on faith from Deprenyl Research Ltd., a small Toronto drug company. . . .

…

It seems Morty has been cutting through layers in his favorite time-tested ways to get Alzene into U.S. circulation ahead of the official approval process. There have been letters to American neurologists from Deprenyl Research, that warn “overwhelming demand” for the drug has caused a shortage.” The FDA is no happier about this Mortyescapade than was Canada’s Health Protection Branch before them. It issues a reprimand ordering Deprenyl Research to stop promoting Alzene. Morty again denies exaggerating or law breaking. He faxes the FDA to assure them of the potential efficacy of Alzene.

…

He stops sending letters to U.S. doctors; asserts, “I have done nothing more than inform my shareholders of events that might affect the stock.”

The formula for having it both ways was working fine, for the second drug in a row. The publicity will speed the approvals process while letting Deprenyl Research do business by dealing the drug during the pre-approvals gap. For about a year before Eldepryl was approved for sale in the U.S. Deprenyl Research has sold it to American patients through the mail.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Uh-uh, Shulman seemed to be doing what he accused Sherman of doing illegally.

As in Part 1, Barry Sherman and his brother-in-law Allen Barry Shechtman had been selling Apotex drugs by mail since 1989, with magazine advertising by a Bahamas-based company, to U.S. consumers without the necessary prescriptions or approvals; it led to an FBI criminal investigation in 1993 and a $500,000 fine on one of Sherman’s companies in 1995.

Also as in Part 1, responding to Sherman’s pressure in 1990 to let Apotex develop and sell a generic version of his Parkinson’s disease drug Eldepryl, Shulman hired private detectives to investigate Sherman’s businesses, and discovered Sherman’s mail selling of drugs, which Shulman viewed as illegal.

Now it turned out that Shulman also sold drugs by mail to the U.S. without proper approvals. That was hypocritical, was it not?

Selling a medication before receiving official approval was obvious problematic as reviewed in Part 1 in Sherman’s case. But here Shulman seemed to suggest that promoting a drug by sending a letter to U.S. doctors, but without public advertising that Sherman’s companies had been doing, would not be illegal.

Another critical media story in August 1992, in The Globe and Mail, revealed that Sherman’s company was actually doing currency trading on a unusually large scale, much larger in monetary amount than its pharmaceutical operations:

“The Journal story runs Tuesday, August 25, 1992; the next day, Wednesday the 26th, the Globe reprints the whole thing on the front of its Business section.

It is not a happy time in Deprenylville.

Dan Westell of the Globe follows with a close look at Morty’s dollar-hedging activities.

He reports that Deprenyl’s currency transactions top $514 million in a six-month period; that Danny Gordon, Deprenyl’s broker at currency traders Friedberg Mercantile Group affirms: “He’s on top of things. He’s on the phone with me almost before I’m in the office.”

Deprenyl, which reported revenue of $7.3 million in the six months ended June 30, did more than $514 million worth of securities transactions in the same period.

Martin Barkin says Dr. Shulman deals with Deprenyl’s investments and then reports back on what he has done.

“We’re not gambling on foreign exchange,” Dr. Shulman says. “We hedge our net assets [of somewhere between $5 million and $20 million] because Deprenyl expects the Canadian dollar to fall.”

This open avowal sits uneasily. Canada is stumbling towards a national referendum that is being bannered as the harbinger of its almost certain disintegration.

…

But for Morty, as for hedgers and floggers the world over, the shaky economic and political situation comes to a focuspoint in the gleaming golden four-figure number that shows the downticking state of the Canadian dollar. As far as he’s concerned politics is bunk, politicians are bonkers, and he couldn’t be happier. Each tick is worth $1,000, every time the buck falls a point.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

A truer picture was revealed in the above story. Back in March when Barkin joined, Deprenyl Research with its subsidiaries was touted by Shulman as worth “almost half a billion dollars” on the stock market as earlier quoted, but now in this August story its real net assets was revealed to be “somewhere between $5 million and $20 million” – much, much smaller.

Moreover, Shulman was using this modest amount of assets to play the currency market, buying and selling by hedging on the Canadian dollar, raking up a huge amount of transactions – $514 million within 6 months – because of the frequency of his trading.

So how much did Shulman’s company make from pharmaceuticals, really, versus from other trading activities such as currency hedging?

Barkin again provided some clarity by announcing more financial figures, also pointing out that Shulman talked too much at the detriment of the company, while the company’s stock price continued to drop to $7.63:

“DEPRENYL PRICE SLIDES AFTER CRITICAL STORY IN U.S. PAPER

The stock dropped 38 cents to $7.63, bringing to 9 per cent the decline so far this week. The tumble began Tuesday after publication of a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal that was critical of Deprenyl and its marketing of Alzene. . . .

 

Martin Barkin has used all his political savvy to smooth the waters. “The only thing that’s happened in the last two weeks is that Morty has been the subject of news articles,” he tells reporters. Barkin also issued a press release which took the unusual step of predicting Deprenyl’s pre-tax net income from pharmaceutical operations would be $1 million in the 3rd quarter compared with $728,000 in the same quarter a year earlier.

But notwithstanding, analyst Michael James, Health Care analyst with Montreal-based Dlouhy Investments, expects the stock price to keep falling . . .”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As Barkin reported, Deprenyl’s pre-tax net income from pharmaceutical operations was $728,000 in the 3rd quarter of 1991, and would be $1 million in the same quarter of 1992 so there was steady progress.

On the other hand, recall that Barkin had in April announced the total revenue in 1991 as $13.9 million and profit $6.5 million, and a Toronto Star story reported “a whopping $10-million before-tax profit”; and if one multiplies $728,000 by 4 as an estimate of the full year pre-tax profit, it would come to $2.912 million, suggesting that only about 29% of the company’s pre-tax profit came from pharmaceutical operations – while the vast majority, around 70%, came from other trading activities unrelated to medicine.

Recall as quoted in Part 1, Shulman was sometimes accused of “stock manipulation”:

“… Then he turns the drug, Deprenyl, into a pharmaceutical company that at one time was worth $100 million. Along the way he is accused of stock manipulation, quackery and worse. …”

(“Another look at what makes Morty run”, by Edward Trapunski, January 15, 1994, Toronto Star)

As reviewed, Shulman was boasting a market value of far more than “$100 million” cited above, but “almost half a billion dollars” for his company and its subsidiaries. While the facts reviewed did not constitute “stock manipulation”, they did show an unhealthy degree of preoccupation with, even addiction to, the stock and currency markets – for someone who claimed his company to be at the forefront of developing and marketing new medical drugs.

September 1992 marked the sixth month of Martin Barkin joining Morton Shulman’s company since March 1992.

In September, two major international pharmaceutical companies ended their cooperation with Deprenyl Research. One came as a huge disappointment when the U.S. subsidiary Bone Health’s promising new drug trial, mentioned earlier, was abandoned by the leading brand-name drug company SmithKline Beecham:

“On the 5th comes the announcement that Purdue Frederick, the Canadian division of a U.S. drug company, is ending an 18-month-old agreement to market Eldepryl in Canada.

The official announcement says this is a mutual decision [with Deprenyl Research] because Deprenyl Research is acquiring the expanded sales staff it needs to market all of its own growing product pipeline.

On September 18th Bone Health gets a huge kick in the shin.

SmithKline Beecham announces it is dumping One-alpha D(2) because it feels preliminary data from the clinical trials did not demonstrate a significant difference between patients treated with the drug and those taking placebo. SmithKline transfers its marketing rights back to Bone Care International.

Deprenyl has a 14 per cent interest in Bone Care and holds 381,500 shares of Lunar Corp., the U.S. pharmaceutical company associated with Bone Health. The announcement knocks Deprenyl shares from just above $7 to $6.63. The future of Bone Health is pronounced “uncertain.”

If Deprenyl investors bail out of their Bone Health warrants, it could cost Deprenyl $3.4 million, instead of the $5 million it was counting on reaping. On September 19th, Deprenyl shares hit a 52-week low of $5.38.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Recall that Shulman had offered Barkin 1 million shares of stock options at $7 per share to get the latter to join the company in March. By now in September, those stock options were essentially worthless because one could just buy the shares on the stock market at the cheaper price of $5.38.

Barkin again blamed it on Shulman for getting too much publicity. As the stock value continued to slide, a special company board meeting was convened and a decision was made for Barkin to replace Shulman as the CEO, with Shulman remaining as company board chairman. Barkin immediately reined in the other trading activities and kept the company’s focus on medical drugs:

“Barkin tells the press the company is “paying the price for Morty’s seeking – and getting – so much publicity. Deprenyl sure gets a lot of press attention,” Barkin says ruefully.

The company has decided to “tone down its image notably by keeping its chairman and founder, the flamboyant Morton Shulman, out of the limelight. “There is no question that Morty Shulman has tried to keep the media eye on this company and that has not always been the best policy for this or any other company.”

Barkin added that the evidence on which SmithKline based its pullout from Bone Health is “pretty flimsy.”

“Two days later Deprenyl shares clunk down to $4.70, totter back to $5.38. DUSA lurks around $6.75. Chief Financial Officer Ed Foster emphasizes the company is still in great shape financially, well able to come up with cash to redeem the Bone Health warrants if need be.

On September 23rd a special Deprenyl Research Limited board meeting is called.

…

The official press release comes the next day: “Martin Barkin Named CEO of Deprenyl Research. Morton Shulman to Remain Chairman.”

…

Barkin tells reporters there will be a brake on Morty’s currency activities, which will be supervised by two outside advisors. … And, “While Shulman’s health is good, the company is definitely looking at succession planning. We accept the fact that Morty is 67 years old . . . and we are taking a look at succession planning as it deals with his son Geoff.”

The king is dead; long live the kings.

The shares close up 13 cents that night: $5.50. The industry analysts express their approval. Confidence reigns, sort of.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

It had been a nightmarish six months for Martin Barkin; and now he was finally the man in charge.

But just when he thought there was a big CEO salary for him now, he found out that Shulman had literally lived on the stock market and had no CEO salary – a discovery that would turn Barkin’s face “dark red in temper” like described earlier about his ego and temper:

“The day after Dr. Barkin is elevated to CEO, he sends a letter to Shulman asking to have Shulman’s salary as CEO diverted over to himself. Shulman gleefully replies that he is happy to turn it over in full, “But, as I have never drawn a salary as CEO, it will not be of much help to you”. Morty personally takes the letter over to Barkin. Barkin reads it, turns red in the face and rips it into little pieces.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

With the dust settled, Martin Barkin had an unlucky 6 months of the stock market compared to Barry Sherman and Joel Ulster in 1973-1974, who held for 6 months the shares they had gotten from selling Empire Labs to the famous Milan Panic’s ICN Pharmaceuticals and watched the ICN stock go up and down, but in the end did cash in at about the same price as when they first received them – before the stock value really sank like Deprenyl Research’s that rendered Barkin’s stock options worthless.

As reviewed in Part 1, less than two years later under Barkin, the company lost its legal battle with Apotex over Sherman’s plan for a generic version of Deprenyl Research’s drug Eldepryl.

Then in May 1994, the company changed its name to Draxis Health – taking one of the “final steps to put the Morton Shulman era behind it” – and most likely by this later time enhanced share options were made available for Barkin, as reported in a Toronto Star story quoted earlier and in Part 1:

“The company emerged from its annual meeting yesterday with a new name – Draxis Health Inc. – a new corporate structure and a new share option program for senior management.”

(“Deprenyl change ends Shulman era; Company to be called Draxis and get new focus”, by Art Chamberlain, May 27, 1994, Toronto Star)

Despite the burst of the big stock bubble in his first six months, Barkin continued as the company’s president and CEO until the end of 2007 when he retired; by that time the company was into completely different pharmaceutical products and was a global supplier for those specialized ones:

“DRAXIS Health Inc. (TSX: DAX) (Nasdaq: DRAX) announces that Dr. Martin Barkin today informed the board of directors that he will retire as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company effective December 31, 2007.

Dr. Barkin joined the senior management of DRAXIS in 1992. Over the last fifteen years, he has been instrumental in guiding the Company through a period of significant growth from a small Canadian pharmaceutical marketing company to its current position as a provider of specialized pharmaceutical and radiopharmaceutical products in markets globally.

…

DRAXIS Health, through its wholly owned operating subsidiary, DRAXIS Specialty Pharmaceuticals Inc., provides products in three categories: sterile products, non-sterile products and radiopharmaceuticals. …”

(“DRAXIS Health Inc. Announces Retirement of Dr. Martin Barkin as President and Chief Executive Officer”, October 31, 2007, Cision)

While my review above of the history gives a good glimpse into Martin Markin’s joining and succeeding Morton Shulman at the small pharmaceutical company the former Ontario Chief Coroner founded, an intriguing question remains.

Did Shulman recruit Barkin to his company just because Barkin was a distinguished medical professional, healthcare leader and former provincial deputy health minister, or that it had something to do with Barkin being the adoptive father of the Winter family cousins of Barry Sherman?

Sherman was one of Shulman’s most hated enemies, as he told the media to that effect in 1993, quoted earlier and in Part 1:

“This is a true crusade,” Shulman said in an interview in his Roncesvalles Ave. office. “I’ve got nothing to do (but fight with Sherman.) I’m delighted. It was a godsend that this came along.”

…

Shulman’s son Geoffrey and Dr. Martin Barkin, who was brought in last year to run Deprenyl, now manage the company as it tries to expand its range of products and defend its Eldepryl turf.”

(“Shulman vs. Sherman; The drug entrepreneurs face off”, by Art Chamberlain, July 11, 1993, Toronto Star)

Most likely, at some point in time Martin Barkin and his wife Carol had learned of the 1967 provision between Royal Trust and Sherman for protecting their adopted Winter boys’ future financial interests, which Sherman conveniently dodged in 1973 when he sold Empire Labs. By this time in 1992-1994, Sherman had reacquainted with the Winter cousins, and no doubt with Barkin, and showered the cousins with help worth millions of dollars but apparently did not raise the issue of that old provision.

Morton Shulman, a former chief coroner and politician, could also have learned about that provision through the private investigation he had done on Sherman’s various businesses, previously discussed in Part 1.

If Shulman’s invitation for Barkin to join his company had the motive in mind of politically countering Sherman, then Barkin could well have a compatible motive, namely using Shulman as a leverage to get more from Sherman – given Barkin’s own masterful experience playing politics as a leadership figure in the healthcare field and in government.

As discussed earlier, Barkin was as bright and as competitive as Barry Sherman. The 1990 Canadian Medical Association Journal’s profile of Barkin, cited earlier, also portrayed him as a shrewd and money-interested man with his own agenda:

“Before joining the government his career was built on enlightened self-interest. As a urologist he was a staunch defender of extra-billing, charging up to 10 times more to reverse a vasectomy than the slightly more than $200 now paid by the provincial health insurance plan.

…

Doctors don’t hesitate to complain either. “The biggest knock against Martin that I am aware of is that he really doesn’t want to listen to anybody else”, says one high-ranking OMA officer. “He has his prearranged agenda, which he’s going to blow through, come hell or high water. . . . He is undoubtedly the Machiavellian mind behind the attempts to force physicians into alternate payment schemes.””

(Brian Goldman, MD, 1990, Canadian Medical Association Journal)

As told, Barkin liked to make a lot more money whenever he could. Thus, if he viewed Sherman’s friendly gestures to his adopted sons as not enough because of the existence of the old Empire Labs provision, he would likely explore other ways to pursue it.

As also referred to above, Barkin was known as a “Machiavellian mind”, and so such an ‘other’ motive in joining and taking over Shulman’s company would have been compatible with his interests and his personality nature.

The last chapter of Shulman’s 1993 autobiography described Shulman’s being notified, in May 1993, of his appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada; it was supposed to be confidential before the official announcement, but Shulman couldn’t wait to tell his friends, and a celebratory brunch with the “Morty circle” was held at the home of their friends Roma and Denny Dzerowicz in the Halton Hills on May 16, 1993.

At the end of that Chapter 10, The Bestowal, on the way home Shulman said something and became emotionally teary-eyed, and the interactions with his friends at that time revealed a subtle relationship between Shulman and Barkin regarding Barry Sherman:

“May 16, 1993

From the four corners of Metropolitan Toronto, the Morty circle is gathering.

The impossible has happened.

Morty is to be inducted into the Order of Canada.

He has just gotten the news and of course it is all strictly confidential, but . . .

…

The circle, three-quarters of whom are directors of Morty companies past, present and future, have grown to, for none of them was born to, savor the subtle delights of opera and the silken joys of extremely expensive wines, many of whose names they happily admit they cannot pronounce.

…

The brunch is to mark two milestones.

The first is the news of Morty’s impending induction, at last, into the Order of Canada.

The second is his final break with the company that he and Parkinson’s built, the rift of which, finally and inescapably leaves him on one side of the canyon and, on the other, Martin Barkin and Geoff Shulman.

…

After lunch there is an ad-hoc partial board meeting downstairs in the gym. Arnie, Kingham, Morty: Arnie wants to know if Safety Corp. is going to be in competition with Deprenyl. He also wants to know just where Safety Corp. is at.

Sam Sarick stays at the table, where the golden sauternes shimmers in the glasses, nodding and seeming to doze, and missing nothing.

There are dragons to be slain, wicked witches and wizards to be overcome. On the drive home Morty is hyped, up and down.

Viola McMillan, whom he once dubbed the Boadicea of mining promotions, one of his targets in the Windfall mining scandal of the ’60s, has breathtakingly transcended a 1967 conviction for stock skulduggery and received an Order of Canada, too, at the spring ceremonies just past. They moved the date of the presentation to April 21, to coincide with her 90th birthday, April 21.

…

Thus do laurels wreath the brows of those who make markets.

“She was supposed to spend nine months in prison; I swear she never spent a day! I railed against her in the Legislature, I went to see her in prison and I couldn’t find her; they took her in the front door and out the back. It was an unbelievable scandal.”

Will anyone, anyone at all listen?

Sam focuses serenely on the highway, seems not to be paying attention, until Esther pricks up at something Morty has just said: medication smuggled from Canada and abroad, for illegal resale in the States; imminent rack, ruin for the generic king …

“Does Martin Barkin know about this? Esther asks.

“Martin won’t talk to me,” Morty says.

“Martin won’t talk to you? Oh, nonsense. Whatever gives you that idea? Everything has been taken into account.” Sam has been listening, after all. Morty twitches his shoulders, turns to the window his wide and watering eye.

“Nothing will be done. Won’t make any difference,” he mutters.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As in the above anecdote, at the end of celebrating with friends his Order of Canada appointment just notified him by the government of Canada, Shulman’s thoughts were, interestingly, in his old modes as chief coroner and provincial legislator, “dragons to be slain, wicked witches and wizards to be overcome”.

Coincidentally, the previous chapter of his book being discussed here, Chapter 9, is titled, “Slaying the Generics Dragon”. It has been a primary source of my quotes in Part 1 from the book.

Shulman was unhappy that a businesswoman who was a convicted criminal, Viola MacMillan, had already received the Order of Canada before him.

Then he mentioned medication smuggling for “illegal resale in the States”, and “imminent rack, ruin for the generic king” – none other than Barry Sherman who, in the next month June 1993, as in Part 1, would be reported by the media to be under FBI criminal investigation.

One of a couple of friends with Shulman in the ride home, Esther, immediately asked, “Does Martin Barkin know about this?”, and Shulman replied that “Martin won’t talk to me”.

Esther’s husband Sam immediately interjected, “Martin won’t talk to you? Oh, nonsense. Whatever gives you that idea? Everything has been taken into account.”

But Shulman was in tears, muttering, “Nothing will be done. Won’t make any difference”.

See, even before the FBI criminal investigation of Sherman and Apotex became news in June 1993, Shulman already knew it was about to happen, but also knew that it would not lead to any real result – as reviewed in Part 1, after the initial major media publicity about the FBI criminal investigation, by late January 1994 it did not seem to exist anymore, and eventually the end result was a fine in 1995 for one of Sherman’s companies.

When Shulman said, “Martin won’t talk to me”, it could have meant that Martin Barkin was no longer listening to, or even on speaking terms with Shulman. But when Sam replied that, “Whatever gives you that idea? Everything has been taken into account”, it showed that Sam did not think of Barkin as not speaking with Shulman, and that even if Barkin did not he had already taken into account what Shulman wanted to say.

Sam and Esther in the above conversation were Toronto businessman Sam Sarick and his wife. Sarick was not only a Shulman friend but also a board director of Deprenyl Research, as alluded to in the above passages as well. (“About Us”, Samuel Sarick Limited, Eastwood Developments Inc.; and, “Samuel Sarick Independent Director, DRAXIS Health Inc.”, S&P Global Market Intelligence, Bloomberg)

Coincidentally, Sarick died recently in late March 2018, i.e., about two months after Martin Barkin who had died over a month after the Shermans, and his funeral service and burial site were in the same venues as Barkin’s. (“Sam SARICK Obituary”, March 28, 2018, Toronto Star)

Whatever Barkin would not speak with Shulman on was most likely some specific topic, given that Sarick, a director of the company, did not view the two as not on speaking terms.

And if it was only a specific topic, Shulman already said it was about “imminent rack, ruin for the generic king”

This meant that when it came to a matter like prosecuting Barry Sherman, Martin Barkin refused to discuss with Shulman. It caused Shulman to become teary-eyed because it was very personal to him.

The legal patent dispute between Deprenyl Research and Apotex over Shulman’s Parkinson’s disease drug was business that Barkin must handle as the company CEO. But he refused to listen to Shulman’s further ideas regarding Sherman, i.e., criminal prosecution.

There was one obvious reason Barkin would not take a harder stance: Sherman was his adopted sons’ billionaire cousin and since 1988 had been giving them help that has been reported to be worth “millions of dollars”.

I note that, as in Part 1, this was an especially emotional time for Shulman since in May 1993 he was making a personal gesture of excluding Apotex drugs from his prescriptions as a doctor for his patients.

Shulman’s becoming teary eyed when saying that Barkin would not talk to him, also could mean that he felt sad that he failed to win over Barkin at this personal level.

It is therefore a probable scenario that this personal level of thinking had been in Shulman’s mind when first recruiting Barkin to his company, i.e., he could win more to his side including the situation with Barkin’s adopted sons – or “everything” as Sarick might be alluding to.

But Barkin was a mastermind of his own as earlier reviewed and he most likely only used, in my analysis, the animosity between Shulman and Sherman as a leverage for his own interests, rather than pursuing Sherman’s criminal problem as Shulman wanted to see happen.

Barkin’s cousin Jack, also a medical doctor, described Martin Barkin as “extremely aggressive” and doing everything “with a purpose” – not unlike Barry Sherman in a sense:

“He says that his cousin has always used strategy – everything is done with a purpose. “Martin was always a gentleman who knew where he wanted to go. He was extremely aggressive in whatever he was doing, whether it be business, family relationships, or medicine. He always wanted to excel.”

According to past associates, Barkin has few close friends except for his wife Carol, a former fashion model who now sells real estate. The Barkins adopted six children, the last four coming from a single family when the parents died suddenly.”

(Brian Goldman, MD, 1990, Canadian Medical Association Journal)

The first paragraph above, in my analysis, gives additional credence to the scenario that, besides succeeding a high-profile Morton Shulman at the helm of the latter’s company, Barkin had an aggressive strategy of using Shulman as a leverage in his and his adopted sons’ attempts to get more from Sherman – but not siding with Shulman to the point of losing potential gains from Sherman.

Reading also the second paragraph quoted above, I would pose a broader question: what could, or would, Martin Barkin’s “purpose” have been, to begin with, in adopting the Winter sons “when the parents died suddenly?”

From what Beverly Winter’s brother Wayne Rockcliffe recalled, quoted earlier from the Toronto Life story, the late Winters’ home could be available to the adoptive parents. But could there be more that was in Barkin’s “Machiavellian mind”?

One direction to look into, in the context of my review, is that Sherman, an MIT Ph.D. student whose University of Toronto accomplishments had been even more stellar than Barkin’s, in the days between the death of Louis Winter and that of Beverley Winter in November 1965 had expressed a keen interest in taking over Empire Labs.

Then the Winter children were adopted by the Barkins.

Thus, more specifically in my questioning, when Sherman and Ulster acquired Empire Labs in 1967, could the terms of it, in particular the provision between Royal Trust and Sherman for the future interests of the children, be influenced by the adoptive parents?

If Martin Barkin did have a role in the addition of that provision in the Empire Labs purchase agreement between Royal Trust and Barry Sherman, that would befit his cousin Jack’s description of him as a man of “strategy” and “purpose”.

On the other hand, the paradox, or contradiction to it, is that Barkin soon failed to provide good parental care or guidance to at least half of the four Winter sons, and then for decades up to this time in 1993 failed to let them know about that historical provision.

From this perspective, the following year 1994 when Barkin cemented his leadership at Shulman’s former company, changing its name and guiding it to new focuses, was when Barkin and Sherman reached a sort of power balance, albeit an uneasy one: Barkin assumed full control of Shulman’s mantle, or as Sarick said about Shulman’s animosity toward Sherman, “everything has been taken into account”, whereas Sherman poured “millions of dollars” worth into helping Barkin’s adopted sons but doing so without yielding ground that could revive the old Empire Labs provision.

The year after, 1995, then saw the reality of human frailty, or possibly human cost, highlighted in the death of Dana, Louis and Beverley Winter’s youngest son – in a context related to Sherman’s help:

“But no amount of money could set things right. In 1995, Barry sent Dana to a remote fishing village in B.C. to get clean. Dana decided to settle in B.C., married a woman named Julia Zwicker, fathered two children and slipped back into drugs. He would later be charged with conspiracy in the murder of a fellow drug dealer. From a holding tank in Vancouver, he called Barry to arrange bail. While he was out, Dana, then 33 years old, died of a heroin overdose. At the time of Dana’s death, Kerry was in the final chapter of his marriage to Elee Scarlett, a lawyer. The living allowance that Barry gave Kerry would eventually reach $20,000 a month.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

On can reason that had Sherman not sent Dana to British Columbia to “get clean”, Dana would not have instead become a drug dealer there, been charged with conspiracy to murder a “fellow dealer” and died of a heroin overdose in Vancouver.

As above, at the time Sherman was providing a living allowance to Kerry, and so Dana probably received one also. Sherman could not have easily sent one of them to another place had he not provided financial assistance.

One may wonder if Dana’s unexpected death, or otherwise the serious criminal trouble ahead, shocked Sherman or hardened him more. The next year, 1996, was when Sherman had a family Christmas vacation in Africa where he penned his unfinished memoir.

Now, I can re-read some of Sherman’s words in the context of the recent history just prior to it, namely that he had re-connected with his Winter cousins, given them help that was generous but at the same time held them at bay, while their adoptive father Barkin had joined and now led the company of his nemesis Morton Shulman.

Sherman wrote:

“I cannot see that human behaviour differs in any fundamental way from that of numerous species on the savannahs of Serengeti.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Yep, Dana’s behaviour and life existence that Sherman knew well, including frequent illegal narcotic involvement and repeated incarceration, exemplified what was “on the savannahs of Serengeti”.

Sherman then asserted, as a philosophical truth:

“We are all driven by our instincts to eat, drink, copulate, protect ourselves and our young, and cooperate with others, particularly those most closely related to us, if and when it is to our mutual advantage.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Dana was, incidentally or not, the example of “instincts to eat, drink, copulate”, having in 1988 met at a restaurant the old family friend Stan Garden who reconnected him to Sherman, was sent by Sherman to B.C. in 1995 where he decided to marry Julia Zwicker and father children.

But when it came to “instincts to … protect ourselves and our young, and cooperate with others, particularly those most closely related to us”, Sherman himself was a master of the art. From the start, his agreeing to the provision protecting the future interests of his Winter cousins was important for his acquiring Empire Labs on good financial terms, and since 1988 to this time in 1996 he had provided generous help to the cousins he had re-connected with.

However, all the protection that Sherman agreed to and help that Sherman provided were not without conditions as Sherman made it very clear in his philosophizing, “if and when it is to our mutual advantage”.

The old Empire Labs provision had two crucial conditions that Sherman invoked so as not to owe financial interests to these cousins whose late father had been his uncle and mentor: if and when selling Empire Labs was to his advantage, or if these cousins could not be responsible employees at his Apotex, then it would not matter to him whether ownership shares might be good for them.

Earlier, I’ve concluded that answering Morton Shulman’s accusation of his having no “redeeming features” may have been a motivation for Sherman to pen this memoir in 1996; and I’ve noted that Sherman made this memoir available to the media in 2007 as a part of his legal defence against the $1.5 billion lawsuit filed by his Winter cousins.

Now my above review of the relevant history leading up to Sherman’s writing this memoir would suggest that in 1996 Sherman also anticipated that, sooner or later, his Winter cousins would find out and ask about the old Empire Labs provision and what it could mean to the Apotex ownership – because two influential men, namely their adoptive father Martin Barkin and his nemesis Morton Shulman were now together and had the interest in pursing it.

Further development of events beginning in 1999 was consistent with the above conclusion of my review and analysis, namely that Barkin and Shulman were important factors behind the Winter sons’ pursuing this matter:

“The relationship between Barry and the cousins started to sour in 1999 when Jeffrey began seriously investigating aspects of the Empire Labs sale. He was convinced that he and his siblings had been cheated out of years of royalties, and out of their promised share of the successor companies, including Apotex. When Royal Trust failed to hand over key documents, saying they were mislaid, Jeffrey took them to court, and a judge ordered the company to hand them over. …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Jeffrey was the first to begin “seriously investigating aspects of the Empire Labs sale” in 1999 and sued Royal Trust to get the key documents.

The fact that Jeffrey started the “family feud” saga is symbolically and logically important. From the various facts discussed, in particular Barkin’s January 2018 obituary, we know that Tim and Jeffrey have been the Winter sons with a close family relationship with the adoptive Barkin family; of the two, Tim had originally been adopted by the Winter family and that may have had to do with the fact that he never asked for Sherman’s help; Jeffrey, therefore, was the only Winter biological son who also called himself a Barkin.

That the first salvo in the old Empire Labs provision dispute came from Jeffrey meant that Barkin likely provided some clues; also, that it happened a year before Shulman’s death, which was in August 2000 as quoted in Part 1, suggests that the Parkinson’s disease-stricken Shulman’s long-time wish to go hard against Sherman helped to make it happen – in a way that would be positive for Barkin’s interests.

As further evidence that preparing for his Winter cousins’ eventual legal feud with him had been a motivation in Sherman’s writing the memoir, I note that the timeline of Sherman’s telling the media about the unfinished memoir closely matched the timeline of the Winter sons’ taking legal recourses to claim major financial interests owed them.

Here is a timeline of the Winter sons’ lawsuits for financial claims against Royal Trust and Barry Sherman:

“… Then, in March 2006, Tim, Jeffrey, Kerry and Dana’s widow, Julia, filed a claim against Royal Trust for $500 million, accusing them of failing to protect their interests. Royal Trust argues that it had acted properly and the claim should be dismissed.

That summer, Apotex was embroiled in the Bristol-Myers Squibb debacle. A U.S. judge ordered Apotex to stop sales of a generic version of Plavix while the case proceeded through the courts—but not before Sherman had flooded the market, made a fortune, and paid out $6 million in bonuses to his entire staff. While Sherman battled over Plavix, he also sought and received assurance from the cousins that they wouldn’t launch a suit against Apotex.

In January 2007, Kerry, Tim and Julia nevertheless filed a claim against Sherman and his former partners for $1 billion. …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

As told, the first lawsuit, with financial claims of $500 million against Royal Trust, was filed in March 2006; and in the summer while battling Bristol-Myers Squibb over the Plavix drug Sherman privately persuaded his Winter cousins not to sue Apotex; then in January 2007, they nevertheless filed a $1 billion lawsuit against him – the two suits’ claims totalled $1.5 billion.

As reviewed earlier, the first major media story referring to his unpublished memoir was a National Post article in August 2006 – in the summer of 2006 – on the Plavix dispute, entitled “Generic drug, specific issue: Apotex fights Plavix”, here partially quoted again:

“The opening chapters of a draft autobiography sit amid the hundreds of pill bottles and mound of legal documents in Dr. Bernard Sherman’s office. It will be the story of a brainy kid born in Toronto who becomes Canada’s richest generic drug mogul.

Though a work in progress, it has the makings of a page turner. One chapter will recount how an employee from a brand-name drug company offered to sell him secret files. Another, he says, will describe how Dr. Sherman caught a rival stealing …

But what promises to be the book’s most riveting chapter is still unfolding. It is the part where Dr. Sherman seemingly outsmarts two big drug companies, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis…”

(Stephanie Saul, August 16, 2006, National Post)

The above quote reveals that when Sherman began telling the media about his memoir, the chapters he talked about – on disputes with brand-name drug companies – had not really been written.

Why did Sherman talk about these business disputes, especially the ongoing one against Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, by telling through empty chapters of an unfinished memoir? A logical explanation is Sherman wanted to show off what was already in the memoir, but not quite yet because his cousins had launched a lawsuit against Royal Trust but not yet one against him.

Then, after his cousins’ lawsuit against him was filed in 2007, Sherman’s memoir was prominently featured in a The Globe and Mail article on him and his history, entitled, “The real Barry Sherman”, quoted earlier and here again partially:

“So who, exactly, is Barry Sherman? Is he a cutthroat businessman? A strings-attached benefactor? Or just a munificent, self-confessed workaholic?

In 1996, the drug baron asked himself some of those same questions. During a family trip to the Serengeti, he stepped back for a moment of reflection and
started writing a memoir called A Legacy of Thoughts. It has never been published – in fact, it sat in his desk until it surfaced in the family’s recent legal fight.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As told, the memoir was Sherman’s medium to answer the question of who Barry Sherman really was, and “it sat in his desk until it surfaced in the family’s recent legal fight”.

In other words, the family legal feud was the first occasion when Sherman really made use of his memoir. My conclusion from reviewing the relevant history points to the likelihood that when he wrote it in 1996 Sherman had thoughtfully planned for exactly this use – also with the consideration that his moral accuser Morton Shulman was now bonded with his Winter cousins’ adoptive father.

But Sherman did not want to concede anything before it was publicly raised by his cousins, and so instead of talking about his special relationship with his uncle, the memoir boasted about how excellently he did work for his uncle at Empire Labs in the summers of 1960, 1961 and 1962.

Now in 2007 as the family feud began, his cousins struck hard with a billion-dollar financial claim, and Sherman responded hard by also disclosing in his legal deposition what verbal exchanges had occurred between them:

“In the deposition, he said the family dispute arose around 2002. Mr. [Kerry] Winter accused him of being “involved in some conspiracy to murder their father and deprive them of their inheritance in the 1960s.”

Mr. Sherman said he was “totally flabbergasted at this untrue allegation.”

In an affidavit, Mr. Winter denied making the murder allegation. …”

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Aha, the Winter sons had learned or taken cue from the criminal charge of “conspiracy to commit murder” levied against their late brother Dana, or were so angry that Sherman’s sending Dana to British Columbia had led to their brother’s fatal heroin overdose, that when they started arguing in 2002 the allegation Kerry levelled against Sherman was about past involvement “in some conspiracy to murder their father and deprive them of their inheritance”!

It was unlikely that Sherman fabricated this anecdote, since being accused of such a criminal terror was not a pride and would not help himself. Winter’s denial was also understandable because one needed to be extra cautious in a legal setting about making such a serious allegation.

But how likely was it true, i.e., Sherman having been involved in a conspiracy to murder his uncle and mentor Lou Winter and deprive his cousins the inheritance, or alternatively to get access to it for himself?

The elementary facts and basic logic would suggest that it was not likely unless a very broad social conspiracy existed. The reason is that at the time of Louis Winter’s death, Sherman was a Ph.D. student studying in MIT at Boston, and the intensity of academic studies expected of an aspiring young scholar, not to mention Sherman’s own hard drive for academic excellence, meant that during that time he was likely somewhat detached from the social and family happenings in Toronto – even if there had existed a conspiracy of the alleged type.

But when it came to attaching conditions, i.e., attaching strings onto benefits for the Winter children, Sherman was every bit as smart in the generous help that he provided since 1988 as he had been with the old Empire Labs provision.

In their lawsuit, the Winter sons alleged that Sherman’s monetary help “made them dependent” on him, he “used it to keep them under control”, and he often required “security for financial gifts”:

“He bought his cousins homes, cottages, financed various business ventures and gave them millions of dollars, according to court filings. Kerry received up to $15,000 a month for years, according to court filings. After Dana died, Mr. Sherman bought his widow a home and sent monthly cheques to her two children.

The cousins allege the money made them dependent on Mr. Sherman and he used it to keep them under control, often requiring security for financial gifts.

Around 2000, the cousins allege they first became aware of the sale agreement and began asking Mr. Sherman questions. In 2001, they went to court and won an order requiring Royal Trust to turn over documents relating to the deal.

The cousins allege Mr. Sherman demanded that they drop the legal action or he would cut off financial support. When they filed a suit against Royal Trust last year, Mr. Sherman allegedly told Kerry to sell his cottage and slashed his monthly stipend to $2,000. He also allegedly cut off monthly support to Jeffery and Dana’s widow. The cousins aren’t backing down and in the court filing they claim Mr. Sherman has illegally interfered with their rights by not telling them about the agreement and withholding royalties.

Not all the cousins agree. Jeffrey has backed out of the lawsuit and, according to Mr. Sherman, he is furious at the others. They claim he is fearful of Mr. Sherman.

Mr. Sherman, 64, can’t understand how it has all come to this. “To suggest that I was trying to keep control and cover up information is ridiculous,” he said exasperated. “When I found out these kids had problems I did everything I could to help them. So you’ve got an extraordinary and bizarre situation here.””

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

The facts in the above early story in January 2007 on the Sherman-Winter family legal feud did show that the Winter children were dependent on the monthly stipends he provided: when they filed the lawsuit against Royal Trust their allowance amounts were cut off or slashed to a minimum; such countermeasures created difficulties for them and as a result Jeffrey – the first Winter son to begin seriously investigating the old Empire Labs provision in 1999 as reviewed earlier – withdrew from the $1 billion lawsuit due to fear.

Ironically, Kerry Winter and Dana’s widow Julia Zwicker, with their lifestyles more ‘street-hardened’, so to speak, were more able to withstand Sherman’s pressure of slashing monetary help than Jeffrey who had lived his life closer to his “loving father” – as from the January 2018 obituary quoted – the adoptive Martin Barkin.

But the Winter children’s dependence on Sherman’s money does not mean that Sherman had purposely used it as a means of controlling them as they alleged; also, in the above story no facts were presented regarding Sherman’s “requiring security for financial gifts”, which would have rendered the “financial gifts”, well, not really gifts.

Subsequently in February 2007, the media reported on a $7.9 million countering lawsuit that Sherman filed against Kerry Winter, showing that outside of the monthly allowance much of the financial help by Sherman had been in the form of loans – namely security and repayment required:

“The cousins have acknowledged in court filings that Mr. Sherman, 64, gave them money. Mr. Winter received as much as $15,000 a month and Dana’s widow has been given money to support her two children, according to court filings. However, they have alleged that Mr. Sherman used the money to control them. In court filings, Mr. Winter said his monthly payments dropped to $2,000 a month after the relatives filed a suit against Royal Trust Co. last year.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Sherman alleges that Mr. Winter, 45, signed a promissory note last November agreeing to repay $7.9-million on demand. Mr. Winter had borrowed the money over the years to finance a home renovation business and purchase several properties, according to family members. Mr. Sherman is seeking repayment of the promissory note, plus interest, as well as possession of a house in Fenelon Falls, Ont.

Court filings show that Mr. Sherman sent Mr. Winter a letter demanding repayment about a week before the cousins filed their lawsuit.

“It’s simply to protect my interests,” Mr. Sherman said yesterday. “I’ve got to realize on the security. But the value of it is far less than I’ve lent him.””

(“With ‘disgust,’ Apotex head strikes back”, by Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, February 10, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As anyone can read what Sherman said in the above, that when it came to the money for doing business and purchasing properties, Sherman had “lent” it to Kerry, over the years totalling $7.9 million; when Kerry had the intent to pursue a lawsuit, he needed to sign a “promissory note” agreeing to repayment “on demand”; and when the lawsuit was about to be filed, Sherman demanded immediate full repayment.

Kerry lost a legal battle to keep the properties, including his family home; a house Sherman had helped Dana’s widow Julia buy had a mortgage provided by Sherman, and Sherman now revoked it, according to an October 2007 media story:

“Mr. Sherman has also appointed a receiver to seize four houses he helped Mr. Winter buy, including his family home in Toronto.

Mr. Winter is fighting to hang on to the houses. He recently lost a legal battle and is now appealing.

A fifth house in Vancouver belongs to Julia Winter, the wife of a cousin who died in 1995. According to allegations filed in court, Mr. Sherman has moved to revoke a $321,000 mortgage he holds on that house because Ms. Winter joined the others in the lawsuit.”

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Losing a legal battle in the $7.9 million counter-lawsuit by Sherman meant Kerry had to surrender his properties, including his family home:

“In January 2007, Kerry, Tim and Julia nevertheless filed a claim against Sherman and his former partners for $1 billion. Sherman, acting with the same lethal cool he brings to his fights over patents, turned down an offer to settle. He then sued Kerry for $8 million in outstanding loans. In Vancouver, Sherman took Julia to court to have the terms of his mortgage on her house clarified so he could collect his money immediately rather than when the house was sold.

In August 2007, the court heard the suit against Kerry. His lawyer, Malcolm Kronby, argued that Sherman was acting vindictively. The judge still ruled in Sherman’s favour and Kerry had to surrender two business properties, a cottage and his home on Bellwoods Avenue. Kerry agreed to stay on as a tenant, paying $2,500 a month. Even this sum could be hard to come by. His construction company was shrinking while he continued to obsess over justice and riches.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

The facts as reviewed were indeed that much, probably most, of the financial help provided by Sherman had not been “financial gifts” as much as “loans”, was not free, and was dependent on the Winter children being on good terms with Sherman.

But of course, the cash Sherman provided for the Winter cousins’ allowances and paying their Visa bills, over the eighteen years or so from 1988 to 2007, probably did come to millions of dollars.

The way Sherman conditioned these loans and the manner in which he later revoked them or demanded repayment, show that he had in mind his “control” of the Winter cousins’ financial predicaments, methodically considered years in advance in preparation for the likelihood of their discovering the old Empire Labs provision and demanding substantial financial interests.

Kerry Winter called Sherman’s controlling tactics “bullying” that could cause him and his family “irreparable harm”:

“Kerry Winter has alleged that Mr. Sherman is bullying the family and that he has gone back on a promise not to retaliate financially while the lawsuit over Toronto-based Apotex proceeded. “If he is permitted to continue, Mr. Sherman will cause me and my family irreparable harm,” Mr. Winter said in an affidavit filed in court.

Mr. Sherman denied that his actions were tied to the lawsuit. “I’m doing it to enforce the security [of the properties], it’s as simple as that,” he said in an
interview. In court filings, he said that a couple of the houses have been vacant and property taxes on three have not been paid for years.

Mr. Sherman began backing Mr. Winter in 1994 by arranging a $1.2-million line of credit to help him start a home renovation business. More money followed to Mr. Winter and others.

Mr. Sherman, who is much older than his cousins, said in court filings that he felt obliged to help the Winter children after their parents died in 1965.”

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As in the above, the more substantial finance by Sherman for Kerry and the others, i.e., business loans, began in 1994. That was the year when Martin Barkin cemented his leadership at the brand-name drug company Morton Shulman had founded, changing its name as well as its focus.

The timing coincidence could be an instance of Barkin’s leveraging Shulman’s animosity toward Sherman to get benefits for his adopted sons, in this case some major career-oriented help from Sherman. Sherman claimed to the court that he felt obliged to help them, but despite such feeling his help at this business level started only 6 years after their reconnecting.

In the above, in 2007 Sherman said he was simply “enforcing the security [of the properties]”. But the fact that in the several media stories quoted above there was no mention of Sherman demanding money repayment from Jeffrey, who coincidentally at some point withdrew from the $1 billion lawsuit, indicates that the security was enforced selectively – as a condition “to keep them under control” as alleged in the Winter cousins’ lawsuit.

So, those aware of this high-profile family legal feud have witnessed the costly price of attempting to claim a share of the family business ownership from the prominent Canadian billionaire and leading philanthropist Barry Sherman: it was awfully steep for the Winter family cousins feuding with Sherman, whose late father had been his mentor, that within months their comfortable lifestyles were gone when he withdrew his favours and demanded payback through “enforcing the security” in the conditioned help he had provided.

This onerous outcome for the Winter sons was probably important for Sherman. His unfinished memoir which he publicized in 2007 as a part of this family legal fight, showed how central the notion of “mutual advantage” was in his philosophy – without exception even for those close to him.

According to Geraldine Sherman, writer of the July 2008 Toronto Life article later republished in December 2017, when she interviewed Barry Sherman for that article, the latter reiterated that he had no intent to compromise with his Winter cousins – he might have been too good to them already:

“Even at his stage of life, he’s committed to expanding his business and shoring up his legacy, more concerned with the judgment of the courts than with public opinion. As for the Orphan Children, he remains steadfast in his belief that he did all he could for them, perhaps too much. He argues that at the time of the Empire sale, the boys, ages 11 to 15, were too young to benefit. And after so many years, it’s too late to file a claim.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

It wasn’t easy even just to stay in the family legal dispute against Sherman. Kerry Winter’s lawyer Malcolm Kronby did not want to publicize the case, and for a while Kerry communicated with the media sneakily. Finally, he decided to fire his lawyers, blaming their being Jews as the reason that they did not fight hard publicly for his “revenge” but instead tried to shut him up, as he told the Toronto Life writer:

“Kerry winter admits that for many years Sherman was “like a surrogate dad and I was like an adopted son.” Now, perhaps because he feels most betrayed, he leads his family litigation and, going against his legal advice, feeds stories to the press. His lawyers told him not to talk to me, and for more than a year we communicated like spies. He would secretly transmit documents if I promised not to tell Kronby. He’d call me with various rants: “For me it isn’t about shekels, it’s about revenge!” Dozens of emails passed between us. He accused me of falling for “Sherman’s spin” if I hesitated before contacting people he recommended. Once, when I didn’t reply fast enough, he accused me of being out for dinner with Honey and Barry. Twice, after I sent questions in advance to both Kerry and Kronby, Kerry backed out of our scheduled interview. Finally, last March, we met.

…

Sipping his coffee, Kerry explained that he was firing his lawyers. “They always tried to shut me up. Well, they’re finished.” He drew his finger across his throat. He thinks that because his lawyers are Jewish they hesitated to go after Barry in the press, afraid of being shunned by their community. He claims there was a breakdown of trust.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

The Winter sons’ uncle Wayne Rockcliffe, who as reviewed earlier had a grudge about Beverley Winter’s decision for the children’s Jewish adoption, expressed his support for Kerry Winter:

“He arrived at the Starbucks near his Trinity Bellwoods home, a tall, ruddy-faced, boyish-looking 46-year-old. He had just come from seeing his uncle, Wayne Rockcliffe, who had once again come to his aid, promising to cover Kerry’s $2,500 rent that month if needed. I was surprised. A recent Globe and Mail article had reported Rockcliffe’s advice that the cousins move on with their lives. Later, when I spoke with Rockcliffe, he complained that the reporter had omitted a crucial qualifier: “Perhaps if I’d had their terrible start in life, I’d think differently.” Rockcliffe has his own reason to dislike what he calls “Barry’s cold heart.” Forty-three years ago, when they shared a limo at Beverley’s funeral, Rockcliffe said it would be a shame if the Orphan Children were adopted separately. Sherman’s reply, he claims, was, “So what? Worse things could happen.” Rockcliffe says he can’t forgive him. Sherman denies ever having said anything to that effect.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

As recalled by Rockcliffe, back in 1965 the young MIT Ph.D. student Barry Sherman’s attitude toward his Winter cousins’ facing adoption was rather “cold” hearted. That attitude apparently had not changed over the decades, and if anything was further rationalized by Sherman’s articulation of his moral philosophy in his 1996 memoir.

In his interview with Toronto Life’s Geraldine Sherman, Kerry Winter also spoke of support for him from Barry Sherman’s “business enemies”:

“According to Kerry, Stan Garden and Rockcliffe aren’t the only people on his side. He says several of Sherman’s business enemies want him to win. As he spoke to me, his face reddened and his voice rose. “If Barry had his way, I’d be eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC. Well, Barry, that’s just not going to happen.” …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

As my review of facts, many of which not yet given attention by the media in investigating the Shermans’ deaths, has shown that their adoptive father Martin Barkin and his business partner Morton Shulman for many years had considerable clouts in the pharmaceutical business field, and so the Winter sons at least had the option of utilizing some of those professional and business links.

In this logical context, the first guess of who those “Sherman’s business enemies” were as Kerry called them would be the ones in the brand-name drug business field – versus Apotex’s generic drug business field – as reviewed in Part 1.

What Kerry said in the above can be interpreted as that he had to up the ante and involve some of Sherman’s business enemies on his side – even if he and his siblings were legally claiming shares of Apotex ownership – because otherwise he could end up “eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC” as Sherman intended.

In other words, Sherman’s harshness toward persons who legally disputed him could make them feel necessary to act harder in response.

Even with such broader backing from the presumably influential in business, Kerry had no illusion that it would be a easy fight, and vowed of being Sherman’s “nemesis”, as “a lifelong mission”:

“… He rapped his knuckles on the table and leaned in close. He vowed he’d be Sherman’s “nemesis,” saying that for him this was “a lifelong mission.” …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

In his interview with Toronto Life for the same 2008 article, Barry Sherman clearly indicated that he would not compromise on the Winter cousins’ lawsuit:

“No one can say when the $1-billion suit will be heard in court. It will probably take years. Will Barry settle? Not likely. He’s a lion, a stranger to the notion of compromise.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

The lion is the king of the Serengeti. Isn’t that the metaphor?

Kerry Winter also expressed fear for his own safety, as well as for that of the Toronto Life writer interviewing him:

“… He expressed fear for his personal safety and, pointing a finger in my face, warned: “By the way, sweetie, you’re next.” By this time, he was shouting. He imagines Sherman at the courtroom door, begging to settle. “I’ll go to trial, sweetie,” he growled. “I’m not going away.” Then he put on his coat and walked out without another word.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Real or imagined, the street-hardened Kerry Winter would naturally think that such a high-profile and high-stake legal feud against a powerful business leader could mean personal danger, and he himself was also quick to talk in that term about others – not merely about the reporter – as well, like with his gesture about firing his lawyers, as earlier quoted, ““… Well, they’re finished.” He drew his finger across his throat.”

Recall as in Part 1, a “Mr. Jones”, who headed a private investigative agency working for the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, once said about Barry Sherman, as recalled by another private investigator Paul Whybrow:

“… Jones is thinking about how he can get Sherman. This is no longer just business, this is personal. He doesn’t just want to compromise him in a corporate way. He’s talking about playing hardball with Barry Sherman. It was very direct. He said to us, ‘We have to get this bastard Sherman.’ He said to us, ‘What are we going to do about him? Let’s take him out of the game. Take him out.’ …”

(Jeffrey Robinson, Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

And so, in his connecting to Barry Sherman’s business enemies, if Mr. Kerry Winter ever became in touch with Mr. Jones, no doubt there would be a lot of fireworks, verbally and possibly more.

Kerry Winter’s “lifelong mission” turned out to be indeed so – as in Sherman’s life, so far.

Over a decade after the initial lawsuit filing in 2007, in September 2017 an Ontario judge made a ruling on the Winter sons’ $1 billion lawsuit. Siding with Barry Sherman, Justice Kenneth Hood dismissed the lawsuit’s claim as “wishful thinking and beyond fanciful”. Then in early December 2017 – a week before Barry and Honey Sherman were last seen alive – the judge also ordered the Winter sons to pay $300,000 of Sherman’s legal costs:

“On Sept. 15, 2017—three months to the day before Sherman and Honey were discovered dead—an Ontario judge sided with Sherman, dismissing the suit as an abuse of process and calling the cousins’ claim “wishful thinking and beyond fanciful.” On Dec. 6, one week before the Shermans were last seen alive, Justice Kenneth Hood issued another ruling, ordering the cousins to pay $300,000 of Sherman’s legal costs.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

The judge again ordered Kerry Winter to pay back the $7.9 million loans he owed Sherman – as reviewed earlier it had been ordered by a judge in 2007, resulting in Winter losing all his properties:

“As part of the court’s decision, Winter not only lost his claim on his cousin’s fortune, but he was also ordered to pay Sherman back $8 million. …”

(“Barry Sherman’s cousin fails lie detector test over allegation of plot to kill Honey Sherman”, by Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

At this point, a curious reader may wonder: could Barry Sherman’s Winter cousins, particularly Kerry, have something to do with the Shermans’ murder, having lost the legal battle for their $1 billion lawsuit and slapped with more financial burdens?

The media was equally curious, for example, asking a similar question in the Maclean’s April 2018 investigative article:

“The timing of those two judgments triggered inevitable suspicions. Could they have been a motive for murder?”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

It is a good question, namely about the Winter cousins’ possible roles in the double homicide, for at least three reasons.

Firstly, the Maclean’s article quoted above and more extensively in Part 1, also asked a related question , “why now?”, about Sherman’s murder. Here that question is quoted along with facts previously quoted in Part 1:

“The question to be answered is not only why was Sherman murdered alongside his wife, but why now, at 75? It’s no secret the drug executive had amassed a long list of enemies in his 50-year career. A renowned risk-taker, disruptor and pitbull professionally, Sherman was a polarizing figure—regarded as a softie with a heart of gold by those in his proximity and loathed by those who claim they were outfoxed or betrayed by him. The man who learned weeks before his death of his nomination to the Order of Canada was also called out as unethical in business dealings. The late physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Morton Shulman, who did battle with Sherman, called him “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever.””

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

By this logic, if one ponder the question of why the murder happened at this time when Sherman was at a senior age of 75, then Mr. Winter would look more suspect than Mr. Jones and the brand-name drug companies competing with Sherman as reviewed in Part 1. The hypothetical answer, or scenario, is that the Ontario judge’s dismissal of the Winter son’s lawsuit triggered the Shermans’ murder, and so the timing of the murder was determined by the court ruling’s timing.

Secondly, suspecting the Winters is reasonable because Kerry has publicly admitted that, because of the timing coincidence, people may view him as a suspect even if there has not been physical evidence for it:

“Speaking to Maclean’s, Winter says he understands why some may consider him a suspect, given the timing of the lawsuit’s dismissal and the subsequent costs award. “People can think: ‘Oh, Kerry lost his summary judgment motion and he went out and—some way, somehow—got into Barry’s house on Old Colony and did the dirty deed, and now he’s acting like a loon on The Fifth Estate. He is the main suspect,’ ” he says. “Come on. Would I be walking around, six, seven weeks after the murder? If I’m a suspect, where is my DNA? Where is my hair? Where are my fingerprints?””

(“Barry Sherman’s legal battle with his cousins goes on weeks after his murder”, by Michael Friscolanti and Anne Kingston, February 8, 2018, Maclean’s)

Winter even admitted that he had no alibi for his own whereabouts on the day when the Shermans were believed killed:

“Winter says no one can verify where he was at all times on Dec. 13, the day Barry and Honey Sherman were last seen alive. 

“No, no alibi,” he told The Fifth Estate. He said after a Cocaine Anonymous meeting, he went home and fell asleep.

“Very easy for me to have left work at any time because I’m not on the clock. … I could easily have driven over to [the Sherman home] and did the deed.

“I admit to that, but I didn’t, I didn’t, and that’s why I’m not nervous.””

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

But he said that police told him he was not a suspect:

“Winter said he planned to meet police for an interview and that he was told he was not a suspect.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

The lack of evidence tying Kerry Winter to the actual crime could mean that he was not a killer in this case. That could be what the Toronto Police meant telling him that he was not a suspect.

But as in the case of his late brother Dana in 1995 and the example of what he once accused Barry Sherman of as Sherman stated to the court in 2007, involvement in a “conspiracy to commit murder”, or the perception of such, would be harder to absolve for Kerry.

Finally, suspicion of Kerry Winter is natural because he even told the media about fantasizing killing Barry Sherman in the past, in “very graphic” terms:

“In a wide-ranging interview with The Fifth Estate, Winter said he told his psychiatrist that in the past, he had fantasized about murdering Barry Sherman.

“I would talk about killing Barry, and it was very graphic,” Winter said. “He would come out of the parking lot of Apotex, and I’d be hiding behind a car, and I’d just decapitate him. I wanted to roll his head down the parking lot, and I’d sit there and wait for the police.””

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

Nonetheless, besides emphasizing the lack of evidence against him, Kerry also firmly stated, in an interview with Maclean’s, that he “had nothing to do with their demise”:

“Speaking to Maclean’s, Kerry insists he had nothing to do with the slayings. “I admit that I have utter disdain and hatred for Barry Sherman,” he says. “He wronged me. He didn’t honour my father. He didn’t honour the option. He pulled a sleaze move. He stopped visiting me. He lied to me. He betrayed me. I have every reason to hate this man, but I had nothing to do with their demise.””

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

In another interview, with the CBC’s The Fifth Estate program, Kerry also asserted that he did not know “who did it”:

“Winter admits he could be seen as a suspect in the Sherman killings.

“I probably had reasons to lash out to do the dirty deed,” he told The Fifth Estate’s Bob McKeown. “I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know who did it.””

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

Kerry Winter’s statements above amounted to a flat denial of any role in, or even knowledge of, a “conspiracy to commit murder”.

Nevertheless, other things Kerry said and did in the same circumstances show that the above denial should not be easily taken as truthful.

Here I review two serious concerning facets of what Kerry Winter said and did in the same circumstances: one, Kerry’s street-hardened background gave him ready access to the hard-core criminal sector, and in the above interview with The Fifth Estate as well as other media venues, he made a relevant claim of once arranging for a would-be murder wanted by Barry Sherman; and two, Kerry was prone to lying, and while making his denial in the above-quoted interview he also failed a polygraph test about this other claim of murder planning, and even admitted to lying about it.

Relating to the first facet, namely his criminal connection and intent, Winter dropped a bombshell in the media by claiming that about two decades ago in the mid-1990s, Sherman asked him to arrange for the killing of Sherman’s own wife Honey:

“Though he cannot remember the date, Winter said that in the 1990s, on two separate occasions during a visit to Barry Sherman’s office at Apotex, he recalls Sherman asking him to make arrangements to kill Honey. At the time, by his own admission, Winter said he was heavily into drugs and the street culture.

“Back in the mid ’90s, we had a discussion in his office at Apotex,” Winter said. Asked what led to the discussion, Winter said: “His disdain for his wife, Honey. His unhappiness in his marriage and that he couldn’t stomach to be in the same room as her.”

Asked by the Star if he believes the comments he alleges were made in the 1990s held true in 2017. “They could have kissed and made up,” he said.

Winter said he never told police, but told two close friends.

“I was quite surprised. I wasn’t surprised that he had this idea, I was quite surprised that he was asking me if I knew someone who would do that,” Winter said, though he later conceded he was likely asked because “I was on the street, I was on drugs at the time and I knew a lot of bad people.””

(“‘I had absolutely nothing to do with it,’ Barry Sherman’s cousin says”, by Kevin Donovan, January 31, 2018, Toronto Star)

According to his interview with The Fifth Estate, Kerry did find a “hit man” but at the last minute persuaded Sherman not to do it:

“Winter’s bizarre allegation of the plot to kill Honey Sherman includes the claim that he lined up a hit man to do the job two decades ago.

“He said, ‘I want you to whack my wife,’” Winter claimed. Winter then claimed the plan was aborted at the last minute.

“I called him and said: ‘You know, there’s no turning back, Barry, if I push the button,’” Winter said.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

In these media interviews Kerry essentially provided witnesses, saying that at the time, i.e., in the mid-1990s, he told two close friends about it. The Fifth Estate managed to contact those two people and verified the authenticity to some degree, namely that two decades ago Kerry had indeed told them about the murder plot:

“The Fifth Estate interviewed two of Winter’s friends who said they were told of the plot two decades ago, but neither had any direct knowledge of such a plot ever happening.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

The Fifth Estate arranged a polygraph test for Kerry Winter, to see if it can affirm the truthfulness of his claim through the lie detector, a claim of past involvement in a “conspiracy to commit murder” by both him and Sherman:

“Some of Winter’s claims were reported this week by Canadian and U.K. media outlets, but The Fifth Estate could find no direct evidence to support Winter’s claim that he and Barry Sherman were involved in a conspiracy to commit murder.  

Winter and his lawyer agreed to a lie detector test on the question of whether or not Barry Sherman had asked him to arrange the killing of his wife.

The test, filmed by The Fifth Estate, was conducted by former Quebec police officer and veteran polygraph expert John Galianos.  

Galianos determined that Winter was not being truthful about the alleged plot and that he “failed” the test.

While not admissible in court because of possible inaccuracies, polygraphs are commonly used by police officers to determine truthfulness.

Winter told Galianos on camera that he “embellished” part of the scheme. He also said he fabricated other parts of the story.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

As above, the polygraph test showed that Kerry was not being “truthful”, and on the spot he explained it as due to embellishing part of the plot and fabricating other parts.

Kerry then arranged for another polygraph test without involving The Fifth Estate, and those results were “inconclusive”; but he refused to take a polygraph test directly on whether he killed the Shermans: 

“Late Thursday, Winter sent The Fifth Estate results of another polygraph test he says he arranged himself that showed the results were “inconclusive.”

On the advice of his lawyer, Winter also declined to take a lie detector test on the question of whether he killed the Shermans.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

Thus, Kerry Winter who had a criminal past including illegal narcotics dealing and time in jail, had quite likely told some friends two decades ago about arranging to murder Honey Sherman for Barry Sherman, but what he has told the media now was not reliable and he has admitted to lying about the it.

Can the denial of someone like that, with a criminal past and prone to lying, about any involvement in or knowledge of the murder of the Shermans be easily trusted? After all, the shocking double homicide occurred two decades after his talking to others about one wanting to kill the other with his help.

Criminologist Michael Arntfield, who observed The Fifth Estate’s polygraph test, posed the question why Kerry Winter went through the test, “this whole song and dance”, when he clearly was lying: 

““He was lying, and the test results — the polygraphist — confirms that,” said Michael Arntfield, a criminologist at Western University in London, Ont., who observed the polygraph test.

“I mean, why go through this whole song and dance? That’s really the underlying question here.””

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

The criminologist’s question is a very meaningful one because it regards Kerry Winter’s objectives.

In his interview with The Fifth Estate, Kerry asserted that his objective was to “hurt” Sherman’s legacy:

“Winter told The Fifth Estate he was going public now with the allegations because he wanted to “hurt” Barry Sherman’s legacy.

Winter and his siblings had been locked in a protracted, decade-long lawsuit launched in 2007 seeking a piece of the Apotex fortune. Last September, an Ontario Superior Court judge dismissed the case as “fanciful.” The cousins have since appealed.

“I was betrayed. My cousin hurt me, and now I want to hurt him,” Winter told The Fifth Estate.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

In order to hurt Sherman’s “legacy”, or reputation, the alleged murder plot Sherman had wanted needs to be credible, i.e., seen as credible by others. That has been partially achieved when Kerry Winter’s two close friends confirmed to The Fifth Estate that they had heard about it from him two decades ago – at least it isn’t a newly fabricated story.

But in a legal sense, this was about planning for a would-be murder, and any solid confirmation would carry potential criminal-law implications for Kerry Winter, alone among he and Barry Sherman now that Sherman is dead. As some of the above quotes from The Fifth Estate story indicate, police pay attention to polygraph results and lawyers would advise not taking such tests.

For this reason, my explanation is that Kerry lied so that the polygraph results could not fully confirm the murder plot; but when the results were concluded as false, he did another test on his own to show that it might not be all false. In other words, Kerry wanted some degree of credibility for the old murder plot so as to hurt Sherman’s reputation, but not full confirmation that could cause himself trouble.

In my view also, Kerry Winter’s objective was not just hurting Sherman’s “legacy”, but had practical motivations.

For one motivation, such negatives in Sherman’s legacy, namely the bad deeds he had done, have ramifications to his business ownership reputation.

Sherman had been adamant, on several occasions as reviewed earlier, that his Winter cousins were simply not suitable to work at Apotex and thus would not qualify for ownership interests.

But now, if both the prominent businessman and leading philanthropist Barry Sherman and the sometimes criminal Kerry Winter were at one time would-be murderers, or co-conspirators in a would-be murder, the notion of business ownership suitability could change in favour of Winter.

However, a main weakness of this murder plot claim by Winter, in my opinion given that The Fifth Estate had partial verification from his two close friends, is the alleged murder motive – that Sherman was unhappy in the marriage.

In my quite lengthy review of the various media profiles of Barry Sherman and his memoir, I have not noticed such a deadly facet in his personality traits.

When the media first reported that the Toronto Police suspected the deaths as murder-suicide, there were stories about the “clashing personalities” of Barry and Honey Sherman:

“‘Yin and yang’ is how family described Honey and Barry Sherman. They complemented each other, yet had clashing personalities.

Reserved, socially awkward and a workaholic, Barry was a pugnacious man who never backed away from a courthouse or corporate fight.

As an entrepreneur, he hired private detectives to rummage through his competitor’s garbage, then got a court order so he could barge into their head offices and seize their papers. He didn’t hesitate to foreclose on the homes of people who owed him money, even relatives.

“Free will is an illusion . . . Life has no meaning or purpose,” he said in his unpublished memoirs.

Honey was outgoing, with a cutting wit and salty tongue. Feted for her philanthropic work, she had the mettle of someone who survived throat cancer and took part in a charity dance contest after undergoing surgeries for her crippling arthritis.

…

Friends close to the couple describe signs of discord in the Sherman’s marriage, such as public ribbing about Barry’s devotion to work, but they viewed it as shtick. Everyone the Globe and Mail spoke with over the past week has been incredulous at the police’s initial theory that it could be murder-suicide. There have been no further details from police about the case.

Interviews with friends, court records, Barry’s memoirs and public tributes at the couple’s memorial Thursday paint a portrait of two people with outsized personalities who were polar opposites.

Back in 1970, Honey Reich was volunteering at Mount Sinai Hospital when she told a nurse that she was looking for a nice Jewish doctor. That nurse was married to Joel Ulster, a friend and business partner of Barry, a budding pharmaceutical magnate. He was not a medical doctor, but he did have a PhD. The two were introduced.

…

Honey was a socialite philanthropist, and loved nothing more than an excuse to celebrate. Holiday get-togethers were one area of their lives where the otherwise frugal couple loved to go all out. What began years ago as a modest family dinner evolved over the years into an 80-person feast, with a banquet table cutting across the entire length of their mansion. In the kitchen, Honey – in her sweatpants and flip flops – would be cooking for everyone.

…

Despite their busy household, Barry spent most of his time at the Apotex offices – six days a week, in the company’s early years, often working longer than 12-hour shifts. At night, he slept with a pad and pen by his bedside in case he woke with an idea.”

(“Who were Barry and Honey Sherman?”, by Tu Thanh Ha, Molly Hayes and Rachelle Younglai with reports from Andrew Willis, December 22/23, 2017, The Globe and Mail)

As told, the couple were opposite personalities with contrasting life focuses, the husband being aggressively driven in business while the wife immersed in social events and philanthropy, and Barry was not the medical-doctor husband Honey Reich had looked for.

But there were no outward signs of anything really “clashing” between them in their marriage, and so as in the above story their friends scratched their heads trying to substantiate Toronto Police’s “initial theory” of murder-suicide.

Thus, media reported facts about the couple do not support Kerry Winter’s claim about Barry Sherman’s animosity toward his wife.

For another motivation on Kerry’s part, a hidden history on the part of Barry Sherman involving a plan to murder his wife Honey could bolster the “murder-suicide” scenario of their shocking deaths, in a way befitting Kerry’s interests.

Using his sensational tale of hiring a hit man for Sherman two decades ago as evidence, Kerry firmly stated, in an interview with Toronto Sun’s Joe Warmington, his “belief” that the deaths were the result of Barry killing Honey and himself, exactly as the Toronto Police initially suspected:

“… He believes the Shermans, who were found dead of ligature neck compression hanging from an indoor pool railing, was a murder-suicide as police originally suspected.

“If you believe (family lawyer) Brian Greenspan, if you believe it was a targeted hit and it was up close and personal, let’s find out when they charge the person responsible for Honey and Barry’s death,” Winter said.

“Well that day is never going to come sir because I said it, and I will say it again, Barry killed her and committed suicide,” he said. “That’s my belief and it will never change. The only way it will change if someone admits to doing it.”

…

“I am a recovering addict, six years sober, buddy,” said Winter. “I believe in the Lord. I am not an evil person. I had nothing to do with Honey and Barry’s death.”

But he does allege participating in a conversation with his cousin Barry Sherman in which he claims the Apotex founder asked him to arrange for his wife to be “whacked.”

Winter said “this business about Barry asking me to kill someone …“could be misconstrued as a conspiracy to commit a murder.”

He’s trying to balance that fine line between it not being a conspiracy he was involved in but one that Barry Sherman was allegedly spearheading.

“This idea that Barry never asked me is laughable,” he said. “Barry didn’t love Honey.”

He said the truth will eventually come out — which includes him looking to hire an underworld friend.

…

“You will see I am not a kook, I am not a nut,” he said. “All I said was there was a murder-suicide and I kept my mouth shut. But when Brian Greenspan starts spinning this (double murder) yarn, I am not going to keep my mouth shut anymore.

“The idea that Barry could not harm a hair on her head, Joe, is not true,” Winter said. “Barry hated her. That’s what I am trying to tell you.””

(“WARMINGTON: Cousin claiming Sherman deaths murder-suicide fails lie detector”, by Joe Warmington, February 2, 2018, Toronto Sun)

Basically, Kerry Winter wanted others to accept that he is a decent person but Barry Sherman was once a would-be murderer of wife Honey and now has really killed Honey and himself.

In another interview with the British newspaper Daily Mail, Winter talked in very graphic language about his “gut” feeling that Barry Sherman killed his wife:

“Winter, 56, told DailyMailTV: ‘My gut tells me he killed her.

‘That’s my feeling [and] I don’t believe somebody out there is going to be found because… Barry did the deed.

Winter’s own immediate reaction on learning of their deaths, he said was: ‘F***ing hell he finally did it. Barry finally killed the b****.’

…

Winter says that Sherman had ‘many enemies’ and that over the years people may have wanted him dead – but says the simplest explanation and the one he believes is that he did it himself.

‘Is it plausible that somebody out there had an ax to grind and arranged for them to be targeted?’ he told DailyMailTV. ‘Absolutely, because of the manner in which he did business and the many enemies he had.’

But he said: ‘There is no doubt, sitting in front of you here, that Barry killed her. I’m not surprised. Actually I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.’

…

Winter insisted this is legal feud with Sherman has no bearing on his conviction that his cousin killed first his wife and then himself or his decision to speak out now.

‘It’s not so much I’m saying negative things,’ he said. ‘I’m saying truthful things.’

And in reality, Winter said, the man mourned by Trudeau was a ‘pathological liar’ who was obsessed with accumulating wealth and held his wife in ‘disdain’.

Winter said: ‘He couldn’t stomach to be around her. He used to say to me, ‘There’s love and hate in every marriage. But there’s just so much hate in mine.’

‘And all these people who sit back and say, “Barry would NEVER have harmed her…he adored her,”’ Winter shook his head, ‘Barry wasn’t capable of love.’”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

To show how bad Sherman could be, Kerry told Daily Mail other anecdotes, including that the generous help Sherman gave the Winter sons not only were mostly loans – as my earlier review has shown – but also deceptively stripped off their remaining family inheritance, and that the Royal Trust documents on the Winter estate had information about their mother’s worry shortly before her death that Sherman would steal Empire Labs from her children:

“He bankrolled three of the brothers in business ventures. He paid visa cards, allowances, bought them homes, cottages, cars and speedboats. Only, in a detail they would later come to rue, Sherman didn’t actually ‘give’ them any of these things.

He signed lines of credit contingent on them handing over the remainder of the inheritance left to them by their parents.

At the time, twice-married Winter, was developing houses and losing himself to the drug addiction which very nearly killed him.

Sherman co-signed to millions of dollars of credit, mortgages and loans supposedly to help Winter expand his business and he provided him with $20, 000 – $30,000 a month.

Then, older brother Jeffery started asking questions about the sale of their father’s business and everything changed.

The siblings sued Royal Trust in 2001 for access to documents relating to the sale. In 2002 they discovered the option that Sherman had buried.

On one document, Winter said, a handwritten note from a trustee who visited Beverly shortly before her death noted she was ‘visibly upset’ and, ‘worried that Barry is trying to steal the company from the children.’

…

The last time Winter spoke to Sherman other than in a lawyer’s office was a telephone call he made on learning about the existence of the option some 15 years ago.

Winter said: ‘It was a short phone call and I was emotional. I remember crying and I remember saying, “Barry you lied to me.”

‘He said, “I know.” I said, “Why did you lie so much to me?” And it broke my heart.’”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

Winter stated to Daily Mail his conclusion that Sherman had never wanted to let the cousins share the ownership of the company he had taken over from their family estate:

“Today, Winter said, his older cousin ‘never had any intention of honoring that option.’

Certainly he never told Martin and Carole Barkin, the couple who adopted the Winter orphans, that it existed.”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

As Kerry Winter confirmed in the above media interview published at the end of January 2018, shortly after his adoptive father’s death, that Barry Sherman never mentioned the Empire Labs ownership provision to the Barkins.

But as I have pointed out before, Royal Trust would have and certainly should have informed the adoptive parents.

In concluding his Daily Mail interview, Kerry said something showing that he wasn’t that absolutely convinced of the deaths being a murder-suicide:

“But for all the unknowns he has no doubt about one thing: Sherman was capable of murder and wasn’t bound to his own life by anything that brought him joy.

Winter said: ‘If Barry Sherman hadn’t been an entrepreneur and a CEO he would have been a serial killer.’ 

He reflected: ‘Either way he had a terrible end. He either killed his wife and hung himself or he was targeted and Honey was punched out in front of him and his last moments must have been horrific.

…

‘But my feeling is he killed her. Barry did this. And all the tea in China doesn’t change that fact.’”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

As above, the mindset shown was consistent with my analysis earlier. Kerry Winter was not really so absolutely convinced that Sherman killed his wife, but that he was very capable of it and had wanted it at one time and so nothing is more certain than if he “finally did it” – a degree of wishful thinking has been embedded in this definitive belief even though Kerry knew Sherman might have been “targeted” after all.

While painting a picture of Barry Sherman as a murderer the best he could, Kerry also portrayed himself as now clean, well-behaved, and no longer involved in illegal drugs or with the criminal world like in the past:

““I’m six years sober, I’m a wonderful father, I work full time, I haven’t done a drink or drug in six years. I view myself as rehabilitated and recovered. I no longer associate with street people, drug dealers, criminals.””

(Kevin Donovan, January 31, 2018, Toronto Star)

That would be a perfect outcome in Kerry Winter’s imagination, that in the end Barry Sherman is a dead murderer whereas he himself is a born-again good citizen ready for some serious business ownership.

Kerry’s attempts to rehabilitate his own image had begun at least as early as 2008 in his interview with Toronto Life’s Geraldine Sherman, stating at the time that he no longer did illegal drugs except marijuana, and that had he known the prospect of becoming rich he would have changed earlier:

“We met a second time, same place. I asked Kerry about the effects of drugs on his life. He said he’s been clean for the past four years, “except for weed.” He said he once told Barry that he might have given up the drugs earlier if he’d known it might have made him a multimillionaire.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

But as reviewed in Part 1 and acknowledged by Kerry Winter in some of the quotes above, by the time of these media interviews he did in late January-early February 2018, the private investigators hired by the Sherman family had found evidence of “multiple killers’” in the killings, and the Toronto Police had also announced as “double homicide”. These conclusions were reported by the Daily Mail alongside Winter’s sensational opposite assertions:

“Toronto police initially treated the Shermans’ ‘suspicious’ deaths as murder-suicide after autopsies returned the cause of death as ‘ligature neck compression’ – strangulation caused by a cord or rope.

Then private investigators hired by the Shermans’ children concluded that the couple were murdered by multiple killers two days before the 75-year-old and his wife were found hanging from their poolside railings in a ‘semi-seated’ position. They had been strung up by belts.

Sherman was honored in death by Justin Trudeau, who publicly mourned him at a memorial service and tweeted a tribute to the couple’s ‘vision and spirit’.

Last Friday, after six weeks of investigation during which 127 witnesses had been interviewed, thousands of hours of surveillance camera footage recovered, 150 items removed from the couple’s 12,000 square foot home and even sewers searched in a bid to recover evidence, cops announced that they too were viewing the deaths as double-homicide.”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

Nonetheless, there could be some credit in Kerry Winter’s insistence that Honey Sherman had been a murder target two decades ago and the real murder target this time. Author Jeffrey Robinson, who had interviewed Barry Sherman for his 2001 book, Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry, following the Shermans’ deaths also voiced the opinion that Honey Sherman could have been the real target:

“Another possibility that the writer entertains is that it was Honey Sherman who was the real target.

“She was well-known as a pain in the ass, maybe somebody had something against Honey,” Robinson said.”

(“SHERMAN MURDERS: Did organized crime kill billionaire?”, by Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

In that case, I suppose if and when the killers also came upon Barry Sherman in the Sherman home they might find it necessary to neutralize him.

In response to Kerry Winter’s talking to the media about his strong belief in a murder-suicide, the Sherman family issued a statement denouncing him and his “outrageous and baseless claims about our father”:

“We are deeply hurt, shocked, and angered that Kerry Winter is using the tragedy of our parents’ homicides to make outrageous and baseless claims about our father. The family accepts the conclusion of the Toronto Police Service, and finds it regrettable that the media would give a platform to these completely absurd allegations.”

(“Statement from the Sherman Family: Allegations by Kerry Winter”, Apotex Inc., February 1, 2018, Cision)

After Kerry Winter’s high-profile media interviews with sensational claims about Barry Sherman intending to kill Honey two decades ago, and stating his strong belief in their deaths being a murder-suicide, it was reported that Julia Winter, widow of Kerry’s brother Dana, asked the court to conduct a mental-health assessment of Kerry while the Winter family appealed the 2017 court ruling against their $1 billion lawsuit:

“In a newly-unsealed court document obtained by the Sun, a relative contends the controversial cousin who’s made outlandish allegations surrounding the murder of Barry and Honey Sherman suffered “some sort of nervous breakdown” after the billionaire couple was discovered dead in their home last December.

Kerry Winter’s “perplexing media campaign” has also cast him as a murder suspect, worries his sister-in-law in the filed affidavit.

“Although I have no formal training regarding mental or emotional disorders, I have known Kerry for approximately 25 years and based on his recent conduct, it is my opinion that he has suffered some form of nervous breakdown,” says Julia Winter, widow of Kerry’s brother Dana.

…

“I did not approve of Kerry’s recent statements to the press. I attribute it to his illness,” his Vancouver sister-in-law wrote in her affidavit.

…

Winter outraged many by blaming Sherman, telling the Sun’s Joe Warmington, “Barry killed her and committed suicide.”

Instead, people believe Winter is involved, his sister-in-law said in her affidavit, due in part to his “recent perplexing media campaign concerning his relationship with Barry. Kerry even recently appeared (involuntarily) on the cover of the National Enquirer with the caption “The Cousin Did It.”

His children are now being harassed at school. “In particular, they are being told that their father (Kerry) is a murderer.”

While he’s spearheaded the lawsuit on her behalf, as representative of her late husband, as well as his brother Tim Barkin, Julia Winter said her brother-in-law is now “unable to provide instructions” to their lawyer Brad Teplitsky or “participate in joint decision-making regarding the litigation with me and Tim.”

Teplitsky asked the court to require Winter to undergo a mental health examination to see whether the Office of the Public Guardian should be appointed as his litigation guardian. He’s now agreed to the assessment.”

(“MANDEL: Barry Sherman’s cousin Kerry Winter suffered nervous breakdown, sister-in-law tells court”, by Michele Mandel, May 4 , 2018, Toronto Sun)

The real world is much more complicated than in his self-interested idealization of what happened, Kerry Winter being familiar with the criminal world and well aware of his own life exploits and adventures.

In any practical scenario it is unlikely that Barry Sherman actually killed Honey, and although Kerry said he did not know “who did it” he also admitted to lying in The Fifth Estate’s polygraph test; even if he really did not know who, with the hard-core criminals and street characters he knew the killers may well have known Kerry Winter; and even if they did not know him, with the way he liked to talk about Sherman’s enemies and about his fantasy of killing Sherman, they may well have been aware of him and felt inspired by his anger and hate.

In my view, perhaps one of the strongest arguments against the murder-suicide scenario is the timing, namely the wrong timing of the deaths. Not only that the timing coincided with an Ontario court ruling shortly beforehand against the Winter sons on the $1 billion lawsuit they had filed in 2007, ordering them to pay $300,000 legal costs to Sherman, thus making a bold man like Kerry Winter extremely angry, but it also coincided with the Senate of Canada having just awarded a 150 Anniversary Medal to the Shermans and the government of Canada having just made a decision to appoint Barry Sherman to the Order of Canada – both in November 2017 as discussed in Part 1.

For Barry Sherman, as it had been for his old nemesis Morton Shulman in May 1993 as reviewed earlier, such was a time to celebrate, to rejoice, to be ecstatic and to be jubilant, rather than to kill his wife Honey and end his own life.

But Barry Sherman’s enemies were not limited to the brand-name drug companies as reviewed in Part 1, and his Winter family cousins and their adoptive family as reviewed up to this point in Part 2.

When the April 2008 Maclean’s investigative article asked the question why the murder happened now when Sherman was 75, it stated, here quoted again, that Sherman “had amassed a long list of enemies in his 50-year career”:

“The question to be answered is not only why was Sherman murdered alongside his wife, but why now, at 75? It’s no secret the drug executive had amassed a long list of enemies in his 50-year career. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

My review next will look at some well-publicised cases of Sherman’s disputes with others more generally in business, and in the community that he was a part of.

Note that in his 2008 interview with Toronto Life, as quoted earlier, Kerry Winter claimed that “several of Sherman’s business enemies” wanted him to win in the $1 billion lawsuit.

Those “Sherman’s business enemies” might not be limited, at all, to only those in the pharmaceutical business field which the Winter sons’ adoptive father Martin Barkin was a member of, given Winter’s past lifestyle dabbling in illegal narcotic dealing activities as well as various small business ventures, some of which supported by loans from Sherman.

In his business career, Barry Sherman has also made a broad mix of investments outside of the pharmaceutical industry, as Maclean’s reported:

“… Sherman’s wealth saw him cross paths with high society and low—from business and political elites to shady characters out of a Coen brothers movie. His investments outside of Apotex were both extensive and, at times, perplexing—a list that includes a failed casino bid, a money-losing gold mine, an outfit that produced therapeutic pads for horseshoes, a stake in the hottest commercial real estate venture in the country, a now-bankrupt jewellery company that dealt in “loose diamonds,” an investment in a yacht named The Great Gatsby that never existed and his backing of B movies Real Gangsters! and Sicilian Vampire.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

It looks like, from the above, that Sherman had some fascination in stories of gangsters and mobsters. Perhaps it had to do with the business ventures he had interests in.

As previously noted in Part 1, Author Jeffrey Robinson, who had interviewed Sherman for his 2001 book on the pharmaceutical industry, did not think the brand-name drug companies were behind the killing of the Shermans; Robinson also mentioned “Russian and Chinese organized crime syndicates” as examples of who could do such a murder job:

“But Robinson doubts one of Sherman’s Big Pharma enemies took out a contract on him.

“Big Pharma doesn’t take out hits on people, at least not in North America,” Robinson said. “They’ll plant a kilo of cocaine in the trunk of your car or embed kiddie porn on your computer but they won’t murder you.”

Russian and Chinese organized crime syndicates, on the other hand, play by different rules. Robinson said some Russian hitmen “fly in on Monday, do the job, then they get on a plane and disappear on Tuesday morning.””

(Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

Something like what Robinson said in the above, an international professional criminal hit, would be harder to solve. But presumably only the powerful would have the capability to easily arrange such an international assassination. The Big Pharma is certainly among the powerful.

Robinson thinks Sherman’s problem was “winning” at all cost:

“Now, investigators are working on the why and who.

“Barry was a prick, if he needed you to pay $150,000 he wouldn’t hesitate to spend $3 million in court. It was all about winning for him,” Robinson said.

“People really hated him in the business.””

(Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

As said, “People really hated him” because in a dispute Sherman must win through legal means.

On the other hand, it may not be winning that was what Sherman went after but that putting his opponent down was his need or satisfaction, as Kerry Winter said in 2008, quoted earlier:

“… “If Barry had his way, I’d be eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC. Well, Barry, that’s just not going to happen.” …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Rather interestingly, the April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article referred to such a vindictive trait of Sherman’s as “righteous certitude”:

“… A hard-nosed strategic genius who built Canada’s largest pharmaceutical company, Sherman also conducted business with known criminals. He’d generously bail out someone in need—but often with a longer, self-interested view. He was a billionaire driven to litigation less by money than something more primal: a sense of righteous certitude that propelled him to prevail at any cost.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Whether that kind of “self-interested” stiffness should be described as “righteous”, conducting business with “known criminals” while having such a “righteous certitude” could be a deadly mix.

So let’s look at the case the Maclean’s article referred to when referring to Sherman’s “righteous certitude”, to see if it could offer any clue:

“In the summer of 1988, Barry Sherman received an urgent phone call—from a prison in Oregon. On the other end was a familiar voice: that of Harvey Rubenstein, a notorious Toronto stockbroker convicted of fraud on both sides of the border. Though Rubenstein’s financial scams garnered plenty of headlines, few people had any idea his victims included the founder of Canadian generic drug giant Apotex Inc. Mere weeks before taking that call, Sherman had launched a lawsuit against Rubenstein, his former investment adviser, claiming he’d been duped out of millions.

Now the disgraced broker, recently extradited to the United States to face another slew of fraud charges, was asking for even more of Sherman’s money: US$100,000 so he could post bail. He told Sherman if he weren’t behind bars, he could focus his efforts on recovering his lost money. Sherman agreed. “I couldn’t see any benefit, from my viewpoint, of having him languish in jail,” Sherman later testified in a sworn deposition.

The story didn’t end there. After Rubenstein pleaded guilty, Sherman agreed to loan him half of the $100,000 bail money so he could pay restitution to his victims. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Wow, Sherman seemed uncharacteristically generous in this case. Harvey Rubenstein, a notorious stockbroker who had been convicted of fraud in both Canada and the U.S. and who had as investment adviser defrauded Sherman “out of millions” and was being sued by Sherman, phoned Sherman from a U.S. prison asking for the help of $100,000 U.S. dollars to get out of jail; Sherman decided to post the $100,000 bail to secure Rubenstein’s release, and then loaned him half of the $100,000 bail money – in cash – so that Rubenstein could pay restitution to his victims.

That did not look like winning at any cost. Rubenstein had “duped” Sherman “out of millions”, and yet Sherman did not want to let him linger in prison but would lend him an additional $100,000 as bail, and after Rubenstein was released let him use $50,000 of the $100,000 to compensate the fraud victims.

In this case, Sherman was not only kind toward the fraudster Rubenstein but also considerate toward the other victims of Rubenstein’s fraud. Sherman being generous like this, a criminal likely would not want to kill him.

But then a related dispute arose:

“… But when another creditor stepped forward to claim rights to the remaining $50,000, Sherman spent the next four years fighting in U.S. court to eventually recoup what, for him, was essentially pocket change.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As told, when another creditor, i.e., someone to whom Rubenstein owed money, laid claim to the remaining $50,000 of bail money, Sherman switched to the ‘winning at any cost’ mode, spending 4 years fighting in the U.S. court to recover that money – for a person of his wealth $50,000 was very small, and the legal costs of fighting in the U.S. court over the four years probably cost him more.

The story did not say that the other creditor was a “criminal”. U.S. court records show that it was City National Bank. (“UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff, v. Harvey RUBENSTEIN, Defendant. Bernard C. SHERMAN, Claimant-Appellant, v. CITY NATIONAL BANK, Cross-Claimant-Appellee.”, July 24, 1992, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Court Listener)

It seems to me to be a mindset where when it was a small amount of money Sherman would be willing to make a kind gesture, but he could not stand his sense of authority being challenged – especially when the other creditor was a large financial institution.

Thus, in this case Sherman was rather generous to the difficult plight of a known criminal who had defrauded him, but unrelenting in fighting a financial institution just like fighting Big Pharma in his pharmaceutical business world.

Such a must-win attitude was obviously “certitude”, i.e., a sense of having the absolute right.

But it would not have been “righteous” but rather ‘ungenerous’ had the other creditor not been a bank but an individual victim of Rubenstein’s – just like, as in Part 1, when Sherman’s target of aggressive generic drug push was not a major international brand-name drug company but the small Canadian company owned by Morton Shulman selling a brand-name drug that treated himself as a patient.

I note that the bail and restitution money Sherman provided for Rubenstein were only lent to the latter, and so Sherman did not go beyond the norm as with the help given his Winter cousins – namely helping Dana get out of jail by posting bail, but giving financial help mostly in loans.

In fact, the fact that the $100,000 bail money for Rubenstein was a loan was central for Sherman’s winning the legal fight in the U.S. court not to let City National Bank take the other half not intended for restitution. When the court determined that the money’s ownership was Sherman’s, it was ordered to be returned to him:

“13   Rubenstein spent 1989 vacillating with regard to the federal criminal charges pending against him. In February he withdrew his not guilty plea and pleaded guilty. In June, he changed his plea again. In January 1990, he again pleaded guilty. Sometime during this period, Rubenstein learned that he might avoid a long prison sentence by making restitution to victims of his fraudulent schemes. Rubenstein then convinced Sherman in late 1989 to assign half of the deposited funds, $50,000, to the district court clerk solely for use in paying restitution on behalf of Rubenstein. Rubenstein also assigned to the district court clerk whatever interest he retained in the bail funds.

14    When Rubenstein was sentenced on March 23, 1990, he was ordered to pay restitution. To assure performance, the district court set aside $50,000 of the bail funds for distribution to Rubenstein’s victims. The court then turned its attention to City National Bank’s recently-filed motion to compel the district court clerk to comply with the bank’s newly-obtained writ of garnishment. Because ownership of the remaining $50,000 in bail funds was unclear, the district court instructed the bank to apply to the state court “for [a] determination of who the balance of the bail money belongs to.”

15    At this point, Sherman and City National Bank returned to state court, where Sherman filed a claim of exemption alleging that he, not Rubenstein, owned the bail funds. …”

(July 24, 1992, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Court Listener)

The Harvey Rubenstein example was one of several cases mentioned in the April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article where persons who had done work for Barry Sherman did something wrong and Sherman pursued them in court rigorously – note that Sherman did have a lawsuit against Rubenstein for the fraud, despite bailing him out of the U.S. jail.

One of the other examples in the Maclean’s article involved Sherman’s accountants who failed to alert him of potential problems in his investments into luxury yachts Elegance and The Great Gatsby:

“Sherman, being Sherman, was often aggressive in seeking restitution. In the 1980s, he was one of many high-profile Canadians burned in what’s considered the biggest tax fraud in the country’s history—limited-partnership tax shelters involving luxury yachts Elegance and The Great Gatsby. When it was revealed that no yachts existed, Sherman tried, unsuccessfully, to sue his accountants for negligence, claiming he lost more than $600,000. The Ontario Court of Appeal said Sherman was an “astute businessman” and “experienced investor” who should have known better.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

According to a judgment by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on September 3, 2003, The Great Gatsby and Elegance were two of 79 limited partnerships for luxury yachts in the Mediterranean and Caribbean marketed as tax shelters by businessman Einar Bellfield, 36 of which fully purchased by around 600 Canadian investors, including the two by Sherman alone. In most of the cases, no yacht turned out to exist and the investment’s tax benefit was denied by Revenue Canada – both were contributing factors to the financial losses suffered by Sherman and other investors:

“1. Background

4    Great Gatsby and Elegance were two of 79 limited partnerships registered by Einar Bellfield between 1984 and 1991 – ostensibly for the purpose of acquiring, and chartering, luxury yachts in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. Thirty-six of the partnerships were fully subscribed – their limited partnership units having been acquired by approximately 600 investors. The general partner of each limited partnership was Overseas Credit and Guarantee Corporation (“OCGC”) of which Bellfield was the sole shareholder.

5   The partnerships were marketed to investors in Canada as tax shelters and, for the plaintiff, this was certainly their primary – and, probably, their only – attraction. In 1987 Revenue Canada commenced an audit and investigation into their activities and, in a letter of June 15, 1989, the plaintiff was informed that the partnership’s tax losses, and interest deductions he had claimed in 1985, 1986 and 1987 in respect of his investment in Great Gatsby, would be disallowed. …

6    Ultimately, all of the losses and deductions claimed by the plaintiff in connection with the limited partnerships were disallowed and tax was assessed on that basis. …

7    At the trial of this action it was not disputed that the limited partnerships promoted by Bellfield were part of a scheme in which he obtained funds from investors by way of fraudulent misrepresentations. No yachts were ever chartered and the very few that were acquired may have been intended only to give an appearance of legitimacy to the scheme. …

8    On November 16, 1999, Bellfield was indicted on charges of defrauding the Crown of the tax payable in respect of losses of $ 118 million claimed on behalf of the 36 limited partnerships, and of defrauding their unit holders. He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment and a fine of $1 million.”

(“Sherman v. Orenstein & Partners”, Cullity J., September 3, 2003, Ontario Superior Court of Justice, JD  Supra)

Sherman then sued his investments’ accountant firm for negligence, asserting that at some point the firm should have sent him a “going concern note” to alert him of the risk. The lawsuit was dismissed by the Ontario Superior Court for the reasons that the accountant firm did not breach the standard of care in this case, and that Sherman himself did not give sufficient care to the investments – here as summarised in a judgement of the Ontario Court of Appeal on December 2, 2005:

“A. OVERVIEW

1    The issues in this lawsuit are whether the respondent chartered accounting firm, Orenstein & Partners (“Orenstein”), breached the standard of care required of it in performing a review engagement; and, if so, whether its breach caused the loss claimed by the appellant Bernard Sherman.

2    Sherman is an astute businessman, an experienced investor, and the chair of Apotex Inc., Canada’s largest generic drug manufacturer. In the mid 1980s, Sherman invested in two tax shelters by purchasing all the units of two Limited Partnerships: the Great Gatsby and Elegance. These and seventy-seven other similar limited partnerships were formed to invest in luxury sea-going yachts. Overseas Credit and Guarantee Corporation (“OCGC”) was the general partner of all the limited partnerships.

3    OCGC loaned Sherman the money to buy the units in Gatsby and Elegance. Sherman made monthly interest payments on the loans, which he deducted along with other expenses and losses for Gatsby and Elegance on his income tax returns for 1985-89.

4    The Limited Partnerships turned out to be a sham. They did not conduct the business they claimed to conduct. OCGC became insolvent and its principals were convicted of fraud. After an audit, Revenue Canada disallowed the tax losses and interest deductions that Sherman had claimed for the years 1985-88.

5    Orenstein performed review engagements of the financial statements of twenty-two of the limited partnerships, including Gatsby and Elegance. …

6    Sherman sued the respondents for negligence. He claimed that they negligently failed to include in the financial statements of Gatsby and Elegance a “going concern” note. He claimed this note would have alerted him that the Limited Partnerships would not likely become operating businesses. He alleged that had the respondents included a going concern note, he would have stopped making interest payments much sooner than he did. He quantified his loss at more than $600,000.

7    In comprehensive reasons, Cullity J. dismissed the action. He concluded that the respondents did not breach the standard of care required for a review engagement. He also concluded that even if the respondents had included a going concern note, Sherman either would not have noticed it, or, if he did, would not have stopped making interest payments.”

(“Sherman v. Orenstein & Partners”, J.I. Laskin, E.A. Cronk and E.E. Gillese JJ.A., December 2, 2005, Ontario Court of Appeal, JD Supra)

As cited above, the Ontario Superior Court judgment concluded that even if the accountants had sent Sherman a “going concern note” it would not have made a difference.

The primary reason for Sherman’s lack of attention to these investments was his reliance on the businessman Bellfield’s personal guarantee of the desired tax-shelter benefits:

“95    The plaintiff evidently decided that it would be a fruitless exercise to attempt to recover on the guarantees he had extracted from OCGC and Bellfield and that the defendants were likely to possess a more capacious pocket. He was, of course, entitled to do this but, to succeed, the fact that he may have been defrauded by Bellfield is not to the point. He was required to prove negligence in the performance of the defendants’ professional responsibilities and not merely an exercise of judgment with which reasonable accountants might disagree. In the light of the evidence of accounting principles applicable to review engagements in the period in question, I believe the area in which reasonable accountants might reach different decisions was not negligible. …

…

105   I should add that, if it were necessary to consider the question of reliance, I would not have accepted Dr. Sherman’s evidence that he relied on the absence of a going-concern note in the financial statements of the limited partnerships. I am not satisfied that he ever read – let alone relied on an implied representation in – the financial statements. He had obtained advice from his personal advisers before subscribing for units of Great Gatsby and they had secured for him a personal guarantee of Bellfield that he would receive the desired tax results. He referred to the existence of this guarantee as a reason for never asking to see the financial statements of OCGC even though, pursuant to the settlement agreement of April 1986, these were to be provided to his accountant annually. There was no persuasive evidence that, after making the investments, he paid any further attention to them before 1989. The burden of proving reliance was on him and, in my judgment, it was not discharged.”

(Cullity J., September 3, 2003, Ontario Superior Court of Justice, JD  Supra)

As Justice Cullity asserted in the above, Sherman lost his investments and tax benefits, felt he could not recover the money from the fraudster and so sued the accountants in the hope of getting paid by them for the loss. One can sense that the judge stopped just short of scolding the wealthy Sherman for going after not necessarily so rich accountants to pay for investment losses in businesses about which he cared only for their tax-shelter benefits.

This last point is significant regarding these “tax shelters”, as the judge pointed out that Sherman probably did not even read the financial statements from the businesses once he had been given “a personal guarantee” of “the desired tax results”.

The fact that Sherman himself could be ignorant of his own finances – when he felt they were secure – is also shown in the Rubenstein case when he told the U.S. court that he did not know where his $100,000 bail money for Rubenstein actually came from, relying on his staff to get the money:

“His financial interests, conducted through a web of private companies, trusts and foundations were so Byzantine that even he had trouble keeping them all straight. During his Rubenstein deposition in 1990, a lawyer asked him where he got the bail money. “I don’t know,” he replied. “My banking is very, very complex. I simply instructed my staff to have the money forwarded.””

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

On can understand that when he found out that his staff or adviser failed him or even defrauded him, Sherman would become legally tough on them.

But it would not have been easy to manage money for Sherman, because like he said above, “My banking is very, very complex.”

The Maclean’s investigative article cited above mentioned the labyrinth of companies Sherman set up for his family investments:

“When the Shermans put their house on the market, they did what many rich people do to protect privacy: they used a numbered company as the seller. Sherman had a library to choose from; the one that was chosen listed him as president and his sister-in-law, Mary Shechtman, as a director.

That Sherman had a numbered Ontario company with his sister-in-law named as an officer wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with his labyrinthine holdings outside of Apotex—ventures that put the test to Sherman’s claim he didn’t care about making money. Relatives pop up in the records of Sherman’s non-Apotex ventures held through “Sherm”-prefixed companies—including Shermco Inc., Sherfam Inc., Sherfam Industries Inc., Sherfam Holdings Inc.—as well as Bernard C. Sherman Limited and numerous trusts and private foundations. The Shermans’ real estate holdings—apartment buildings, condos, commercial properties, rumoured private islands—were held via Sherfam Inc., Signet Realty and Weston, Fla.-based Sherm Realty, as well as trusts. At one point, Sherman owned Deerhurst Inn, an Ontario resort, but sold it after failing to obtain a casino licence. Just months before he was killed, he partnered with a prominent Toronto developer to provide $61.5 million in financing for the most buzzed-about condominium project in the country: The One, an 85-storey structure to be built at the corner of Yonge and Bloor.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

It was not easy to provide service to Sherman in general: it could be complex or Sherman was just demanding, and he might not pay much attention himself; but when he discovered problems he would unleash his lawyers hard on the service provider.

Sherman really hit hard legally to get compensation for damages. If this point was not so clearly exhibited in the above example of the failed tax-shelter yacht businesses because the Ontario courts ruled against him, it was very glaring in another case of service that was unsatisfactory for him: the case of the architects and builders who designed and constructed his home.

The Shermans budgeted $2.3 million in 1985 to build their dream home. After moving in in 1991 they found a lot of problems with their new home, “a disaster” as Barry Sherman called it; so they sued the architects and builders, and recouped $2 million of the design and construction costs:

“When Barry and Honey Sherman bought their North York property in 1985, they planned to spend $2.3 million to build their dream home.

But they noticed problems with the home within months of moving in, in 1991, with Barry describing it as “a disaster.”

After litigation against the house’s designers and builders, they wound up recouping $2 million of the contracted amount to construct the home, according to a 2006 judgment.

The civil litigation that involved both the Shermans, who were found dead in the house on Friday, was one of many Barry was embroiled in, and offers a rare glimpse into the couple’s private life.”

(“Barry and Honey Sherman sued builders of North York home”, by Tamar Harris, December 19, 2017, Toronto Star)

A luxury “dream home” that took $2.3 million to design and build ended up costing the Shermans only $300,000, after a legal battle recouping $2 million.

That must have been a prime example of Barry Sherman’s legal prowess, although his lawyers would have cost money, too.

The house was an “architectural modern masterpiece” – despite all the problems when it was first built – according to a $6.9 million real estate listing in December 2017 when it was put on the market for sale by the Shermans shortly before their unexpected deaths:

“The house near Bayview Ave. and Highway 401 was listed for sale this month at $6.9 million.

The 12,000 square foot house is an “architectural modern masterpiece of poured concrete and steel construction,” according to an online real esate listing. The home has indoor and outdoor pools and hot tubs, a tennis court and underground parking for six cars with a heated ramp. The five-plus-one bedroom, nine-bath home is two storeys and features hardwood floors and a balcony.”

(Tamar Harris, December 19, 2017, Toronto Star)

Wow, what a bargain for $300,000! It was a 12,000 square-feet house with both indoor and outdoor pools, hot tubs, a tennis court and underground parking.

Let’s look at more details of this legal case:

“They went on to sue at least five of the people and companies involved in the home’s design and construction, including Jack Winston Designs, Thomas Marzotto Architects and Ewing Construction.

All but two settled.

The remaining two defendants, 21 Degrees Heating and Air Conditioning and Walter Kenyon of Walter Kenyon Designs, had designed the home’s heating and air conditioning system.

The Shermans sued 21 Degrees and Kenyon for negligence related to the design of the HVAC system, and 21 Degrees for breach of contract.

According to the judgment, “Mr. Sherman testified that there were so many things done wrong with respect to the construction of the house that it was a disaster.”

…

In their statement of claim, the Shermans asked for $500,000 in undefined damages for breach of contract or negligence from 21 Degrees and Kenyon. By the end of the trial, they sought nearly $34,000 in special damages and general damages of an unspecified amount.

…

In 2006, the judge presiding over the case found that 21 Degrees breached their contract and that both 21 Degrees and Kenyon were negligent.

But because the Shermans failed to prove they suffered any damages, the judge awarded them no damages and dismissed the case.

Two years later, an appeal to the Divisional Court was quashed.”

(Tamar Harris, December 19, 2017, Toronto Star)

As told, the Shermans’ sued at least five of the parties in the design and construction of the house, and all but two of the parties settled – that accounted for all the money recouped, so it would have been around $2 million. The Shermans continued to sue the remaining two defendants, asking for $500,000, and won their legal arguments in court; but because they failed to show the damages, the courts did not award them money from these last two defendants.

Had they shown serious damages with the last defendants, that magnificent home could have cost the Shermans absolutely nothing – other than any legal expenses for their own lawyers.

The problem, on the other hand, in my opinion given the home being an “architectural modern masterpiece of poured concrete and steel construction”, is how these architects, designers, builders and workers could make their living – with all the materials and parts, and time and work they had spent creating it and then the money paid them nearly all taken back.

But no doubt, these companies and persons learned a hard lesson of Mr. Barry Sherman’s “righteous certitude”.

I wonder now. In 2008 when Kerry Winter told Toronto Life as quoted earlier, “If Barry had his way, I’d be eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC”, did he only grieve his own plight after filing the $1 billion lawsuit against Sherman then seeing his properties and home taken away due to the loans he owed Sherman, or did his sentiment also reflect a perception by the community, including those who had created Sherman’s magnificent home?

It seems that, from my review thus far, it is the combination of his aggressiveness in competition and his vindictive certitude in winning that has been a formula of Sherman’s business success, but that also led to harsh outcome for the losers.

Here, let’s consider the examples of using private investigators.

In Part 1, we have seen the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer hire private investigators to loiter around Apotex company grounds, pose as employees to try to uncover anything illegal; and we have also seen Morton Shulman hire private investigators to look into Sherman’s businesses, and Sherman’s illegal mail-marketing of Apotex drugs into the U.S. was somehow conveyed to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

But neither matched the tenacity of Barry Sherman’s use of private investigators, here quoted like previously on the contrasts between his personality and Honey’s:

“As an entrepreneur, he hired private detectives to rummage through his competitor’s garbage, then got a court order so he could barge into their head offices and seize their papers. He didn’t hesitate to foreclose on the homes of people who owed him money, even relatives.”

(Tu Thanh Ha, Molly Hayes and Rachelle Younglai with reports from Andrew Willis, December 22/23, 2017, The Globe and Mail)

Rummaging through a competitor’s garbage to find something and then getting a court order to barge into its head offices to seize the papers – how many gentlemen would go to such lengths of breaking the social norms in order to achieve more successful business?

The above several cases of disputes between Sherman and others outside of the pharmaceutical field were all about persons who provided Sherman with service that went sour.

The following is a case where the other person was a convicted criminal getting some money from Sherman, allegedly to start his own business, but otherwise had no service relation or other business relation with Sherman.

Not long after the Shermans’ deaths, the media reported the story of a small investment Barry Sherman had made to a convicted Fraudster, Shaun Rootenberg, that then led to a legal dispute. Shaun Rootenberg, a convicted fraudster also known as Shaun Rothberg, wanted investment from Sherman in August 2015, intending to defraud him. Despite knowing the person’s criminal background, Sherman eventually made a $150,000 investment into Rothberg’s project, an app named “Trivia for Good”, as a result of lobbying by Sherman’s own friend Myron Gottlieb, a well-known convicted fraudster himself, on Rootenberg’s behalf:

“Many of Sherman’s non-Apotex ventures were coordinated within his company and listed the same address as his drug-maker: 150 Signet Dr. So it’s unsurprising that Apotex is where Sherman’s friend Myron Gottlieb showed up on Aug. 15, 2015. He went there to meet with company executives to vouch for Shaun Rootenberg, a convicted fraudster looking for Sherman to invest in an app he was developing, Trivia for Good. According to court documents, Gottlieb met Rootenberg (a.k.a. Shaun Rothberg) in prison when he himself was incarcerated for fraud related to Livent Inc., the theatre company he co-founded with Garth Drabinsky. Sherman would ultimately invest $150,000, at Gottlieb’s urging, but would later sue Rootenberg, alleging he and others defrauded him. (Gottlieb is not named in the suit.)”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As told above, Rootenberg had been in jail for fraud, where he met Gottlieb, also jailed for fraud. It was after they had been freed that Gottlieb visited Sherman’s office to “vouch for” Rootenberg who was pitching an app business idea to Sherman.

Rootenberg had been convicted of defrauding family, friends and business associates out of “millions of dollars”, and would continue his fraudulent ways:

“Thornhill fraudster Shaun Rootenberg — aka Shaun Rothberg — has defrauded family, friends and business associates out of millions of dollars over the years.

Now it’s alleged the convicted scam artist may even have cheated murdered billionaire Barry Sherman.

…

As reported in 2017 by Toronto Sun crime writer Chris Doucette, Rootenberg was most recently arrested in June for allegedly defrauding the romantic partners he found on eHarmony.

He was in the cooler for a while after pleading guilty back in 2009 to fleecing friends and family out of $2.5 million.

Somehow, by 2014, he had talked his way into a Chief Financial Officer position with Algoma Pubic Health in Sault Ste. Marie. There, he kept an eye on the public health agency’s $23 million annual expenditures and $25 million in capital assets.

The long con appeared to developing the waterfront in the Sault, but it all ended after city officials were informed of Rootenberg’s past.”

(“Fraudster surfaces in Sherman case”, by Liz Braun, January 27, 2018, Toronto Sun)

As described above, after serving jail time, in 2014 Rootenberg became Chief Financial Officer at Algoma Pubic Health in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, where he supervised public budgets and investments.

It was only an interim position for Rothberg. But in January 2015 when he came again as part of a business trying to win approval for a development project, it was found out that he was actually Rootenberg with a criminal fraud background, and the region public health agency launched an independent audit to see if any money had gone missing under his management:

“Rothberg was introduced as part of a delegation from Canal Village Development Corp., unveiling big plans for the Sault’s Gateway properties.

In an adjoining media room, one reporter quipped that City Council appeared to have been hit that Monday by a pandemic of “infectious enthusiasm” for the project.

By Thursday, that enthusiasm was rather less infectious.

The City of Sault Ste. Marie had advised Canal Village’s lawyer that it now wanted nothing to do with Shaun Rothberg or any corporate entity in which he was involved.

Canal Village principal Paolo Rovazzi quickly provided assurances that neither Rothberg nor Henry Cole (another member of the Canal Village team with whom the city had issues) would be involved in the Gateway deal.

And Algoma Public Health announced that Dr. Kim Barker, its medical officer of health and chief executive officer, had been “shocked” Thursday to receive information about Rothberg that had prompted the health unit’s board to hire an independent audit firm to investigate a six-month period during which Rothberg had served as its interim chief financial officer.

Why all this fuss over a mind-mannered, bespectacled number-cruncher?

Dr. Barker, City Solicitor Nuala Kenny and Ron Hulse, the Toronto consultant who recommended Rothberg to Algoma Public Health, all insist he is actually Shaun Rootenberg, who did time at Beaver Creek Institution in Gravenhurst after pleading guilty to multiple counts of fraud involving more than $2 million.

…

So how does a convicted fraudster get hired to oversee Algoma Public Health’s $23 million annual expenditures and $25 million in capital assets?

The short answer, Dr. Barker says, is that Algoma Public Health (APH) didn’t check out Rootenberg’s credentials because he was hired through a third-party consultant, Ron Hulse of Toronto.

…

APH has certainly had difficulty with its financial operations in recent years.

In July, 2013, Jeffrey Holmes departed as chief financial officer and was subsequently charged with breach of trust and theft over $5,000.”

(“How on earth did this man end up overseeing Algoma Public Health’s cash?”, by David Helwig, January 21, 2015, SooToday)

As told above, Jeffrey Holmes, a previous chief financial officer who had left in July 2013, was charged with breach of trust and theft, and then the agency hired this interim chief financial officer who turned out to have a criminal fraud past. Rothberg’s background was not checked at the time of the hiring because he was recommended by a third-party consultant, Ron Hulse of Toronto.

Fortunately, no money was missing when it came to Rootenberg, and the former Ontario deputy health minister who led the independent audit, producing a report critical of the Algoma Public Health board, in June 2015 actually praised Rootenberg for his work there:

“Marchy Bruni has so far not resigned as chair and a member of the Algoma Public Health board, as he was asked to do this afternoon by Dr. Eric Hoskins, Ontario’s minister of health and long-term care.

“If that’s what they request from the ministry, I have to consider [that],” Bruni told SooToday after a news conference at the Sault Ste. Marie Civic Centre by Hoskins and Graham Scott (shown), the former deputy minister of health who conducted a governance assessment of the APH board.

Scott’s assessment concluded that the board failed to meet its legal obligations.

Hoskins demanded the resignations of all members appointed to the APH board prior to the 2014 municipal election.

Notwithstanding his sharp criticisms of Algoma Public Health’s governance, Scott spoke well of Shaun Rootenberg, APH’s former interim chief financial officer, whose criminal background helped prompt the provincial assessment.

“There was no loss of cash. There was nothing inappropriate or illegal. Mr. Rootenberg did, in fact, quite a credible job during the time he was there,” Scott told SooToday.”

(“Will Marchy Bruni resign?”, by David Helwig, June 16, 2015, SooToday)

As told above, Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins demanded the resignations of all members of that regional public health board, while at the same time the lead auditor, former deputy health minister Graham Scott, told the media that “Mr. Rootenberg did, in fact, quite a credible job during the time he was there”.

So, even though he previously had defrauded, and would continue to defraud family, friends and business associates, Shaun Rootenberg was recently praised for “quite a credible job” for interim work as chief financial officer of a public health agency, when in August 2015 his prison-acquainted friend Myron Gottlieb approached Barry Sherman, a pharmaceutical business billionaire, to vouch for investment for Rootenberg’s app business idea.

Such a business company was set up and the mobile app produced. However, the public announcements did not cite Rootenberg or Rothberg, but named Ronald Hulse, i.e., the person who had recommended Rothberg to Algoma Public Health, as its co-founder, president and chief operating officer:

“Trivia For Good is a Canadian start-up company in the digital advertising platform space that will give away $500,000 in its first five contests over the next ten weeks, with $400,000 of that going to winners and the rest donated directly to charity.

“We hope to unleash a ‘phenomena of kindness’ as we provide cash windfalls to our top contestant weekly, while paying forward large donations to our charity partners, Right To Play, Els for Autism and Jays Care Foundation,” said Ronald Hulse, President and COO.

…

“I don’t believe you’ll find another free game where someone can play and win that much cash while also directly helping charities,” said Steven Glaser, CEO of Trivia For Good.

“The prize pools will increase to USD$1Million per contest as the company expands to a global audience.  We also have plans for even larger prizes and donations centered around the Olympics later this year,” said Glaser.

The idea for Trivia For Good came about when the company’s founders were discussing the difficulties brand advertisers face as they attempt to reach individuals without being seen as an intrusion through social programs and in-app mobile advertising.

“Trivia For Good rewards individuals for their time and offers them financial incentive to play trivia, a game everyone enjoys,” said Hulse, one of the founders.”

(“$500,000 in Prize Money to be won as Trivia For Good Launches its first FREE TO PLAY Contest in Canada”, May 9, 2016, Trivia For Good Inc., Cision)

Trivia For Good Inc. was a part of a larger company, Keek, of which Hulse was a former board member, and the mobile trivia game and advertising app’s launch campaign was featured on the Cineplex Theatre Network and Tim Horton T.V. across Canada. (“Keek Announces Restructuring of Its Social Trivia Division and TriviaForGood Announces Its First Contest and Market Launch Through the Cineplex Theatre Network”, March 2, 2016, Keek, Marketwired)

Whatever the marketing glitz, the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or potentially millions of dollars, of prizes given away and money donated to charities, Barry Sherman knew that it was a fraud and that he was defrauded of $150,000 in the process, and took legal action in May 2017:

“Ontario Superior Court documents show Sherman, founder of the Canadian pharmaceutical giant Apotex, intended to invest in an app called Trivia For Good, billed as a “mobile-trivia app that offers huge cash prizes.”

Sherman launched his lawsuit in May 2017 against Shaun Rootenberg and other parties. The lawsuit alleged “a fraudulent scheme” had cheated Sherman out of his investment.

Court documents show that Rootenberg, a previously convicted fraudster also known as Shaun Rothberg, came up with the Trivia For Good concept. The idea was to make money by selling advertising displayed on the app.”

(“Barry Sherman allegedly duped by convicted fraudster”, by Scott Anderson, Harvey Cashore, Joseph Loiero and Ronna Syed, January 27/28, 2018, CBC News)

Eric Paul, CEO of CannTrust Holdings, a company partnered with Apotex to develop a cannabis-based painkiller pill, has commented that various types of business figures went to Sherman for help and most of the time he would “loan or give them money”:

“Sherman trusted his gut and was willing to take risks, says Paul, who met Sherman 27 years ago when he approached him with a pharmaceutical-related venture. He was surprised at how quickly Sherman signed on. “Barry liked the story and said, ‘Let’s do it,’ ” Paul recalls. “Usually, people say: ‘Send the financials and we’ll do an analysis.’ ”

Such willingness made Sherman a target for people down on their luck or shilling a deal, says Paul: “He was well known in the community, so anyone who had a need—say a business going sideways—would go talk to Barry. Nine times out of 10 he would loan them or give them money.”

Shashank Upadhye, who worked as Apotex’s chief counsel from 2007 to 2012, heard many stories about Sherman’s quiet charity, whether it was covering someone’s tuition or helping an employee pay for a parent’s medical bills. “He was a real generous guy,” Upadhye says. “Now, anecdotally, I do know there probably were some people who took advantage of him, especially in business ventures, people he thought were his friends.”

Paul says he was familiar with the inner workings of these deals, and some left him aghast: “He was giving people money when there was no opportunity for success.””

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As told, “Nine times out of 10 he would loan them or give them money”.

But many of these instances were not necessarily about business of Sherman’s own interest, but about the community he being a billionaire businessman in, that others in the community sought his help – often in the form of business deals.

The various examples reviewed thus far have shown that Sherman could give some money in small amounts, such as for living allowances or paying Visa bills for his Winter family cousins, but when it came to a larger amount he might lend to or invest in the business, but seldom give the money, be it Kerry Winter, fraudulent financial adviser Harvey Rubenstein or fraudulent businessman Shaun Rootenberg.

And Sherman would use his lawyers to enforce whatever the conditions he smartly devised for these loans and investments.

But as Paul pointed out as quoted above, that some of “these deals” had “no opportunity for success”. Worse, some deals were intended to rip off, period, when they were pitched by fraudsters. So now what would happen when Sherman unleashed his lawyers on them? Confrontations became inevitable.

For the case of the convicted fraudster Shaun Rootenberg, there was an even closer timing in relation to the Shermans deaths than the Winter family’s $1 billion lawsuit being struck down by the court in late 2017; Sherman’s lawyers made a legal motion on December 13 – the day the Shermans were last seen alive – to move the lawsuit more promptly to trial:

“On the day he was last seen alive, Barry Sherman’s lawyers filed documents in court supporting a lawsuit against a convicted fraudster who had allegedly duped the billionaire philanthropist out of a $150,000 investment, CBC News: The Fifth Estate has learned.

…

It was in the final week of his life that Sherman stepped up his legal efforts to recover the $150,000 he said he had lost, a relatively small amount for a man reportedly worth nearly $5 billion. Still, on Dec. 13 his lawyers filed an aggressive motion to the court — with the goal of moving the case more promptly to trial.”

(Scott Anderson, Harvey Cashore, Joseph Loiero and Ronna Syed, January 27/28, 2018, CBC News)

That similar timing also caused suspicion.

The CBC story reported that Sherman had given a statement to the police after Rootenberg’s arrest again for new criminal fraud in June 2017 – in a month after the May filing of Sherman’s lawsuit against him – but clarified that CBC did not know of any connection between the Shermans’ murder in December 2017 and Rootenberg:

“Rootenberg was arrested again last June on criminal charges. Toronto Police allege Rootenberg defrauded two women with whom he had intimate relationships. The Fifth Estate has learned that Barry Sherman provided a statement to police in the criminal case against Rootenberg.

Rootenberg was held at Toronto South Detention Centre after his arrest. He was released on bail earlier this month. The Fifth Estate was unable to reach Rootenberg for comment after leaving an email and phone message.

In his statement of defence filed in October, Rootenberg said he “disputes the claim … that he contributed to the loss” and requested that the lawsuit be “dismissed in its entirety.”

Sherman and his wife, Honey, were found dead in their Toronto mansion on Dec. 15 by their real estate agent. Toronto police say they were last seen alive two days earlier. Police said on Friday they believe the Shermans were murdered. CBC has no evidence that there is a connection between the lawsuit and the murder, nor that Rootenberg is a suspect.”

(Scott Anderson, Harvey Cashore, Joseph Loiero and Ronna Syed, January 28, 2018)

What I would wonder is whether Sherman clearly displayed partiality when he launched a legal action against Rootenberg and others and pushed it forward aggressively, but not naming his friend Myron Gottlieb, also a convicted fraudster who not only vouched for Rootenberg but actively procured for his investment, in the lawsuit:

“Gottlieb emailed officials at Sherfam Inc. in August 2015 to thank them for the promised $150,000 investment.

“You advised that Barry Sherman will purchase 750,000 units,” Gottlieb wrote on Aug. 19, 2015.

Gottlieb then provided instructions for how Sherman’s $150,000 should be wired to the trivia company’s bank account. But according to the allegations filed in court, Rootenberg was a participant in a scheme “to defraud” Sherman and divert the funds partly for his own benefit.

…

Gottlieb was convicted along with Livent co-founder Garth Drabinsky in 2009 for defrauding their now-defunct musical production company Livent Inc.

In an email to The Fifth Estate, Gottlieb noted, “I am not a party to the action commenced by Barry Sherman.” He declined further comment except to say he was “privileged to be a friend of Barry and Honey Sherman.”

Rootenberg was arrested again last June on criminal charges. Toronto Police allege Rootenberg defrauded two women with whom he had intimate relationships. The Fifth Estate has learned that Barry Sherman provided a statement to police in the criminal case against Rootenberg.”

(Scott Anderson, Harvey Cashore, Joseph Loiero and Ronna Syed, January 28, 2018)

As above, it was Gottlieb who lobbied Sherman’s family company Sherfam Inc., received the promise of purchase of 750,000 units of investment for $150,000, and then provided instructions for wiring the money to Trivia For Good’s bank account.

This may have been Rootenberg’s fraud scheme. But in the case of Sherman’s investment, it was Gottlieb who visited Sherman’s office at 150 Signet Drive on August 15, 2015, to urge Sherman’s company to invest, as previously quoted from the Maclean’s article, and then on August 19 emailed instructions for sending the investment to the Trivia For Good company’s account as reported in the above CBC story.

Yet, Gottlieb was not named in the Sherman lawsuit against Rootenberg just because, as Gottlieb alluded to and quoted in the above, that he was “privileged to be a friend of Barry and Honey Sherman”?

When Gottlieb met Rootenberg in prison, he was there along with Garth Drabinsky as co-founders of Livent Inc., known for producing popular theatre shows like Phantom of the Opera in Canada and internationally, after having been convicted of fraud, with Drabinsky also losing his Order of Canada honour as a result:

“Gottlieb and Garth Drabinsky, the co-founders of now-defunct Livent Inc., were convicted of two counts each of fraud in a scheme to falsify financial statements so they could keep pace with lofty earnings projections.

Livent, behind such hits as Phantom of the Opera, filed for bankruptcy soon after the fraud was discovered in 1998. Its demise is estimated to have cost investors about $500-million.

The parole board says the courts clearly found Gottlieb was active in arranging and facilitating the fraud, and expresses dismay that Gottlieb says he is guilty only insofar as he didn’t properly oversee those working below him.

Gottlieb was granted day parole from Beaver Creek Institution in Gravenhurst, Ont., to a halfway house in Toronto in July after serving about 11 months of his four-year sentence.

…

Since Gottlieb was released on day parole he has been unable to find work, the board said, but noted that was likely due to his age – he’s 69 years old – and notoriety.

…

Gottlieb apologized for his crime at his July parole hearing, saying he should have spoken up in August 1997, when he said he realized the second-quarter financial report was off by about $24-million.

“I spent a lifetime trying to build a reputation and I blew it very fast,” he told the hearing. “When I knew it was happening, it was like hitting a brick wall and I can’t forgive myself.”

Gottlieb said he has a negative net worth now.

Drabinsky, who was granted day parole in October after serving about 14 months of his five-year sentence, is in the process of fighting a decision to strip him of his Order of Canada appointment.”

(“Livent’s Gottlieb gets full parole, despite ‘abject refusal’ to own up to fraud”, by Darren Calabrese, March 28, 2013/May 11, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

As told in the above, at this point in his life Myron Gottlieb no longer had wealth, was unable to find work, and likely had little money to live on when in August 2015 he persuaded his privileged friend Barry Sherman to invest in Shaun Rootenberg’s Trivia For Good app idea, procuring and securing the investment in a way he knew how; and he succeeded.

Most likely Sherman spared Gottlieb – but not Gottlieb’s prison acquaintance Rootenberg who likely had no wealth either – in the ensuing legal fight to recover the $150,000 due to consideration of the difficult predicament this friend was in.

But Gottlieb was most likely tied to Rootenberg and his Trivia For Good business in far more than getting Sherman’s investment. A press release, quoted earlier, from Trivia For Good Inc.’s former parent company Keek on March 2, 2016, mentioned a Canada-wide advertising campaign at the Cineplex Theatre Network and Tim Horton T.V.; and Gottlieb and his ‘co-0fraudster’ Garth Drabinsky had once been leading executives at Cineplex prior to co-founding Livent:

“In 1979, Mr. Drabinsky co-founded Cineplex Odeon Corp. with the creation of a 21-theatre complex in Toronto’s Eaton Centre. By 1989, Cineplex had amassed more than 1,800 screens in more than 500 locations. On “Black Friday” (Nov. 27, 1989), Mr. Drabinsky and business partner Myron Gottlieb were booted from the company by the Hollywood conglomerate MCA and Montreal’s Bronfman family. Mr. Drabinsky and Mr. Gottlieb hung on to Cineplex Odeon’s tiny live-theatre division.

…

From Cineplex’s live-theatre division, Livent was born. Mr. Drabinsky and Mr. Gottlieb were awarded control of the Canadian rights to The Phantom of the Opera, and the newly restored Pantages Theatre, where the mega-musical had opened a few months before. Soon, Livent was mounting big-budget shows such as Showboat, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime. During his Broadway career, Mr. Drabinsky’s productions captured 19 Tony Awards.

…

On June 30, 1995, Mr. Drabinsky was awarded the Order of Canada. David Mirvish, of Livent rival Mirvish Productions, received the award on the same day.

…

In 1998, Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz offered to buy a controlling stake in the Toronto company and inject some needed cash. A few weeks later, though, his accountants alerted authorities to some alleged “irregularities” in the books. Mr. Drabinsky and Mr. Gottlieb were suspended from the company, which later filed for bankruptcy and sold off its assets.”

(“The many roles of Garth Drabinsky”, March 26, 2009/April 28, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

As summarized above, the Livent debacle beginning in 1998 was not the first time Drabinsky and Gottlieb were ousted from the helm of a spectacularly successful entertainment company, by a Hollywood-based business partner – earlier from Cineplex in 1989 also by Montreal’s Bronfman business family.

I would guess that in 2015 the financially rather desperate Myron Gottlieb went back to his friends and old acquaintances, not only Barry Sherman but also some at Cineplex, to try making what he could out of the Trivia For Good idea.

For example, Ellis Jacob, the Calcutta, India-born and Montreal- and Toronto-educated Cineplex Chief Financial Officer at the time of the 1989 ouster of his bosses Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb from the North American theatre chain originally founded by Drabinsky in Toronto, stabilized the company, then founded a small company Galaxy Entertainment just as Livent went down in fraud, and by the early 2000’s was at the helm of a newly acquired, restructured and expanded Cineplex chain in Canada:

“… Hollywood narratives don’t fizzle without some prospect of redemption, and the hero of this tale is Cineplex’s Calcutta-born CEO, Ellis Jacob. Both here and abroad, he’s known as the man who’s not just reviving the flagging theatre industry but reinventing it. The average Cineplex-by far, Canada’s largest chain, with more than 1,337 screens at 132 theatres nationwide-moonlights as sports emporium, rock concert venue, arcade, lecture hall, food court and, yes, opera house. In some cases, it’s also a bowling alley, a watering hole, a billiards hall and a daycare centre-a cacophonous fusion of high and low culture. …

…

After graduating from McGill in commerce, he got his CA designation and went to work for an auditing firm. Unsatisfied with life as a lowly bean counter, however, he returned to school, earning an MBA from York University, as well as a CMA title. … Growing up in Calcutta, he’d regularly attended the Globe Theatre, a four-screen venue that hosted everything from Bollywood to live shows. In 1987, he got his entree into the movie biz when he was hired as the VP of finance at Cineplex Odeon, the chain started by Drabinsky in 1979, with a flagship 21-screen multiplex at Toronto’s Eaton Centre.

On his first day, Jacob had no desk or telephone. The place was in chaos; Drabinsky was in the midst of a worldwide buying spree that would eventually push the company $750 million into debt. In 1989, shortly after Ellis ascended to CFO, his impresario boss (along with his sidekick, Myron Gottlieb) was ousted. As Drabinsky and Gottlieb mounted an ultimately unsuccessful bid to take the company private, Jacob was left to right the ship. For four years, Cineplex Odeon flirted with bankruptcy. Negotiating day and night, Jacob managed to mollify all 19 banks banging at Cineplex’s door, and in 1998, the company completed an arduous path to solvency, merging with the massive Loews chain in the U.S. The combined business offered Jacob a new position outside Canada, but he and his wife, Sharyn, didn’t want to leave Toronto.

… Showing some of Drabinsky’s brass, Jacob left Cineplex in 1998 to start Galaxy Entertainment. …

Jacob had a lot of cred in the industry, and his promise to waive his salary for Galaxy’s first two years impressed investors. Former Alliance chairman Robert Lantos and Cineplex exec Steve Brown signed on. So did Onex head Gerry Schwartz, who became majority owner.

In 2001, Loews Cineplex, which by then owned more than 2,800 screens worldwide, filed for Chapter 11. Onex snapped up its Canadian assets. Schwartz persuaded Jacob to merge his 20-theatre Galaxy chain with Cineplex in 2003, and spun the movie assets into the Cineplex Galaxy Income Fund, with Jacob at the helm. …

…

Two years later, Onex and Jacob launched a $500-million bid for Canadian rival Famous Players, then owned by Viacom. Today, the combined company-23% owned by Onex-controls two-thirds of the screens in Canada.”

(“The dame stays in the picture”, by Patrick White, September 26, 2008/April 27, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

I would imagine that if Myron Gottlieb visited Cineplex to solicit help, like he did at Sherman’s company, Ellis Jacob would be glad to show his old boss the latest big-screen advertising powers for, well, anything goes probably.

‘All that glitters is not gold’, and in the ensuing legal dispute Trivia For Good had to face and Barry Sherman would not miss, Sherman’s partiality in “righteous certitude” may have been interpreted differently by different persons on the receiving end.

In any case, the scenario of the Shermans’ murder having connection to criminals who had money disputes with Barry Sherman appears credible or at least should not be easily dismissed, just like the scenario of possible connection to Sherman’s Winter family cousins, and the scenario, reviewed in Part 1, of connection to some of the brand-name pharmaceutical companies that Sherman called “the monopolies”.

Moreover, the possibility of links between these criminals and some of Sherman’s Winter cousins, particularly Kerry Winter with his criminal past and outrageously accusatory attitude in the legal and publicity feuds with Sherman, should not be overlooked.

Now, I should point out that there was a context to Sherman’s unsparing certitude towards even small acts of disputing him on the part of others when it came to money: Barry Sherman was once well known for frugality.

The July 2008 Toronto Life article republished in December 2017 pointed out that, at that point in time, Sherman had owned only four cars in his life:

“Barry Sherman parks his 2005 Chrysler Sebring convertible in the spot closest to the main door of the Apotex headquarters in Weston. Although Sherman, the CEO and founder, is the country’s 10th richest man, with a personal wealth of about $3.7 billion, he’s notoriously thrifty. He’s owned only four cars in his life, driving them until they’re ready to junk.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Considering that Sherman became an owner of Empire Labs in 1967, that was four cars only for a timespan of over four decades.

In his Daily Mail interview, Kerry Winter seemed to suggest that Sherman’s frugality – in contrast to Honey’s love of extravagance – could be a cause of the misery for others like the Winter cousins:

“But, for all that, he recognized Sherman as a ‘kook’ with ‘a bolt missing,’ who seemed to have everything but took pleasure in nothing.

Sherman was an atheist who only donated to largely Jewish causes because Honey chose to and it was a tax write off, and Winter said was an atheist who ‘couldn’t give a s*** about the State of Israel’.

Winter said: ‘He couldn’t enjoy life. I asked him if there was anything in life he enjoyed. He said “making f***ing money.”’

Yet he couldn’t bear to spend it. His favorite restaurants were McDonald’s and budget chain, Swiss Chalet – where he always ordered the special.

He drove a clapped-out old car, refused to buy a new television when his old one barely worked, bought cheap shoes and clothes and would sneak back into the theater when he went so that he could see a second movie for free.

In stark contrast, Winter said, Honey was rumored to have one of the world’s largest diamond collections.”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

Kerry Winter’s speaking, in 2008 to Toronto Life, of the unbearable prospect of “eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC” seemed quite possible when Barry Sherman’s own favorite restaurant was McDonald’s.

In the Daily Mail interview, Kerry also discussed, in contrast to Barry Sherman’s thriftiness, how “enviable” the Winter family life had been when his father Louis was alive:

“The seeds of the feud were sown back in 1951 when Sherman’s father, Herbert, died from a heart attack age 46.

Sherman was nine and Winter’s father, Louis Winter, stepped into the role as a surrogate father, partly because he and his wife, Beverley, didn’t think they could have children of their own.

In 1958 they adopted a son, Tim. Then, two years later, Beverly fell pregnant with Jeffery. In 1961 Kerry was born and in 1962 brother, Dana, followed.

Winter’s father Louis, a biochemist, was the founder of generic drug manufacturer, Empire Laboratories.

Winter recalled: ‘We lived in a mansion overlooking the Humber River. We were enrolled in a posh private school. He drove a Rolls Royce. He had two yachts. He was a self-made millionaire.’

Pictures of the family at the time show an enviable existence. But those golden days were short lived.”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

That good life was unfortunately short-lived for Kerry Winter as a child; and then he did not enjoy life in the Barkins’ home, either.

The April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article told of Honey Sherman’s shocked reaction once upon a time, and quick action to admonish her husband, when the couple visited the home of Barry Sherman’s Apotex underling Jack Kay and saw a swimming pool, something Barry had told her they could not afford:

“Where her husband could be frugal to the point of ostentation, Honey, herself known to fly economy, enjoyed a few upper-middle-class trappings: nice jewellery, a Lexus SUV, getaways with “the girls,” shopping in New York with her sister, Mary. At their funeral, long-time Apotex executive Jack Kay recalled Honey and Sherman visiting his house in the early days of Apotex. Taken aback when she saw a swimming pool, Honey called out her husband for telling her they couldn’t afford one. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

But in 1991 the Shermans moved into a luxurious custom-built home with both indoor and outdoor swimming pools and a tennis court, and if Barry still did not want a new car for his 50th birthday, well, that had become secondary anyway:

“… The differences were showcased at a 50th birthday party Honey threw for Sherman. Guests were guided outside to see a new sports car with a big red bow. “Barry was not happy with the gift,” says Rubin. “ ‘Take it back,’ he told Honey.” She did.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

By December 2017 when the Shermans were murdered, they were hung by their killers at the side of the indoor swimming pool, at their home that was on the market for sale as the couple were in advanced planning for the custom-building of an even grander, brick-and-stone home, here as described in the Maclean’s article:

“In the last months of 2017, Honey’s time was also focused on the construction of a grand new house; the move would see a couple known for their relatively low-key lifestyle upsizing at an age most people are doing the opposite. Honey purchased a prime corner property, held in her name, in the city’s exclusive Forest Hill neighbourhood in November 2016. (The purchase price is not disclosed in land registry documents.) The intent was to demolish the existing house and build a stunning structure. Architectural drawings filed with the city reveal a 16,000-sq.-foot brick-and-stone home with a separate pool house, a 41-foot retractable skylight over a central swimming pool, an event room, an elevator and a space for live-in staff. Sherman’s need for privacy was reflected in the “large shredder” planned for an upstairs office.

The ambitious plans called for 15 variances in the building code, some sizable, including increasing the maximum building depth to 47.6 m from the allowable 19 m, and a car stacker in the three-car garage. All the variances were approved on June 28, less than six months before the murders.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

The last day the Shermans were seen alive, on December 13, 2017, they appeared together to meet with the builder for their new home to discuss some design changes:

“Sherman wasn’t keen on moving from the house on Old Colony Road, but was doing it for Honey. “He just said: ‘You know, I wish I was staying here, but my wife wants to move so we’re moving,’ ” says Frank D’Angelo, Sherman’s close friend and business partner in non-Apotex ventures.

On Nov. 27, their house was listed for $6.9 million, described as an “architectural modern masterpiece.” Why the Shermans were selling when contractors hadn’t begun to build their new home isn’t clear. What is certain is that listing meant disruptions and privacy incursions—and a lockbox on the house, a rarity for such a high-end property.

Planning the house brought Honey to Apotex on Dec. 13, a day after she missed the Baycrest meeting. It was the last time the couple was seen alive. They were meeting with the builder to go over some design changes, Greenspan tells Maclean’s. Everything was going as planned. Or so it appeared.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

A potential problem, as pointed out earlier, is that in contrast to the luxury upgrades over the years to the Shermans’ lifestyles, Honey’s wishes as they might be, Barry Sherman’s overly stern and vindictive certitude toward those who he had trouble with in money matters continued to the last moment of his life.

Back in late 2017 after Ontario Justice Kenneth Hood struck down the Winter sons’ $1 billion lawsuit against Barry Sherman, the Winter family decided to appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal. The decision was announced by their lawyer just days after the Shermans’ deaths, at a time when intense publicity was given to matters about the Shermans:

“The family of the Shermans released a statement over the weekend slamming media reports speculating that police are probing the theory that the pair died in a murder-suicide. CBC Toronto has not independently confirmed details about what led to the Shermans’ deaths.

The Winter brothers’ lawyer, Brad Teplitsky says his clients will be moving forward with their appeal because they believe the judge made legal errors in dismissing the case.

Teplitsky has been in contact with Kerry Winter since the Shermans’ deaths and says Winter has “no comment at this time other than to express his sincere condolences to the Sherman family and is requesting that the media respect their privacy during this period.”

Teplitsky told CBC Toronto his clients will not be attending the funeral Thursday, and have had no contact with the Shermans since they’ve been “in litigation for many years.””

(“Barry Sherman’s orphaned cousins fight for cut of Apotex fortune in lawsuit appeal”, by Nicole Brockbank, December 20, 2017, CBC News)

As in the above, the Winter family’s lawyer Brad Teplitsky mentioned the Shermans’ funeral to be held the next day.

On the part of the deceased Shermans, the matter was also gravely urgent; in that morning after their funeral, Barry Sherman’s lawyers filed an appeal of the judge’s decision ordering the Winter sons to pay them $300,000 legal costs – Barry Sherman had wanted a lot more legal costs from the Winters, over $980,000:

“One of Sherman’s final decisions, it turned out, involved the fractious lawsuit with his cousins. Unhappy that the judge ordered the brothers to pay him only $300,000 in legal costs (he wanted $984,813.73), Sherman appears to have instructed his lawyers to appeal the ruling. They did, the very morning after his funeral—a move that saw Sherman litigating from the grave.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

On August 29, 2018, the Ontario Court of Appeal issued a ruling against the Winter sons’ appeal for their $1 billion lawsuit, and ordered them to pay an additional $60,000 legal costs to Sherman’s lawyers:

“A three-justice panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that a lower court’s decision that there was no need for a trial in the case was correct. The justices also upheld the lower court’s decision last September that the decades-old fight was an “abuse of process” by the Sherman cousins.

The cousins have now been ordered to pay $60,000 to the Sherman side to cover its legal costs in defending the appeal, on top of the $300,000 in costs awarded Sherman in September 2017 when Justice Kenneth Hood of the Superior Court of Justice made the ruling that the court of appeal adjudicated.

“It would be unfair and an abuse of process” to allow the cousins to take the matter to trial, the court of appeal justices state in their reasons. (The court of appeal panel was made up of justices Robert Sharpe, Russell Juriansz and Lois Roberts.)”

(“Sherman cousins lose appeal for piece of drug company’s billions”, by Kevin Donovan, August 29, 2018, Toronto Star)

Kerry Winter immediately announced that the Winter family would take the matter to the Supreme Court of Canada – their final legal option – and asked the media to “wish us luck”:

“Kerry Winter, who has been the most vocal of the cousins in the court battle, said Wednesday that they will “seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court” of Canada. “Wish us luck,” Winter said. Their claim has long been that it was Sherman’s involvement in their father’s company that gave him the leg up that allowed him to start Apotex. That’s why the cousins say they are deserving of part of the Apotex wealth, roughly a $1-billion share.

If the Supreme Court refuses to hear an appeal, the case will be over.”

(Kevin Donovan, August 29, 2018, Toronto Star)

If the Supreme Court of Canada refuses to hear the Winter sons’ appeal, their legal recourses would appear to be over.

It was not the first time the Winter family had something to do with Canada’s highest court. In 1964, just a year before their father Louis’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1965, his own Empire Laboratories won a landmark case at the Supreme Court of Canada, defeating the court appeal of an American brand-name drug company, Parke, Davis and Company, which alleged that Empire Labs’ generic drug packaging appeared too similar to the brand-name drug’s and thus infringed on their registered trade marks.

(“Parke, Davis & Co. v. Empire Laboratories Ltd.”, March 23, 1964, Supreme Court of Canada, Lexum)

Now, nearly a year after the Shermans’ gruesome deaths in a yet unsolved, “targeted” double homicide, led by Kerry Winter the Winter children have asked for the Supreme Court of Canada to intervene so that they would be awarded a total of 20% ownership of Canada’s leading pharmaceutical giant Apotex, which they claim had been denied them when Empire Labs was acquired and then sold by their father’s protégé and their cousin – and a brilliant young academic scholar and ultimately successful billionaire – Barry Sherman.

They have made this legal claim despite a condition in the over 50-year-old provision that to get such a chance each must be capable of being “a responsible employee” of the company – a condition their past troubled lives have been in sharp contrast to.

Will the Supreme Court of Canada even be willing to hear them?

(To be continued in Next Part)

A first year of blogging in 2009 – penning on the tenth anniversary of my first blog article (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1)

Ten years ago today, on February 20, 2009, I began posting my second blog article, which consisted of a series of posts written through the course of 2009, focusing on Canadian politics and entitled, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”.

It was a long title that was not self-evident. Nonetheless, one can ponder about key words like: Airbus Affair, Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s investigation, myth of political vendetta in the investigation, politics of Brian Mulroney and of Jean Chretien, and Canadian social undercurrents.

In writing the posts, I first focused on the title’s first part, namely the “Airbus Affair”, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s investigation relating to it, and the “myth of political vendetta” in the police investigation.

I began by reviewing the current state of matters in early 2009:

“The long awaited, long-overdue Canadian government inquiry into the Airbus Affair involving former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, and millions of dollars in commissions rumored to have included kickbacks to Mr. Mulroney personally from a 1988 sale of European Airbus planes to Air Canada – a hot topic of Canadian federal politics for well over a decade, ^{1, 2} – is finally getting started at the end of this March 2009. How exciting it is for the Canadian political scene.

Or is it?”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 1)”, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Okay, the opening reads like, that, after having been a “hot topic” of Canadian politics for nearly two decades, the Airbus Affair regarding “millions of dollars in commissions” given by the European company Airbus Industrie that may have included kickbacks to then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney for the sale of planes to Air Canada in 1988, might finally be getting a Canadian government public inquiry though I was not sure of it.

Well, that was the rhetorical style in which I began.

What was happening in 2009 was much less in scope; and I immediately answered in the negative to my own question quoted above:

“Not really. A Canadian government public inquiry headed by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant of Manitoba is indeed underway in its preliminary stage and the first phase of the inquiry into the facts will begin in late March in Ottawa. ³ But this inquiry is not about the Airbus Affair, only into allegations made by Mr. Schreiber in a civil lawsuit against Mulroney and during hearings held by the Canadian parliamentary Ethics Committee, in 2007-08, that he had a business service agreement in 1993 with Mr. Mulroney while the latter was still the prime minister, that he then in accordance gave Mr. Mulroney three cash payments totalling $300,000 during 1993-94 shortly after the latter had stepped down, and that Mr. Mulroney subsequently did nothing, or very little, to justify the payments. ⁴…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As described above, the public inquiry headed by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant would only focus on allegations made by the German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, that he and former Prime Minister Mulroney had had a $300,000 business service agreement before the latter’s stepping down and he made the payments afterwards but Mr. Mulroney subsequently did not do the work needed.

Mr. Mulroney, on his part, asserted that the amount of money he had received was only $225,000, he had then done the work and there was no need for an inquiry:

“… Mr. Mulroney however stated during the Ethics Committee hearings that he got into some sort of business consulting arrangement with Mr. Schreiber only after he had left the prime minister position, that he has fully done his part in the agreement despite receiving only $225,000 (rather than the promised $300,000) from Mr. Schreiber, and that there is no need for a public inquiry. ⁵”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As in the above two quotes, in 2007-08 there had been hearings by the Canadian parliamentary Ethics Committee, and Schreiber and Mulroney had each told their side of the story.

So there were various kinds of official fanfares, but weren’t they just about some small potatoes when compared to the “millions of dollars in commissions” involved in the Airbus Affair?

In the sense of the money involved, yes, small potatoes. In comparison, the Airbus Affair felt like a classic case of government corruption scandal as I noted in the article’s first footnote. The Airbus sale to Air Canada had been brokered by Schreiber and Prime Minister Mulroney’s close friend, former Newfoundland Premier and former Air Canada board member Frank Moores, and the two would then privately distribute the Airbus commissions:

“1. Air Canada’s purchase of European Airbus planes in 1988 smelled of a possible scandal from the beginning, as the purchase deal by then government-owned Air Canada had been brokered by controversial German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber and (former) Air Canada board member Frank Moores who was a former Newfoundland premier and a close friend of then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and as commissions of millions of dollars from Airbus Industrie were planned right from the start, to be distributed in private by Schreiber and Moores…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But not small potatoes in politics. In 2009 it was the first time in history a Canadian government Commission of Inquiry would be conducted on matters about a sitting or former prime minister. (“Commissions of Inquiry”, August 28, 2018, Privy Council Office, Government of Canada)

That was precedent-setting importance when it came to government leadership ethics and conduct.

Ironically, the credit for this public inquiry’s happening was Mr. Schreiber’s, as I noted that it came about after Schreiber’s filing a lawsuit against Mulroney and speaking to the media about the matter, at a time when he faced the prospect of deportation to Germany to be prosecuted there for fraud in a corruption scandal involving former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl:

“In fact, there might not have been any inquiry scheduled on any question about the ethics and conduct of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, at all, despite the kind of things that have dogged him since shortly after he became national leader and continued through when he was leaving office in 1993 and making decision to accept money from businessman Karlheinz Schreiber. ^{6, 7, 8} Represented by renowned Toronto criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan, Mr. Schreiber has been under increasing pressure since after he became a criminally accused fraudster in Germany in 1999 (a far cry from the earlier days when he was once a district court judge in Munich) related to a corruption scandal dogging former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as well as to the Airbus Affair, facing deportation by Canadian authorities; but initially he continued to deny having any role in the Airbus Affair (or having given any money to Mulroney). ^{9, 10} Schreiber however began to realize that Mulroney was publicly turning negative toward him just as his political-connection fortune started declining … and he decided to file a lawsuit to get $300,000 “compensatory damages” from Mulroney; that led to a media report in late 2000/early 2001 about Schreiber having paid Mulroney $300,000, and finally to November 2003 when Schreiber talked to one of the leading experts on the Airbus Affair, author William Kaplan, nonetheless emphasizing that the money was not part of any Airbus commission. ¹¹ …”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As described, Schreiber had been tight-lipped about the Airbus Affair but when he faced deportation and saw that Mulroney was turning unfriendly, he brought forth this ‘small money’ dispute.

When Schreiber did his first major interview on this matter in November 2003, with author William Kaplan as cited above, the RCMP had recently closed its criminal investigation of Mr. Mulroney in the Airbus Affair; Schreiber then became a sort of ethics crusader on this new matter while he fought legal battles to avoid deportation, and even wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

“… The breaking of silence by Mr. Schreiber came about seven months after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who had spent years investigating Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, had announced in April 2003 that the Airbus Affair criminal investigation against Mulroney was terminated without finding evidence for a criminal proceeding against Mulroney. ¹²

Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber then became more and more indignant as his lost one after another legal battle to avoid extradition to Germany where he is to face criminal charges; he made appeals to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he was adamant that he is not going back there without being given the opportunity to account how he was ‘ripped off’ $300,000 by the (former) Canadian prime minister he has been dealing with in his second homeland since the early 1970s, and he talked about “public trust”, “clean up” and “fundamental justice” versus “abuse of power”, “criminal activity” and “totalitarian Governments”. ¹³”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As described above, the sentiment Schreiber expressed was that the Canadian government should not simply deport him back to Germany to face criminal charges there when a former Canadian prime minister had “ripped off” him in business dealings here.

I noted that it was not an “easy” situation for Prime Minister Harper, that Mulroney was “some sort a patron” for Mr. Harper, having helped with the 2003-2004 merger of his old, “practically unelectable” Progressive Conservative Party with Harper’s “up-and-coming” Canadian Alliance:

“But it would not be an easy demand for Prime Minister Stephen Harper for whom Mr. Mulroney has been some sort of a patron since 2003-04 when Mulroney encouraged a merger between Harper’s up-and-coming but largely western Canada-based Canadian Alliance and his old, practically unelectable Progressive Conservative Party; ¹⁴ …”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Also, Mr. Peter MacKay, a top Harper cabinet minister whose father had been in Mulroney’s political circle and was a friend of Schreiber’s, and who led the Progressive Conservatives’ merger with Harper’s party, in 2003 publicly vouched for Mulroney’s innocence in the Airbus Affair:

“… when the RCMP in April 2003 announced termination of its Airbus Affair investigation, then Progressive Conservative MP, justice critic and leadership contender Peter Mackay, son of former Mulroney government’s solicitor general Elmer Mackay who has been a personal friend of Karlheinz Schreiber, commented, “It’s a sad comment that it took the RCMP this long to come to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to proceed”, and declared, “I see it as a total, unqualified vindication of Mr. Mulroney and his complete innocence in this entire affair”. ^{22, 23} …

…

22. Mr. Peter MacKay’s father, former Mulroney government solicitor general Elmer MacKcay and former Pierre Trudeau Liberal government justice minister Marc Lalonde guaranteed part of a $1 million bail for Karlheinz Schreiber’s release from extradition detention…

23. Peter MacKay later became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and agreed to merge the party with Stephen Harper’s Canadian Alliance to become the new opposition Conservative Party, in government today…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Prime Minister Harper then turned to an eminent Canadian, University of Waterloo President Dr. David Johnston, for advice. In 2008, Dr. Johnston advised that there should be a limited public inquiry on the Mulroney-Schreiber dispute – referred to as the Mulroney-Schreiber affair by the media – but it should not include the Airbus Affair, which according to Dr. Johnston was “this well-tilled ground” investigated by the RCMP for years already:

“Prime Minister Harper then turned to an academic, Dr. David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo, to advise him what to do while the parliamentary ethics committee hearings featuring Schreiber, Mulroney, Mulroney’s long-time aide Fred Doucet and others were under way; Dr. Johnston reported back that there should be a limited public inquiry based on Karlheinz Schreiber’s allegations about Brian Mulroney, but that there is no necessity to include the Airbus Affair in the scope of the public inquiry because the RCMP had spent years conducting a criminal investigation into that, found “insufficient evidence” and closed its file; Dr. Johnston referred to the Airbus Affair as “this well-tilled ground”. ¹⁶”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I should clarify that Prime Minister Harper publicly announced the inquiry prior to consulting Dr. Johnston on its scope. (“The investigations: 2007-2009”, March 27, 2009, CBC News)

So that was the current state of affairs in February 2009 when I began my second blog article – prior to the start of the public inquiry.

Still, I noted that Airbus Affair-related matters were not explicitly excluded in the written rules for the inquiry but were left for the Oliphant Commission’s discretion:

“But wait. It turns out the Oliphant inquiry could still be more than only about the $300,000 or $225,000 in dispute between the two gentlemen, Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney. The Terms of Reference of the inquiry, as decided by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the recommendations of Dr. David Johnston, say to examine the “business and financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney”, and that what those dealings were is within the matters the Oliphant Commission will determine. ¹⁷”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Justice Jeffrey Oliphant could still look into related matters if he so wished, I felt. But my sense was that he likely would not, given Dr. Johnston’s assessment that the Airbus Affair was “this well-tilled ground”; and so I opined that it would be up to Mr. Schreiber’s telling more for those matters to be heard:

“… Mr. Mulroney however stated during the Ethics Committee hearings … that there is no need for a public inquiry. ⁵

How boring it is to do something there is no need, or only insignificant need for – even Justice Oliphant makes more than the money in question for his honourable work on the matter.

…

And so more of a bore it will be if others do not hear more surprises from Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber during these upcoming hearings of the Oliphant Commission.”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

To counter the perception of the Airbus Affair being “this well-tilled ground” as expressed by Dr. Johnston, I analyzed reported facts from the press archives to try to debunk the notion that the RCMP had satisfactorily investigated the Airbus Affair and found nothing wrong with Mr. Mulroney; and I was able to demonstrate that the RCMP had not done a thorough job at all, in particular did not even get to the $300,000 that Schreiber had given Mulroney. On the basis of the facts analyzed, I concluded:

“…

And so you see, from 1989 to 1995 the RCMP had sit on a ‘nominal’ criminal investigation for 6 years, allegedly due to pressure from the Mulroney government (1984-1993), then for 4 years from 1995 to 1999 the RCMP presumably did not do much either (given the RCMP’s own admission that they started to interview Karlheinz Schreiber from the year 2000 forward), possibly to do with the Chretien Liberal government’s inaction, and then from 2000 to 2003 the investigation was likely more active – still under the Chretien government – when RCMP interviewed Karlheinz Schreiber “numerous” times by Sgt. Sylvie Tremblay’s account; but then the RCMP was unable to even figure out the $300,000 from Schreiber directly to Mulroney in spite of the many interviews with Schreiber, let alone uncover anything more elaborate.

Nowhere near “a total, unqualified vindication of Mr. Mulroney and his complete innocence in this entire affair” that Mr. Peter MacKay confidently declared in April 2003 after the RCMP announced termination of the Airbus Affair investigation.”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I pointed out that, in fact, the RCMP continued to express an interest in investigating the Airbus Affair provided new information became available:

“As a matter of fact, as late as of 2006 an RCMP spokeswoman, Sgt. Nathalie Deschenes, still stated that “anybody” could bring new information on the Airbus Affair to the RCMP and a new investigation could be commenced, though some felt the agency had become intimidated by Mr. Mulroney’s past legal action. ³³”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I also pointed out that, the last time at the height of the Airbus Affair publicities in 1995-1997, the RCMP’s lack of resolve or candour had been the main reason that the government in January 1997 settled with Mr. Mulroney on his libel lawsuit:

“But either the RCMP have indeed been this impotent, or regarding the Airbus Affair the agency has had leads it was unwilling to pursue, or information it was unwilling to disclose. The last of these scenarios, namely the RCMP’s unwillingness to disclose certain information (the particular information in question was not about Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair but about the extent of the RCMP investigation, and was wanted by Mr. Mulroney’s lawyers), was in fact instrumental behind the Canadian government’s decision to settle a civil lawsuit with Mr. Mulroney in January 1997, paying his legal expenses on his November 20, 1995 defamation lawsuit over a September 29, 1995 Airbus-Affair investigation letter sent to Swiss authorities containing criminally-accusatory language against him. ³⁴”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In any case, in the subsequent months in 2009 following my several blog posts on these matters, Justice Oliphant stayed clear of the Airbus Affair in the public inquiry hearings, to the point that political commentator Norman Spector expressed his regret in a The Globe and Mail article:

“… Regrettably, notwithstanding some intriguing evidence, Mr. Justice Jeffrey Oliphant made clear that the sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada was not within his mandate.

And he quickly shut down any questioning that may have helped reveal what Mr. Schreiber did with the $20-million in commissions he received.”

(“The Oliphant inquiry was an almost perfect Ottawa case study”, by Norman Spector, June 11, 2009/April 28, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

Mr. Spector, a former Mulroney government official and Prime Minister Mulroney’s chief of staff, no doubt knew as well as anyone – except Schreiber and Mulroney themselves – the extent of Schreiber’s official contacts with Mulroney, having personally witnessed Schreiber’s unparalleled lobbying access; in his disappointment, Spector wrote that the limited public inquiry matter was, well, “small potatoes compared to the Airbus Affair”:

“During the Oliphant commission hearings, we learned that Mr. Mulroney met with Mr. Schreiber – a German-Canadian arms dealer – as many as a dozen times while in office. These meetings included breakfast at 24 Sussex Dr. and a private meeting at Harrington Lake, the prime minister’s summer residence. Both Privy Council clerk Paul Tellier and I testified that we could think of no other example of such access to Mr. Mulroney.

…

Mr. Schreiber continued to shell out hefty lobbyist fees, but in the end, the cost to taxpayers of the matter being considered by the Oliphant commission comes down to the waste of public servants’ time – small potatoes compared to the cost of the sponsorship program, and small potatoes compared to the Airbus affair.”

(Norman Spector, June 11, 2009/April 28, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

So, “small potatoes” when it came to the matter being examined, but precedent-setting inquiry for its public scrutiny of matters of a former prime minister, were the state of affairs in 2009 when the Oliphant Commission examined the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

With the Oliphant Commission at work, in August 2009 Schreiber was deported back to Germany, and was later convicted of tax evasion and sentenced on November 14, 2013, to 6 and 1/2 years in jail. (“Arms lobbyist deported: Figure in CDU party donations scandal returns to Germany”, August 3, 2009, Spiegel Online; “Karlheinz Schreiber gets 6½ years for German tax evasion”, November 14, 2013, CBC News; and, “Decree in Karlheinz Schreiber trial”, Photo by Karl-Josef Hildenbrand, November 14, 2003, Getty Images)

In May 2010, Justice Oliphant released his public inquiry’s findings, concluding that Mr. Mulroney’s conduct in his “financial dealings” with Mr. Schreiber had been “inappropriate”:

“The conduct exhibited by Mr. Mulroney in accepting cash-stuffed envelopes from Mr. Schreiber on three separate occasions, failing to record the fact of the cash payments, failing to deposit the cash into a bank or other financial institution, and failing to disclose the fact of the cash payments when given the opportunity to do so goes a long way, in my view, to supporting my position that the financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were inappropriate. These dealings do not reflect the highest standards of conduct, nor do they represent conduct that is so scrupulous it will bear the closest public scrutiny.”

(“The Schreiber-Mulroney affair: Key quotes from Justice Jeffrey Oliphant”, by Mary Vallis, May 31, 2010, National Post)

Hmm, accepting cash stuffed in envelopes on three different occasions, not recording them, not depositing them into bank accounts, and not disclosing them when asked about his relationship with Schreiber. One wonders what Mr. Mulroney had been thinking.

Whatever that money was for, Mr. Mulroney has never been a “close friend” of Mr. Schreiber’s, concluded Justice Oliphant:

“My perspective of the relationship is markedly different from that of Mr. Schreiber. To put it bluntly, I hold the view that Mr. Schreiber is deluding himself if he believes that Mr. Mulroney was ever a close friend.”

(Mary Vallis, May 31, 2010, National Post)

In my February 20 post in 2009, I had noted in a footnote that Schreiber’s relationship with Mulroney dated back to 1983 when he and Frank Moores helped Mulroney depose Progressive Conservative Party leader Joe Clark and become the leader:

“23. … in April 2003 the PC party leader was former Prime Minister Joe Clark, a former leadership rival, long-time partner in government and ideological opposite of Brian Mulroney; Mr. Clark had been deposed in his earlier stint as PC party leader in 1983, by Mr. Mulroney with the help of, among others, former Newfoundland premier Frank Moores and German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber – two personalities later at the centre of the Airbus Affair after Mulroney became prime minister…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Following the public inquiry’s completion, in July 2010 Dr. David Johnston was named by Prime Minister Harper to become the Governor General of Canada. The appointment made political commentator and Airbus Affair observer Andrew Coyne wonder what might be in it:

“It’s true that it was Johnston, as adviser to the Prime Minister on the terms of reference for the Oliphant inquiry, who recommended against including the Airbus scandal in its mandate, a decision that looks all the more baffling in light of the judge’s findings: not only that Brian Mulroney took hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, shortly after leaving office, from the very man from whom he was accused of taking bribes while in office, but that he lied about it, up to and including his appearance before the inquiry. Regardless of whether Mulroney was personally involved, the circumstances surrounding the Airbus deal are so suspicious that, even 22 years later, they cry out for an inquiry — not in spite of the passage of time but because of it. Johnston’s reasoning, that Airbus, having once been the subject of an RCMP investigation, was “well-tilled ground,” is simply unsupported by the facts: the RCMP had only just begun their investigation when it was shut down by the leaking of the infamous “Swiss letter,” a calamity from which it never recovered.”

(“That David Johnston scandal, in full”, by Andrew Coyne, July 12, 2010, Maclean’s)

In 2009 for my blog writing, though, I did not get bogged down with following the money trail.

Being more interested in politics and in government leadership ethics than in the details of commercial kickbacks to a prime minister per se, I proceeded in the blog post series to review broader issues in relevant Canadian politics during a longer historical period – beginning from Mr. Mulroney’s ascent to power in the early 1980s – with the hope that they would shed revealing lights on the Airbus Affair in particular.

Consequently, “the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”, became a part of this long 2009 article’s title.

But in my article’s first post, I did not get to what the “myth of political vendetta” was in the RCMP investigation of the Airbus Affair, nor did I really discuss that bigger affair, except noting:

“Earlier, in August 1999 over two-and-a-half years after the Canadian government had settled a civil lawsuit with Mulroney, Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman Luc Lavoie made the accusation that there was a “political vendetta” behind the continuing RCMP criminal investigation (probably seeing that the investigation was going to continue well into the New Millennium). ²⁴”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In the blog post series through 2009, these various matters were looked into as the broader politics was reviewed.

I began Part 2 by showing that some key basic facts about Mr. Mulroney’s politics would shed light on why allegations of corruption, in particular the Airbus Affair about possible commercial kickbacks, arose.

For one key fact, Mr. Mulroney’s politics emphasized economic privatization and free trade, and was closely identified with that of Ronald Reagan’s in the United States and Margaret Thatcher’s in Great Britain; in relation to that, “the connections between the conservatives’ politics and their business and personal lifestyles” were regularly scrutinized by the left-leaning Canadian media, as I noted:

“When the Mulroney conservatives ascended to power in 1984 on a platform of economic privatization and free trade with the United States, and were perceived as practising politics more closely identified with that of the rightwing Mr. Ronald Reagan in the United States and Mrs. Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, the connections between the conservatives’ politics and their business and personal lifestyles naturally became subjects of scrutiny by the traditionally left-leaning Canadian media. ³⁷ Since that early days the press media have regularly exposed facts as well as innuendos, while the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate TV program has relentlessly pursued some of the harder topics. ³⁸”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 2)”, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

For another key fact, Mulroney’s politics and policies proved “extremely unpopular with most Canadians” in the end, and after his handing over the government to his successor Prime Minister Kim Campbell in 1993 the party, “once led by the founding prime minister of Canada Sir John A. MacDonald”, was nearly obliterated in the October 25 election:

“Mulroney’s approach to politics in the end proved extremely unpopular with most Canadians. The Progressive Conservative Party he had led for ten years, 1983-1993, nine of which as prime minister with two consecutive terms of parliamentary majority, a party once led by the founding prime minister of Canada Sir John A. MacDonald, in the October 25, 1993 election under his successor, the first female Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell, won only two parliament seats. ³⁹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

With the above two key basic facts in mind, I reasoned that the subsequent government of Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien would be willing to “take a hard line” when approached by the RCMP to initiate cooperation with the Swiss authorities to investigate the Airbus Affair; and I noted that, like the first female Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell, Kimberly Prost, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the September 29, 1995 letter to the Swiss authorities, referring to “criminal activities carried out by the former prime minister”, was also a woman:

“Given this background of history it is obvious that it was politically appealing in 1995 for the Justice Department to take a hard line when it was approached by the RCMP to initiate cooperation with the Swiss authorities in the Airbus Affair investigation; as for the real story of how the Justice Department letter dated September 29, 1995 and signed by senior counsel Kimberly Prost – another woman – came to include the reference “criminal activities carried out by the former prime minister”, it has never been adequately explained, i.e., who was, or were, behind the criminally accusatory language that would result in a $50 million defamation lawsuit from Mr. Mulroney and over $2 million of legal-settlement costs by the government. ⁴¹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Compatible with my reasoning about the key basic facts regarding the Mulroney government, Norman Spector’s article in 2009 at the end of the Oliphant Commission’s public hearings, cited earlier, also clearly demonstrated the contrasting responses by Prime Minister Mulroney earlier and by Prime Minister Chretien later to Schreiber’s “aggressive” business lobbying:

“Still, one group of Canadians is sure to get value for the millions the commission will spend examining another of Mr. Schreiber’s projects, Bear Head. Since that project was considered both by Liberal and Conservative governments, political scientists will find buried in the Oliphant commission transcripts and exhibits an almost perfect case study of how Ottawa really works.

Under Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, the project was put to death in less than two years; during the Conservative era, it proved impossible to kill. How can one explain the differing response to Mr. Schreiber’s aggressive lobbying?

…

Frank Moores and Fred Doucet under the Conservatives and Marc Lalonde under the Liberals had no difficulty making contact and arranging meetings with powerful ministers. And they all had easy access to the PMO. The principal difference between the Conservative and Liberal eras was Mr. Mulroney’s personal involvement – and the personal involvement of his successive chiefs of staff, including me – which created the widespread perception in Ottawa that Bear Head had friends at the highest levels of government.

Under the Liberals, Marc Lalonde wrote to Mr. Chrétien – his former cabinet colleague – about Mr. Schreiber’s project, but neither Mr. Chrétien nor his chief of staff took a personal interest in it. …”

(Norman Spector, June 11, 2009/April 28, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

That kind of cosiness with business lobbyists was likely a reason not only for the Mulroney government’s being dogged with corruption scandals exposed pursued by the media, but also for Mr. Mulroney’s taking cash stuffed in envelopes soon after leaving government – as the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair finally revealed decades later.

Also interesting is where the word “vendetta” originated regarding the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney, that as alleged by Mulroney’s associates it had involved not only the police, but also the media and especially a number of female journalists.

In August 1999, Mulroney’s spokesman Luc Lavoie called the RCMP criminal investigation a “political vendetta” only days before Schreiber was first arrested for deportation, as I noted in a footnote of Part 1:

“24. Mr. Mulroney spokesman Luc Lavoie’s calling the continuing RCMP criminal investigation a “political vendetta”, came in August 1999 just days before the RCMP would arrest Karlheinz Schreiber in Toronto to try to deport him to Germany to face criminal charges there; it would take almost another 4 years before the RCMP would close the investigation without finding sufficient evidence against Mulroney…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But several years earlier, in 1996 for his libel lawsuit against the RCMP and the government, Mulroney’s side already alleged that there was a “vendetta” against him in the Canadian media, and subpoenaed three top journalists, all female, along with Justice Minister Allan Rock’s executive assistant by the name of Cyrus Reporter, for testimony, as I described in Part 2:

“In 1996 during his civil litigation with the RCMP and the Canadian government over the Airbus Affair, Mr. Mulroney’s side expressed the view that there was a vendetta against him in the Canadian media that contributed to the RCMP criminal investigation, and his lawyers subpoenaed three top Canadian journalists to testify to find out their roles in it, who were: author and former The Fifth Estate host Stevie Cameron, The Globe and Mail newspaper columnist Susan Delacourt, and Maclean’s magazine writer Mary Janigan; all happened to be women (in addition to the three female journalists, Mulroney’s lawyers also subpoenaed the executive assistant of then justice minister Allan Rock by the name of Cyrus Reporter). ⁴²”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As cited above, the three female Canadian journalists subpoenaed by Mr. Mulroney were author and former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation The Fifth Estate TV program host Stevie Cameron, The Globe and Mail newspaper columnist Susan Delacourt, and Maclean’s magazine writer Mary Janigan.

Of the three, at least Stevie Cameron was very well known for her anti-corruption writings with a focus on Mr. Mulroney and his associates since the early time of the Mulroney government era, and was also viewed as a key person for the RCMP’s Airbus Affair investigation, having cooperated with the police since soon after the 1988 Airbus plane deal:

“It is also known that media materials provided to the RCMP had been crucial in the agency’s 1995 decision to revive the Airbus Affair investigation, and that author and journalist Stevie Cameron has been generally viewed as a key person in a tireless media campaign driving the investigation, not only through her articles, books and public speaking but also her communications with the RCMP, cooperating with the RCMP since 1988 and was later officially designated a “confidential informant” by the agency. ^{44, 45} …

Not a surprise at all for Stevie Cameron to be casted as someone driving behind the RCMP Airbus-Affair criminal investigation, as she has been a leading Canadian journalist of anti-political-corruption repute ever since the early years of the Mulroney era. …”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In 2007 during the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, Ms. Cameron reflected on her past role in exposing Mulroney by citing Schreiber’s lament to Mulroney about her on January 29 of that year:

“Ms. Cameron herself is also sure that the persons she has been chasing view her in this way as well, as she has been quoted as saying on November 13, 2007: ⁵⁷

“Would I be at the top of Mulroney’s list of journalists? You bet. In a letter Schreiber wrote to Mulroney on Jan. 29 this year, he said, ‘All my personal problems began with Stevie Cameron’s book On The Take and Allan Rock’s political witch hunt with the RCMP against you.’”

”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In this 2009 article’s Part 2, I presented a concise overview of Stevie Cameron’s anti-corruption writings, from the early time of the Mulroney era in the mid-1980s to the time of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair in 2007-2009.

Initially, in the mid-late 1980s, Cameron reported extensively on the “lifestyles and related problems” of the Mulroney family, namely extravagance paid for by the Canadian government and by his Progressive Conservative Party; what she exposed became a “hot topic” before the 1988 election – Mulroney nevertheless won it despite the negative publicities:

“… by the mid-1980s, Cameron had begun to take on assignments investigating political ethics and conduct, and she made her initial fame in this field through reporting on the lifestyles and related problems of the family of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, in 1987 exposing the so-called Gucci-gate, i.e., Prime Minister Mulroney’s closet built to house 50 pairs of Gucci shoes, 30 suits and other personal furnishings. ⁴⁸

More intriguing among what Cameron reported in 1987 than the fact that the Progressive Conservative Party helped pay for the Mulroney lifestyles, was that during those early years there were already prospects of a legal dispute with a legitimate businessperson who did services for the Mulroney family for their lifestyles, who was threatening to take the family and the government to court for money owned; but he was given career-ending threat not to pester Mr. Mulroney who being the national leader was powerful and influential. ⁴⁹

The Gucci-gate and related topics of lavish personal spending (of government and party money) by then Prime Minister Mulroney and his family became a hot topic before the 1988 election, pounded upon by opposition parties and journalists alike. …

…

49. The businessperson threatening to sue was interior designer Giovanni Mowinckel, in a dispute with Mrs. Mila Mulroney and the government over interior design costs for the Prime Minister’s official residence…”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Then, in the early 1990s, Cameron was the host of the CBC’s hard-hitting The Fifth Estate TV program; also, beginning from the late 1980s, she specialized in writing books investigating corruption in the Mulroney government and the Mulroney circles:

“Moving on from her 1987 lifestyle stories on then prime minister Brian Mulroney and his family, journalist Stevie Cameron hosted the flagship broadcast program of Canadian investigative journalism, The Fifth Estate, in 1990-1991. ⁵⁵

After the 1987 Mulroney-lifestyle stories Cameron also began to concentrate on a career as a book writer, specializing in investigative political journalism, and she has been growing her reputation ever since in this field, through a series of bestselling or award-winning books on subjects centred at corruptions in the era of the former Mulroney government, starting with, Ottawa inside out: power, prestige and scandal in the nation’s capital (1989; an introduction to political life and business lobbying in Ottawa, with a focus on the years of Mulroney’s first term in government, 1984-1988), then after the Mulroney era had ended, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years (1994; a book credited with bringing to public attention the Airbus Affair and contributing to the revival of the RCMP criminal investigation), then after the government’s 1997 legal settlement with Mulroney on his defamation lawsuit, Blue trust: the author, the lawyer, his wife, and her money (1998; the real-life stories of Montreal tax lawyer Bruce Verchere, whose father had been a British Columbia supreme court justice, and who was entrusted with supervising Brian Mulroney’s personal business affairs while Mulroney was prime minister, stories about Verchere’s manner of business, his Swiss and Vatican bank connections, his marital infidelities and dispute with his wife who was a successful computer-software businesswoman, and his ultimate suicide in August 1993 – only two months after his appointment as chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited by Mr. Mulroney the day before Mulroney was to step down as prime minister), and finally, The last amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the anatomy of a scandal (2001; a book co-authored with then CBC The Fifth Estate producer Harvey Cashore, describing various international business and political-bribery activities of German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber). ⁵⁶

The last in the above series of books from author Stevie Cameron has been proven very credible by Karlheinz Schreiber’s own disclosures and revelations of facts in the last few years. …”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Cameron’s books listed above, published from 1989 to 2001, were respectively on the subject of: power and scandal in Canada’s capital Ottawa; crime and corruption in the Mulroney years, including the Airbus Affair; the life and death of a lawyer who supervised Mulroney’s personal business affairs; and Schreiber’s international business and political-bribery activities.

Especially worth noting was the influence Cameron’s books exerted, as quoted above. While the first book introduced the reader to politics and business lobby in Ottawa, the second book was credited with bringing the public’s attention to the Airbus Affair and leading to the RCMP’s intensified criminal investigation of Mulroney in 1995; and the fourth book was an introduction to Karlheinz Schreiber’s international activities and in some sense anticipated the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

In other words, several times Cameron’s books were galvanizing factors for, or forerunners to, major Canadian political affairs about corruption or ethical misconduct.

Thus, in praise of Cameron’s achievements, I wrote:

“… Ms. Cameron’s reputation as a courageous and solid investigative journalist doggedly on the money trails of former prime minister Brian Mulroney and German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber has been firmly established.”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The third book of Cameron’s listed above is perhaps the exception, in the sense that it has not foreboded a scandalous affair so far.

But that book is perhaps the most interesting, or most intriguing, of them as I wrote:

“For Stevie Cameron, the story of Bruce Verchere, former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s tax lawyer, has continued to be a subject of intense interest, as Ms. Cameron posted a blog article about him as recently as on February 26, 2008; in her blog article, Cameron made it clear that when Mulroney was the Prime Minister he had a “lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland” (something Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman denied when Karlheinz Schreiber first said it in 2006-07, as mentioned in an earlier part of this blog article), and that as explained the day before on February 25, 2008 by Mr. Schreiber in front of the parliamentary ethics committee this lawyer was Mulroney’s tax lawyer Bruce Verchere, who was also his financial trustee while he was serving as prime minister. ⁵⁸

The reason for then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Canadian lawyer to be referred to as his lawyer in Switzerland is that Bruce Verchere was also the Canadian lawyer representing the Swiss bank where (in a branch in Zurich, Switzerland) Mr. Schreiber opened bank accounts for Airbus commissions and other funds including his now famous $300,000 given to Mulroney in 1993-94.^{59, 60, 61}”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As described above, the central figure in Cameron’s third book, lawyer Bruce Verchere, was once Prime Minister Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee and, at the same time, a lawyer representing the Swiss bank where Schreiber had accounts for the Airbus commissions as well as the $300,000 he later gave Mulroney.

In other words, Verchere, who died of a suicide in August 1993 soon after Mulroney’s departure from government, could have been a key to the mysteries of Airbus Affair, namely to the possible Airbus kickbacks to Mulroney that the RCMP failed to uncover in its long-running and fruitless criminal investigation.

Karlhienz Schreiber has alleged something nearly to that effect. In Part 1 of my 2009 blog article I quoted from a 2007 media story referring to Schreiber’s allegation about Mulroney’s “lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland”:

“And yet by early November 2007 when he was trying hard to avoid extradition to Germany, railing against “abuse of power” by Mr. Mulroney earlier when the latter was prime minister, Mr. Schreiber took an extra legal step to try to expose Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, a role that was connected to the company Government Consultants International, an Ottawa lobbying firm during the Mulroney era founded by Frank Moores, Mr. Mulroney’s appointee to the Air Canada board, according to a report in The Globe and Mail newspaper: ²⁶

“An adviser to former prime minister Brian Mulroney asked Karlheinz Schreiber to transfer funds, made in connection with Air Canada’s 1988 purchase of Airbus airplanes, to Mr. Mulroney’s lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland, according to an affidavit sworn by Mr. Schreiber and filed Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

The affidavit states that Mr. Schreiber informed Mr. Mulroney during a meeting at Zurich’s Hotel Savoy on Feb. 2, 1998 that one of Mr. Mulroney’s closest friends and advisers, Fred Doucet, had asked him to transfer funds “related to the Airbus deal” from the lobby firm, Government Consultants International, or GCI, to Mr. Mulroney’s Swiss lawyer.”

Such new and shocking revelation would make one wonder what else important Mr. Schreiber may have yet to disclose (even if in the case of the above accusation Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman denied it, stating that Mr. Mulroney never had a lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland). ²⁷”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, in 2007 in information formally provided to the court, Schreiber alleged that Mulroney’s adviser Fred Doucet had once asked him to send funds “related to the Airbus deal” to Prime Minister Mulroney’s lawyer in Geneva – namely Bruce Verchere.

After that 2007 court filing, in February 2008 Schreiber explicitly stated to the Canadian parliamentary Ethics Committee – as in the second last quote above – that Prime Minister Mulroney’s “lawyer in Geneva” had been Bruce Verchere, and Cameron also wrote a blog article to explain who Verchere had been.

In a footnote in Part 2 of my blog article, I noted not only Verchere’s close relationship with Mr. Mulroney but also close professional link with lawyer John C. Major, who on November 13, 1992 was appointed by Prime Minister Mulroney to the Supreme Court of Canada:

“60. There are several crucial facts in Cameron’s 1998 book on Bruce Verchere that are worth commenting on here: one, Bruce Verchere’s Montreal law firm Verchere, Noel & Eddy, in 1989 (i.e., when he was the financial trustee for then prime minister Brian Mulroney) merged with Calgary law firm Bennett Jones to form a national law firm Bennett Jones Verchere, and one of the lawyers in this law firm was John C. Major, who had represented Karlheinz Schreiber in Alberta, and who later in 1991 was appointed to the Alberta Court of Appeal and then on November 13, 1992 was appointed by Mr. Mulroney to the Supreme Court of Canada; two, although Verchere and his Montreal law firm also represented the family of murdered Italian banker Roberto Calvi – dubbed “God’s Banker” for his close ties to the Vatican and the Vatican Bank – after Italy’s biggest banking scandal and the unsolved murder, the Calvi family’s Canadian lawyer initially was Arthur Campeau at Brian Mulroney’s law firm Ogilvy Renault, and changed to Verchere’s law firm when Campeau came over in August 1983 just two months after Mulroney had defeated Joe Clark to become leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in June 1983; and three, Verchere was not only tax lawyer and financial trustee for the prime minister but enjoyed extremely close friendship, accompanying Mulroney in a 1988 White House visit for President Ronald Reagan’s farewell, and was appointed chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited in June 1993 one day before Mulroney was to step down, and just two months before Verchere’s own suicide in August 1993…”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But obviously, by the time of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, or even a decade earlier at the height of the Airbus Affair, a man already dead could not cause a scandal, or at least could not do anything to cause one.

Still, Stevie Cameron has been very effective keeping journalistic tabs of the key figures and their activities related to former Prime Minister Mulroney’s ethical problems.

A reason for Cameron’s ability and effectiveness investigating scandals could be the intelligence background in her and her family’s past, which I mentioned:

“… From a family of some background in the intelligence field, Stevie Cameron had apparently worked for a short time at the Communications Security Establishment – a Canadian intelligence agency she discussed at length in her 1989 book Ottawa inside out: power, prestige and scandal in the nation’s capital – before becoming a food and lifestyles journalist; ⁴⁷…”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In addressing certain media criticisms of Cameron’s writings, specifically that of her having a “conspiracy theorist” mindset, I discussed more about the intelligence background of hers and her father’s, and his tragic death when she was only 12 years old:

“One major category of criticisms levelled at Cameron has been that she collected all kinds of information she could get, including innuendos, rumors and gossips, and presented them as facts against Mulroney, and that she was a “conspiracy theorist”, “gratuitous” or even “mean-spirited” targeting Mulroney; varying degrees of this view have been expressed by many of her critics, notably author William Kaplan, columnist Philip Mathias of the National Post/Financial Post newspapers and Tory Senator Marjorie LeBreton. ⁶²

…

Regarding her “conspiracy theorist” mindset and her relatively liberal use of materials, Ms. Cameron’s background and interest in the field of intelligence may have given her a sense of liberty to include some innuendos and rumors with the facts in her documentation of corrupt activities.

Reading her books I have had the impression that Ms. Cameron did have a liking in quoting or citing persons in the social environment of a main character in a book, where the opinions or statements were not always verified with sufficient facts; and she did have a tendency to suggest the existence of regular patterns as well as of collaborations among persons behind the scenes, especially as they relate to corrupt practices, without presenting, or possibly even being in possession of, evidence to substantiate them.

That brings to mind that Ms. Cameron’s father, Whitey Dahl, had a colorful and adventurous life with some intriguing mysteries possibly to do with working with the CIA (including playing golf often with former CIA director Allen Dulles and befriending others in that agency), who died in an airplane crash when Stevie Cameron was only 12 years old, and that she has had a genuine fascination for her father’s life story and had even chosen to become a member of the “spy” community early in her career, dropping out only when she found out that she wasn’t good at her job of technical code-breaking of Russian radio communications. ⁷²

It is entirely possible that someone with Ms. Cameron’s background, knowledge and experience has the tendency to suspect more, to try to get at more, and to suggest that there was more, than has met the eye. The point is where a line should be drawn in the judgment of the writer in investigative journalist documentation; and on that Ms. Cameron has been at least as much a political journalist as she was an investigative journalist.”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Because of her journalistic work exposing corruption, Stevie Cameron had concerns for her family’s safety, and she was especially unwilling to be viewed as cooperating with the police, also because of her sad experience with the RCMP at the time of her mother’s death:

“… Cameron however has been unwilling to be treated or viewed as in cooperation with the law enforcement – the RCMP in particular – out of safety concern for her family as well as concern about some of the ways in which the RCMP have operated. ⁴⁶

…

46. Some of the reasons author Stevie Cameron has minimized to the public her role in cooperating with the RCMP in the Airbus Affair criminal investigation can be found in an article on the author’s website; two of these reasons I have found both sad and intriguing: one reason is her stated fear for safety of her two daughters, as around the time of publication of her 1994 book, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years, one of them, Amy, then a Concordia University student in Montreal, was followed and threatened, and one of her publishers’ office and the typesetting company were vandalized; another reason has to do with how she was treated insensitively by the RCMP investigators around the time of her mother’s final days in hospital in Toronto when she had to be on her mother’s bedside, a story reminding me of my unintended absence during my own father’s final days at a turbulent time in 2005 when his passing happened exactly one month after the death of Frank Moores (discussed in the Notes of an earlier part of this blog article) – the RCMP got Stevie Cameron away for an interview in the morning of January 14, 1997 and at the end of the interview when she phoned the hospital she learned that her mother had already died in the middle of the interview hour; …”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As in the above, around the time of the publication of her 1994 book on corruption in the Mulroney years, Cameron’s daughter Amy was threatened, and her publisher’s office and her book-typesetting company were vandalized; and, worse in some sense, in January 1997 when she had to be on her ailing mother’s hospital bedside, the RCMP got her away for an interview – doubtlessly about Mulroney and the Airbus Affair – and in those hours her mother died without her knowing.

I note here that Cameron mother’s death happened in the same month in 1997, mentioned earlier, when the government settled with Mulroney on his libel lawsuit against RCMP and the government.

In the above quote, I also mentioned the resemblance of “my unintended absence during my own father’s final days at a turbulent time in 2005 when his passing happened exactly one month after the death of Frank Moores (discussed in the Notes of an earlier part of this blog article)”.

Those relevant facts about my father and the time of his death – including coincidences with Frank Moores, and with former Supreme Court of Canada Justice John Major – which was unexpected to me in 2005, had been in the footnotes of the 2009 blog article’s Part 1 dated February 20:

“2. Amid the Airbus Affair publicity there were some influential Canadians who took exception to the prevalent negative view about Karlheinz Schreiber’s way of doing business; one such notable person was then Supreme Court of Canada Justice John C. Major, who had previously acted as Schreiber’s lawyer in an Alberta provincial government inquiry into questionable real-estate dealings involving Schreiber in the city of Edmonton; Justice Major was quoted at the height of the Airbus Affair frenzies in December 1996 that his dealings with Schreiber had been “very honorable”, and that Schreiber had been “badly treated in the accusations” in Edmonton…

…

20. Mr. Frank Moores, the crucial middle man in the Airbus Affair, is dead and therefore cannot be questioned by the Oliphant Commission in the upcoming limited public inquiry or by any broader investigation/inquiry processes that might be conducted in the future; Mr. Moores died of liver cancer on July 10, 2005; not long afterwards on August 3, 2005, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlan of the Supreme Court of Canada announced the early retirement of Justice John C. Major who happened to be one of the rare influential Canadians personally positive about Karlheinz Schreiber, to take place on Christmas Day 2005 two months ahead of his mandatory retirement at 75; …

21. The time around the liver-cancer death of Mr. Frank Moores and the announcement of Justice John Major’s retirement would happen to be also a very difficult time in my personal life: my father, a professor of philosophy in Canton, China …, who happened to have been born exactly 76 years ago on the date of this February 20, 2009 blog article, exactly two years after Justice Major was born, and exactly two days after Premier Moores was born, was having serious heart-exhaustion problems and would die of heart failure on August 10, 2005, exactly one month after Frank Moores; being in a difficult situation here in Canada myself I did not receive adequate notice of the gravity of my father’s situation and missed being with my father at his final moment, whom I had not seen since just before Christmas in 2001. The several days around my father’s death were also turbulent in Canadian and international human affairs of relevant interest: three days prior on August 7 Peter Jennings, ABC News anchor and probably the most recognizable Canadian in the world, who had just celebrated his 67^thbirthday on July 29, died of lung cancer…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, Frank Moores, another key man who may have possessed crucial knowledge about possible Airbus kickback to former Prime Minister Mulroney, i.e., besides Bruce Verchere who had committed suicide in August 1993, died of cancer in July 2005.

In another footnote, I discussed Moores’s role in the Airbus Affair:

“19. Despite his lifetime denial to the contrary, former Newfoundland premier Frank Moores, a close friend of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, lobbied for and helped complete the 1988 $1.8 billion Air Canada purchase of European Airbus planes; Moores had to resign from the Air Canada’s board of directors to which he had been appointed by Mulroney, ahead of the completion of the deal because of political controversy; after Karlheinz Schreiber received around $20 million dollars of commissions from Airbus Industrie (an amount according to himself), Moores billed Schreiber at least a confirmed $1.3 million for his part of the commissions; the conventional wisdom is that Moores was a middle man for Schreiber in distributing millions of dollars of commissions to others in Canada…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Moores’s death happened at a crucial time, around halftime from November 2003 when Schreiber did his first major interview – with author William Kaplan as mentioned earlier – about the $300,000 he had given Mulroney, to March 2007 when Schreiber filed a lawsuit against Mulroney and the controversy became the full-blown Mulroney-Schreiber Affair. (“Background on the Mulroney-Schreiber affair”, November 29, 2007, National Post)

The deaths of Bruce Verchere and Frank Moores, if they were not purely incidental, added to earlier mysterious deaths – suicides that have been disputed – related to Prime Minister Mulroney’s circles and money, discussed in Cameron’s 1994 book on corruption in the Mulroney years and cited in Part 3 of my 2009 blog article:

“Some persons had already died in mysterious circumstances after they had become entangled in the web of the former Mulroney government’s money, according to Cameron’s 1994 book, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years: besides what have been mentioned in this blog article about the story of Bruce Verchere (and his suicide), there had been other mysterious deaths of Tory associates of Brian Mulroney’s (that had also been ruled as suicides but were disputed), namely the deaths of John Grant and Roger Nantel who in different capacities had been in charge of dispensing federal government money. (In the Notes of the earlier parts of this blog article I have also mentioned the premature deaths of Frank Moores and Gary Ouellet, noting that my own father passed away in 2005 exactly one month after Moores.)”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 3)”, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

On the anti-corruption side, the personal costs were particularly demonstrated in the case of Ottawa-area businessman Glen Kealey, a crusader who became “financially broke and penniless”:

“A better example of the consequences of anti-corruption crusade, one Cameron as a journalist also wrote about extensively, is the personal experiences of Glen Kealey, an Ottawa-area businessman who had had a dispute with some of the Mulroney associates during the early years of the Mulroney government – regarding an alleged 5%-kickback request from Mulroney cabinet minister Roch LaSalle especially – and subsequently embarked on a campaign to publicize, and to criminally prosecute corruptions in the Mulroney government: he became financially broke and penniless. ⁹³”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Kealey’s case, which Cameron reported as a journalist, also illustrated the difficulty to achieve any tangible result, at all, in anti-corruption crusades; same was true of my own experience in political activism over Mulroney’s leadership and conduct:

“As mentioned in some of the earlier Notes, I myself was once in peaceful political activity, in late 1992 in Vancouver, attempting to publicly air criticisms of then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership in general and especially his conduct during the Charlottetown constitutional process, sending press releases to some media outlets. … But my efforts at airing criticisms brought nothing but personal misery.

…

Glen Kealey not only lost all his business and money, but after years of hard campaign – including daily protests outside the national parliament lasting through the end of the Mulroney era – achieved only meager results: only one person out of 13 Tory politicians and 3 senior RCMP officers Kealey had wanted to prosecute, namely the former Mulroney cabinet minister Roch LaSalle, was charged by the Ontario Provincial Police (but not by RCMP); the OPP then missed the deadline for proceeding with the criminal charges …

In one of her first newspaper articles reporting on the Glen Kealey story, Cameron even quoted what was written on Kealey’s protest placard outside the House of Commons in the capital: ⁹⁵

“RCMP always get their man – but not their politicians”.

”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As quoted by Cameron, above, from Kealey’s protest placard about police catching criminals, “RCMP always get their man – but not their politicians”.

Apparently, the Airbus Affair turned out to be more of the same, as was my experience as noted above in activism over government leadership and conduct.

It wasn’t until the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair and the public inquiry in 2009-2010, that someone of authority, in this case Justice Jeffrey Oliphant, finally concluded that Mr. Mulroney’s conduct had been “inappropriate” – as already discussed.

In the 1990s when Cameron was writing to expose corruption and matters related to the Airbus Affair, some particularly strong criticisms of her came from the Canadian media baron Conrad Black, who accused her of “journalistically” assaulting Mulroney, of avoiding the court and ‘double-crossing’ the RCMP investigator; such aggressive assertions prompted a journalist to say that Black wanted to have Cameron “put in jail”:

“A most interesting, rather lengthily outspoken and contemptuous attack on Stevie Cameron has come directly from Conrad Black, who was owner of the National Post newspaper in 1998 when he penned a review of William Kaplan’s book, Presumed Guilty: Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair, and the Government of Canada. Mr. Black referred to the RCMP Airbus Affair criminal investigation as “a disgraceful abuse of police and ministerial powers”, stated that Stevie Cameron’s “pathological hatred of Mulroney was notorious”, and described certain controversy about Cameron to do with leaked RCMP information – which the government had used as reason for settling Mulroney’s libel lawsuit – as that Cameron “febrilely promoted” the RCMP criminal investigation and then “double-crossed” the investigator Staff Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald as well as the RCMP legal defence for the lawsuit because she was not willing to “identify her source under oath or alternately face contempt charges” in court: ⁶⁷

“Because she didn’t wish to have to identify her source under oath or alternately face contempt charges, she destroyed the feeble defence the government had against the man she had obsessively assaulted journalistically for years and she ratted on her police informant. Eventually, impartial history will have to record that for Brian Mulroney to have had such enemies was a badge of honor.

Justice was ultimately done, in that Mulroney was vindicated but most of the wrongdoers went unpunished. Only the RCMP sergeant paid with his job, doublecrossed by Ms. Cameron, the beneficiary of his misconduct, retiring the day before his disciplinary hearing, (with a full pension).”

Black also unabashedly declared that his notion of media ownership had much to do with power struggles directly related to the issue of how former prime minister Brian Mulroney should be treated by the media:

…

Such barely veiled warnings from the powerful press baron Conrad Black prompted newspaper columnist John MacLachlan Gray to comment unambiguously that Black wanted to have Stevie Cameron “put in jail” and turn Canadian journalists into “toy soldiers”. ⁶⁸ Also in reaction to Conrad Black’s comments, The former RCMP Airbus Affair investigator Fraser Fiegenwald sent a letter to Stevie Cameron issuing a denial that he had been betrayed by Cameron in anyway. ⁶⁹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Conrad Black’s public attack of Cameron in the media and praise for Mulroney received Cameron’s public response, calling Black “Brian Mulroney’s new champion”, as I quoted:

“Even though Stevie Cameron had not always answered her critics directly she took Conrad Black very seriously, and she took steps, fierily and determinedly, to answer Mr. Black’s accusations. Cameron wrote an article in which she called Conrad Black “Brian Mulroney’s new champion” and recounted the kind of denigrating language Black had used in his criticisms of her and the RCMP: ⁷⁰

“Black has emerged as Brian Mulroney’s new champion and the old contempt and patronizing dismissals of Mulroney which litter his autobiography have vanished. But not his contempt for investigative journalists, whom he has described as “swarming, grunting jackals” and police officers he calls “gasconading dupes” and “fascistic palookas.””

Cameron then publicly denied that any leaked information in question had come to her from Fraser Fiegenwald or anyone in the RCMP:

…

Cameron also stated clearly that contrary to Black’s assertion she was ready and willing to testify in court:

…”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Concerned about potential suppression of press freedom by such a powerful media owner, Cameron also brought a complaint about Black to the journalist organization Canadian Journalists for Free Expression:

“In addition to replying to Conrad Black’s scathing criticisms through her newspaper articles, Stevie Cameron took an unusual step to counter what she felt was a “smear campaign” against her coming from Black’s media ownership power, by bringing a complaint to the journalist organization Canadian Journalists for Free Expression; Cameron accused that Conrad Black had put “his attack dogs at the National Post“, which had published several stories attacking her, and that Black had used his power as “chairman of Hollinger Inc. and chairman and CEO of Southam Inc., who owns some 58 Southam and Hollinger newspapers in Canada”, to have those newspapers in an organized effort not publish review articles on her 1998 book, Blue trust: the author, the lawyer, his wife, and her money; the board of directors of the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression responded to Stevie Cameron’s concern by deciding that the organization would “monitor” Conrad Black’s actions. ⁷¹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I noted the irony that Conrad Black’s wife, journalist Barbara Amiel, had been a fierce critic of Prime Minister Mulroney in the 1980s when Cameron was exposing Mulroney’s extravagant lifestyle funded by the government, and even predicted that Mulroney would be brought down in the 1988 election because of his excess, a prediction that, unfortunately, did not come true:

“The Gucci-gate and related topics of lavish personal spending (of government and party money) by then Prime Minister Mulroney and his family became a hot topic before the 1988 election, pounded upon by opposition parties and journalists alike. One of the journalists who expressed outrageous opinions at the time was Canadian columnist Barbara Amiel based in Ottawa and in London, England, who commented with considerable disdain: ⁵⁰

“The problem with the Mulroneys, who are certainly bright enough to know this, is that they are still a little too lower-middle class, culturally speaking, to be able to accommodate their hungry social ambitions to this reality.”

Ms. Amiel even made a bold prediction that the many Gucci shoes would end Mr. Mulroney’s political career:

“It is an understandable failing but a failing that will bring them down. The ludicrous thing about Canada is that it is not the dreadful politics of Brian Mulroney nor his lack of principle in foreign and domestic policy that will be his undoing, but one pair of Gucci loafers too many.”

Well, Canadians all know that Mr. Mulroney was a tough leader who could not be so easily brought down by one pair of Gucci shoes too many, not in 1988 anyway, and apparently thus far has never personally lost in a general election or in the court of law.”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Even more ironically, I noted, that ten years later when Mr. Black had become a member of the British House of Lords it was Ms. Amiel’s husband, Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour, who was brought down:

Rather, and quite ironically, recently in 2007-08 it has been by this time Ms. Barbara Amiel’s dear husband of intellectual and trans-Atlantic fames, Canadian and international press baron Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour, who was brought down for having – together with his associates – tens of millions of dollars too many in a way that constituted criminal fraud and not just lifestyle excess. ⁵¹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I also commented on a similar irony with Black versus Cameron, noting that it was the American justice system that brought down Lord Black:

“Apparently, as of today nothing really bad has occurred to Stevie Cameron in this contest of journalistic wills between ‘the David and the Goliath’, i.e., between her and Conrad Black.

On the other hand, Conrad Black is currently sitting in a U.S. jail serving time for fraud and obstruction of justice that have taken place within his media ownership. The irony is that it has been the American justice system, which the leftwing Canadian journalists tended to belittle, that has done Lord Conrad Black in.”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As in the second last quote above, by 2007-2008 Conrad Black was prosecuted for criminal fraud in the “tens of millions of dollars”.

I commented that it was a case of “Chicago corruption”, mentioning that Black was defended by Edward Genson, the same Chicago lawyer as for former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich:

“The Conrad Black case is an instance of ‘Chicago corruption’, which has been discussed in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, and which included the ongoing case of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich who is represented by the same Chicago lawyer Edward Genson who defended Conrad Black. The standard views on the Black case are different, however, and they included opinions that Black’s was a case of American justice for a Canadian crime, as well as opposite opinions that Black was harshly targeted because he was non-American. ^{52, 53}

In any case, Ms. Barbara Amiel is fortunate that Lord Black’s high lifestyle with her as Lady Black, personally more extravagant than the lifestyle of the family of former prime minister Mulroney while in office, hasn’t contributed further misery to the life of Mr. Conrad Black in prison. ⁵⁴”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I should note here, that I had mentioned Black’s media business and criminal case, along with assorted well-known figures related to Chicago – including Barack Obama, Rod Blagojevich, John Nash and Oprah Winfrey – in my very first blog article dated January 29, 2009:

“… Now retuning to contemporary politics and looking at history from one side to another one notes that, being a Democratic politician from the state of Illinois, Senator Barack Obama was very careful during his recent 2008 presidential campaign, avoiding controversies by distancing himself from some of his old acquaintances on the political left such as his (former) pastor, the flamboyant Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his former Chicago Annenberg Challenge colleague, the defiant Prof. William Ayers, each step of the way. ⁶⁰ But the November election outcome has indicated that most American voters would not mind viewing such past connections of Obama’s as no more than a sort of error in ‘judgment’. ⁶¹ And it was when the story came of Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois asking for favor in return for appointment by him to President Elect Obama’s U.S. Senate seat, that the American media had a collective exhalation of understanding: That’s Chicago, isn’t it? ⁶²

…

Mysteries aside, some of John Nash’s brash but cryptic statements in those old days are nonetheless food for thought: if John Nash was to be the “Emperor of Antarctica” as he claimed in 1959 when declining to take up a prestigious academic position at the University of Chicago, then how should the modern-time, outspoken Oprah Winfrey be referred to as, whose media empire is based in Chicago? ⁸⁷ Queen of the Arctic who happened to have been born exactly 55 years before the day of this blog article? ⁸⁸ What about President Barack Obama, who from 1992 till becoming United States Senator in 2004 was on the faculty of the University of Chicago? ⁸⁹

…

The Canadian-British media baron Conrad Black did not mind Chicago either, owning the Sun-Times. His 2008 fraud trial in the Windy City was however not up to him, nor was the outcome up to his lawyer Ed Genson. ⁹⁴

Now you may say that for someone so brash and confident as to give up his Canadian citizenship to become a British lord, Conrad Black probably did not think he would lose in Chicago; but my question is what did he have to gain? ⁹⁵

…

95. Despite his massive international newspaper holdings at one time or another and many U.S. media properties, the Chicago Sun-Times has been the only major U.S. newspaper among Conrad Black’s possessions; Black also began his U.S. business empire in Chicago, in the mid 1990s, from there controlling his worldwide holdings…

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I wrote then, as in the above, about Lord Conrad Black’s Chicago venture, “what did he have to gain?”

But for a Canadian willing to give up his citizenship to become a British Lord, it likely had been about the glory and allure of power and conquer rather than about media.

Besides the attack by Conrad Black and the criticisms about her “conspiracy theorist” mindset, as already discussed, during her vigorous journalistic pursue of corruption related to former Prime Minister Mulroney Stevie Cameron faced other types of criticisms of note in the media – some of special interest to me.

One type of these other criticisms that I reviewed with special interest referred to Cameron’s husband, former government official and Canadian constitutional expert David Cameron, implying that she had a grudge against Prime Minister Mulroney because his rise to power ended her husband’s federal government career:

“A second type of criticisms of Stevie Cameron has implied that she had a personal (i.e., family) grudge against Brian Mulroney because when Mulroney became prime minister in 1984 it ended the career of her husband David Cameron as a federal government official in Ottawa, “an assistant under-secretary of state” (i.e., assistant deputy minister) specializing in constitutional and federal-provincial relation issues. ^{64, 65}”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In my blog article’s Part 3, I reviewed some key history relating to David Cameron’s government work on Canadian constitutional matters.

Mr. Cameron had been an official in Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government, with a role in Prime Minister Trudeau’s enactment of Canada’s first Constitution in 1982, and following the arrival of the Mulroney government became a vice president at the University of Toronto:

“As pointed out in an earlier part of this blog article and the Notes, in the early 1980s Ms. Cameron’s husband David Cameron was a federal official handling constitutional and federal-provincial relation issues in the Liberal government of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and as such he played a role in Mr. Trudeau’s enactment of the first Canadian Constitution in 1982; he was apparently let go when the Mulroney government came to power.

Ms. Stevie (Dahl) Cameron apparently had married (in the mid-1960s) an exceptionally able intellectual and civil servant – regardless of how he would have faired within the Mulroney government – for very soon after he had been let go David Cameron became the vice president of institutional and governmental relations at Canada’s leading university, the University of Toronto.⁷⁷”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Then, as Stevie Cameron engaged in her journalistic crusade exposing the excess of Prime Minister Mulroney and the corruption of his associates, her husband worked as a constitutional and intergovernmental affairs official in the Ontario government of Liberal Premier David Peterson, and also as Ontario’s representative to the province of Quebec:

“Then in 1987 only several months after Stevie Cameron’s series of newspaper articles had become famous about Mr. Mulroney’s 50 pairs of Gucci shoes as well as other lifestyle trappings of the Mulroney family, David Cameron was appointed deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs in the Liberal provincial government of then Ontario premier David Peterson. ⁷⁸

Further along, in early 1989 when Stevie Cameron’s first book, Ottawa inside out: power, prestige and scandal in the nation’s capital, was to be published in the fall and “most insiders” were expecting it to become a bestseller, David Cameron was appointed special adviser to Ontario Premier Peterson on constitutional reform as well as Ontario’s senior representative to the province of Quebec. ⁷⁹”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As just mentioned, Canada had introduced the country’s first national constitution only in 1982. Subsequently in the 1980s during the Mulroney era, constitutional issues were another major area of media and public interest, i.e., besides corruption-related topics. Hence, I explained, David Cameron’s role in this period somewhat paralleled his wife’s, i.e., opposing the Mulroney government but in the constitutional-reform arena:

“To better understand that the differences between the Trudeau Liberals and the Mulroney Conservatives were fundamental, one needs to take into account that Mr. Mulroney brought in not only the policies of economic privatization and free trade to dismantle the core of the Trudeau government’s socialist, government control-centered economic and social doctrines, ⁸⁰ but also a set of agendas of decentralization and regionalization of government power, which included aligning with some of the Quebec sovereigntists-separatists (such as Lucien Bouchard, Mulroney’s old friend from his law school days), that were aimed at radically changing the orientation and the scope of the Canadian Constitution which the staunchly federalist Mr. Trudeau had brought in not long before without the agreement of the French-speaking province of Quebec; Mr. Trudeau would become dead set against these agendas during the entire Mulroney era. ^{81, 82}

Thus, from 1987 to 1990 as a key Ontario official-adviser on intergovernmental and constitutional affairs under then Liberal premier David Peterson, David Cameron was in an important position during the period of the Meech Lake constitutional reform, sitting across the table from representatives of the Mulroney Conservative federal government; ⁸³ this the general public knew less than they knew about the newspaper articles and a book from Stevie Cameron outing the Mulroney lifestyles and chronicling Mulroney government scandals.”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As explained above, Mr. Trudeau had enacted the Canadian Constitution without the agreement of the French-speaking province of Quebec, and Mr. Mulroney then embarked on the Meech Lake constitutional-reform process in the late 1980s, with “a set of agendas of decentralization and regionalization of government power, which included aligning with some of the Quebec sovereigntists-separatists”, which Mr. Trudeau strongly opposed.

After the Meech Lake constitutional reform’s failure, the Mulroney government embarked on a new round of constitutional consultations and negotiations led by former Prime Minister Joe Clark, and David Cameron again served as a special constitutional adviser for the province of Ontario, this time under New Democrat Premier Bob Rae:

“After the Meech Lake constitutional accord ultimately failed in 1990, Mr. Mulroney proceeded to give former Prime Minister Joe Clark a leading role on constitutional affairs within his government and bring on the Charlottetown constitutional reform, and Mr. Clark brought the aboriginal people of Canada into the constitutional process. ⁸⁴ At this time, the even more leftwing, recently elected Ontario government of New Democrat premier Bob Rae turned to David Cameron once more who had returned from his posting in Quebec and was acting in his former job of deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs, again naming Cameron the special constitutional adviser to the premier. ⁸⁵”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

That led to the widely-publicized Diane Wilhelmy Affair in September-October 1992, when a phone conversation between Quebec’s deputy intergovernmental affairs minister Diane Wilhelmy and Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa’s constitutional adviser Andre Tremblay, was leaked to the media. The conversation was very critical of the tactics deployed by some Ontario officials – including David Cameron – opposite Quebec in the Charlottetown constitutional-reform negotiations:

“That David Cameron played a key role for Ontario in the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional reform, has been recorded in a rather controversial way – at the centre of the Diane Wilhelmy affair in September-October 1992 about a taped phone conversation between Diane Wilhelmy, then Quebec deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs, and an unnamed official (later identified as Andre Tremblay, constitutional adviser to Premier Bourassa); the tape recorded the other official using very nasty language to say things about three Ontarians, one of them David Cameron; the Ontarians were blamed for ‘ripping off’ Quebec in the constitutional negotiations in which Premier Bourassa did not perform well under pressure: ⁸⁶

“XX: We’re walking on our knees, as you know, eh? I think mine are full of holes … We were aggressed, badgered, fatigued. In other words, there were an awful lot of those types of problems. It’s tough to take, psychologically having all these people against you. And they’re all against us. And those Ontarians, they’re the worst sons of bitches you can imagine. Worse than that. It’s terrible.

DW: That’s what we were saying last year. It hasn’t gotten any better, eh?

XX: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. They are truly, to use a bad word … and Jeff Rose is a perfect one. Bornstein is double-faced, triple-faced. And David Cameron: there’s a guy who’s profoundly hypocritical. And who tells us things that are unbelievable …

DW: Phew, what madness. But when I saw yesterday on television that it was starting all over again. And that they were even going back on the Supreme Court and immigration. Then I said to myself, it’s a national disgrace. We should leave. Mr. Bourassa should take the plane right away and come back here. What a humiliation to arrive at that point.”

”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Here are some selected, from the above, of what David Cameron’s Quebec counterpart Andre Tremblay said regarding the Ontario officials:

“We were aggressed, badgered, fatigued.”

“And those Ontarians, they’re the worst sons of bitches you can imagine.”

“And David Cameron: there’s a guy who’s profoundly hypocritical.”

And here is what Diane Wilhelmy said of the humiliation to Quebec Premier Bourassa:

“Then I said to myself, it’s a national disgrace. We should leave. Mr. Bourassa should take the plane right away and come back here. What a humiliation to arrive at that point.”

There was a real problem that time. Quebec Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa had a history of skin cancer dating back to the Meech Lake constitutional reform era; this time he was again invited by Prime Minister Mulroney to the negotiation table, and he did not perform well; soon afterwards it was discovered that his cancer was already spreading. Thus, the physical and psychological exhaustions were hard on Mr. Bourassa, and a few years later he died from the disease:

“During the Charlottetown constitutional negotiations in 1992 Premier Bourassa was “fatigued” and did not do well, partly due to the long hours and the intensity of the negotiations and partly because shortly after the Meech Lake accord he had undergone treatments for a serious form of skin cancer, which Brian Mulroney personally noted during his public campaign for the Charlottetown accord’s passage in the upcoming October 26, 1992 national referendum, and which would be discovered already spreading shortly after the Charlottetown accord failed in the referendum; Bourassa would ultimately died of it on October 2, 1996. ⁸⁸

…

87. Quebec boycotted further constitutional negotiation after the failure of the Meech Lake accord in 1990, and the initial package of the Charlottetown accord was reached in July 1992 – without the official participation of Quebec – by other provincial, territorial and aboriginal leaders and the federal government negotiators led by Joe Clark; Quebec was then invited to join the negotiation process, and it hesitated, until Robert Bourassa was given personal assurances from Brian Mulroney (overruling part of the initial deal)…”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The Diane Wilhelmy Affair became a critical factor swaying Quebecers’ sentiments against the Charlottetown Constitutional Accord, which was soon defeated in a national referendum on October 26, 1992:

“Premier Bourassa himself at the time of the Wilhelmy affair acknowledged that the affair, involving national publicity on negative opinions from the Quebec government’s top two constitutional experts, ⁸⁹ swayed public opinion in his province against the Charlottetown constitutional accord he had helped negotiate. ⁹⁰ In the end, the Wilhelmy affair became one of the major factors contributing to the accord’s defeat in Quebec in the October 26, 1992 referendum held across Canada. ⁹¹

…

89. Diane Wilhelmy’s background had been considered pro-separatist, and she had also been the top constitutional expert responsible for Quebec’s part in the Meech Lake accord; she was then again (with Andre Tremblay)  given the responsibility for the Charlottetown accord negotiations – under the premier who personally attended the final negotiations…”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Prior to the national referendum, Ms. Wilhelmy went to court to try to legally prevent the leaked phone conversation from airing by Quebec media. Later during the Airbus Affair when Mr. Mulroney filed a libel lawsuit against the RCMP and the Canadian government in November 1995, he chose the same lawyer Wilhelmy had used in 1992, Gerald Tremblay of the law firm McCarthy Tetrault, as his lead lawyer. I related the two in the following observations:

“If one wonders whether Brian Mulroney was mindful, then and later, of how some Quebecers loathed David Cameron’s role in the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional process, and of the fact that Cameron’s wife Stevie Cameron was a journalist-author writing about corruptions in his government, one can take note of the following fact which seems to have been overlooked: Mulroney not only publicly acknowledged during the October 1992 referendum campaign for the Charlottetown accord that the prospect of its passing was hurt by the Wilhelmy affair, but when the Airbus Affair became the top news story in November 1995 partly thanks to publicity from Stevie Cameron’s second bestselling book, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years, Mulroney would choose lawyer Gerald Tremblay of the law firm McCarthy Tetrault as his lead lawyer for the $50 million defamation lawsuit against the RCMP and the Canadian government – the same lawyer previously representing Diane Wilhelmy in September 1992 trying to get a court injunction to prevent the phone conversation tape (and its transcript) from being aired by the media in Quebec (a partial transcript quoted above had been published in Ontario). ⁹²”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

These Canadian constitutional issues have been of special interest to me. In particular, in November 1992, Prime Minister Mulroney’s constitutional reform processes were among the first topics I commented on when I began my Canadian political activism critical of his leadership, as I recalled in a footnote of my 2009 blog article’s Part 1:

“18. A long time ago – during 1992-1993 – while a faculty member at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and afterwards, I was involved in some activities related to academic politics and Canadian politics (briefly alluded to in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”); in a press release I wrote and sent to some media outlets, CBC-TV Vancouver especially, dated November 20, 1992, I made the following statement regarding some of what I viewed as then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s misconduct during the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional processes: “They like to say Mr. Mulroney never learns. Well, he can’t be that dumb, can he?” I note that a ‘legal guardian’ of a sort for German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber then in Alberta, Justice John C. Major, was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada around this time – on November 13, 1992…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Another type of media criticisms of Stevie Cameron and her anti-corruption journalism, that I reviewed with special interest, insinuated that her crusade was socially biased, insincere and possibly with hidden agendas, dismissing her with terms like “ancient sycophants”, “self-righteous self-flatterer”, and “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment”:

“National Post columnist Gerald Owen went as far as comparing Cameron (and the American prosecutors in the Conrad Black case) to “ancient sycophants” bent on persecuting the rich and powerful out of envy more than out of justice. ⁶³

…

Another category of criticisms of Cameron has touched on her Presbyterian background, hinting that she was a “self-righteous self-flatterer”, and yet in another view was of “Victorian sensitivity” and “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment” – and that some of her writing sounded like “a Presbyterian spinster’s detailed account of an orgy in the choir loft”. ⁶⁶”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In regard to this line of criticism, I first pointed out that, although viewed in Canada as “hard-hitting”, Cameron’s exposés were “quite tame” compared to some by American left-wing intellectuals:

“On the lighter side of a serious note, as much as her books are viewed as hard-hitting in Canada, Stevie Cameron has been quite tame, albeit sensationalist, when compared to some of the American intellectuals who had similar backgrounds in the apparatus of the state before turning to leftwing politics. …”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

For comparison, I referred to American political scientist Chalmers Johnson, who also had an intelligence background prior to becoming a left-wing writer, and who delivered his criticisms of imperialist aspects of U.S. foreign policies in broader and greater strokes, warning of the consequence of “blowback” by terrorism in his book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, published a year before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.:

“… One such scholar I have mentioned in the Notes of my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late” (in the context of the story of the ‘mad’ mathematician John F. Nash), is Dr. Chalmers Johnson, who was a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, when I was a mathematics Ph. D. student there. Like Cameron, Johnson had a background in the intelligence arena, having done consultant work for the CIA for a number of years in the past; also like Cameron, Johnson has published a series of books developing his views on a set of related topics, in his case critiques of what he viewed as the imperialist aspects of American foreign policies based on dominance through global presence of the U.S. military; in particular, Johnson considered dangers of terrorism against the United States as a type of “blowback” counter-effect to such policies, and warned the public about such and others in the first book (of this series), Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, published in year 2000, i.e., prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on American soil. ⁷³”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

This is a topic of timely interest now, in light of what I have recently elaborated on regarding the subject of war and peace, in Part 1 of my review of 2009 blog posts.

In 2009, I especially quoted Dr. Johnson from a newspaper article in which his comments critical of the “axis of evil” speech of President George Bush, Jr.’s on January 29, 2002, recalled certain history that in my review is relevant to Cameron’s Presbyterian background but contrary to her “puritanism”:

“For the interest of readers of this blog article, though, that also befits the more common type of alienation displayed by Canadians toward the U.S., I quote here from an article of Dr. Chalmers Johnson’s for The Japan Times newspaper – written in March 2002, i.e., after 9/11 and the world’s responses to the terrorist attacks but before the Iraq war – in which he made a comparison of president George W. Bush’s hawkishness and notion of “faith” with certain disgraceful deeds of a 19^th-century pioneering European Protestant missionary in East Asia, the Rev. Karl Gutzlaff of Germany: ⁷⁴

“In his “axis of evil” speech of Jan. 29, 2002, Bush succeeded in scuttling the emerging hopes for peace on the Korean Peninsula. In Seoul, amid pomp and obfuscation, while he blathered on about Laura, terrorism, democracy, worship, and “the family,” South Koreans may have wondered what he really had in mind. They no doubt feared that they had entrusted their fate to the village idiot.

It was in China, however, that the president gave an Olympic gold medal demonstration of insensitivity and cultural rudeness. In a speech to students of one of China’s most distinguished universities, he said: “America is a nation guided by faith. Someone once called us ‘a nation with the soul of a church.’ Ninety-five percent of Americans say they believe in God, and I’m one of them.”

Bush apparently has no knowledge of the role Christian missionaries played in the imperialist exploitation of China. Missionaries were active in the opium trade. It was a German Protestant, Karl Gutzlaff, who introduced opium to north China. The British and Americans, who pioneered the illegal import of opium into China, used the doctrine of “free trade” as a cover for their activities. One of the reasons the Chinese empire resisted reform for so many decades was that toleration of Christianity, as the Western powers demanded, meant surrendering to the purveyors of filth and crime.”

”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I emphasized that Dr. Johnson wrote the above-quoted passages a year before the U.S. launch of the Iraq War that has been discussed in Part 1.

To describe the passages in brief, Dr. Johnson asserted that President Bush’s speech scuttled “the emerging hopes for peace on the Korean Peninsula”; commenting on President Bush’s notions of “faith” and “the soul of a church” in a related speech, Dr. Johnson referred to history when “filth and crime” also came with Christianity to China, mentioning German Protestant missionary Karl Gutslaff, “who introduced opium to north China”.

This part of history was of personal interest to me because of its connection to my maternal family’s historical Chinese Christian heritage mentioned in Part 1 of my current review.

Specifically, my maternal family’s Christian history can be traced to a pioneering church founded by a 19th-century German Swiss Basel missionary recruited to China by Rev. Karl Gutslaff, a prominent leading Protestant missionary in Asia; and when this Swiss missionary and his Swedish Swiss Basel colleague then discovered the involvement of Gutslaff’s organization in the opium trade, they broke ties with him and expose some of the problems:

“I hasten to say that although some of Rev. Karl Gutzlaff’s mistakes in mixing the opium trade with missionary work in China have long been recognized by the Christian community – for someone Rev. Gutzlaff’s statue and distinction who in history was also the first to bring the Bible to Thailand and to Japan in their native languages – I owe part of my maternal family cultural heritage to a (German) Swiss Basel missionary who and whose (Swedish) Swiss Basel fellow missionary were the first to China in the history of their organization, founding a pioneering church in my maternal grandmother’s ancestral village in southern coastal China in 1849 after having been recruited to China by Rev. Karl Gutzlaff; but the Swiss Basel missionaries were among the first missionaries to break with Guztlaff and expose some of his problems once they realized, and got a handle on, the prevalence of opium-trade deception in Guzlaff’s Christian organization – the Chinese Union. ⁷⁵”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

A relevance of this particular history to Stevie Cameron’s Presbyterian background, and also to some critics’ use of phrases like “ancient sycophants” and “inbred puritanism” to describe her and her anti-corruption writings, is that Cameron not only wrote to expose corruption but also practiced helping the poor in living her life, and has been praised as “street-side saviour of Canada’s destitute”:

“If, as we have seen, that the criticisms of author Stevie Cameron about her adventurousness in investigative journalism and about possible influence of her marriage on her professional work, when examined carefully, actually served to highlight the seriousness of some of the context and backgrounds to her anti-Mulroney-corruption crusade, then the criticisms about the cultural peculiarity of her religious background (Presbyterian) could threaten to turn her into a ‘saint’ of the society in the eyes of the poor, and justify her crusade in a way that a “sycophant” label on her alone cannot achieve.

Or at least that has been how a ‘progressive’ sector in the Catholic Church in Canada want others to see Stevie Cameron as, i.e., a saint for the poor; they have been hailing her as “street-side saviour of Canada’s destitute”, not so much for her anti-corruption journalistic crusade but for her work helping the poor since 1990-91 when she co-founded the “Out-of-the-Cold” program as an elder at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in downtown Toronto, personally doing gourmet cooking for the homeless on a regular basis (at a time when she already had a solid journalistic reputation that included her 1987 Mulroney-lifestyles articles, her 1989 book on Ottawa politics and her hosting of the CBC’s The Fifth Estate), as well as for her work on behalf of missing prostitutes in Vancouver Downtown Eastside when in 1999 while at the helm of the Elm Street magazine she and writer Daniel Wood publicized the story of the missing prostitutes, which according to this progressive Catholic view “sparked public interest and a subsequent police investigation”, eventually leading to the prosecution of Robert William Pickton. ⁹⁶”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, one special deed of Cameron’s helping the poor was her writings to publicise the story of missing prostitutes in Vancouver Downtown Eastside, that helped lead to the prosecution of the killer, Robert William Pickton.

Cameron herself, in fact, once lamented that writing about a serial killer were easier than writing about corrupt politicians:

““Among those reasons? While writing about a serial killer, I wasn’t afraid for the lives of my children. I wasn’t afraid for the job of my husband. I didn’t worry that my phones were tapped or that somebody was going to break into my house or my publisher’s office.

“I didn’t look behind me when I crossed the street. I didn’t have to drive carefully on the highway so nobody could run me off the road.

“And the numberone reason why I prefer serial killers? Serial killers don’t sue.”

Litigious politicians make life hell for a writer. Cameron describes how, at her peak as a political scribe, verything was heavily lawyered, and even then publishers might back away from releasing a book for fear of legal reprisals.”

(“Stevie Cameron prefers serial killers to crooked politicians”, by Susan G. Cole, February 15, 2011, NOW)

My goodness, would not some of those intimidation tactics against her, also discussed earlier, have been illegal?

As in the last quote from Part 3 of my 2009 blog article, another of Cameron’s special deeds helping the poor was her co-founding of the “Out-of-the-Cold” program as an elder at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in downtown Toronto and her personally doing gourmet cooking there regularly for the homeless.

While it would be misguided to associate such good deeds with labels like “sycophants” or “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment”, Cameron’s actions were extra special when her family history and her church’s history were also taken into account.

Cameron’s family tradition had been political conservative, I noted:

“There indeed had been conservative influence in Stevie Cameron’s family background, and she has been open about it: a great-great-grandfather, a grandfather and an uncle of hers had been Tory politicians, and in the 1970s she once campaigned for Tory candidate Duff Roblin (a name which I suspect could be related to her mother, Eleanor Roblin Bone Dahl) in Peterborough, Ontario.¹⁰⁵ But that background had not prevented Cameron from developing her passion for anti-corruption investigative journalism focused on the former Mulroney Conservative government.”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I would think that in choosing such a career departing from her family tradition, Stevie Cameron was very much motivated by what she felt would be right, would be fair and would be just.

Likewise, Cameron’s church where she co-founded the “Out-of-the-Cold” program, the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in downtown Toronto, was historically one of the oldest and richest Presbyterian churches in Toronto and Canada. I briefly reviewed that history:

“With or without praises from some on the Catholic Church side, the Out-of-the-Cold program started by Cameron at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto has been very widely praised and has been an inspiration for people from other walks of life, including professional chefs, lawyers and healthcare professionals, to participate in or start various charity programs helping the homeless. ¹⁰⁶

Perhaps it’s best to take a look at how the Presbytery of Eastern Toronto has described the Out-of-the-Cold program founded by Stevie Cameron at St. Andrew’s Church in this presbytery – in a September 2005 article titled, “A united effort crowns righteousness”, written by staff writer Amy MacLachlan of the Presbyterian Record. ¹⁰⁷

Its opening passage is about the area of the presbytery:

“As one of the church’s largest and richest presbyteries, East Toronto occupies an interesting spot on the landscape. Even though it was only created in 1949 (when the Presbytery of Toronto was divided into east and west), its history includes some of the oldest churches of the denomination in Canada. …”

…

Further in this article, about the Out-of-the-Cold program:

“The presbytery is also ministering to groups who are marginalized because of poverty, various disabilities, or sexual orientation. Many of the presbytery’s congregations support Evangel Hall, an inner-city mission providing food and shelter to the city’s homeless. The presbytery also runs several Out of the Cold programs. Known as “the church with a heart in the heart of Toronto,” St. Andrew’s, King Street, was one of the first Toronto congregations to operate this program, led by congregation member and journalist Stevie Cameron. Out of the Cold offers warm meals, and sometimes a warm bed, during the winter months to those who have nowhere else to go. The initiative at St. Andrew’s has been so successful that it is often used as a model and training centre for other congregations wanting to develop their own homelessness projects. St. Andrew’s is one of the oldest Presbyterian congregations in Toronto, established in 1830.”

…

If you say Stevie Cameron’s gourmet cooking probably made the difference, I would have to guess you are right, but St. Andrew’s Church established in 1830 is not only one of the oldest Presbyterian congregations in Toronto, but also a historic downtown church located at King Street and Simcoe Street only two blocks from the Toronto Stock Exchange on King Street between York Street and Bay Street, i.e., it has been one of the very richest, and this church says so about its own history: ¹⁰⁹

“The present building was opened for worship in 1876. At that time the King and Simcoe Streets location was a busy place and most of the congregation lived within easy walking distance of the church. Across the street stood Government House, the official residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario. Upper Canada College stood on a second corner and on a third was a popular tavern. With St. Andrew’s, the four corners were known locally as Legislation, Education, Damnation and Salvation!!”

”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

To summarize the above from a 2005 article in the Presbyterian Record and from St. Andrew’s Church’s own history account, led by Stevie Cameron one of the oldest and richest historical church, originally built across the official residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and today situated only two blocks from the Toronto Stock Exchange, was transformed into a place of warmth and comfort for the poor and destitute.

No doubt, Stevie Cameron family’s older generations and her church once had a lot like, if not in common with, “the old Ottawa establishment” albeit in different cities; but Cameron’s courage and work brought about remarkable changes as I remarked:

“This church tells you that it used to be the place where, in-between their other activities carrying important future implications to Ontario and Canada and themselves, rich and powerful people went to reflect on their sins.

From this point of view, and as earlier pointed out also, it has been Stevie Cameron’s willingness and courage to break with traditional societal taboos and stereotypes that have underscored her success, including as a journalist and author exposing topics from about the imperious Brian Mulroney to about the down-and-dirty Robert Pickton.”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Now, not just Cameron’s ‘puritan’ Christian background but her specific Presbyterian background had links to my family’s Christian background.

Specifically, my family’s early Chinese Christian heritage mentioned earlier, namely dating back to the era of a German Swiss missionary who broke with and exposed the opium-trade involvement of the leading Protestant missionary Karl Gutzlaff, also had historical as well as modern links to Stevie Cameron’s Presbytery in Toronto, Canada.

The 2005 Presbyterian Record article quoted in my second last quote above, written by staff writer Amy MacLachlan, discussed not only Stevie Cameron and her “Out-of-the-Cold” program for the homeless, but also the ethnic churches in the same Presbytery, including a “Chinese, Toronto” church led by Rev. Thomas Eng, and Celebration North led by Rev. Peter Ma:

“… Despite its fabled past, the presbytery is in the midst of change. Encompassing a downtown portion of the city as well as its northern and eastern outskirts, the demographics of East Toronto aren’t quite what they once were. Originally a destination for immigrants from the United Kingdom, the bustling city has grown to include immigrants from non-European countries, changing the community’s makeup as well as the people in the pews. Toronto is the most multicultural city in Canada and the presbytery’s 25 congregations reflect that fact.

East Toronto includes five ethnic congregations – two Chinese, one Mandarin, one Formosan and one Taiwanese. (Geographically speaking, there are also several Korean congregations in the area, but formally they belong to the Western Han-Ca Presbytery.) Chinese, Toronto, holds English and Chinese services with music in both languages, and two Sunday schools. It also offers a long list of fellowship programs for all ages and stages of life, including a sports group and a drama group called ACTS – Acclaiming Christ Through Stage, that performs in the church and in the community.

It was through the vision of Thomas Eng, minister at Chinese, Toronto, that Celebration North was born. Celebration has a large Asian contingent, but is English-speaking. Although they don’t have their own building, the church’s minister, Peter Ma, has led the congregation of about 75 adults since its inception in 1996. Ma is devoted to reaching those who do not go to church. He proclaims that attendants need not worry about violating protocol. …”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The building of the “Toronto, Chinese” church led by Rev. Thomas Eng, namely the Toronto Chinese Presbyterian Church, had been built on efforts spearheaded by Rev. Edward Ling; about Rev. Ling, I quoted a Toronto Star article titled, “Community leader also man of faith”:

“He was born in the manse of a Presbyterian Church in Kuangtung Province in China. His father was a Presbyterian minister, his grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, and so Edward Ling became a Presbyterian minister, too.

But it happened in Canada, 56 years after his birth, and after he had helped build the Chinese Presbyterian Church, Toronto’s oldest Chinese church, as a thriving cultural and spiritual centre on Beverley St.

A successful importer and exporter, he put all his business dealings on hold for two years in the late 1950s, while he went to every Chinese restaurant and business in the city and suburbs to cajole them for cheques and cash to build a new church. At the time, the congregation was using a room at the Young Men’s Christian Institute, located in two houses at 474 University Ave., but had long outgrown it.

As the church elder heading the building fund, Rev. Ling was determined Toronto’s Chinese community would have a building that would become central to their lives. “My father had a vision and he made it happen,” said his eldest son, Alex.

The lieutenant-governor of the province was on hand for the laying of the cornerstone at 177 Beverley St. in 1960. …”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

That was the story of the first real Presbyterian church building for the Chinese community in Toronto.

I commented that though it did not compare to Stevie Cameron’s St. Andrew’s Church it was a good start for an ethnic community:

“A school-style church building was no St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church of Toronto, in wealth or in physical endowment, where church elder Stevie Cameron has served many gourmet dishes to the homeless; but it was a good start for a community, i.e., the Chinese community, that had to be much more frugal, by and large. …”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Rev. Edward Ling is a brother of my maternal grandmother, and their grandfather mentioned in the Toronto Star article in the second last quote had been an origin of their, and thus my, family Christian heritage:

“Rev. Edward Ling was a younger brother of my maternal grandmother. Their grandfather had been not just a Presbyterian minister but one of the first doctors of Western medicine in the eastern region of Guangdong province of China, and was originally from a humble village in which the first Protestant church in that region had been founded in 1849 by a Swiss Basel missionary (as discussed in an earlier part of this blog article and in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”).”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, my great-great-grandfather was not only a Presbyterian minister but also “one of the first doctors of Western medicine in the eastern region of Guangdong province of China”.

Rev. Peter Ma is a grandson of the late Rev. Edward Ling, and their family branch’s modern Christian heritage is closely associated with Knox College of Toronto, as I described:

“Rev. Ling’s sense of diligence, frugality and servitude to the church and to the community have been inherited by his successful children and grandchildren, particularly by his son Alex who had succeeded him in small business, serving as the founding president of the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas as well as an adviser to Toronto Mayor David Miller… and by his son Winston, vice president of finance at Tyndale University College & Seminary in Toronto who, following the father’s example, in 1995 moved from the corporate world to work for the Christian community; ¹¹⁶ both are elders at the Chinese church.

…

Rev. Ling’s grandson Peter Ma is a graduate of Knox College at the University of Toronto; Rev. Ling’s daughter-in-law Stephanie, i.e., Winston Ling’s wife, holds a Ph.D. degree from and has been a governing board member of Knox College, and she has been active in Christian charity activities as a board member of the Scott Mission in Toronto …”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In my 2009 blog article’s Part 4, I went on to discuss the heritage of Toronto’s Knox College, a heritage rooted in the 19th-century Scottish Free Church movement and closely affiliated with the anti-slavery movement in Canada:

“In its history, the renowned Knox College founded in 1844-45 by the Presbyterian Church in Canada once had a prominent leading role in the free-church and anti-slavery movements in Canada.

A main founder of Knox College was Rev. Dr. Robert Burns, a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of the leaders of the 1843 Free Church movement in Scotland (the “Great Disruption”), who was invited to Toronto in 1844 to start the Free Church movement in Canada, became minister of Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto and led the founding of Knox College. ¹¹⁸

The first Principal of Knox College – a position begun in the 1850s – was Rev. Dr. Michael Willis, a colleague of Burns and also from Scotland, who when became the principal was already the founding president of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. ¹¹⁹ The anti-slavery history in Canada at the time was mainly known for the “Underground Railroad” – a network of anti-slavery Americans and Canadians who smuggled black slaves from the American South to freedom and settlement in Canada. ¹²⁰”

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 4)”, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I also discussed Knox College’s Presbyterian namesake founded seven years earlier in Illinois in the United States, which awarded its first honorary doctorate to Abraham Lincoln that was also his first:

“As much as being a part of the anti-slavery history, though, Knox College of Toronto is not related to (and should not be confused with) Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Located at a town that was the centre of anti-slavery activity in the state of Illinois and a “Freedom Station” on the Underground Railroad, this liberal-arts Knox College had been founded seven years earlier in 1837 by a group of anti-slavery advocates led by Presbyterian minister George Washington Gale, starting out as a bible-training college with an odd name, Knox Manual Labour College, for the reason that students worked on the farm to support their educations; this Knox College’s establishment had the approval of Abraham Lincoln among other state legislators, and subsequently it was the ‘historic’ site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate – one of a series of political debates in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas – for election to the U.S. Senate; Lincoln lost the election but the debates propelled him to national fame and in two years’ time election to the U.S. presidency, defeating Douglas this time. ¹²¹  Abraham Lincoln also received a honorary degree from this Knox College – his first and the college’s first honorary doctorate. ¹²²”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The Scottish Free Church movement and its historical Toronto association were a second component of my Chinese Christian family heritage – the Swiss Basel Mission being the first, noted earlier – through Rev. William Chalmers Burns.

Rev. William Burns, historically famous “revival preacher of Kilsyth” in Scotland, and the first official missionary of the Presbyterian Church of England Foreign Missions, was a nephew of Toronto Knox College founder – and one of the Scottish “Great Disruption” leaders mentioned above – Rev. Dr. Robert Burns; in China, Rev. William Burns revived my maternal family village church originally founded by Swiss Basel missionary Rev. Rudolf Lechler, and tutored and baptized my great-great-grandfather, then a young pupil:

“… my great-great-grandfather, namely Rev. Edward Ling’s medical-doctor-and-Presbyterian-minister grandfather (as discussed earlier in the context of a Toronto Star article about Rev. Ling, and in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”), who had been born in or around 1849, the year the first Protestant church in his home region of China was founded in his humble village by Swiss Basel missionary Rev. Rudolf Lechler, in around 1860-61 became a Christian when he was a young pupil tutored by Rev. William Burns at the school of that church and was baptized by Rev. Burns ¹³⁰…

The Rev. William Burns in China in 1861 was the person Canadians had known as Rev. Robert Burns’s young nephew, William Chalmers Burns, who in 1844 had accompanied Robert Burns to visit Canada, where Robert Burns stayed to lead the free-church movement and found Knox College. They and William Chalmers Burns’s fellow young preacher Robert Murray M’Cheyne were enthusiastic members of the Scottish Free Church movement led by Thomas Chalmers, and when visiting Canada the young W. C. Burns was already internationally known as the remarkably incredible revival preacher of Kilsyth, having drawn crowds as large as 10,000 to his spiritual-revival sermons in 1839.¹³²

William Chalmers Burns was born in 1815 in the same year the Swiss Basel Mission was founded in Basel, Switzerland, which as a Lutheran foreign mission subsequently had strong influence over British foreign missionary work – particularly that of the Anglican Church – for the next several decades. ¹³³ In 1847, Burns became the first official foreign missionary sent abroad by the Presbyterian Church of England Foreign Missions, going to China in the same year as the two first Basel missionaries to China, Theodore Hamberg and Rudolf Lechler. ¹³⁴ In 1860-61, Rev. William Burns was invited to the Ling family’s home village in the Shantou (Swatow) region of Guangdong province to visit the first Protestant church of the region founded by Rev. Lechler in 1849, which had been left with only 13 disciples on their own in 1852 when Rev. Lechler was expelled by the regional government and returned to Hong Kong. ¹³⁵ Rev. Burns preached and taught school in the same house where Rev. Lechler had done so, and revived and took under his spiritual wing this local church. ¹³⁶

Rev. William Burns died several years later in 1868 at the age of 53, up in the unfamiliar Northeast of China (i.e., Manchuria, homeland of the imperial Qing-dynasty ethnic people), exhausted, nearly alone amongst a small group of Chinese worshipers but still full of the spirit that had set him apart. ¹³⁷”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Before going to China, Rev. William Burns visited Toronto and Canada with his uncle Rev. Robert Burns, and while in Canada he baptized a newborn baby who turned out to become Canada’s first Presbyterian foreign missionary, a famous one by the name of Rev. George Leslie MacKay:

“Prior to his life journey in China, William Chalmers Burns was in Canada from 1844 to 1846, preaching in churches in different part of the country. In the Woodstock area of Ontario (Oxford County) Rev. Burns baptized a baby born in 1844 – the year he arrived in Canada – by the name of George Leslie Mackay. ¹⁴⁰ Little Mackay grew up with W. C. Burns as his idol, studied at Knox College in Toronto and at other Presbyterian institutions, became the first foreign missionary sent abroad by the Presbyterian Church in Canada (and became a medical doctor), following the example of his idol to China and following his idol’s footsteps to do missionary work in the Shantou (Swatow) region; but after arrival Mackay decided to sail across the sea to take a look first at the island of Taiwan, and once he saw the Tamsui town in Taiwan he knew instantly Taiwan would be his home, where today a large Mackay Memorial Hospital (in the capital city Taipei with branches including in Tamsui Township) stand in testimonial of his contributions to his adopted homeland – even if the hospital originally was not named for him but after a Captain Mackay of Detroit whose wife donated money for his clinic on the condition that the hospital be named that way. ¹⁴¹

Rev. Dr. Mackay died at the age of 57 in 1901 in Taiwan, after a fruitful and fulfilled life, whose achievements beside the medical hospital included founding around 60 churches with thousands of coverts, founding the Oxford College – forerunner of Taiwan Theological College and Seminary where in the 1960s Rev. Edward Ling studied to become a preacher – and serving as the elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1895…”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In that early historical time, there was a sort of a ‘puritan’ episode in Knox College’s prehistory and history, that separated this Presbyterian branch from the established St. Andrew’s Church – well over a century before Stevie Cameron’s work to transform the latter as I noted – over the Free Church movement and the related anti-slavery movement:

“The purpose, or morale, of the preceding, long-winded family history digression in this blog article about Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair and Stevie Cameron, is the illustration that in the proud history of Canadian Presbyterians there was a long period from 1843-44 to the end of the 19^th century when, inspired by Scottish Presbyterians, the Church was split into two, the Established Church and the Free Church, with the former then overseen by and beholden to the government and the landownership, while the latter independent and democratic in its religious affairs, governing, and finance: ¹⁴⁸ in this historical division, the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto where Stevie Cameron has been an elder and founded the Out-of-the-Cold program, was the centre of the Established Church in Canada, from which the Free Church led by Rev. James Harris, broke off, founded Knox Presbyterian Church as its new centre, ¹⁴⁹ brought over Rev. Robert Burns and Rev. Michael Willis (among others) from the Scottish Free Church, founded Knox College, and became active also in anti-slavery activity.

The Chinese Presbyterians in Toronto have been associated with the Free Church tradition, and with the heritage of William Chalmers Burns from Scotland and in China. They have also been associated with the early heritage of Swiss Basel missionaries in China, who made efforts to separate missionary work from the state of being tainted by unscrupulousness under German missionary Karl Gutzlaff – who had taken part in the opium trade himself and in the Opium War as a British colonial official – and to expose some of the problems in Gutzlaff’s organization Chinese Christian Union. ¹⁵⁰”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As I have discussed in the present Part 2, the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, the Airbus Affair and anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron’s career crusade to investigate corruption and ethical problems related to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, have had various broader aspects and connections that are of special and even close interest to me.

(Continuing to Part 3)

A first year of blogging in 2009 – penning on the tenth anniversary of my first blog article (Part 1)

Ten years ago today, on January 29, 2009, I started blogging with the following opening in an article entitled, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”:

“It was eleven years before the New Millennium, in February 1989 only several months with my Mathematics Ph.D. degree out of the University of California, Berkeley, when the notion “Mathematics for the New Century” circulating in the mathematics community made a strong impression on me. ¹ A larger public-relations campaign was soon launched by then President George H. W. Bush and the U.S. state governors, spearheaded by a few including Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, for what would become the first National Education Summit held in September 1989 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where it was declared that, among other objectives, U.S. high school students would be leading the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000. ² Subsequent efforts would lead to the Goals 2000 project later signed into law in 1994 as a centerpiece of President Bill Clinton’s education reform. ³”

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 1)”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As in the above passage, it was about mathematics, science and education at a national policy level in the United States in 1989, when I was a fresh Ph.D. out of the University of California, Berkeley, and in the years afterwards with a declared objective that by the year 2000 the U.S. would lead the world in high-school mathematics and science education.

But wait, and see what’s next:

“In 1989 I was a computer science faculty member at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, as an educator and researcher generally interested in good news for education and particularly impressed by declaration of lofty goals and projects to achieve them. Education, however, was often trumped by other more ominous or more urgent matters, such as the Gulf War in 1991; or at least that was what I would presume. But press archives indicate that on January 17, 1991, the day of the launch of Operation Desert Storm, or what Iraqi president Saddam Hussein called “Mother of all Battles”, ⁴ President Bush, Sr. actually met with his education advisory panel to hear about creating national standards for student performance, though he made no commitments on their proposal at the time according to panel member and former U.S. secretary of labor William Brock. ⁵”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

So it was also about education in contrast to war, namely the Gulf War then President George H. W. Bush launched in January 1991 against Iraqi forces which, under an aggressive President Saddam Hussein, had invaded a neighbouring country – even though President Bush still had some of his attention on national education.

Well, here comes more:

“Having grown up a peaceful child and done Ph.D. study under someone who happened to have a past background of vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War, I tended to look into things via more idealistic, less bombastic lenses, and my presumption could sometimes be quite naïve. The peaceful and beautiful British Columbia where I had moved to in 1988 was not all reclusive when it came to U.S. politics: the city of Nelson, B.C. was well-known as a haven for many of the Vietnam-era “draft dodgers”, ⁶ and U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Catherine Glaspie, who was in the news over the controversy of exactly what the U.S. government told Saddam Hussein in July 1990 just days before his launching invasion of Kuwait, was originally from Vancouver. ⁷”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Aha, April Catherine Glaspie, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in the news over the controversy of “exactly what the U.S. government told Saddam Hussein in July 1990 just days before his launching invasion of Kuwait”, was originally from the “peaceful and beautiful” British Columbia in Canada.

Obviously, Ambassador Glaspie must have tried to prevent the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and thus the Gulf War consequently, from taking place.

Let’s take a look at what The New York Times reported in March 1991, not long after the launch of the Gulf War:

“For more than seven months, April C. Glaspie kept silent on what she said or did not say to President Saddam Hussein of Iraq in their meeting eight days before his tanks rolled into Kuwait last August.

Despite criticism that as the American Ambassador to Iraq she was not tough enough in her remarks and that she somehow encouraged Mr. Hussein to invade Kuwait, Ms. Glaspie rejected the advice of friends and colleagues that she play the game of Washington guerrilla warfare by publicizing her side of the story.

“It’s a matter of service discipline,” she told them. “I won’t stoop to that.”

An austere, obedient, often stubborn Foreign Service officer who has been depicted as a scapegoat for a policy gone wrong, Ms. Glaspie today offered a defense of American policy and tried to clear her name. In doing so, she stayed true to character, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she was appearing before them “on instructions.” She offered no hint of the bitterness friends say she feels at not being allowed to return to Baghdad. Shunned by Baker’s Aides Ms. Glaspie is the first woman to head an American Embassy in the Middle East and one of only a handful of senior Arabists left in the State Department. After returning to Washington – she was in London enroute to the United States when Iraq invaded Kuwait – Ms. Glaspie was shunned by the inner circle of Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d. She watched stoically as the charge d’affaires, Joseph C. Wilson 4th, an African specialist with no previous experience in the Middle East, conducted the day-to-day diplomacy in Baghdad until the American Embassy was closed on the eve of the allied attack against Iraq.”

(“AFTER THE WAR: WOMAN IN THE NEWS; Envoy No Longer Silent: April Catherine Glaspie”, by Elaine Sciolino, March 21, 1991, The New York Times)

Oh No! Ms. Glaspie may have spoken too softly and “somehow encouraged Mr. Hussein to invade Kuwait”. She was then shunned by the inner circle of President Bush’s trusted friend, Secretary of state James A. Baker, 3rd, and her job in Iraq was taken over by another diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson, 4th.

But that appeared counter-intuitive, i.e., contrary to the modern politically-correct wisdom of history stereotyping when it came to war and peace, didn’t it?

Ms. Glaspie was a diligent foreign service officer with a stellar background of knowledge and achievements relating to the Arab world, and had in the 1980s been praised as “a genuine heroine” by then Secretary of State George P. Shultz:

“Her detractors say she has a stubborn streak that prevents her from backing off from fixed positions; her supporters call it an overwhelming confidence that comes from knowing her brief better than most anyone else.

Born on April 26, 1942, in Vancouver, British Columbia, April Catherine Glaspie cultivated a love for the Arab world from members of her British mother’s family who had served with the British Army in British-mandate Palestine. A graduate of Mills College in history and government with a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies, Ms. Glaspie battled the Foreign Service bureaucracy to study Arabic when women were not encouraged to make their careers in the Arab world.

Fluent in Arabic and French, she rose through the ranks of the Foreign Service, serving in Amman, Kuwait, Stockholm, Beirut, Cairo, London, New York and Damascus. She has held the post of director of the State Department’s Arabic language school in Tunisia, and as the ranking American envoy in Damascus in June 1985 she convinced the Syrians to help free 104 Americans held hostage aboard a TWA plane. George P. Shultz, who was then Secretary of State, later praised her as “a genuine heroine.””

(Elaine Sciolino, March 21, 1991, The New York Times)

Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in September 1990 The New York Times published a transcript, provided by the Iraqi government, of a July 25 meeting between Glaspie and Hussein prior to the invasion. Here are some of the key passages spoken by Glaspie to Hussein regarding Iraq’s possible intentions amassing troops near its border with Kuwait:

“… I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.

I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60’s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly. With regard to all of this, can I ask you to see how the issue appears to us?

My assessment after 25 years’ service in this area is that your objective must have strong backing from your Arab brothers. I now speak of oil. But you, Mr. President, have fought through a horrific and painful war. Frankly, we can only see that you have deployed massive troops in the south. Normally that would not be any of our business. But when this happens in the context of what you said on your national day, then when we read the details in the two letters of the Foreign Minister, then when we see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the U.A.E. and Kuwait is, in the final analysis, parallel to military aggression against Iraq, then it would be reasonable for me to be concerned. And for this reason, I received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship – not in the spirit of confrontation – regarding your intentions.”

(“CONFRONTATION IN THE GULF; Excerpts From Iraqi Document on Meeting With U.S. Envoy”, September 23, 1990, The New York Times)

As the transcript recorded, Ambassador Glaspie stated that the U.S. government had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts”, that such had been her experience in Kuwait in the 1960s and was now also confirmed by Secretary of State James Baker. Glaspie, however, did express some concern and ask Hussein, “in the spirit of friendship”, what his intentions were in deploying “massive troops in the south”, i.e., near Kuwait.

Indeed, from April Catherine Glaspie, there was absolutely no advance and clear warning to Saddam Hussein that Iraq should not invade Kuwait or could face serious consequences.

That’s quite perplexing for an experienced American diplomat who had once been hailed as “a genuine heroine”.

To my understanding, this past history has never been adequately clarified. But one could understand that, after all, it was only patriotic to watch bombs drop on the foreign bad guys, no?

Thus, my first blog article, posted on January 29, 2009, was also about international politics, especially about war and peace.

But why “nearly a decade late” as in the article title? That would be around 1999, ten years after 1989 to recall the earlier history, but ten years before 2009.

Had I not done it late, it would have fit into a timeframe of then U.S. President Bill Clinton’s in the 1990s, which I commented on:

“By the time Bill Clinton became U.S. president and right away came to Vancouver for his first major international summit, the first Clinton-Yeltsin summit in April 1993, pitching different themes from the previous Bush administration’s, including the re-emergence of Richard Nixon as an elder statesman on U.S. foreign policy, ⁸ I was already out of the academia and bogged down in some politics of my focus, and was viewing the pomp and circumstance of the glitzy visit by the rare, distinguished guests to a place I had not long before been exiled from – part of the summit was held at the University of British Columbia – as a sort of ‘swan song’ by the departing Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, hardly noticing that at the time President Clinton was also transmitting his message to the U.S. Congress to legislate for Goals 2000, Educate America Act. ⁹

President Clinton loves Vancouver, British Columbia, obviously.”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told, when Bill Clinton became the U.S. president in 1993, having defeated George Bush in the 1992 presidential election, he immediately came to Vancouver, British Columbia, for his first major international summit, one with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and he also began legislating for the “Goals 2000, Educate America Act”– demonstrating his priorities in international politics and in national education.

And Clinton “loves Vancouver”, as I noticed. In this case, it coincided with his promoting former Ambassador April Catherine Glaspie to a top position in the U.N. peace mission in Somalia, which I noted in a footnote in my article:

“International military or peacekeeping operations approved by the United Nations are not necessarily a panacea, nor do active political roles of women always lead to positive outcome; an example was the disastrous UN Somalia mission in 1993-94 and April Catherine Glaspie’s role in it…”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Oh, No! Ms. Glaspie did a poor job, again. Let’s see what this time it was about:

“The best part of Scott Peterson’s book is on Somalia, where he describes the miscalculations and stupidities of the key US players. President George Bush’s special envoy to the country was Robert Oakley, a retired ambassador and veteran of Cold War years in Vietnam. His preoccupation in Somalia was to ensure the safety of the 25,000 US forces sent to “save Somalia” as part of the 38,000 troops of the Unified Task Force who were intended to cut the circle of famine, warlords, and undeliverable food mountains. But, as Peterson puts it, Oakley made the initial decision “to leave the warlord arsenals intact and to make no concerted attempt to disarm Somalia”. The warlords’ prestige actually increased during the early days of the US involvement.

But the mission mandate changed between the Bush and Clinton presidencies. Another American figure from the past then played a key role. April Glaspie – the US foreign service officer notorious for having given Saddam Hussein the signal of US ambivalence on the eve of his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – was made the UN number two in Somalia. Petersen reveals that Glaspie went well beyond the UN mandate in her involvement in the political and judicial systems, and in working openly to marginalise the powerful General Aidid.

Glaspie authorised the June 5, 1993 mission by a Pakistani UN unit to inspect Radio Mogadishu, source of anti-UN propaganda and a known weapons site. When Aidid’s men were notified of the impending inspection, the message “this means war” came back. The Pakistanis were not given that message, and went to their doom with minimal security precautions. Peterson sums it up: “The result of this American-approved ‘inspection’ was the largest single-day massacre of UN peace-keeping troops since 1961, when 44 Ghanaians were killed in the Congo.””

(“Continental rifts: Victoria Brittain laments the west’s failures of nerve in Africa”, by Victoria Brittain, May 20, 2000, The Guardian)

As in the above account, when Clinton took over the presidency Glaspie was made the United Nations’ No. 2 official in Somalia, and on June 5, 1993, a Pakistani unit authorised by her to inspect Radio Mogadishu suffered “the largest single-day massacre of UN peace-keeping troops since 1961”.

In short, Glaspie’s authorisation led to the worst UN troop loss in three decades.

What was the scope of the casualty? It was 24 Pakistani soldiers, and it also “ushered in a new round of violence” that soon increased the death counts to over 50 UN personnel and several hundred Somalis, according to an Oxfam working paper published in early 1994:

“The killing of 24 Pakistani UN peace-keeping troops in Mogadishu on 5 June 1993 ushered in a new round of violence in Somalia. The repercussions of that incident continue to reverberate. Between then and the time of writing, over 50 UN personnel have been killed and several hundred Somalis, including many women and children. …”

(Mark Bradbury, The Somali conflict: Prospects for Peace, An Oxfam Working Paper, 1994, Oxfam (UK and Ireland))

The escalating violent episodes climaxed with the infamous ‘Black Hawk Down’ battle in early October 1993, when Somali civilians joined the warlord militia in the beating and killing of American soldiers; the deadliest firefight for the U.S. military since the Vietnam War saw 18 U.S. soldiers killed, 73 wounded, a helicopter pilot captured and President Clinton’s subsequent decision to pull the U.S. military out of Somalia:

“This week marked the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Mogadishu, the deadliest firefight U.S. forces had faced since Vietnam.

The incident ultimately pushed the U.S. out of Somalia, leaving a safe haven for extremist groups.

…

There was never even supposed to be a Battle of Mogadishu. In one of his final acts after losing the 1992 election to Bill Clinton, President George H.W. Bush sent American forces into Somalia on a humanitarian mission to bring food to the victims of a raging civil war and man-made famine.

But by the fall of 1993, the mission had expanded to one of restoring a government in Somalia. On Oct. 3, a special ops team was sent into Mogadishu to arrest two top lieutenants of the warlord Mohammed Aidid, who controlled the city.

…

About 40 minutes into the mission, one of the Black Hawk helicopters circling overheard was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, spun out of control and crashed. Not long after, a second Black Hawk was shot down. More men were sent in to secure the crash sites and get the soldiers out. But the rescue team itself got pinned down.

…

The 15-hour battle that ensued left 18 Americans dead and 73 injured. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Somalis were killed. U.S. Army pilot Mike Durant was captured and held by Somali militants for 11 days.

…

After the Battle of Mogadishu, Clinton said that it was a mistake for the United States to play the role of police officer in Somalia. He announced a six-month plan to remove U.S. troops from the country.”

(“What A Downed Black Hawk In Somalia Taught America”, October 5, 2013, National Public Radio)

In an October 1993 article in The Baltimore Sun shortly after this “Battle of Mogadishu”, journalist Roger Simon blamed the United Nations’ leading role in the peace mission for letting things get out of control, and for the Somali people’s hatred as recalled by the captured U.S. Army helicopter pilot, Mike Durant:

“Why are the people there killing our soldiers, stripping their bodies and dragging them through the streets?

Don’t they know that we came to feed them?

So why are they trying to kill us?

Examine the account of Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durant, the captured American helicopter pilot who was released yesterday.

“We lay there on the ground beside the aircraft,” Durant told a British journalist, “and I saw people coming out of tin shacks trying to get to us.”

Eventually the Americans ran out of ammunition. “Then the people got to me and started to hit me,” Durant said.

The crowd pulled off Durant’s clothes and started carrying him through the streets.

“They held me up in the air,” Durant said. “Some people would break through the crowd and hit me.”

Durant was saved from the crowd. But why was the crowd angry at him?

We can understand why the soldiers of warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid would want to attack American soldiers. We are fighting Aidid and trying to capture or kill him.

But why would ordinary people rush out of their “tin shacks” and start beating wounded American soldiers?

We have not been “Ugly Americans” in Somalia. …

We have not brutalized the people of Somalia or tortured them.

So why do they hate us?

Because the United States is fighting as part of a United Nations mission. And if there is anything in the world that you want screwed up, you should let the United Nations handle it.”

(“A little-known massacre explains Somalian hatred”, by Roger Simon, October 15, 1993, The Baltimore Sun)

Roger Simon pointed his finger at UN Pakistani soldiers’ retaliatory massacre of Somali civilians and children on June 13, 1993, as where the UN messed up, and also at the bias President Clinton showed in his criticising Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid for killing UN troops but not the UN forces for the “slaughter of Somalian civilians”:

“Much has been made over the June 5 ambush of Pakistani United Nations forces in Mogadishu. Some 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed by Aidid’s gunmen.

Very little has been made, however, of what followed eight days later:

Pakistani soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons on a crowd of civilians in Mogadishu.

A 10-year-old boy had the top of his head blown off. A 2-year-old boy was shot in the stomach by a high-velocity bullet. At least 20 civilians were slaughtered.

And then, as the survivors lay in the streets begging for help, the Pakistanis got in their U.N. vehicles and roared off.

“There was a man whose arm was almost severed,” Paul Watson, a reporter for the Toronto Star, said. “He was basically mush from the hips down. The guy was still alive when the U.N. trucks passed by, but they just kept on going.”

“I saw three trucks with Pakistani soldiers roll right past injured kids,” Alexander Joe of Agence France-Presse said. “The injured kids looked up at the Pakistanis as if to say, ‘Help,’ but they didn’t even look.”

“This is an absolute disaster,” a U.N. official said after the killings. “Before this, we had the moral high ground.”

Remember how angry you were last week when you saw pictures of our slain soldiers in Somalia? So how do you think the Somalis felt when they saw pictures of their slain children?

Four days after the massacre, President Clinton held a news conference. He strongly criticized Aidid for his killing of U.N. soldiers, but spoke not a word against the slaughter of Somalian civilians by U.N. forces.

This did not go unnoticed in Mogadishu.”

(Roger Simon, October 15, 1993, The Baltimore Sun)

Clinton may need some self-reflection.

The massacre very much appeared revenge killings for the June 5 attack on the Pakistani soldiers, when Somali women took part wielding knives and acting as human shields for warlord Aidid’s militia:

“The commander of the Pakistani peace-keeping contingent here – 23 of whose troops were ambushed and slain eight days ago by Somali gunmen – said his forces opened fire on the crowd today only after being shot at by the advancing Somalis. However, witnesses said they heard no shots before the concentrated Pakistani machine-gun fire.

It was the second straight day that Pakistani U.N. troops here opened fire on apparently unarmed demonstrators protesting United Nations-sponsored U.S. air attacks on arms depots and other installations associated with Somali clan leader and warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed in retaliation for his alleged role in instigating the June 5 attacks on the Pakistani troops.

…

Today’s violence seemed to confirm worries expressed by a number of U.N. and Western diplomats that some Pakistanis, angered over the slaying of their comrades last weekend, may be overreacting to Somali demonstrations and may even be eager for revenge. “The Pakistanis are very nervous,” one official said. “They are still upset about the attacks of Saturday, and obviously trigger fingers are a little itchy.”

U.N. military and diplomatic officials here have tried to explain the Pakistani action by saying that a favored technique of armed Somali militiamen here is to hide behind women who press in on unsuspecting troops.

This is apparently what occurred June 5 at a food distribution center near a crowded market, where Somali women diverted the attention of about a dozen Pakistani troops by surrounding them in close quarters, brandishing knives and acting as human shields for gunmen positioned behind them. Those Pakistanis tried shooting into the air, eventually ran out of ammunition and were overwhelmed by a mob that killed and mutilated several of them and held six others captive for two days.”

(“U.N. UNIT KILLS 14 SOMALI CIVILIANS”, by Keith B. Richburg, June 14, 1993, The Washington Post)

One can see that the hatred Somali civilians later unleashed against U.S. soldiers in the October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu had been exhibited against the Pakistani soldiers on June 5, thus calling into question the UN mission command’s judgment in initiating the armed operation on that earlier occasion.

But was it really the responsibility of April Catherine Glaspie, who obviously would not have been in a military command role?

Unfortunately, yes, it was concluded so:

“UNOSOM has four main divisions (see Diagram 5): Force Command, the Division for Humanitarian Relief and Rehabilitation (DHRR), the Division for Political Affairs, and the Justice Division.

These divisions are officially coordinated by, and report to, the office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG). Since March 1993 the SRSG, and head of UNOSOM, is retired US Admiral Jonathan Howe. …

…

… Admiral Howe, a former National Security Advisor under Bush, seems to have been chosen to provide the continuity between the Bush and Clinton Administrations. …

…

Three political factions have developed in UNOSOM. One (‘the Hawks’) includes Howe, US adviser Teitlebaum, the American Ambassador Gosende, Generals Bir and Montgomery and, when she was in post, Howe’s senior adviser, April Glaspie (former US Ambassador to Iraq). It is this group which has dominated the policies of UNOSOM. It has been reported that Gosende and Glaspie were determined to marginalise Aideed, in preference for other more moderate leaders, such as General Mohamed Abshir.¹²  Glaspie has been identified as the one who approved the arms search of Radio Mogadishu which resulted in the deaths of the Pakistani soldiers on 5 June 1993.¹³ …”

(Mark Bradbury, 1994, Oxfam (UK and Ireland))

So, Americans would blame the United Nations, but over at the UN Somalia mission it was former Bush adviser Admiral Jonathan Howe in charge, and Clinton promotee Ms. April Glaspie in the role of senior adviser authorising an armed operation that turned out to trigger the escalating bloodsheds, and the U.S. military’s humiliating loss and subsequent withdrawal.

That was clearly a bad loss for President Clinton in international politics.

Clinton’s national education plan turned out not to be that successful, either, as I mentioned in my first blog article:

“When the new century, or rather the New Millennium as it was referred to by then, finally drew close the views on progress towards it were by no means universal. Some in fact were quite critical about perceived lack of progress in education despite the efforts: at the eve of the New Millennium, then The New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein described the movement toward “Goals 2000” as a failure’s shutout victory over the United States. ¹⁰”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

That said, the discussed matters in education or in politics were not the reasons, not directly anyway, of my being “nearly a decade late” in reviewing the history.

Immediately following the above quoted passage, I wrote the following in January 2009 about myself at the decade-earlier time, namely around the start of “the New Millennium”:

“Just before the New Millennium began I was joining the Silicon Valley in California (after another stint as an educator at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu), arriving at the high-tech world among the dot-com and venture-capitalism rushes, which I wasn’t really part of. The ominous notion someone like me read and heard daily about the New Millennium at the time was not failure of education, but fears for Y2K (also called the ‘millennium bug’), and the tremendous amount of government and corporate efforts being made (and of course money being spent) to prevent disasters from materializing out of tiny numerical ‘legacies’ of computer programs. It was reported that one man in Ontario, Canada, had been preparing for the potential doomsday scenario for 20 years, burying 42 school buses deep underground as a home for himself. ¹¹

Fortunately, when the New Year of 2000 finally came nothing of a catastrophic type happened, though among the worldwide euphoria of New Millennium celebrations one wondered if there might not be a few vampires arriving for the occasion and taking away with them some tormented souls. The U.S. government later reported only a number of small technical glitches at the moment of the arrival of the millennium, such as: …

At the Eve of New Year 2000, I myself was in a hotel in Hong Kong, having arrived in Hong Kong the morning of December 31, 1999, but prevented by unexpected shortage of bus seats from being able to get to Guangzhou (Canton) in mainland China, only 108 miles north, to be with my parents to welcome the new age at midnight. While lights were glittering in Hong Kong, it wasn’t so much in the hotel I was staying but there was a good-spirited celebration for the New Year countdown. I wondered at the time what it might be like at the moment of the New Year across the Chinese mainland border: the city directly across from Hong Kong was Shenzhen, the special economic zone where Chinese market-oriented economic reforms first began in 1979-80 which have transformed the country from reliance on Communist ideology to functioning as one of the main engines of the modern world economy; one of Shenzhen’s most thriving industries has been – you may not believe it – book printing for the rest of the world. ¹³”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

From what was later recalled, in late 1999 I was joining the Silicon Valley in California “among the dot-com and venture-capitalism rushes” and thus, as mentioned, would have been focused on high-tech and concerned with the myths of Y2K and related potential disasters at the turn of the New Millennium – more than with education or politics to write an article about at the time.

Yes and no.

Yes, because working in the computer industry was to be my career focus. However, over-preoccupation with potential disasters from technological glitches already seemed somewhat silly, like the above cited man in Ontario, Canada, who had spent 20 years building a safe home by “burying 42 school buses deep underground” – that turned out to be a waste of time.

That was about as much time, two decades, as China took transforming itself “from reliance on Communist ideology to functioning as one of the main engines of the modern world economy” as I commented – or at least when it came to “book printing for the rest of the world”.

And that was also only a few years more than I have now lived in the same Canadian province.

But no, I had other ideas as well around the start of the New Millennium: I also set up my own website with my first publicly posted article on – what else – education and politics.

As mentioned in the above quote, I had taught computer science at the University of Hawaii before joining Silicon Valley. Working as a university teacher in Honolulu, I had a webpage posting instructional materials – in the early years of the public World Wide Web.

Then, as the New Millennium began I decided to set up my first independent website, at Netscape.com, with a short article written in Chinese, recalling a decade earlier in 1989 teaching at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and watching TV news about, well, neither U.S. education nor international war that my first blog article later in January 2009 discussed, but pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

I also connected with some aspiring young Chinese professionals, including several doing quite well at the first Miss China Internet competition, and sent them my website article for their reading.

The Miss China Internet competition was a nascent phenomenon promoting the fledgling Chinese World Wide Web, and a few years later for reasons unclear was discontinued, and is now largely forgotten. What is especially remarkable about the inaugural competition was that the top winner, Miss Fanhong Chen crowned in December 1999, had physical disabilities confining her to a wheelchair, could not perform some of the routines in traditional pageantry outside of computer and internet, and was nearly disqualified until popular support on the web pressured the organizing committee to revise the rules for her sake:

“On September 1, 1999, the first Ericsson Cup Qualification for Miss China Internet kicked off. Nearly 5,000 young females born in 1970s from different walks of life such as computer, communication, education and banking signed up. The selection was different from previous beauty contests in that the Organizing Committee highlighted that network knowledge and related understanding and application were the decisive factor and that participants must have their own homepage. Chen Fanhong, a girl from Zhejiang with the cyber name Cabbage Caterpillar, took the first place and won the title of first Miss China Internet.

Chen used to win awards in several network application contests and set up her own homepage Home to Cabbage Caterpillar in May 1998.

Meanwhile, due to her physical illness, she also participated in website building of the Health column of Ningbo Public Information Network. The contest fully displayed the charm of the first Miss China Internet as an intellectual woman in the new age. During the process of the contest, Chen was physically not allowed to participate in performance of rhythmic exercise and almost disqualified by the Organizating Committee for this reason. The twists and turns triggered the reflection and discussion on equality of people online and in reality. At last, with the support of the many netizens and efforts made by Zhejiang zone, on November 19, sponsor of China Internet Network Competition issued on its website an article titled … and Secretary General Hu Jiansheng made a statement on behalf of the Organizing Committee that Chen Fanhong was qualified to participate in the contest. The Committee eventually revised the grading method to encourage contestants to put into play their own unique talents. Chen Fanhong also posted an article titled … at her own website, hoping that issues such as equality of people online and in reality and true meaning of network could be further discussed in the following contest.”

(“History – 1999 – Key Events: On December 10, the first Miss China of Internet was born”, China Internet Museum)

I did not get to know the first Miss China Internet, only some who finished below her. In any case, in my email exchanges with the young Chinese professionals, and speaking to some of them when I visited China, they avoided discussing my website article.

And then at some point, all of a sudden and for no reason, the article on my Netscape.com website disappeared without a trace. Not expecting that, I had not kept a copy of my writing.

So that is an anecdote to do with being “nearly a decade late” in January 2009.

On the other hand, in January 2009 I was doing “blogging” for the first time, i.e., posting a “weblog” on a public blogging site.

In any case, the things discussed so far then became ‘small potatoes’, so to speak, when compared to what else soon happened around that decade-earlier time that took my, and the public’s, attention as I later described in January 2009:

“After the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, the world’s attention focused on Al-Qaeda, and the George Bush, Jr. administration failed to link the attacks to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or find “weapon of mass destruction” in that country and instead found itself on the defensive regarding certain practices criticized as “manipulating intelligence”, such as in the case of alleged Iraqi import of “yellowcake” uranium from Niger, investigated by the State Department’s Joseph C. Wilson ²⁵ who happened to have a past serving as the deputy chief of the U.S. embassy in Iraq headed by April Catherine Glaspie during the Iraq-Kuwait crisis in 1990. Many viewed the 2003 U.S.-led coalition operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein – without sanction of the United Nations ²⁶ – as motivated by other agendas, such as President Bush’s desire to pursue “overarching triumph” of conservatism against perception of American weakness, who in doing so may have unwittingly brought back the “Vietnam Syndrome”. ²⁷ There are however others who have continued to argue that the terrorist attacks may have been based on a broader network of involvement than the Al Qaeda per se, and that some sort of Iraqi role could not be ruled out. ^{28, 29}”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told, the surprise terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which brought down the World Trade Center in New York City and severely damaged the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., focused the world’s attention on Al-Qaeda as well as on the subsequent second Gulf War launched by President George Bush, Jr. – son of President George H. W. Bush who had launched the first war in 1991 – to topple the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq; and Joseph C. Wilson, 4th, the former deputy of Ambassador April C. Glaspie in Iraq – of the first Gulf War origin controversy – was dispatched to Niger to find evidence of Hussein’s “weapon of mass destruction”.

Unlike Glaspie, Ambassador Wilson later publicly disputed with the U.S. government over whether such evidence was found, alleging that President Bush, Jr.’s administration “manipulated intelligence to build a case for war”:

“Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.

Wilson’s assertions — both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information — were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address.

Yesterday’s report said that whether Iraq sought to buy lightly enriched “yellowcake” uranium from Niger is one of the few bits of prewar intelligence that remains an open question. Much of the rest of the intelligence suggesting a buildup of weapons of mass destruction was unfounded, the report said.”

(“Plame’s Input Is Cited on Niger Mission: Report Disputes Wilson’s Claims on Trip, Wife’s Role”, by Susan Schmidt, July 10, 2004, The Washington Post)

As reported, there was some controversy around interpretations of Mr. Wilson’s report, but no evidence of “weapon of mass destruction” was found by him and he made that clear publicly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Little wonder that, nearly a decade after these enormous events’ happening, the historical politics I focused on in my first blog article in January 2009 was about war and peace, rather than about pro-democracy protests.

Another historical anecdote at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks fitting both the theme of education and the theme of war and peace – as my first blog article on January 29, 2009 was – is what President George Bush, Jr. was caught doing at the time in 2001:

“On the morning of this day in 2001, President George W. Bush was at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida, reading “The Pet Goat” to inner-city first graders and listening as the children recited the story back to him.

Earlier, Bush had been on the way from his hotel to the school in his motorcade when an aide called him to report that a passenger jet had crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. Bush said he initially believed that the crash was an accident caused, perhaps, by pilot error.

At 9:06 a.m. Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, entered the classroom. Without alarming the children, he quietly told the president that a second airplane had struck the South Tower and that the nation was under attack.

Bush remained seated for seven more minutes, following along as the children finished reading the book. He then commended them on their reading skills and encouraged them to continue to read more and to watch less television. He then posed for photos with the children, their teacher and school administrators.

While cameras clicked, a pool reporter asked him if he was aware of the attacks. “I’ll talk about it later,” Bush replied.”

(“Bush reads ‘The Pet Goat’ to schoolchildren, Sept. 11, 2001”, by Andrew Glass, September 11, 2015, Politico)

So President Bush was teaching children at the Emma E. Booker elementary school, reading the book, “The Pet Goat”, to them – clearly admirable presidential standard his father would have heartily approved.

Well, not really teaching, or even reading that time. President Bush was nearly nonverbal in that appearance, but smilingly listened to the pupils reading aloud their words for that lesson ending with “Kite, Kit, Steal, Playing, Must”, and proceeding to read “The Pet Goat” when White House chief of staff Andrew Card came in to give him bad news. He then continued to listen to the kids reading aloud from the book while staring at his copy. (“President Bush at Emma E. Booker Elementary School on 9/11/2001”, September 11, 2001, Getty Images)

President George W. Bush was not a polished communicator; but if others liked the messenger, or plainly liked the message they would, well, ‘keep the goat’. Speech and communication expert Richard Greene held that opinion:

“Veteran speech consultant and communications expert Richard Greene doesn’t mince words when it comes to criticizing President Bush as a public speaker. “He is the least articulate president that I’ve ever seen or I’ve ever listened to,” Greene told Salon, just before Bush’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. “He is a horrible communicator.”

…

Greene admits that Bush didn’t deliver the ultimate case for war with Iraq – but he says that’s not what the speech was meant to do. “Here’s the great truth about selling a case, whether it’s front of a jury or in front of the world like Bush was Tuesday night: If you like the messenger, if you feel a connection to the messenger, you will be receptive to the message. And his job last night was to make people like him and be more receptive to the message that was to come.” Bush pulled it off, Greene says.”

(““Horrible” speaker, great speech”, by Edward W. Lempinen, January 31, 2003, Salon)

In early 2009 when I began blogging, there was of course great euphoria with the November 2018 election of Barack Obama, the first African American to win the U.S. presidency, and with President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 that garnered everyone’s attention; and so I noted:

“… Only one year ago the prevailing wisdom was that Barack Obama would not become U.S. president, but with the slogan “Yes We Can!” Obama triumphed.”

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 2)”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

My first blog article also mentioned something less well known but relevant in this respect, that had taken place not long after the start of the New Millennium:

“When the New Millennium began, I and others didn’t know that in a couple of years, in 2002, a young American man by the name of Mark Ndesandjo, originally from Kenya, would move to Shenzhen and make his life there as a businessman and piano performer, and that – something many people today still don’t know – this young man is half brother of 2008 U.S. President Elect Barack Obama. ¹⁴”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted, six years before the election of President Obama a half-brother of his, Mark Ndesandjo, had moved to work and live in the Chinese special economic zone of Shenzhen.

Education being a focus, in my first blog article I devoted most of its second half to the story of the mathematician John Nash, for the reason that, while he is widely known as a ‘mad’ mathematical genius, it had been Nash’s obsession with starting “a world peace movement”, namely his intense interest in international peace politics, that got him into the supposed ‘madness’:

“… The 1998 book “A Beautiful Mind” by The New York Times correspondent Sylvia Nasar about the mysterious but often sad life stories of the mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., told of the tremendous interest on the part of the University of Chicago’s mathematics department including the mathematician Shiing-shen Chern, a patriarch figure in mathematics, ⁶⁴ toward an up-and-coming, flamboyant but abrasive John Nash in 1958-1959, who at the time was on the faculty of MIT but was fancying himself as the “the prince of peace”, the leader of a great movement for world peace, and “the left foot of God”; ⁶⁵ when Prof. Adrian Albert of the University of Chicago made an offer of a “prestigious chair” to John Nash, Nash responded that he had to decline because he was “scheduled to become Emperor of Antarctica”. ⁶⁶ Such undiplomatic response and related uttering prompted then MIT president Julius Stratton to call John Nash “a very sick man”. ⁶⁷ Nash, however, confidently told others that he was receiving encrypted, important political “messages” communicating to him through The New York Times. ⁶⁸

So in early 1959 the very promising mathematician John Nash chose not to go to Chicago, staying at MIT in Boston and talking out loud about forming a world peace movement, but soon (on or around April 8, 1959), he was involuntarily sent to McLean Hospital, committed and diagnosed as suffering from ‘paranoid schizophrenia’. ⁶⁹ …

John Nash nevertheless did not really believe that he had a mental illness. …”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told, John Nash was trying to start a world peace movement in early 1959 when he was diagnosed as suffering from “paranoid schizophrenia” – five decades earlier from when I wrote the above in 2009.

About the Nash saga, I noted a marked difference between the real-life story in the 1998 book “A Beautiful Mind” and the story in the later movie adaptation, that in the movie Nash’s obsession to start a world peace movement became instead fancying himself as secretly working for national security:

“… This sad story has been dramatized somewhat differently in the Ron Howard movie adaptation of “A Beautiful mind”, with Nash portrayed by actor Russell Crowe, in which Nash was fancying himself as having been invited to work for a shadowy, secretive agency that was probably part of the Pentagon, analyzing data related to national security. ⁷⁰ In the real-world story according to Sylvia Nasar’s book, Nash’s claim was that he received messages through The New York Times, and although years before his world-peace ideas Nash had done some consulting work for the military and political think-tank the RAND Corporation, his association with RAND ended at the height of the McCarthy era in 1954 when he was napped by the police for engaging in homosexual activity. ⁷¹”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Perhaps adherence to political correctness can be for every stripe, especially when the movie’s world premiere happened to be three months following the September 11 terrorist attacks, in December 2001 – on December 13, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences located at 8949 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

(“World Premiere of ‘A Beautiful Mind’ Set for Thursday, December 13 At The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences”, December 6, 2001, Universal Pictures, seeing-stars.com)

In January 2009 there was also some of my own family history to write about, when it involved early Chinese Christian heritage that was a consequence of historical events of war and peace:

“… While India, where Rev. John Welch Dulles served as an American Presbyterian missionary from 1849 to 1852, ⁴⁹ was a British colony under the control of the East India Company, China never lost its national independence and during the first half of 19^th century was practically closed to the outside world, with the southern city of Canton as its sole trading port with the West…

… Eventually, it was the Opium War of 1839-1842 that forced China to open more ports for trade, cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain (later Macao to Portugal), and subsequently permit Christianity to be preached and legally practiced in that country. ^{56, 57}

My sister Ning, cousin Ying and I, our maternal family’s heritage had close links to the arrivals of Protestant missionaries in China, to the German-Swiss Lutheran and English Presbyterian missionaries (and with interaction to the American Baptist missionaries), and to the ups-and-downs of western missionaries in southern China; the years 1849-1852 when Rev. John Welch Dulles served in India, happened to be the same years when one of the two first-ever Swiss Basel missionaries to China founded and led his first church in the mainland of China – in a small coastal village that happened to be our maternal grandmother’s ancestral village – before his expulsion by the local government and subsequent concentration on proselytizing among a different regional population who were closely affiliated with the Taiping Rebellion. ^{58, 59}”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

And then, the election of the first African-American U.S. president also brought to attention some history of slavery relevant to China:

“When Rev. Robert Morrison of Scotland came from London to Canton, China in 1807 – the first Protestant missionary in history to come to the country and practically the first western missionary of his time to do so – slave trade was being abolished in Britain but slavery remained legal in the British Empire. ^{52, 53} It was with the East India Company Rev. Morrison came to Canton, and he stayed for decades within the confine of the Company, working as a Chinese language translator while on the side labouring on the first Chinese version of the Bible; and when Rev. Morrison died in Canton on August 1, 1834, at a premature age of 52, it happened to be on the very same day when all slaves officially became “apprenticed labourers” in the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 – but with the notable exception of the territories of the East India Company. ^{54, 55} …”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

By this point, readers may have noticed that my first blog article had many labelled footnotes. As a matter of fact, many of the footnotes were, could be, or were intended to be little stories in themselves – several of the quotes and discussions in the present article have originated from these footnotes – but would have made my first blog article too long, and too much to bear.

Instead, soon on February 20, 2009, I started posting my second blog article, or more precisely a series of blog posts through the year 2009, this time focusing on Canadian politics.

(Continuing to Part 2)

Who could have murdered billionaire Barry Sherman and wife Honey, two of Canada’s leading philanthropists? – Part 1: the brand-name drug companies

Who murdered Canadian billionaire Barry Sherman and his wife Honey in December 2017?

Police do not have an answer.

The couple were found dead in their mansion in Toronto, Canada, on Friday, Dec. 15, 2017. By the next day, media reports said that their bodies were discovered “hanging side by side” next to the indoor swimming pool, by Judi Gottlieb, a real estate agent and the couple’s friend who was helping them sell their home, which was listed on the market for $6.9 million. A police source told the media:

“Forensics need to be done and post-mortems on the bodies, but at this stage it appears there was no forced entry and no evidence of anybody else in the house”.

(“Billionaire Couple Found Dead in Toronto Mansion”, by Tom Ozimek, December 16, 2017, The Epoch Times)

Oddly, police initially referred to the deaths as a “medial incident”, describing them as “suspicious” but did not call them homicides:

“Two bodies were found at 50 Old Colony Road in the North York area of the Canadian city on Friday after police received a call around 11:45 a.m. detailing a medical incident at the home, Toronto Police Constable David Hopkinson said at a press conference Friday afternoon.

Investigators described the deaths as “suspicious” but said it is too early to deem them homicides, Hopkinson said. The homicide unit has not yet been called in, he added.”

(“Billionaire Barry Sherman, wife found dead in their Toronto mansion, officials say”, by Julia Jacobo, December 16, 2017, ABC News)

Though police initially did not disclose the identities of the deceased, the Shermans’ deaths were immediately confirmed by Dr. Eric Hoskins, the province of Ontario’s Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, on Twitter. Hoskins described Barry and Honey Sherman as “my dear friends”:

“I am beyond words right now. My dear friends Barry and Honey Sherman have been found dead. Wonderful human beings, incredible philanthropists, great leaders in health care. A very, very sad day. Barry, Honey, rest in peace.”

(Julia Jacobo, December 16, 2017, ABC News)

In that evening also on Twitter, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed condolences by him and wife Sophie to the Shermans’ family and friends:

“Sophie and I are saddened by news of the sudden passing of Barry and Honey Sherman. Our condolences to their family & friends, and to everyone touched by their vision & spirit.”

(Julia Jacobo, December 16, 2017, ABC News)

Barry and Honey Sherman had played a prominent local role in Toronto supporting the ultimately successful election campaign of the Canadian Liberal Party, hosting a $1,500 per person fundraising party for then party leader Trudeau on August 26, 2015 at their home – the very house where they were later found dead in 2017 – despite boycott and protest by some of their Jewish community friends opposing the Liberal Party’s policies on Iran:

“About 30 protesters from the Jewish Defence League lined the street out front of Sherman’s lavish north Toronto home, holding Israeli and Canadian flags.

“Enjoy the food,” a man holding an Israeli flag yelled as guests walked up the driveway, past a line of valets. Tickets for the party and opportunity to meet leader Justin Trudeau reportedly went for $1,500 each.

One guest stopped and smiled at a protester in the picket line. “Joel? What are you doing here?”

The protester, Joel Goldman, said he was there because he didn’t support the Liberals’ position on the Iran nuclear deal.

“They’re just coming to see Mick Jagger tonight,” Goldman said after his friend went inside. “They’re coming to see a rock star.”

…

The Liberals have pledged to reopen diplomatic ties with Iran and have welcomed the new Iranian nuclear deal.”

(“Justin Trudeau fundraiser picketed by Jewish group over Liberals’ support for Iran nuclear deal”, by Jake Edmiston, August 26/27, 2015, National Post)

Two days after the deaths were discovered, on December 17 police confirmed the identities of the deceased in a statement that also corroborated earlier media reports of hanging, describing the cause of deaths as “ligature neck compression”, stating that homicide detectives had now taken the lead in the investigation:

“Police issued a brief statement on Sunday saying the couple, whose bodies were found on Friday, both died from “ligature neck compression,” but the department refused to comment further.

“That is what the post-mortem indicates and that is the terminology that they give us,” Const. Michelle Flannery said when asked to elaborate on findings from autopsies performed over the weekend.

Police also said homicide detectives have taken the lead on investigating the deaths, which have been classified as “suspicious.”

The statement contained no other details, except to formally identify the Shermans as the two people found dead in a Toronto home on Friday.”

(“Police are investigating the ‘suspicious’ deaths of Toronto billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman”, by Adrian Humphreys and Jake Edmiston, December 15/17, 2017, National Post)

A Toronto Police source told The Globe and Mail that “investigators are working on the theory that Mr. Sherman killed his wife, hung her body and then hanged himself at the pool’s edge”, citing the fact that there was no sign of forced entry into the house:

“A Toronto police source told the Globe investigators are working on the theory that Mr. Sherman killed his wife and then took his own life.

…

Police services spokesman Mark Pugash would not confirm details of the case, only stating the homicide squad is in overall charge of the investigation because it has better resources than the local police station, 33 Division.

“Homicide is working with 33 Division on this until we get the post mortem. When we get the post-mortem result, that should give us a good indication of where the investigation goes from there,” he told The Globe.

There was no sign of forced entry to the home. There was no note left behind to explain what had happened, the source said.”

(“Family urges ‘thorough’ investigation into deaths of Apotex CEO Barry Sherman, wife Honey”, by Tavia Grant, Kelly Grant and Jeff Gray, December 16/17, 2017, The Globe and Mail)

The Sherman family members were outraged by the media-reported police notion of “murder-suicide”, rejecting it in a statement issued by the four children of Barry and Honey Sherman:

“The family of Canadian-Jewish billionaire couple Barry and Honey Sherman, found dead at their home in Toronto on Friday, have slammed the police for allegedly circulating rumors that their death was a murder-suicide.

…

In a statement, the family rejected the account – attributed to “police sources” in the local media – that Barry Sherman may have murdered his wife, hanged her body and then himself from a railing that surrounded their basement pool.

The Shermans’ four children said their parents “shared an enthusiasm for life and commitment to their family and community totally inconsistent with the rumors regrettably circulated in the media as to the circumstances surrounding their deaths.”

They added: “We are shocked and think it’s irresponsible that police sources have reportedly advised the media of a theory which neither their family, their friends nor their colleagues believe to be true.”

(“As Canada’s Jewish Community Mourns, Sherman Family Slams Police for ‘Murder-suicide’ Rumor”, by Allison Kaplan Sommer and Reuters, December 19, 2017, Haaretz)

The Sherman family hired experts, including former Toronto Police homicide detectives, to conduct a independent investigation. In late January 2018, a source with direct knowledge of the private probe told the media that the probe found evidence of the Sherman couple having been murdered by “multiple killers”, likely on December 13, the last day they were seen alive:

“Private investigators believe that the billionaire Toronto couple found dead at their home in December were murdered by multiple killers, a source with direct knowledge of the parallel probe into their mysterious deaths told CBC Toronto.

The new information contradicts a widely circulated theory that Barry and Honey Sherman died as a result of a murder-suicide — a notion that is regarded as fiction by those who knew the Shermans well.

…

The Sherman family has hired a team of experts, which includes a number of former Toronto homicide detectives, to conduct a separate, independent investigation.

…

Their wrists showed evidence that they had been, at one point, bound together. No rope or other materials that could have been used to tie their wrists were discovered, the source told CBC Toronto.

…

The team of private investigators believes that the Shermans were, in fact, killed on Dec. 13, two days before they were found. This conclusion is based on the fact that Honey was wearing the same clothes she was last seen in, on Dec. 13, according to the source.

Private investigators also believe that Honey struggled with her killer or killers. She had cuts on her lip and nose, and was sitting in a pool of her own blood when she was discovered. …”

(“Barry and Honey Sherman were murdered by multiple killers, private investigators believe: source”, January 20/23, 2018, CBC News)

Only after media reporting of the private investigation findings did the Toronto Police confirm that the deaths were now being investigated as a “double homicide”, and a “targeted” attack. The Sherman family issued a statement saying that this was the family’s conclusion “from the outset” and was “consistent” with the private investigation’s findings:

“Toronto police believe Barry and Honey Sherman were victims of a targeted attack and are treating their deaths as murders, the lead investigator said Friday afternoon.

…

The Sherman family released a statement after the police news conference.

“The announcement by the Toronto Police Service that the tragic deaths of their parents are being investigated as a double homicide was anticipated by the Sherman family,” the statement read. “This conclusion was expressed by the family from the outset and is consistent with the findings of the independent autopsy and investigation.”

(“Double homicide investigation: Barry and Honey Sherman ‘targeted’, police confirm”, by Kevin Donovan, January 26, 2018, The Hamilton Spectator)

So who were billionaire Barry Sherman and wife Honey, a wealthy and prominent Canadian couple who met such a brutal and indignant end?

75-year-old Barry Sherman was the founder and owner of the Canadian pharmaceutical giant Apotex Inc., which he founded in 1974 and grew into the largest Canadian-owned pharmaceutical company, producing and marketing more than 300 generic drug products.

According to the December 2017 National Post story by Adrian Humphreys and Jake Edmiston cited earlier, Canadian Business magazine had recently assessed Sherman’s fortune at $4.77 billion CAD, ranking him the 15th richest in Canada. The earlier-cited December 2017 Haaretz story by Allison Kaplan Sommer reported Forbes magazine’s ranking of Sherman as the 12th richest Canadian and 660th among the world’s wealthiest billionaires.

But in reporting their deaths, the media emphasized the praises given to the Shermans by prominent politicians and community leaders, for their renowned generosity – “incredible philanthropists” as Ontario Health Minister Hoskins was quoted as saying.

Canadian Senator Linda Frum, a family friend of the Shermans, said of Barry Sherman the businessman and philanthropist:

“He liked to make money because he loved giving money away — and he did, he gave away very generously”.

(Adrian Humphreys and Jake Edmiston, December 15/17, 2017, National Post)

70-year-old Honey Sherman was a board member of several notable non-profit organizations, including the York University Foundation and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Their deaths were a devastating loss to both the Jewish community and the broader community in Toronto because the couple were “among the most active and generous philanthropists”, said Senator Frum: 

“The Jewish community and the broader community in Toronto are going to be devastated by this loss because they were among the most active and generous philanthropists. For them, community involvement wasn’t just about giving their money, they took a profound and deep interest in almost every institution and organization they supported”.

(Adrian Humphreys and Jake Edmiston, December 15/17, 2017, National Post)

Indeed, Toronto’s Jewish community was stunned by the Shermans’ deaths. Flags were lowered to half-mast at Toronto’s Sherman Campus, which houses a United Jewish Appeal Federation headquarters, a Jewish community center, the community’s Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and Jewish family services and other agencies.

Eli Rubenstein, national director of March of the Living Canada, described the Shermans as “among the leading philanthropists in Canada”, maybe “the most generous” and “definitely among the most generous”:

“The Shermans are among the leading philanthropists in Canada. They may be the most generous in the country, and definitely among the most generous”.

(Allison Kaplan Sommer and Reuters, December 19, 2017, Haaretz)

Rubenstein noted that in addition to their donations to Jewish charities, the couple supported a “host of universal causes”, especially “Holocaust education” because Honey Sherman had been born in a European displaced persons camp to parents who had survived the Holocaust.

(Allison Kaplan Sommer and Reuters, December 19, 2017, Haaretz)

According to an August 2017 story in The Canadian Jewish News, Barry Sherman had donated a record amount of $50 million to the United Jewish Appeal, his Apotex Foundation had donated more than $50 million worth of medicines internationally in the past 10 years, and he was proud that Apotex was “recognized as the No. 1 pharmaceutical company in Canada for total corporate donations”:

“Over the years, Sherman has demonstrated that community is as important to him as success in business. He has been a community leader and shared his wealth generously with the community. He is a major contributor to Jewish organizations, including the UJA – to which he has donated a recorded amount of $50 million – and the Joint Distribution Committee.

He and his wife, Honey, have donated millions to medical research and health-care facilities – including an important addition to Baycrest – and community centres in Toronto and elsewhere.

Sherman also gives through his company, Apotex, and the Apotex Foundation. “One of our major community contributions are to the United Way,” Sherman states on the Apotex website. “We are proud to be recognized as the No. 1 pharmaceutical company in Canada for total corporate donations, being one of the few companies in the country to raise over $1 million.”

The Apotex Foundation is a privately held charitable organization, which has donated more than $50 million in medicines over the last 10 years. Critical medicines have been shipped to every disaster zone around the globe to provide assistance to humans in need.”

(“Barry Sherman ranks High both in wealth and philanthropy”, by Myron Love, August 19, 2017, The Canadian Jewish News)

The Shermans’ “legacy of giving and selfless dedication” was also the focus of their public funeral in December 2017, which was “attended by more than 6,500 and live-streamed”, including many of the business and political elite.

(“The other side of Barry Sherman”, by Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Prime Minister Trudeau, Senator Frum, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, Ontario Health Minister Hoskins and Toronto Mayor John Tory were among the attendees. In her eulogy, Premier Wynne urged all to follow the example of the Shermans’, who had been “full of compassion, hope and generosity”:

“Wynne urged mourners to follow the Shermans’ example: “May we all be inspired to live as they did. Full of compassion, hope and generosity.””

(“‘Painful and so bizarrely surreal’: Thousands mourn deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman”, by Andrea Janus and Nick Boisvert, December 21, 2017, CBC News

In their eulogies, Sherman family members and friends, including Senator Frum and Mayor Tory, reminisced about the couple’s generosity, like Mary Shechtman recalled about her sister Honey, “She wanted to give everything to everybody”:

“Tory told mourners he was “profoundly saddened” by the deaths of the Shermans, and paid tribute to their dedication to bettering their city, and their country.

Long before he was in politics, Tory would ask the couple for support for various charitable projects, “and rarely if ever went away without some support,” he said.

…

Joel Ulster, who called himself Barry Sherman’s oldest friend, described him not only as “the smartest person, but much more importantly, he had the biggest heart.”

The Shermans not only gave millions to charities, he noted, they also helped many people quietly and privately, he said.

“Our hearts are broken.”

Sen. Linda Frum, said it was “a privilege” to call the Shermans friends, and reminisced about Honey Sherman’s kindness. …

“It was easy to love Honey and everybody did.”

Honey Sherman’s sister, Mary Shechtman, tearfully recalled how her relationship with her sister was marked by two favourite things: laughing and shopping.

…

“She just wanted to make everybody happy,” Shechtman said through tears. “She wanted to give everything to everybody.””

(Andrea Janus and Nick Boisvert, December 21, 2017, CBC News)

At the funeral, the Shermans’ son Jonathan announced the creation of a new philanthropic foundation in their parents’ name: The Honey and Barry Foundation of Giving.

Such exemplary spirits of giving!

Shortly before their unexpected and shocking deaths, the Shermans had been prominently honoured by the Canadian parliament and government.

On November 29, Honey and Barry Sherman had been awarded a Senate 150 Anniversary Medal for their being “among Canada’s most generous philanthropists” – as a couple given one of “twelve medals to twelve individuals” awarded by Senator Frum.

(“Senate 150 Anniversary Medal”, November 29, 2017, Senator Linda Frum)

Also in November 2017, the Canadian government had made the decision to name Barry Sherman to the Order of Canada, with the appointment signed by Governor General Julie Payette before their deaths. That prior timing turned out to be necessary for this high honour to be bestowed posthumously:

“In a statement issued on Saturday evening, the family of Barry and Honey Sherman said that news that their late father has been appointed to the Order of Canada, which was made public on Friday, provides them some comfort during a “most difficult time.”

…

“To receive this honour posthumously speaks volumes about our father and confirms what we have always known, he was a true humanitarian and a great Canadian,” the statement from Sherman’s family reads. “We take comfort knowing that his countless contributions to healthcare and philanthropy have been memorialized in such an enduring manner.”

The Order of Canada cannot be awarded to someone after their death but the committee charged with deciding who gets the award actually granted it to Barry Sherman at a meeting in November and Governor General Julie Payette signed the appointment prior to his death.

In their statement, Sherman’s family note that the Order of Canada is “one of this nation’s highest honours.””

(“Family of Barry Sherman say Order of Canada appointment ‘speaks volumes’ about father”, by Chris Fox, December 30, 2017, CP24 News)

The Sherman family had reasons to be appreciative, or at least “take comfort” as they said, cited above. Had these Canadian official gestures not been made in November 2017, these two leading Canadian philanthropists would have forever missed the high and enduring national  honours several weeks later when their “targeted” double homicide occurred in December.

One cannot help but wonder: Who could have committed such a cruel and heinous crime? Who could have murdered the beloved Barry and Honey Sherman, who had been – as praised by Senator Linda Frum and Jewish community leader Eli Rubenstein – among “the leading philanthropists” and “the most active and generous philanthropists” in Canada?

According to a Maclean’s investigative article published in April 2018, police did not have an easy answer about this crime and were thus also looking into the broader circumstances:

“The ongoing investigation into the Shermans’ deaths now casts a harsher spotlight on their lives as police try to answer why the couple were victims of a “targeted” attack…”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

The article mentioned the huge amount of police resources allocated to the case:

“… The mystery deepens as each day passes, with no arrests or known suspects. An affidavit filed in court by a Toronto police officer detailed resources being deployed: 51 officers working the case, combing through more than 2,000 hours of security footage, with “474 investigative actions” being “vigorously pursued,” 240 people interviewed or identified to be interviewed. More warrants and “covert tactics” to track down the killers are expected. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Intriguingly, when considering the broader, albeit hypothetical, question of “who could have murdered” the Shermans, it will become clear – as I review the relevant media coverage, past and present – that, despite all the high praises the couple have received, there have also been no shortage of persons and organizations that hated Barry Sherman.

The Maclean’s investigative article pointed out that two decades ago Sherman himself had said he could be a murder target for his work in the pharmaceutical industry, and that since then his list of enemies has grown even longer:

“Two decades ago, Sherman himself admitted he could be a target for murder. “For a thousand bucks paid to the right person, you can probably get someone killed. Perhaps I’m surprised that hasn’t happened,” he told author Jeffrey Robinson in the 2001 book Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power Inside the Pharmaceutical Industry. After that, his list of adversaries only grew, as privately held Apotex expanded into more than 100 countries, including Mexico and India, and began developing a cannabis-based pill. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

A paradoxical and unpleasant scenario to contemplate, that Sherman may have been a murder target for his work when his pharmaceutical company benefited people in so many countries.

A potential explanation is that, while he was adored by those close to him Barry Sherman was also loathed by others and was accused by some as “unethical in business dealings”, according to the Maclean’s article:

“… A renowned risk-taker, disruptor and pitbull professionally, Sherman was a polarizing figure—regarded as a softie with a heart of gold by those in his proximity and loathed by those who claim they were outfoxed or betrayed by him. The man who learned weeks before his death of his nomination to the Order of Canada was also called out as unethical in business dealings. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Hmm, so the Order of Canada was bestowed on a businessman who had been regarded as “a softie with a heart of gold” by some but had also been “called out as unethical in business dealings” by others, and who was soon murdered alongside his wife in what the police have called “a targeted attack”!

While such an alternative depiction would be unflattering of Sherman, interestingly in his eulogy at the Shermans’ funeral Apotex president and COO Jack Kay said something subtly that could be interpreted similarly, that Barry Sherman was “kind of a teddy bear in real life, but with a mind like a steel trap and the stubbornness of a bull”:

“Apotex president and COO Jack Kay, his voice breaking numerous times, reminisced about 35 years of both a business and personal relationship with Barry Sherman and his family. In 1982, Sherman interviewed Kay in Montreal for a vice-president’s job at Apotex, and ended their conversation by saying: “Come move to Toronto and we will build this company and have a lot of fun and make a lot of money.”

He noted Sherman’s vast intellect, devotion to hard work and love of his family and friends.

“Barry was just a regular guy,” Kay said. “He was kind of a teddy bear in real life, but with a mind like a steel trap and the stubbornness of a bull. He changed my life, and I’m so very grateful to have shared those years with him.””

(Andrea Janus and Nick Boisvert, December 21, 2017, CBC News)

Still, at first glance at the facts as recently reported in the media, it isn’t immediately obvious how unethical Sherman was in his pharmaceutical business practice, other than that he was a man in many legal disputes.

Sherman’s privately-owned Apotex has launched an astonishingly large number of lawsuits over the years, more than 1,200 in the Federal Court of Canada alone since 1990:

“Launched in 1974, it was a corporation in constant battle mode: against Big Pharma, against government regulators, against anyone who dared question the founder’s pure intentions. He touted himself as a patent-busting underdog, the courtroom crusader bravely suing the Mercks and Pfizers and Bayers of the world so he could provide needy patients with cheaper generics. “If we’re thieves, we’re Robin Hoods,” he once claimed. Winning in the courts was so crucial to his success that he liked to tell his employees they worked for a legal company that happened to sell medications.

Sherman railed against “incompetent” bureaucrats who had the audacity to disagree with his interpretations of federal drug law—and he dragged them to court, too. In Federal Court alone, Apotex has launched more than 1,200 legal actions, including 83 against Health Canada since 1990. A ministry spokesman says “because of the high volume of cases,” officials can’t even begin to calculate how many millions Sherman’s litigation has cost Canadian taxpayers. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As told above, Sherman prided himself and his company as “Robin Hoods” expanding the consumer reach of their cheaper generic drugs; he and his company were in “constant battle mode” using legal litigation as a mighty weapon, against Big Pharma – the international pharmaceutical giants that dwarf his Canadian generic drug company – government regulators, and anyone who dared to stand in their way.

Sherman’s litigations have cost Canadian taxpayers “many millions”, according to a government spokesman. But while that may have been true, from the standpoint of Barry Sherman and Apotex the many legal battles were a necessity.

When Sherman admitted he could be a murder target, as cited earlier from a Maclean’s investigative article, he did so to Jeffrey Robinson, author of the book Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry, who interviewed him.

As excerpted from the 2001 book, an enormous amount of legal litigation is what a generic drug company had to endure to be successful because a generic drug is a “copycat” of a brand-name drug, the generic drug company must not infringe on existing drug patents and the determination is through legal battles:

“A generic drug is a copycat version of a branded drug, permitted to come onto the market as soon as the branded drug goes off patent, but only on the condition that the copycat is “bioequivalent” with the original, which means the generic version must be more than just a chemical copy. It has to be as safe and effective as the branded drug and act in exactly the same way. It must contain an identical amount of active ingredient and must be in the same dosage. A generic must also meet standards for “bioavailability,” meaning that it must deliver the same exact amount of the active ingredient into the bloodstream and in very nearly the exact same time, within a narrowly defined margin of difference.

…

Because the generic manufacturers have not had to undergo huge R&D expenses or vastly complicated clinical trials, building a generic costs considerably less than developing a branded drug. Where Merck may spend $300 million on researching and developing a drug, Apotex can get its generic version on the market for around $1 million.

But first the generic company has to get past the branded companies’ lawyers.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

I find that author Jeffrey Robinson’s very precise definition of the technical requirements for a generic drug, quoted above, needs to be clarified, namely that in practice an Apotex generic drug may not necessarily contain “an identical amount of active ingredient” as the brand-name drug.

In the following example in a legal dispute between GlaxoSmithKline and Apotex in 2003, that Big Pharma company was unable to prove to the court that Apotex’s generic version of the brand-name drug Paxil actually contained sufficient amounts of the patented active ingredient:

“Barry Sherman, chief executive of privately held Apotex, said the company is “elated” with the ruling of the U.S. federal court in Chicago, but could not pinpoint a launch date for its version of Paxil.

…

Federal court Judge Richard Posner found that while Glaxo’s patent is valid, the Middlesex, England-based company could not prove that Apotex’s version contains sufficient amounts of patented active ingredient hemihydrate to constitute an infringement.

The ruling says TorPharm Pharmaceuticals did not infringe the Glaxo patent with its own drug. TorPharm is a subsidiary of Apotex Inc.

Glaxo said it would appeal while it continues to defend the Paxil patent in a separate case.”

(“Apotex wins dispute with Glaxo: Legal action over Paxil still pending”, by Michael Lewis, March 5, 2003, National Post)

Clearly, if a generic version did not contain sufficient amounts of a key active ingredient of a brand-name drug, the generic quite likely would not be as “effective as the branded drug”, let alone “act in exactly the same way” as stipulated in the earlier quote from Robinson’s book.

Also quoted in Robinson’s book, Barry Sherman extensively lamented about how difficult it was to invest in the health-care industry in Canada, pinpointing the main unfavourable factors as the anti-competitive government regulations and the brand-name drug companies’ “pseudogenerics”, as well as the brand-name drug companies’ legal tactics:

“The entire generic industry is, Sherman says with obvious frustration, “Unsustainable. The combination of the anti-competitive regulations and the pseudogenerics, those two factors make it impossible to continue to invest in the health-care industry in Canada. As a result of which, the monopolies will go on forever. No one will invest in new products because you won’t be able to get it onto the market.”

Pseudogenerics are the branded companies’ own drug, repackaged as a generic, brought to the market a few months before the generic company can launch its own version.

“Or they hang us up in court. … Whether you’re right or wrong, when you get to court it’s fifty-fifty. You’ve got a non-infringing process and they’ll get a Nobel laureate to swear that the moon is made of cheese. So even if you’ve got 99 per cent certainty that you’re not infringing, you know they’re going to sue you anyway and so you’re off the market for that period of time with no revenue to pay for the litigation. Under any normal scenario, you just launch the product, then you litigate, and if you lose at the end of the day you give up your profits. In this country it’s rigged against us. We have to carry all the expenses, have no sales to deduct that from, and if we’re stopped because the court rules against us, then we’ve lost all of our investment, not just the profit but all of our investment. And that means we can’t invest.””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

I find it interesting that Sherman’s view of leading scientists was so unflattering, that the branded companies would get a Nobel laureate “to swear in court that the moon is made of cheese”, i.e., to speak totally without scientific integrity.

Here are some of my interpretations of Sherman’s words quoted above: one, upon the launch of a generic drug the company would be sued by the brand-name drug company regardless of whether patents were infringed, and so Sherman’s company chose to “just launch the product” first and then litigate; and, two, in Canada the “anti-competitive regulations” kept the generic drugs off the market during a legal dispute, and so his company also sued the government for that reason.

Barry Sherman sounded very competitive but not exactly “unethical”, or at least not like “a Nobel laureate” that he belittled.

Shortly after the Shermans’ murder, Amir Attaran, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa, disputed the public image of Barry Sherman and Apotex as legal fighters bringing cheaper drugs to Canadians. Generic drugs in Canada are among the most expensive generics in the world, according to Attaran:

““I think he was probably the most active litigant in any industry in Canada,” said Amir Attaran, a professor in the faculties of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa.

“I practise in Federal Court, and there’s no one else in Federal Court whose name is attached to more cases that I know of.”

…

“That’s how they spin it. He was always in court fighting for Canadians to get cheaper drugs,” Attaran said.

“That is outrageous fabrication. Because for all his efforts being the biggest generic drug company in Canada, having the greatest influence of any company in Canada over generic drugs, Canada pays among the highest prices in the world for generics. And that has been documented again and again.””

(“When it came to launching legal battles, Apotex founder Barry Sherman was ‘absolutely singular’”, by Victoria Gibson and Jacques Gallant, December 22, 2017, Toronto Star)

That public image was “outrageous fabrication” because “Canada pays among the highest prices in the world for generics. And that has been documented again and again.”

Now that begins to look not so ethical about Barry Sherman, i.e., fighting many legal battles to push his company’s generic drugs onto the market but not passing on the gains to the Canadian consumers – not a “Robin Hood” if Attaran’s view is right.

Attaran also called Sherman “unethical in business”:

“Apotex has been involved in more than a thousand court cases in Canada, using the legal system to aggressively challenge drug patents.

“It definitely makes it the most litigious pharma company in Canada and probably the most litigious company period,” says University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran.

“It’s fair to observe the way he did business he would have had many enemies,” he says.

Canadians pay some of the highest prices in the world for generic drugs, and Attaran argues Sherman’s business practices contributed to that.

“He was unethical in business. His drugs were overpriced and gouged Canadians,” he said on Twitter.

(“Barry and Honey Sherman: The mystery of the strangled billionaires”, by Jessica Murphy, February 4, 2018, BBC News)

As Attaran observed about Sherman in the above, “the way he did business he would have had many enemies”. This observation points to a possible connection between the Shermans’ murder and Barry Sherman’s way of conducting business.

But “price gouging” as Attaran accused Sherman of would have been ripping off many more Canadians.

Nonetheless, again, the perspectives from Sherman’s standpoint were quite the opposite. In the last quote earlier from Robinson’s 2001 book, Sherman was quoted as saying that it was difficult to invest in the Canadian health-care industry to make a profit.

Here is a more objective description by Robinson in his book, of Apotex’s drug prices and profitability:

“… Sherman brought generic drugs to market, charged 70 to 80 per cent of the brand price, took half the market share, and steered Apotex through sixteen years of strong growth.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

No doubt Apotex’s half share of the entire Canadian market and “sixteen years of strong growth” indicated strong profitability. Perhaps 70-80% of the brand-name drug price was still, as Attaran has said, “among the highest prices in the world for generics”, which would mean that Sherman and Apotex did not pass enough of the profits to the Canadian consumers.

But if one reads more carefully his words earlier quoted from Robinson’s book, Sherman’s main preoccupation did not seem to be on cheaper drugs, but on breaking “the monopolies” of the brand-name drug companies.

Another quote of him here from Robinson’s book confirms that Sherman’s higher priorities were expanding the Canadian drug industry and creating pharmaceutical jobs in Canada:

“The generic industry is vital to Canada. When I say vital I’m talking about high-tech employment, research, and saving money for the health-care system. I’ve spent thirty years building this fantastic industry in Canada, we employ thousand of people, we save billions of dollars for the health-care system, we’ve done all the right things…”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

I can interpret Sherman’s priorities stated above as: this fantastic generic industry in Canada, high-tech employment, research and – then – cheaper health-care.

And I would not be surprised if Sherman indeed directed Apotex’s business strategies and finance in that priority order.

In fact, after Sherman’s murder, author Jeffrey Robinson again restated Sherman’s agenda in that order, “creating jobs in Canada” and “protecting the little guy against big pharma”:

““Barry Sherman was constantly at war with everybody and when I talked to him, he had an agenda, ‘I’m creating jobs in Canada’, ‘I’m protecting the little guy against big pharma’,” Robinson recalled.

“He was basically saying, ‘it’s me against the world.’””

(“SHERMAN MURDERS: Did organized crime kill billionaire?”, by Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

So, it wasn’t fully ethical when Barry Sherman and Apotex emphasized so much to the public – probably in their advertising mode – as noted by Attaran, that they fought hard in court to bring cheaper drugs to Canadians. But when he was interviewed for a book on the pharmaceutical industry, Sherman did carefully phrase his objectives.

Now, all that legal fighting must have also come with huge legal costs, which would have reduced the amount of savings that could have been passed on to the Canadian consumers.

Shortly after the Shermans’ murder, Toronto Life magazine republished a 2008 article on the Shermans, that included a succinct description of what Apotex achieved and how it did it, citing a few telling numbers:

“When Sherman founded the company in 1974, generic drugs were generally dismissed as flawed imitations of the real thing. Since then, Apotex has become Canada’s largest drug manufacturer, filling 75 million prescriptions a year. Most of the company’s 300 products are versions of such widely used drugs as the antidepressant Paxil, the antihistamine Claritin and the antibiotic Tetracyn. Apotex tests and develops its products with a staff of 2,100 scientists, who run a 105-bed clinical hospital for human guinea pigs.

Sherman also spends a small fortune on litigation—a full 50 per cent of what he invests in research. Generic manufacturers like Apotex live or die by the speed with which they can plunge into the market­place with copycat versions. So they make it their business to shorten the duration that brand name companies hold on to drug monopolies, weighing potential profits against the risk of lawsuits. It’s not unusual for Apotex—probably the country’s biggest litigator—to be engaged in 100 court cases simultaneously.”

(“Bitter Pill”, by Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

The above recount of Apotex’s history included at least three matters worth digging into for their relevance to Sherman’s business practice: one, Apotex had a staff of 2,100 scientists who run “a 105-bed clinical hospital for human guinea pigs”; two, Sherman had an astonishing amount of business spending on legal litigation, equal to 50% of his investment on research; and three, Apotex typically began marketing a generic drug when the brand-name drug patent was still in effect – trying to cut the patent short, taking the risk of getting into legal disputes.

Firstly, how bad were Sherman’s drug trials using “human guinea pigs”? That could involve issues of ethics.

A 2006 news story on Aotex’s generic version of the heart drug Plavix mentioned the human experiments at that 105-bed Apotex hospital, but revealed no detail as to any risks they could pose to the patients’ health:

“Apotex has more than 6,300 employees and fills one in every three prescriptions in Canada, Sherman said. Sales of Plavix this year may double his annual revenue to $2 billion, he said.

The Apotex complex covers several city blocks in the Toronto suburb of Weston. Sherman owns just about everything that touches his drugs, from the chemistry labs to the plants that produce capsules, pill bottles and labels.

To speed drug development, he opened a 105-bed hospital three years ago to conduct drug trials. The beds are filled with paid participants from a database of 30,000 pre-screened people. Blood drawn there can be analysed in labs around the corner, and medications can be rapidly modified and sent back to the hospital for additional tests.

For more than a week now, Apotex equipment has been churning out copies of Plavix pills at a rate of six million every 14 hours. The product, used to prevent heart attacks and strokes, keeps platelets from clumping together and forming clots. Plavix last year was the world’s second-biggest selling drug behind Pfizer Inc.’s cholesterol medicine Lipitor.”

(“Apotex CEO vows he’ll best Sanofi, Bristol-Myers in battle over Plavix rights; ‘I don’t ever shy away from a fight,’ says Barry Sherman”, by Lisa Rapaport, August 19, 2006, Telegraph-Journal)

It certainly sounded like very high-intensity patient drug trials at Apotex’s hospital purposely built for drug trials, a hospital owned, like “just about everything” of Apotex’s, by Barry Sherman.

Nevertheless, reviewing the press archives I have not come across news about these drug trials and so, I guess like others say, ‘no news is good news’.

Secondly, how could Apotex sell a generic drug before the original patent’s expiration and what were the legal risks like? This obviously had much to do with his company’s huge legal spending.

Consider the example of Plavix here. The above quote mentioned that Apotex was mass-producing and mass-selling its generic version of the heart drug Plavix at the time in 2006.

The patent for the brand-name Plavix was still in effect and would be for another five more years; predictably, Sherman’s move got Apotex into a serious legal battle in the U.S.:

“His latest battle, which played out in a U.S. court Friday, is over Plavix, the world’s second-best selling drug, with $6.2 billion US in sales last year. If Apotex prevails, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Sanofi-Aventis SA will lose their exclusive right to market Plavix five years earlier than planned and Apotex will get a windfall selling a cheaper version of the $4-a-day blood-thinning pill.

Sherman is at the centre of a storm involving drug prices. Apotex and generic-drug makers are challenging the validity of product patents so they can sell less-expensive copies sooner than scheduled. …

…

… In a hearing Friday in U.S. court in New York, Bristol-Myers and Sanofi
asked a judge for an injunction to halt sales of Apotex’s generic copy of Plavix and for an order that the Canadian drugmaker recall inventory already sold. Apotex has argued the Plavix patent was invalid and that an injunction would cause irreparable harm by forcing a recall of millions of dollars in medication already distributed.”

(Lisa Rapaport, August 19, 2006, Telegraph Journal)

As the story told, “Apotex and generic-drug makers are challenging the validity of product patents so they can sell less-expensive copies sooner than scheduled”.

So, Apotex wasn’t the only generic-drug makers who challenged existing brand-name drug patents.

But Apotex also put its generic version of Plavix on the market five years before the patent’s expiration, doing so by simply arguing that the patent was invalid. It was Barry Sherman’s battle and not just Apotex’s, as the above news story stated univocally.

The court injunction being sought by the Big Pharma companies in this case, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, while the existing drug patent was being contested in a broader court battle, would force Apotex to immediately stop sale of the generics and recall the sold products.

That would mean absolutely no income for Apotex at this point in time while having to pay the costs of developing and selling the generics.

Getting the injunction was critical for these Big Pharma brand-name drug companies, because Sherman’s move caused them major financial losses:

“Sanofi and Bristol-Myers “lost $10 billion in market capitalization since” Apotex began selling the generic Aug. 8, said Evan Chesler, the companies’ lawyer, during opening arguments.

“You can never put our Humpty Dumpty back together again if this thing isn’t stopped.”

Apotex attorney Robert Silver said during opening arguments that removing generic Plavix from the market would harm consumers by driving up prices. “If we’re off the market, then they have the entire market again and they can charge whatever they want.””

(Lisa Rapaport, August 19, 2006, Telegraph Journal)

As Evan Chesler, lawyer for Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb, was quoted telling a U.S. court on August 18, 2006, the two companies lost $10 billion in their stock market worth since August 8 when Apotex began selling its generic version with the original patent still in effect – only about 10 days of Apotex’s sale of generics already made these Big Pharma companies feel like a broken “Humpty Dumpty”.

In response, U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein ordered an injunction to halt Apotex’s sale of the generics while the legal litigation was in process, but refused to order Apotex to recall the sold products:

“… On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein agreed and issued an injunction that prevented Apotex from producing generic versions of the drug until the case has concluded. However, Judge Stein refused to order Apotex to recall pills that it had already shipped.”

(“Apotex rolled the dice on Plavix and they came up snake eyes”, by Paul Waldie, September 2, 2006, The Globe and Mail)

So, Sherman’s aggressive, risk-taking strategy, putting the generic Plavix on the U.S. market in violation of the drug patent, got Apotex a 10-day sale revenue that it could keep for the time being.

That 10-day market damage inflicted on Bristol-Myers Squibb was enough to see the Big Pharma company’s CEO be forced to step down:

“Bristol-Myers loss of Plavix was only temporary, but the impact of Apotex’s aggressive strategy was devastating.

…

Bristol-Myers’ earnings stagnated and its share price plummeted. For getting outmaneuvered by Apotex, Bristol-Myers’ chief executive was
forced to resign. And it’s not over yet. The two sides are back in court fighting over whether the Plavix patent is valid once again. …”

(“Apotex’s jagged little pills”, by John Greenwood, January 29, 2007, National Post)

I also note that compared to, as discussed earlier, Apotex’s generic drug prices at 70-80% of the brand-name prices in Canada, in the U.S. in 2006 Apotex’s generic Plavix was in great demand even at 80-90% of the brand-name price:

“Apotex’s generic version is selling for about 10% to 20% less than typical US$4-a-day Plavix, which is widely used to prevent recurrences of heart attacks and strokes. Bristol-Myers announced this week it was giving rebates to its customers in an attempt to counter Apotex’s generic price.”

(“Generic drug, specific issue: Apotex fights Plavix”, by Stephanie Saul, August 16, 2006, National Post)

With such a heated head-to-head competition between Apotex and the two international pharmaceutical giants, and the Apotex generic version selling briskly despite only at a modest discount, I guess there would be less ground for the legal and medical expert Amir Attaran to accuse Barry Sherman of gouging, in this case, U.S. consumers.

And now, thirdly, how large in reality was Sherman’s spending on legal costs, that equalled 50% of his research investment?

The Plavix case illustrated that serious legal spending was necessary to ensure a high-stake and fierce dispute over the right to sell drugs in a lucrative market to stay within the legal realm and be properly adjudicated, and not get carried away.

A 2008 news story cited a few interesting numbers about Canadian lawyers earning generic drug litigation money and their gratitude toward Sherman, especially in the context of patent litigation generally in Canada:

“Harry Radomski of the law firm Goodmans in Toronto is lead generic drug counsel for Apotex inc. He’s driving a litigation train.

Notice of compliance cases — a method pharmaceutical companies use for obtaining approval of a new drug — constitute some 90% of the firm’s IP litigation, generating between $10-and $20-million in annual billings for Mr. Radomski and his colleagues.

The truth is that pharmaceutical litigation of the kind known as generic drug litigation is a docket hog. Such cases make up at least 60% of all patent cases in the Federal Court and consume at least 75% of the legal fees. Indeed, on one summer day, 17 of the 20 motions on the Federal Court list in Toronto were pharmaceutical cases.

“IP litigation lawyers should erect a monument to Barry Sherman,” says Scott Jolliffe, managing partner of Gowling Lafleur Henderson in Toronto.

…

“The pure profit of the generics is one thousandfold that of the brands, so there’s huge money at stake for both parties,” Mr. Jolliffe says.

It pays the generic companies, then, to take on litigation with slim chances of success in the hope that one suit will pay off in spades.

“Barry Sherman will tell you that he needs to win only one case in 100 in order for his company to stay very profitable,” Mr. Jolliffe says.”

(“Litigation train keeps rolling on; Patent Lawsuits”, by Julius Melitzer, September 24, 2008, National Post)

As reported, Goodmans, the law firm of Apotex’s lead generic drug counsel Harry Radomski, brought in $10-20 million annually from just one type of generic drug cases – Notice of compliance cases – and that at the Federal Court of Canada, generic drug cases made up 60% of the patent cases and consumed 75% of the legal fees.

And as lawyer Scott Jolliffe pointed out, the pure profit of generic drugs is a thousand times of the brand-name drugs and Barry Sherman only needed to win one in 100 cases for Apotex to be very profitable. So, in taking the legal risks and counting on litigation, to the Canadian Intellectual Property litigation lawyers – many of whom undoubtedly enriched by the Apotex legal cases – Sherman was a hero deserving “a monument”.

From the press’s portrayals of his generic drug business ambitions and drive that I have reviewed to this point, I would describe Barry Sherman’s business practice as commercially and legally very aggressive, probably to the point of being reckless, and possibly with some misplaced priorities.

But I can’t quite call Sherman a “pitbull” that the Maclean’s investigative article has termed, or “unethical” as law and medicine professor Amir Attaran has also alleged.

In Robinson’s 2001 book, Sherman explained why his company had a better focus on producing and selling drugs than Big Pharma did, which spent a lot of its money on marketing and advertising, in Canada:

“Apotex employs some thirty-five hundred people, compared with Big Pharma’s total in Canada of around fifteen thousand. But Sherman points out that Apotex produces more than Big Pharm does. “They have all these people in marketing and 30 per cent of their income goes to these glossy ads to doctors. The purpose of the ads, of course, is not to get the best therapy but to get the doctors to prescribe those things on which the drug companies make the most profit. …Then, as soon as there’s generic competition, they move on to promoting something that’s more expensive, even though it’s not necessarily better.””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

Barry Sherman sounded a lot like a Canadian industry hero, a patriot, didn’t he – even if Apotex’s generic drugs weren’t that cheap for the Canadian consumers as pointed out by Amir Attaran?

With my review thus far of various media-reported facts, there is an emerging picture of how Barry Sherman and Apotex competed with the international brand-name drug companies to grow and establish his company as the leading Canadian generic drug company, and in the process became financially successful.

Thus, one can can ponder a more specific question about “who could have murdered” the Shermans: driven by unrelenting ambitions, could Sherman’s Canadian pharmaceutical business practice have been a cause of the “targeted” brutal murder of him and his wife – regardless of his being “unethical in business”, facts about which I have not yet encountered in my review?

Surprisingly, the answer is affirmative because, as cited earlier from the Maclean’s investigative article, Sherman was quoted in Robinson’s book as having entertained that thought, and here a fuller quote from that book shows what exactly Sherman pointed his accusing finger at:

“The branded drug companies hate us. They have private investigators on us all the time. The thought once came to my mind, why didn’t they just hire someone to knock me off? For a thousand bucks paid to the right person, you can probably get someone killed. Perhaps I’m surprised that hadn’t happened.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

“The branded drug companies” could “just hire someone to knock me off”, and “I’m surprised that hadn’t happened”, said Sherman as above.

Interestingly, at the time of their conversation, Jeffrey Robinson thought Barry Sherman wasn’t really serious about the possibility of being targeted; and now the author has professed to be “stunned” by the murder:

“Jeffrey Robinson — author of Prescription Games – Money, Ego and Power Inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry — interviewed Sherman for the 2001 book.

He said he was stunned when he heard the generic drug dynamo had been murdered.

…

However, the writer said that when Sherman said he was surprised he hadn’t been bumped off by his slew of enemies, he was being glib.

“Barry said it like, ‘I bought another baseball mitt mom,’” Robinson said. “Neither of us took it seriously and it has nothing to do with what’s going on right now.””

(Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

But Sherman’s “targeted” murder has happened, whether or not Robinson took it seriously when Sherman said it could have happened. Without a more thorough analysis, any investigation should not dismiss the scenario that it may have involved Big Pharma.

For instance, Apotex’s aggressive generic drug selling would readily, as in the case of the heart drug Plavix discussed earlier, breach an existing patent, i.e., illegally while it was still in effect, and the unpleasant market surprise could cause substantial financial losses and made the brand-name drug companies and their dependents feel like a broken “Humpty Dumpty”. Consequently, the thought of “knocking off” such a competitor could have come to the minds of some who suffered losses, as it had come across this competitor’s own mind.

Along this line of contemplation, one would be looking at international pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb, and the likes of Pfizer, Merck, Bayer and AstraZeneca – to cite a few mentioned in Robinson’s 2001 book – for culpability.

However, to be fair, even if brand-name drug companies were somehow connected to the Shermans’ murder, one should still consider issues on Barry Sherman’s part – such as his “unethical” business dealings – that could have contributed to his bloody end.

The Maclean’s April 2018 investigative article has cited a specific person, Morton Shulman, who had been a pharmaceutical business battle with Sherman and who regarded Sherman with utter contempt:

“… The late physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Morton Shulman, who did battle with Sherman, called him “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Jesus Christ, “no redeeming features whatsoever”!

The article did not cite any concrete facts in relation to such a derogatory comment on Barry Sherman by “the late physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Morton Shulman”. Nonetheless, when one learns who Morton Sherman was, his characterization of Sherman could well be damning, or even condemning:

“Morton Shulman, OC (25 April 1925 – August 18, 2000) was a Canadian politician, businessman, broadcaster, columnist, coroner, and physician.

…

In exchange for his involvement in the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, he was appointed Ontario’s chief coroner in 1961. In 1963, he was named Chief Coroner of the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto. Shulman was outspoken and used the coroner position to crusade on a number of issues such as enacting tougher regulations on lifejackets for small boats, having government regulate car safety, the introduction of breathalysers into Ontario, and against then-restrictive abortion laws after he investigated the deaths of women who had died while trying to terminate their pregnancies. … His years as a coroner became the inspiration for the Canadian television drama Wojeck.

…

After embarrassing the provincial government by revealing its inaction in enforcing the fire code in a recently built hospital, he was fired, in 1967, as Ontario’s Chief Coroner and decided to avenge himself by running for the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. … Despite his strong capitalist beliefs, he decided to run for the democratic socialist party because they gave him a free hand in choosing his own riding, and because their views in support of public safety were compatible with his own. He ran as a candidate in High Park and was elected as Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for the riding in the 1967 provincial election.

…

From 1977 until 1982, he hosted a hard-hitting television show on CITY-TV called The Shulman File which featured confrontational interviews, sensationalist and risque topics and outrageous opinions. … At the same time, he began writing a regular column in the Toronto Sun which continued into the 1990s. …”

(“Morton Shulman – Biography”, JewAge)

The late Dr. Shulman once served as the Chief Coroner of the province of Ontario and also of the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, his crusades for human safety inspired a Canadian TV drama, and he later became a politician, a newspaper columnist and the host of a hard-hitting TV interview and opinion show.

The experience of examining human deaths and determining the causes should give Shulman the ability to judge personality and character. Hence, if Shulman did not exaggerate in his “hard-hitting” opinion of Sherman, the latter must have been quite “unethical” in at least some of the many business and legal battles he and Apotex fought against others, including Shulman and the brand-name drug companies.

In the press archives, there is a reasonable amount of past coverage on legal disputes in 1993-1994 pitching Sherman and Apotex against Shulman and his company, Deprenyl Research.

Their disputes originated from Apotex’s plan to develop and market a generic version of a brand-name drug, deprenyl, also known as selegeline, for Parkinson’s disease, which Shulman suffered from and as a result started a company owning the drug’s Canadian right, selling it under the trademark name Eldepryl.

It was a David vs. Goliath battle, except not pitching Sherman and Apotex against Big Pharma like in most of the media-reported legal cases involving Sherman and Apotex, but in a role reversal pitching them against a small Canadian company and its owner Morton Shulman, who was a practising medical doctor:

“Apotex, in documents filed in the Ontario Court’s General Division, claims Dr. Shulman has defamed it by using a stamp on his patients’ prescriptions that instructs pharmacists not to fill them with drugs made by Apotex.

In its statement of claim, Apotex said it wants $1-million in damages …

…

Dr. Shulman said in an affidavit that he has concerns about the safety of Apotex products because of reports about legal problems Apotex and an associated company in the United States are having with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He said he has an obligation to protect the interests of his patients.

…

The drug is used for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, which affects the central nervous system.

Dr. Shulman, who suffers from Parkinson’s, is a former chief coroner for Metropolitan Toronto, former New Democratic Party member of the Ontario Legislature, author of several best-selling books on how to accumulate wealth, former host of a television public-affairs program and a millionaire who still practices medicine.

… In an interview last year, Apotex president Bernard (Barry) Sherman said the company made 109 different generic drugs, had annual sales of more than $200-million in Canada and almost $500-million world wide.

“In April, 1993, Deprenyl became aware that Apotex intended to develop and market its (own) brand of selegeline,” Mr. Sherman said in an affidavit filed with the court. “Competition by the Apotex generic brand of selegeline would pose a very serious threat to Deprenyl.””

(“Drug firm sues Shulman for defamation; Apotex seeks damages over MD’s orders on prescriptions against use of its products”, by Peter Moon, July 2, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

As told in the above, Sherman wasn’t shy about the prospect that his big company’s generic drug could pose “a very serious threat” to the small company of Shulman’s, but was quite blunt telling the court about it.

When Shulman first learned of that unpleasant prospect in April 1993, he asked, through an intermediary Arnold Polan, for Sherman’s consideration not to introduce the generic, as he recalled in a court affidavit in defence against the above-cited $1 million Apotex lawsuit, “Deprenyl produces but one drug, whereas Apotex has many”:

“In their affidavits, Mr. Sherman and Dr. Shulman agree that Arnold Polan, a Toronto stockbroker who has traded stocks for both men, met with Mr. Sherman at Dr. Shulman’s request.

“I asked Mr. Arnold Polan to speak to Mr. Sherman to see if he would not develop and introduce (a generic version of selegeline),” Dr. Shulman’s affidavit said. “Deprenyl produces but one drug, whereas Apotex has many.””

(Peter Moon, July 2, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

Sherman flatly rejected Shulman’s request. Shulman then began to instruct pharmacists to exclude Apotex’s drugs from the medicines he prescribed as medical doctor, and that action incurred the Apotex lawsuit:

“I refused,” Mr. Sherman’s affidavit said. “It appears that, as a result of (my) refusal to accede to (Dr. Shulman’s) request, (he) determined that he would attempt to intimidate me into withdrawing development and sale of Apotex’s generic selegeline, or alternatively, to punish Apotex for my refusing to do so.

“Commencing some time in the week of May 3, 1993, on prescriptions which he wrote, and without regard to whether Apotex even manufactured the particular medicines being prescribed, (Dr. Shulman) placed the following stipulation: ‘Do not fill this prescription with an Apotex product.’” As a result of protests by Apotex, court records show, Dr. Shulman stopped using the stamp. But he replaced it with another one that instructed pharmacists to fill patients’ prescriptions with “Original brand or Novapharm. No sub.”

The stipulation meant pharmacists could dispense only higher-priced brand-name products or generic drugs manufactured by Novapharm Ltd., Apotex’s chief competitor in the manufacture of generic drugs.

Dr. Shulman’s affidavit says a physician has a right to prescribe whatever brand of drug he wishes. “I believe that if I have reason to doubt the efficacy of a particular product, then it is my responsibility to my patients to make sure that that brand is not taken. I have such reasonable doubts with respect to (Apotex) and its products.””

(Peter Moon, July 2, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

The Sherman-Shulman dispute is a good example showing that Barry Sherman and Apotex were not merely focused on fighting Big Pharma but also keen on pushing a generic drug even when it could threaten the wellbeing of a small Canadian-owned company.

In this case, the owner of the small company the Apotex generics would pose “a very serious threat to” – in Sherman’s own language in a court affidavit – was also a medical doctor and a former chief coroner, and thus had first-hand professional expertise on medicines and their effects. As Shulman stated in his court affidavit, that “if I have reason to doubt the efficacy of a particular product, then it is my responsibility to my patients to make sure that that brand is not taken. I have such reasonable doubts with respect to (Apotex) and its products.”

Most uniquely in this case, the small brand-name drug company owner himself was also a sufferer of Parkinson’s disease that the drug was for the treatment of, and he tried to appeal for Sherman’s compassion – since Shulman’s Deprenyl Research company produced only that one drug – to stop Apotex from marketing its generic version.

Sherman’s firm refusal and brash attitude, as shown by quotes from his court affidavit, were in my view quite in stark contrast to his reputation projected to the public as a compassionate and generous philanthropist.

Sherman was ungenerous and unkind to refuse to consider Shulman’s unique and difficult personal predicament, and then showed lack of compassion for compromise with his stern and unabashed pursue of Shulman in court in order to stamp out Shulman’s individual gesture of protest as a doctor about Apotex drugs.

Particularly abominably, Sherman and Apotex chose a time when Shulman’s Parkinson’s disease had begun worsening, after years of successful treatment with that drug, to announce their plan to make the generic version:

“Dr. Morton Shulman, officially retired but still proud father of Deprenyl Research Ltd., and Barry Sherman, president and owner of Apotex Ltd., are doing battle, armed with legal briefs, affidavits and reports from private investigators.

…

Allegations, insinuations and downright slanderous statements are flying in both directions. Despite attempts to negotiate a truce, it seems likely this war will continue.

“This is a true crusade,” Shulman said in an interview in his Roncesvalles Ave. office. “I’ve got nothing to do (but fight with Sherman.) I’m delighted. It was a godsend that this came along.”

The battle started this spring, about the same time Shulman, 68, was being eased into retirement from Deprenyl Research, the company he founded to import a drug to combat Parkinson’s disease.

Shulman, who last week was made an officer of the Order of Canada for his contributions in health care, won fame and fortune as a crusading Metro coroner in the 1960s, an outspoken MPP, opinionated investment counsellor, television talk show host and drug company founder.

He suffers from Parkinson’s disease and set up Deprenyl in 1987 to import the drug Eldepryl from Europe.

Shulman became his company’s best advertisement as the drug alleviated his symptoms for years. Now, his condition is deteriorating and his speech is slurred and movements are jerky.

Shulman’s son Geoffrey and Dr. Martin Barkin, who was brought in last year to run Deprenyl, now manage the company as it tries to expand its range of products and defend its Eldepryl turf.”

(“Shulman vs. Sherman; The drug entrepreneurs face off”, by Art Chamberlain, July 11, 1993, Toronto Star)

At that particular time, Barry Sherman was literally adding insult to Morton Sherman’s injury.

And the insult could mean more: the above July 11, 1993 Toronto Star story noted that Shulman “last week was made an officer of the Order of Canada for his contributions in health care” – likely on July 1, Canada Day – but I notice that his Order of Canada appointment may have been made on April 22, i.e., in the same month when Shulman became of Apotex’s plan to make a generic version of his drug – a timeline stated in Sherman’s court affidavit cited earlier earlier from a July 2, 1993 The Globe and Mail article.

(“Honours, Order of Canada, Morton Shulman, O.C., M.D.”, updated March 26, 2018, Archives, Governor General of Canada)

In deciding to produce a generic version, Sherman and Apotex disregarded the existing patents covering Shulman’s drug brand:

“Shulman says he met Sherman a few years ago when Sherman made an unsuccessful offer to buy Deprenyl, but their paths have not crossed since.

Once a drug patent expires, or is legally defeated, companies such as Apotex and Novopharm Ltd. can make generic copies and earn a healthy profit selling them at a fraction of the brand-name’s cost.

In April, Apotex announced it felt Deprenyl’s patents wouldn’t stand up in court, and it planned to begin selling a copy soon.

Deprenyl and Apotex have a separate legal action over the patent protection that hasn’t come to court yet.”

(Art Chamberlain, July 11, 1993, Toronto Star)

As cited above, besides the lawsuit by Apotex against Shulman which Sherman played a personal role in, there was a separate legal patent case between Shulman’s Deprenyl Research and Sherman’s Apotex.

I note that, like later in 2006 selling a generic version of Plavix in the U.S., without first legally contesting the existing patents but by only asserting its own opinion, Apotex would produce and sell the generics. This was a tact Apotex used whenever it could as Sherman discussed its pros and cons in Jeffrey Robinson’s 2001 book, quoted earlier.

It seemed that nothing could affect Sherman’s single-minded, strong-willed and boorish drive pursuing his monumental generic drug ambitions.

But in Shulman’s case, something did seem to stop Sherman from pushing ahead with the generic version according to a January 1994 Toronto Star article reviewing Shulman’s autobiography, Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?; maybe it had to do with former Chief Coroner Shulman’s law enforcement connection, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation  launched a criminal investigation of Apotex and it changed Sherman’s mind:

“Although Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up? claims to be about his whole life, it focuses mostly on his latest life, the life he created for himself after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease 11 years ago when he was in his mid-50s. Sentenced to death by the disease, (or worse, a life of helplessness) he discovers a Hungarian wonder drug that can treat his symptoms. Then he turns the drug, Deprenyl, into a pharmaceutical company that at one time was worth $100 million. Along the way he is accused of stock manipulation, quackery and worse. Among the claims he makes for Deprenyl is that it has strengthened his libido (never weak, in any case): “My wife was quite amazed and what had been a twice weekly activity became and has remained a daily delight.”

…

Shulman acknowledges that he has a thirst for revenge. This book is his opportunity to get back at those he perceives as his enemies. One enemy is
Canadian generic drug king pin Barry Sherman, the founder of Apotex, Inc., who matches Shulman in tenacity and aggressiveness. Not long after
tangling with Shulman, the FBI investigated Sherman’s company for mail fraud, money laundering and illegal drug dispensing; Sherman, not
surprisingly, gave up the idea of producing a generic version of Shulman’s wonder drug.”

(“Another look at what makes Morty run”, by Edward Trapunski, January 15, 1994, Toronto Star)

It took two to tango. As told above, Morton Shulman clearly liked to exaggerate and he also manipulated his company’s stocks; on the other hand, Barry Sherman could be an even more “unethical” businessman if some of the FBI allegations, “mail fraud, money laundering and illegal drug dispensing”, were true.

The July 11, 1993 Toronto Star story quoted earlier mentioned “reports from private investigators” that were used in the legal dispute between Apotex and Shulman. Specifically, Shulman hired private investigators to look into Sherman’s business practice, and that may have helped him reach a settlement in the end:

“Two years ago, he and former coroner and MPP Morton Shulman waged a public dispute that entertained the pharmaceutical industry for months with charges and counter charges over a drug to treat Parkinson’s disease.

Shulman even had private investigators digging into Sherman’s complicated corporate world, which includes operations in Bermuda and a host of American companies.

In the end, they negotiated a truce and dropped the lawsuits.”

(“Taking heart from court victory Drug stockpile a gold mine for Apotex”, by Art Chamberlain, May 23, 1995, Toronto Star)

The settlement, with Sherman and Apotex dropping the $1 million lawsuit and Shulman agreeing not to exclude Apotex from prescriptions he wrote as a doctor, was reported by the media in November 1993:

“The two bad boys of the pharmaceutical business have called a truce in their public spat.

Barry Sherman, president of Apotex Inc., has dropped a lawsuit for a little matter of $1 million. And Morty Shulman, doctor and founder of Deprenyl Research Ltd., has agreed to stop stamping his prescriptions with a note telling pharmacists not to use Apotex drugs.

Shulman was not too happy about Sherman’s plans to sell a copy of Deprenyl’s main product. But the medical multi-millionaires have agreed to patch things up.

“He’s stopped,” Sherman said this week. “He doesn’t want to be confronted with a lawsuit for damages because he knows he’d lose.”

“I haven’t used the stamp for a long time,” Shulman said. He added: “One of the terms is that I’m not allowed to say anything.”

That’s a bit of a problem for a man with a new biography called Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?

The answer seems to be no: Shulman did go on to talk about the settlement. But he called back with a chuckle two minutes later. He said his lawyer told him his comments would be in contempt of court.”

(“Medical multi-millionaires stamp out their drug row”, November 6, 1993, Toronto Star)

As reported above, as of November 1993 with the legal settlement, Shulman was still unhappy because it did not stop Apotex’s plan to develop and sell a generic version of the brand-name drug he owned the Canadian right of.

In an earlier quote from a review of Shulman’s new autobiography, in the Toronto Star on January 15, 1994, it was reported that Sherman “gave up the idea of producing a generic version of Shulman’s wonder drug” due to an FBI criminal investigation of him:

“Not long after tangling with Shulman, the FBI investigated Sherman’s company for mail fraud, money laundering and illegal drug dispensing; Sherman, not surprisingly, gave up the idea of producing a generic version of Shulman’s wonder drug.”

(Edward Trapunski, January 15, 1994, Toronto Star)

That was probably Shulman’s view by January 15, 1994, a few months after the legal settlement.

Ironically, Shulman’s autobiography was entitled Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?. Obviously, Shulman did not like to shut up and in his new autobiography he bragged about his battle with Sherman.

Unfortunately in this case, Sherman did not really give up. Thirteen days later on January 28, another Toronto Star story cited Sherman as stating that “Apotex is developing a generic version of deprenyl to sell in Canada”:

“Sherman has said Apotex is developing a generic version of deprenyl to sell in Canada.”

(“Apotex chief must testify, judge rules U.S. civil lawsuit over deprenyl sale set for April trial”, by Art Chamberlain, January 28, 1994, Toronto Star)

Clearly, an FBI criminal investigation and Shulman’s private investigation, both digging into his business practice, weren’t enough to change Sherman’s mind, after all.

That history looks even more ironic today, that currently there are also a police criminal investigation and a private investigation, the latter launched by Barry Sherman’s family, into the Sherman couple’s own double murder – bear in mind that Morton Shulman was a former Chief Coroner!

It was logical from Sherman’s standpoint in 1994 that he and Apotex did not give up. They had planned to produce a generic for Shulman’s drug ever since the early days of Shulman’s drug business. Shulman’s autobiography, co-authored with Toronto writer Susan Kastner and published in late 1993, recalled some prior history:

“One fine day in May 1993, Barry Sherman announced he was bringing out a 40 percent lower-priced generic version of Eldepryl, and that there was nothing Morty and his folks could do to stop him.

What made it particularly galling for Morty was the fact that only two weeks earlier, Deprenyl had confidently announced that Eldepryl would be safe for nearly three more years from the depredations of the generics – protected by a brand-new regulation that gave extra teeth to Bill C-91, the Patent Protection Act.

…

Barry Sherman has had his sights trained on selegeline, the chemical generic of Eldepryl, for a long time, and now he means to bag it for Apotex.

Within months of Eldepryl’s HPB approval as a recognized Parkinson’s medication, in January 1990, Apotex signalled its interest in cloning the drug.

Morty had, of course, earmarked the generic threat from the very start. As part of his push for HPB sanction he hooked into the pharmaceutical industry fight for the passage of Bill C-91, a new law to beef up patent protection against the accursed generics.

…

In February [1993], the Morton and Gloria Shulman Centre for the study of Movement Disorders opens in a modestly gala ceremony at Toronto Western Hospital.

In March, 1993, a Private Member’s Bill is introduced to buy Eldepryl patent protection until 1997.

“What, no statue? No horse, no sword?” quips a delighted Morty.

Late in April, 1993, he scoots a flyer to pharmacists, bearing on its cover APO – the Apotex logo – with a big X through it:

“It’s time to Substitute. If it has APO in the name it comes from Apotex. Apotex is owned by Barry Sherman.””

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As in the above from his autobiography, Shulman began sending a flyer to pharmacists in late April 1993, to ask them not to use Apotex drugs. It indicates that this was the time when his negotiation with Sherman through an intermediary, cited earlier, failed to stop Apotex’s plan for the generic version. Within two weeks, Sherman publicly announced Apotex’s plan to introduce the generic version.

A 40% discount from the brand-name drug appeared lower than the usual 20-30% discount of Apotex generics as reviewed earlier, although it’s not clear if the price Sherman announced in this case was specifically targeted.

Sherman’s announcement, barely two weeks after Shulman invoking a new legislative protection for the brand-name patent, also presented Apotex’s opinion why the new legislation could not protect the brand-name drug from Apotex’s generic:

“On April 27, 1993, Morty sends “A Letter to My Friends” on stationery of The Safety Corporation.

…

The Globe story that day describes a new federal regulation that extends the drug-patent protection extended by Bill C-91. It closes a loophole that allowed generics to quietly begin development of patent drug copies before a patent has expired, and go on working while the whole thing is battled in court.

Now the generic company must give notice of intention to the patent holder, and will be prevented from selling its copy for up to 30 months after court action is commenced.

This is the 30-month safety shield Deprenyl has happily invoked.

But barely two weeks later, here is Barry Sherman making a counter-pronouncement that Apotex means to produce Eldepryl by a process that has nothing to do with the patented Deprenyl method.

This means war.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

From Sherman’s perspective, this was an example of an “anti-competitive regulation” as he referred to in Robinson’s 2001 book, that was an obstacle to Apotex’s generic drug drive, except that the provisional brand-name protection in this case would benefit a small Canadian drug company, not Big Pharma.

In Shulman’s failed negotiation with Sherman, his intermediary Arnold Polan received Sherman’s reply that it would take a $10 million payment from Shulman – the amount of profit that Sherman estimated he would make from the generic – for Apotex not to produce and sell the generic:

“Mr. Polan asked him what would it take for Apotex to stop developing and producing in competition to Deprenyl. Mr. Sherman said that likely he would make about $10 million profit and so if Dr. Shulman wanted to stop him, it would cost $10 million.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Regardless of which of the two was winning their battle – apparently Sherman and his giant Apotex were much more resourceful, both legally and technologically – one thing is clear about their comparison, that the Canadian official reputation of Shulman’s has been better than that of Sherman’s.

Morton Sherman was an Officer of the Order of Canada, whereas Barry Sherman became, at a lower rank, a Member of the Order of Canada posthumously; while both lived to the age of 75, Shulman received the honour in 1993, the year of his dispute with Sherman, and then lived for another 7 years.

(updated March 26, 2018, Archives, Governor General of Canada; and, “Appointments to the Order of Canada”, December 29, 2017/January 11, 2018, The Governor General of Canada)

Nonetheless, for someone with Sherman’s achievements and official honour, one obviously cannot easily agree with Shulman that this man was of “no redeeming features whatsoever”.

While I have not found detailed media coverage of Shulman’s private investigation into Sherman’s business practice, which may have influenced his opinion of Sherman, media coverage of the FBI criminal investigation beginning in June 1993, and of a related lawsuit filed by a U.S. drug company, did show the extent of illegal marketing activities Sherman and one of his family members engaged in to sell Apotex drugs to the U.S.

These drugs made for Canada did not have the approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the U.S. market; they were provided by Apotex to some small companies – Interpharm, Silver Bullet Marketing and others – controlled by Sherman and his brother-in-law, Allen Barry Shechtman, operating from the Apotex company site, and sold by mail to the U.S. consumers without the necessary prescriptions:

“Canada’s largest pharmaceutical drug manufacturer, Apotex Inc., is being probed by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to find out how its generic drugs are reaching U.S. residents who do not have prescriptions for them.

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore are looking for evidence of violations of U.S. federal laws involving mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and the unlawful distribution of unapproved drugs. The RCMP have been helping the FBI with its investigation.

…

Besides Apotex, the FBI probe includes the company’s president, Bernard (Barry) Sherman, 50; his brother-in-law, Allen Barry Shechtman, 45, and Mr. Shechtman’s company, Silver Bullet Marketing.

Interpharm Inc., a Bahamian company whose ownership remains obscure, and several other Canadians and Canadian companies are also part of the investigation.

…

A spokesman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration confirmed that the agency had passed its file on the matter to the U.S. Justice Department.

…

Papers filed as part of civil suits with the Federal Court of Canada in Toronto and the U.S. District Court in Atlanta set out the way in which drugs manufactured in Toronto by Apotex are mailed to U.S. consumers.

…

It has used the mail-order method to sell about 60 generic drugs to U.S. consumers, including anti-AIDS drugs and naproxen, an anti- inflammatory used by arthritis patients.

…

But because the drugs are not approved in the United States, authorities there have no mechanism for applying quality controls or prescription restrictions.

…

The Apotex drugs are promoted by Interpharm in the United States by means of direct mailings and advertisements in newspapers and magazines aimed at groups such as the elderly, people with AIDS, veterans, the arthritic and heart patients.

The material says the drugs may be legally imported into the United States for personal use, and offers savings of as much as 60 per cent off the price of U.S. name-brand equivalents.

Bahamian records list the directors of Interpharm as two local trust-company officials, but its ownership is clouded in the secrecy provided by Bahamian law.

Court records show that one Interpharm direct mailing reached 500,000 U.S. households. Canadian telephone records show that between May, 1991, and February, 1992, Interpharm’s 1-800 telephone number – which was answered at the Silver Bullet premises in Toronto – received 12,812 calls. (The 800 number was originally listed to Apotex, but it was later transferred to Silver Bullet, the records show.) Financial records showing how much Apotex and Silver Bullet made from drug sales in the United States through Interpharm have been sealed by the court in Atlanta.

But evidence filed there showed that Apotex provided generic drugs it manufactured or bought in Canada to Silver Bullet.

The company operates out of premises owned by Apotex, less than 50 metres from the Apotex plant on Signet Drive in the Metro Toronto municipality of North York. Silver Bullet then acted as a marketing agency for Interpharm.”

(“FBI probes big Canadian drug firm Apotex products sold to U.S. residents without prescriptions”, by Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

There indeed was a real problem of ethics here. The owner of Canada’s leading pharmaceutical company was also, along with a family member, conducting direct mail-marketing of drugs into another country in disregard of that country’s government health regulations.

But I note that in such a illegal direct sale scheme the generic drugs could indeed be cheap, as much as 60% off the U.S. branded drug prices as Interpharm advertised, claiming it to be legal.

It appeared that Apotex had earlier done the mail selling when it was allowed by the U.S. FDA, and then stopped after an FDA policy change:

“Apotex said in its release it did supply generic drugs to companies selling to the U.S. market “when it was the policy of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration … to allow Americans to import drugs for personal use.”

That policy was issued July 23, 1988, by FDA Commissioner Frank Young at the National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference and AIDS Forum in Boston, said Apotex, so that people with AIDS could get drugs that might combat the disease.

But Apotex stopped supplying products after the FDA changed its policy so that personal imports were no longer allowed, the company said.

“Apotex asserts that at no time has it, or any of its officers or directors, done anything unlawful,” the release said.

The Globe reported the FBI probe includes Mr. Sherman’s brother-in-law, Allen Barry Shechtman, 45, and his company, Silver Bullet Marketing.”

(“It’s harassment, Apotex says of FBI probe”, June 21, 1993, The Hamilton Spectator)

As asserted in the above, Sherman’s big company Apotex may have followed the U.S. government policy properly in its direct-mail selling; however, Sherman and his brother-in-law then used small companies operating at the fringe of this business field to continue the selling in violation of the U.S. regulations – that was most likely why the Interpharm-Silver Bullet 1-800 phone numbers for mail drug ordering had previously been Apotex’s as in the June 19, 1993 The Globe and Mail story quoted earlier.

As early as in January 1992, the U.S. FDA had sent letters warning of serious illegality to Sherman and Shechtman, and Bahamas-registered Interpharm with undisclosed ownership, stating that “these drugs and their solicitation are in serious violation of United States law, specifically the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act”:

“The FDA, in warning letters sent to Mr. Sherman, Mr. Shechtman and Interpharm in January, 1992, said Interpharm “falsely represented the legitimacy” of its activities in labels and advertisements sent to U.S. residents.

The FDA said its review “has revealed that these drugs and their solicitation are in serious violation of United States law, specifically the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. . . . We are taking steps to warn our citizens that these drugs may not be legally marketed in this country.””

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

Then in March 1993, i.e., a few months before media reporting of the FBI criminal investigation, a U.S. District Court judge in Atlanta ruled that Sherman’s mail selling of drugs to the U.S. market represented a “threat to public health”:

“A U.S. District Court judge ruled in Atlanta in March that the export of the drugs from Canada to the United States involved “false representations in furtherance of . . . business interests” and represented a “threat to public health.”

…

In an affidavit sworn in February, Mr. Sherman said he believed that the Atlanta lawsuit was launched to punish him for making cheaper drugs available. “I believe the real motive for the present suit is to inflict revenge on Apotex and me as an officer of Apotex because of Apotex’s actions in providing low-price, safe and effective drugs to the public.””

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

I note that the U.S. judge’s ruling of “threat to public health” came after reviewing a sworn affidavit by Sherman in February making his point of “providing low-price, safe and effective drugs to the public.”

As quoted from the June 19, 1993 The Globe and Mail story, the FBI criminal investigation was already a next step – following the FDA’s – in the U.S. government’s efforts to stop Barry Sherman’s illegal mail-selling of drugs to the U.S. market.

Perhaps this next step was influenced by Morton Shulman, who bragged about it in his autobiography according to a January 15, 1994 Toronto Star article quote earlier.

Certain details of the drug mailing reported by the FBI showed that these small companies of Sherman’s were well aware that it was illegal activity requiring hiding of their identities and evading U.S. Customs inspections:

“The process worked as follows: Silver Bullet in North York answered calls made by U.S. residents who dialled a 1-800 number advertised in the United States by Interpharm of the Bahamas.

Silver Bullet then mailed the drugs in blister packets to the U.S. addresses. The drugs were sent in hand-addressed envelopes with no return address on them. Instead of using a postage meter, which would include an identification number, Silver Bullet employees stuck Canadian postage stamps on the envelopes.

The FBI report noted that after the FDA warning letters were sent Silver Bullet changed the colour of the envelopes it used to mail the drugs to the United States.

“It should be noted that the envelopes used are a very nondescript type that will bear three Canadian stamps and reflect no return address,” the FBI report said.

“The average customs inspector would be unable to recognize the parcel as a commercial piece of mail containing a ‘blister pack’ with approximately 100 tablets inside. Because of this tactic, FDA efforts to interdict the product at the Canadian border have met with little success.””

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

Due to its potential health risks, both the FBI and the FDA also declared – even more gravely than the U.S. District Court judge cited earlier – that the mail selling of drugs “constitutes a significant threat to the health of the U.S. consumer”:

“The report said that “any time a call is made to purchase these drugs, the consumer is asked for the name of his or her doctor and doctor’s phone number. It has been documented in every single case (investigated) that no confirmation call is ever placed to the consumer’s physician by the subject after an order is received.

“Because of this, the FBI and FDA believe that the continued sale of unapproved generic drugs into the United States constitutes a significant threat to the health of the U.S. consumer.””

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

This direct-mail selling case also showed how unrelenting Barry Sherman was in advancing his generic drugs’ reach. Even after Judge Horace Ward, the U.S. District Court judge in Atlanta overseeing a civil lawsuit from the U.S. drug company Syntex, ordered an injunction against Interpharm in March 1993, Sherman told the judge he wanted to continue selling through a “sister” company named Medicine Club International:

“On March 18, U.S. District Court Judge Horace Ward issued a preliminary injunction in Atlanta against Mr. Sherman, Mr. Shechtman, Apotex and Interpharm.

They were defendants in a civil action brought by Syntex (USA) Inc. Syntex is the U.S. manufacturer of naproxen, which is sold under the brand name of Naprosyn.

Syntex is alleging unfair competition, trademark infringement and violations of the Georgia Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act.

All four defendants contend in their brief to the court that they have broken no U.S. laws. They note that Syntex has sued Apotex unsuccessfully several times in Canada, and they say the U.S. action is an attempt to accomplish in that country what it failed to do in Canada, “namely destroy Interpharm.”

The injunction ordered the defendants to stop claiming that their naproxen meets U.S. standards, has been approved by the FDA and may be imported legally into the United States for personal use.

“The court has found that defendants’ representations that the quality of their products is identical to United States standards are literally false,” Judge Ward said.

Evidence presented to Judge Ward showed that the export of Apotex’s drugs to the United States began in 1989, soon after Mr. Shechtman left the entertainment and publishing business. Mr. Sherman placed him on the Apotex payroll at $1,400 a week and provided him with company insurance. A few weeks later, the marketing scheme involving Silver Bullet and Interpharm was begun.

Mr. Sherman, Mr. Shechtman and Interpharm recently told Judge Ward that they want to continue exporting drugs through a “sister” company called Medicine Club International Inc. They have filed an advertisement they want to use and asked the judge whether it can be used without contravening his injunction order.

Syntex has filed an objection, saying the continued importing of drugs into the United States without FDA approval is a breach of U.S. law.”

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

As cited above – and not unlike in Apotex’s patent dispute with GlaxoSmithKline in 2003, discussed earlier – the U.S. judge found that the Apotex generic version marketed by Interpharm did not meet the U.S. quality standards.

One can see from what a U.S. civil lawsuit proceeding revealed, that with or without Morton Shulman’s involvement, Barry Sherman’s aggressive push, despite warnings of it involving “serious violation of United States law”, could sooner or later lead to a U.S. criminal investigation of him and his companies.

In contrast, in the Canadian court as noted in the above story, the U.S. company Syntex had filed lawsuits several times but had been unsuccessful every time – a top favourable factor in the Canadian court was no doubt the Canadian lawyers whom Sherman and Apotex spent a lot of money on.

In the case of Shulman’s drug for Parkinson’s disease, Apotex actually had a generic version selling by mail to the U.S. market as of early 1994, and was facing a lawsuit from the U.S. company Somerset Pharmaceuticals that owned the patent:

“The head of Canada’s largest generic drug maker has been ordered to testify as part of an American lawsuit against him and his company.

Barry Sherman, president of Apotex Inc., can’t escape testifying in the civil lawsuit by Somerset Pharmaceuticals Inc., Judge Ellen Macdonald of the Ontario Court of Justice, general division, has ruled.

Somerset argues Apotex and related companies are illegally selling deprenyl in the United States by telephone and mail order.

Somerset has a patent on the drug in the United States. It alleges Apotex, through a variety of related companies, has been selling a selegiline hydrochloride, the chemical name for the product it sells as Eldepreyl.

The drug is used to treat Parkinson’s disease and is sold in Canada as Eldepreyl by Deprenyl Research Ltd., a company founded by Morty Shulman.”

(Art Chamberlain, January 28, 1994, Toronto Star)

As the above news story told, Sherman as Apotex president did not want to testify in court on this U.S. company lawsuit, and Ontario Judge Ellen Macdonald ruled that he must testify.

In my guess, a topic Sherman may have wanted to avoid testifying in court about could be the difference between the companies Interpharm and Apotex:

“The judge rejected arguments that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should protect Sherman and the others. The case is a private matter, so the Charter does not apply, she said.

Somerset said the Apotex drugs were being sold by a Bahamian direct mail company with a telephone link to Toronto.

Sherman told The Star’s Tracey Tyler his company stopped selling generic drugs to international firms for distribution in the U.S. out of concern the practice might offend U.S. law.”

(Art Chamberlain, January 28, 1994, Toronto Star)

As told above, Sherman asserted that his company had stopped selling drugs to international firms for distribution in the U.S.; that company was Apotex as reviewed earlier. But a “Bahamian direct mail company”, namely Interpharm, with 1-800 phone numbers answered by Silver Bullet Marketing at the Apotex site as reviewed earlier, continued to sell to the U.S. market.

Apotex’s huge expenditure on lawyers to tangle with the brand-name drug companies gave Sherman the luxury of trying to evade undesirable legal consequences or inconveniences resulting from his business practice; even though he had to testify in a U.S. civil lawsuit as a Canadian judge ruled in January 1994, the FBI criminal investigation might not be that serious anymore as noted by Judge Macdonald:

“The Somerset case is set to go to trial in Florida in April, but Sherman and the other parties had refused to be examined by Somerset’s lawyers.

They argued before Macdonald that Somerset was simply on a fishing expedition, but she rejected that suggestion.

Sherman also argued there have been reports that he is subject to a criminal investigation and should not be ordered to testify against himself.

Macdonald said that “aside from media reports, there is no evidence that a criminal investigation is being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.””

(Art Chamberlain, January 28, 1994, Toronto Star)

I wonder if, as a part his settlement with Shulman reported in November 1993, discussed earlier, Sherman got Shulman’s agreement to get the FBI to ease the criminal investigation of him and his companies.

If so, the former crusading Chief Coroner of Ontario and Toronto was a little too easy to settle, and too quick to brag about it to the media, because soon in this above news story dated January 28, 1994, Sherman was cited – as quoted earlier – that Apotex was “developing a generic version of deprenyl to sell in Canada”.

As mentioned earlier, besides a high-profile $1 million lawsuit by Apotex against Morton Shulman reviewed earlier, there was a separate legal case between Shulman’s Deprenyl Research and Sherman’s Apotex regarding the latter’s generic drug move. Soon in April 1994, Shulman’s company lost that legal dispute in the Federal Court:

“Parkinson’s disease sufferers could soon save “millions of dollars” as a result of a Federal Court of Canada decision, a generic drug manufacturer says.

The court dismissed an application by Deprenyl Research Ltd. of Toronto, a brand name manufacturer, to prevent the government from licensing a cheaper generic version of one of its most profitable drugs.

Deprenyl officials say the company is planning an appeal of the Federal Court ruling as well as other unspecified legal action.

Deprenyl argued in its court application that any move to licence a generic equivalent would violate its patent.

…

But Associate Chief Justice James Jerome ruled the patent applies only to the process used to produce Eldepryl.

He said it does not cover the essential ingredient, selegiline hydrochloride, or the use of the medicine itself.

The decision means Apotex can proceed with its application to have its cheaper version of the drug licensed.”

(“Parkinson’s boon: Federal licence OK for generic Eldepryl”, April 29, 1994, Times – Colonist)

I note that Associate Chief Justice James Jerome’s ruling essentially sided with Sherman and Apotex, whose main argument as earlier quoted from Shulman’s autobiography was that they would use a different method than Shulman’s company’s to produce the drug.

The above news story quoted Deprenyl Research officials as saying that the company would appeal the court decision that favoured Apotex.

But barely a month later in May 1994, Shulman’s company decided to change its name to Draxis Health from Deprenyl Research – now that it would have a generic drug competitor to its drug deprenyl, marketed as Eldepryl – and readjust its focus:

“Deprenyl Research Ltd. has taken some final steps to put the Morton Shulman era behind it.

The company emerged from its annual meeting yesterday with a new name – Draxis Health Inc. – a new corporate structure and a new share option program for senior management.

President Martin Barkin said the name change reflects the company’s new focus on products other than Eldepryl, a treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

Draxis recently lost a court battle and expects generic drug maker Apotex Ltd. to have a cheaper version of Draxis’s main product on the market later this year.

To reduce losses, Draxis has joined forces with Novopharm Ltd., Canada’s other major generic drug maker, to produce a cheaper version before Apotex does.”

(“Deprenyl change ends Shulman era; Company to be called Draxis and get new focus”, by Art Chamberlain, May 27, 1994, Toronto Star)

As the above story exclaimed, the name change was a part of “some final steps” to the end of “the Morton Shulman era”.

Then in 1995, there was a sort of consolation for Shulman in his crusade against Sherman – from the FBI criminal investigation, but no longer targeting Sherman personally.

Medicine Club International, as cited earlier the Bahamas-based Interpharm’s “sister” company that in 1993 Sherman and his brother-in-law Shechtman had told U.S. Judge Horace Ward would continue to sell drugs by mail in the United States, pleaded guilty to “illegal interstate commerce” and agreed to pay the maximum fine of $500,000:

“A Bahamian company has been fined $500,000 (U.S.) for selling a Canadian-manufactured generic drug in the United States without government approval.

The fine, the maximum allowed under U.S. law, is the result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into how U.S. residents were obtaining generic drugs from Canada, without prescriptions and without the drugs having been approved for sale by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration.

According to a plea agreement filed with the U.S. Federal Court in Greenbelt, Md., last Thursday, the drugs were manufactured by Apotex Ltd. of Toronto, Canada’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, and distributed illegally in the United States by Medicine Club International Inc., a Bahamian trading company whose ownership was not filed in court documents.

Medicine Club, which pleaded guilty to one count of illegal interstate commerce, also agreed to pay $339,074 toward the U.S. government’s investigative costs.

In addition, Medicine Club established a $1-million letter of credit that would be forfeited to the U.S. government if it, Apotex or several other Canadian or Bahamian companies became involved again in the manufacture or distribution of unapproved drugs in the United States during the next five years.

The court ruled that the $1-million would also be forfeited if Bernard (Barry) Sherman, Apotex’s president, his brother-in-law, Allen Barry Shechtman, or six other directors or employees of Apotex became involved in the illegal distribution of drugs in the United States during the five-year period.”

(“Firm fined for illegally distributing Canadian-made drug”, by Peter Moon, January 11, 1995, The Globe and Mail)

Nothing was wrong, Sherman proclaimed, just “a business decision” to pay a fine:

“Mr. Sherman said in an interview that the FBI investigation and the subsequent criminal charge against Medicine Club occurred only because “the FDA was under immense pressure from the American drug companies to stop the personal imports (to U.S. residents from Canada).”

He noted that U.S. government tests showed that Apotex drugs that reached the United States through Medicine Club passed all the FDA’s safety tests.

Medicine Club’s guilty plea “was a business decision,” he said. “In fact, there’s no basis for any suggestion that anything improper was done, in my view.””

(Peter Moon, January 11, 1995, The Globe and Mail)

In 1997, Apotex received Canadian government approval to sell its generic version of Shulman’s drug, whereas Shulman’s former company refocused its business onto selling Anipryl, a new drug for treating dogs for Cushing’s disease, in Canada as well as entering the U.S. market:

“Management at the Mississauga-based company has high hopes that Anipryl, a drug approved last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating canine Cushing’s disease, could eventually fetch the bulk of the company’s sales.

“We are very excited to have received the FDA approval,” said Martin Barkin, company president and chief executive officer.

Since last September, monthly sales of Anipryl have shown “steady growth,” and annual sales in Canada are projected to reach $1-million.

The drug was launched this week in the United States, where the veterinary sales market is estimated to be 15 times larger than Canada’s.

“My expectation is that we will be doing 50 per cent of our business in the United States by the end of 1998 — and at least two-thirds of that from Anipryl,” Dr. Barkin said.

…

“The United States is one-third of the worldwide pharmaceuticals market,” said Dr. Barkin, a former Ontario deputy minister of health. He sees Anipryl as Draxis’s first big step into the U.S. market.

“We’ve gone with a much larger launch [for Anipryl] than we’ve ever had in Canada,” Dr. Barkin said. “There’s 250 reps in the field for the launch and 150 telemarketers to market it in the U.S.”

…

Aside from developing and marketing animal health products, Draxis sells pharmaceutical products for humans that treat disorders of the central nervous system, skin and bones. One of the company’s better known products is Eldepryl, a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease.

…

In 1993, in an attempt to fend off competition from generic manufacturers, Draxis forged a distribution alliance with Novopharm Ltd. of Toronto to market Novo-Selegiline, Draxis’s own generic version of Eldepryl. In February, Apotex Inc. of Toronto announced it had received Canadian regulatory approval to sell a generic version of Eldepryl.”

(“Stock in the news: Analysis Draxis looks to U.S. market for sales; Canine drug Anipryl launched south of border following FDA approval”, by Andrew Poon, June 11, 1997, The Globe and Mail)

With my review, to this point, of the past media coverage I can now apprehend why Morton Shulman once described Barry Sherman as a person “with no redeeming features whatsoever”. It was clearly a sentiment from his very personal experience, but it was not illogical.

In a first-person account from his co-authored autobiography, Shulman told of a deeply personal and emotional story about Barry Sherman’s brazenness and nastiness exerting pressure on him to give up his brand-name drug patent protection, and about his fighting back by hiring private detectives to investigate Sherman’s illegal cross-border direct-mail drug selling:

“Did I ever tell you my story of Barry Sherman?

I was summoned by him in 1990, a few months after we got approval from the HPB for Eldepryl, one of my brokers called – Arnie Polan from Scotia McLeod – and said, “Barry Sherman would like to see you.”

I said, “Who’s Barry Sherman?”

“Sherman is one of the richest men in Canada. He makes more money than anydody else. He’s got the biggest generic drug company. He wants you to see him. He wants you to come to his office.”

He took me and Arnie on a tour of the place. It was wonderful. State-of-the-art; it’s a monstrous place, and he said, “I want Deprenyl and I want you to sign a contract with me and give me the rights to produce a generic competitor in June of 1993.”

This was February 1990.

I said, “Why should I give it to you?” And he said, “Because, if you don’t, I’m going to knock you off.” I said, “What’s this crap I always read in the paper where you’re saying you’re a patriotic Canadian, and you drive down the price for the multi-nationals?” And he said, “Never mind that bullshit; I want it and I’m going to have it and you’ll get a 5 per cent royalty and I’ll give you $50,000 in advance, or you’ll get nothing and I’ll take it.”

So, I went and hired Percy Parks, who went to work on him. Sherman made a lot of money legitimately, but he was greedy, and he was running an operation from Nassau called Silver Bullet Pharmaceuticals, and he was advertising in American magazines – “Prescription drugs at half price, no prescription necessary, send your check to Silver Bullet” – and when detectives traced Silver Bullet back to Toronto, it was just a mail drop.

The money was sent there, came back to Toronto and was given to D.

D. took it over to Apotex and he would take shipment of all the drugs from Apotex.

And, somehow, the situation went into the hands of the FDA, just – somehow!

You don’t know how delighted we were. And he had problems and he was too busy to worry about me.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Again, as recalled by Morton Shulman, Barry Sherman’s behaviour conducting business negotiation in private was in stark contrast to his public image as a compassionate and generous philanthropist, in this occasion referring to his crafted media image of “a patriotic Canadian” as “bullshit”, and making such threats to the small businessman Shulman as, “I’m going to knock you off” and “you’ll get nothing and I’ll take it”.

A different kind of “Robin Hood”, perhaps, who had no problem threatening to “knock off” a small Canadian business owner, but who also had the thought of himself being “knocked off” by Big Pharma – “the monopolies” as Sherman called the brand-name drug companies, as quoted earlier from Jeffrey Robinson’s 2001 book.

Irrespective of Apotex’s legal victory over Shulman’s company, my review thus far of some high-profile legal cases involving Sherman’s practice in the generic drug business field – including the very personal Sherman-Shulman dispute – has come upon matters of serious concern regarding the ethics of Sherman’s schemes and tactics.

So at this point, I can say that the use of the label “unethical” by some to describe Barry Sherman’s conduct in business, such as “unethical in business dealings” according to the April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article, and “unethical in business” as asserted by the law and medicine professor Amir Attaran, is justifiable.

Similar to it has been the opinion of U.S. Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks stated in 2013, who referred to Sherman’s behaviour as “egregious misconduct”:

“Canada’s generic drug king found himself on the wrong side of several shaking fingers in the past year. After Health Canada demanded a recall of Apotex’s mispackaged birth control pills (they contained too many placebos and not enough medication), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration threatened to block Apotex products for “repeated deficiencies,” including bacterial contamination. Meanwhile, a Florida judge ruled against the pharmaceutical company in a lawsuit where Apotex claimed Brussels-based UCB infringed on its patent for a manufacturing process for a blood pressure medication. United States District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks had some harsh words for Sherman, who took the stand himself. “Dr. Sherman engaged in affirmative and egregious misconduct” throughout the patent prosecution, Judge Middlebrooks wrote.”

(“A great year for billionaires”, December 9, 2013, Canadian Business)

The brief press summary above also reported that some Apotex generic drugs had serious defects, such as “too many placebos and not enough medication”, and “repeated deficiencies”, that have drawn disciplinary responses from both Canadian and U.S. government health regulators.

The Apotex drugs’ deficiencies were “repeated” according to the U.S. FDA.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the deficiencies were quite persistent, because in my review so far there were also a 2003 court ruling on a dispute with GlaxoSmithKline and a 1993 court ruling on a dispute with Syntex, stating that Apotex drugs might not contain sufficient active ingredients or did not meet U.S. quality standards; furthermore, as already discussed in detail, in a 1993 court affidavit for a civil case former Ontario Chief Coroner Morton Shulman, then a practising MD, expressed his “reasonable doubts with respect to (Apotex) and its products” – doubts regarding their “efficacy”.

As for Sherman’s “affirmative and egregious misconduct” censured by Judge Middlebrooks, I have not found media coverage of the details.

Barry Sherman may have qualified as a Canadian business legend, and a Canadian industry hero, but if and when the conduct by him and his company could carry serious ramifications to many medicine consumers around the world, the media should not avoid the controversy – not in a mature democracy with a genuine degree of press freedom.

The Sherman-Shulman dispute, due to Morton Shulman’s long-time popular public profile, received considerable media attention in 1993-1994 as did, in that same atmosphere, the FBI investigation of Barry Sherman and his companies. Media coverage of these events has served as a ‘beacon of light’ in my review to understand some history of consequential relevance.

Medicines that were developed and sold in violation of existing patents, and medicines that did not satisfy required quality standards, were typically viewed by brand-name drug companies, especially Big Pharma with its bias, as “counterfeits”, admitted author Jeffrey Robinson in his book:

“As the market for legitimate prescription drugs has grown to a colossal size, the market for illegal prescription drugs has grown alongside it.

These are illicit generics made by companies in direct violation of patent protection; counterfeit drugs that contain no active ingredients but are packaged and priced like the real thing; and substandard drugs that contain some active ingredients and are sold as the real thing but do not meet pharmacopoeial standards. Because it serves Big Pharma’s interests, illegal prescription drugs get grouped together under the heading of counterfeits. When the word “generic” can be tossed into the pot, they deliberately tar legitimate generics with the same brush as counterfeits, trying to confuse the issues of bioequivalence and counterfeit drugs to create the impression that the two words are interchangeable.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

As my review has shown, the repeated deficiencies of Apotex drugs, coupled with Barry Sherman’s law-breaking aggressive push of generics – putting them directly on the market in violation of existing patents and mail selling them across national border in violation of relevant regulations – have put some of Sherman’s and Apotex’s pharmaceutical business practice into the “counterfeit” domain – from the brand-name drug companies’ perspective.

It wasn’t only Morton Sherman who once hired private detectives to investigate Sherman’s businesses, but also some in Big Pharma who viewed Sherman and Apotex as “counterfeiters”.

Robinson’s book told of a story where Paul Whybrow, a former London police officer and the British police’s first undercover detective specifically dealing with financial fraud, joined a leading private investigation agency working, under a man named only as “Mr. Jones”, on counterfeit drugs and patent violations in the pharmaceutical industry, a field that offered big money to private investigation agencies in Europe – not unlike it did law firms in Canada as discussed earlier:

“Because it worked so well the first time, Whybrow was sent undercover a second time. Within a few months, his superiors realized that he had a real talent for this. So they gave him a new identity, a passport to match, a credit card and a bank account in his new name, and a safe-house address. Just like that, the City of London Police had the first official undercover officer in the entire country specifically to deal with financial fraud.

…

So Whybrow decided to call it a day. … Within one week, Carratu International, one of Europe’s leading private investigation agencies, offered him a job. He was taken to lunch by a man – call him Mr. Jones – who said the firm needed someone to work undercover in its pharmaceutical division to collect evidence of counterfeit drugs and of patent and trademark infringements.

At Carratu, just as they are in so many private detective agencies, pharmaceuticals are a big money market.

…

There were jobs for AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Glaxo Wellcome, Bayer, and Roche. After that, there were also jobs that took him through the back door. While he insists that no one ever asks anyone to do anything illegal, everyone who plays this game knows what evidence is needed. …”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

When Mr. Jones became the lead private investigator for the German brand-name drug giant Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Whtbrow and another ex-cop Mick Flack were recruited to set up their own agency, which they called Temple Associates, to work for Mr. Jones and one of their first cases was to investigate Barry Sherman and Apotex:

“One of Carratu’s clients, the German giant Bayer Pharmaceuticals, started finding these so-called grey market drugs in pharmacies only a few blocks from its factory in Leverkusen. So Whybrow was dispatched to Switzerland to gather evidence against the culprit.

…

What Whybrow didn’t yet know was that Jones had a serious falling out with the management at Carratu. One day, just like that, Jones was gone. Whybrow, together with another ex-cop working at Carratu named Mick Flack, went to see Jones and found him very down in the dumps. They did whatever they could to encourage him, to assure him that he’d find another job somewhere. A few months later, Jones seemed to land on his feet, employed by Carratu’s own client, Bayer AG.

Remembering the guys who’d stood by him, Jones offered Whybrow and Flack the opportunity to leave Carratu and form their own agency. He told them he was controlling all of Bayer’s investigations, had a budget worth around £1.4 million for patent protection, and that Carratu would never get a penny of it. He told them, “You two start a business and you can have the lot.”

They were reluctant at first, but the offer was simply too good to turn down. So Whybrow and Flack set up a company called Temple Associates in Covent Garden, and went back to work for Jones.

One of the first cases he put them on to was Barry Sherman and Apotex.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

Mr. Jones was “obsessed with Sherman”, viewing him as “a real thorn”, “a major infringer” to be “taken down”:

““As far as Jones was concerned, Barry Sherman was a real thorn in his side. He was obsessed with Sherman, convinced that he was a major infringer, and he wanted him taken down. I’d been out to Canada on behalf of Carratu, gone through the front door of Apotex, and had an interview. Mick and I then went out to Canada together, and sat around watching the trucks going into the loading bays at the rear of the plant. We dressed in overalls and carried clipboards and walked around the loading bays to see what was coming in and going out. Sometimes we even carried a box with some stuff in it, just in case someone asked us what we were doing there. …

Not far from the Apotex loading bay was an area with picnic tables where employees would have lunch. So Whybrow and Flack sat there eating hot dogs for a couple of days, always taking notes.

“Maybe we did a week’s surveillance around the back. But the security is pretty tight at Apotex and you can forget about getting in there after hours. …””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

Fortunately for Sherman and Apotex, in this particular private investigation the covert onsite surveillance turned up nothing incriminating. But Mr. Jones did not give up, and pressured Whybrow and Flack on the prospect of planting evidence to frame Sherman, to “get this bastard Sherman” and “take him out of the game”:

“They reported back to Jones that they didn’t yet have what he wanted. He asked them to try to get a mole inside the company, and they felt they could arrange that. But that wasn’t enough for Jones. Now he came to England to meet with Whybrow and Flack.

“We had lunch together at a country pub,”, Whybrow alleges, “and all the time, Jones is thinking about how he can get Sherman. This is no longer just business, this is personal. He doesn’t just want to compromise him in a corporate way. He’s talking about playing hardball with Barry Sherman. It was very direct. He said to us, ‘We have to get this bastard Sherman.’ He said to us, ‘What are we going to do about him? Let’s take him out of the game. Take him out.’ Mick and I both knew enough not to say anything. He could have been wired. We weren’t going to commit ourselves to anything. But Jones was suggesting everything.”

According to Whybrow and Flack, the conversation then went like this:

Jones: “What can we do?”

Whybrow: “What do you want us to do?”

Jones: “What about your contacts with the police in Canada? Could you get him stopped?’

Whybrow: “Anything’s possible.”

Jones: “Let’s say he had half a kilo in his boot.”

Whybrow insists that neither he nor Flack said anything about this.

Jones: “What’s his sexual preference? Could we get him hooked up with little girls, or even underaged boys?”

Again, Whyborw says, he and Flack refused to get drawn into this. They knew better. But, Whybrow maintains, Jones was adamant.

Jones: “We’ve got to take him off the scene. Got to take him out.””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

Mr. Jones stated that getting Sherman was not just business, but “personal”. So it looked like that he, or much more likely his employer Bayer Pharmaceuticals, had some serious grudges against Barry Sherman – much like Morton Shulman who took his drug business dispute with Sherman very personally.

It was in this context, i.e., when author Robinson told him about these European private investigators’ story, that Sherman made his comment on the prospect of being “knocked off”, i.e., “killed”, that has previously been quoted partially from the April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article and fully from Robinson’s book; and here once again, Sherman’s words are quoted but in the broader context:

“In fairness, Whybrow adds, Jones never actually asked him to do anything illegal. All he wanted them to do, they insist, was “whatever it takes.” Whybrow thought Jones a bit reckless. But Jones never said to them, do it. Jones never asked them to commit a crime.

Whybrow now thinks Jones was really on some sort of fishing expedition. “He was looking to find out from us what we could do. He wanted Sherman taken out, but I don’t know what his solution was. He might not even have had one. Even if he did, it wasn’t going to be easy because Sherman is a very sharp operator.”

When the conversation was repeated to Sherman, he didn’t seem surprised. “The branded drug companies hate us. They have private investigators on us all the time. The thought once came to my mind, why didn’t they just hire someone to knock me off? For a thousand bucks paid to the right person you can probably get someone killed. Perhaps I’m surprised that hasn’t happened.””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

As the ex-police detective Paul Whybrow noted, Barry Sherman was a “very sharp operator”. In the interview with author Robinson, Whybrow listed the schemes Mr. Jones had once suggested to use to frame Sherman, such as planting banned narcotics as evidence, or using “little girls” or “underaged boys” to trap him, and yet Whybrow still claimed that he did not know what Mr. Jones’s “solution” was; later when told of this story, Sherman quite probably would think of something worse. 

In spite of Barry Sherman’s flaws, author Jeffrey Robinson of the intriguing 2001 book has expressed his opinion that the Shermans’ double murder was not carried out by his “Big Pharma enemies”, because “Big Pharma doesn’t take out hits on people, at least not in North America”:

“… Robinson doubts one of Sherman’s Big Pharma enemies took out a contract on him.

“Big Pharma doesn’t take out hits on people, at least not in North America,” Robinson said. “They’ll plant a kilo of cocaine in the trunk of your car or embed kiddie porn on your computer but they won’t murder you.””

(Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

Mr. Robinson’s argument is learned and persuasive – he cites means similar to what Mr. Jones once suggested to the Temple Associates investigators according to the latter, as what Big Pharma would do only – but in my opinion should not be taken as conclusive. This double murder was so rare that it could well be an exception to the norm – considering how “egregious” Barry Sherman’s schemes and tactics had been in his business moves and legal battles.

When this businessman, in the drive to realize his generic drug ambitions and expand his businesses, relentlessly and aggressively flouted the laws and regulations, and yet his gargantuan business expenditures on lawyers ensured the steady growth of his success and fortune with barely a scratch of consequences for his “egregious misconduct”, who knows what some of the brand-name drug enemies of Barry Sherman’s could resort to?

(Continuing to Part 2)

A review of postings about scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, with observations regarding elite centrism – Part 5: inventions, innovations, and ushering of ‘the new normal’ (iii)

(Continued from Part 5 (ii))

When the Harvard University computer pioneer Howard Aiken, inventor of Harvard Mark I, the world’s first “automatic digital calculator” built in the early 1940s by IBM, took early retirement in 1961 from his professorship, intending to become a businessman in the industry, he and Cuthbert Hurd, director of IBM’s Electronic Data Processing Machines Division, likely had discussions about starting “the first microcomputer computer company in the world”, with design work already being done by an assistant director of engineering at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, where Aiken was a regular consultant; but as in Part 5 (ii), their collaboration plan did not materialize and Aiken founded his own Howard Aiken Industries Incorporated in New York and Florida, specializing in buying ailing companies, fixing and then selling them, while Hurd left IBM in 1962 to become board chairman of the first independent computer software company, the Computer Usage Company.

As reviewed in Part 5 (ii), Aiken had been the leading academic computer-pioneer rival to John von Neumann, but not attaining the level of prominence of von Neumann who has been regarded as the “father of computers” for his role in the development of the first general-purpose electronic computer ENIAC built in the mid-1940s at the University of Pennsylvania, his advocacy of the “stored program” computer design, and his subsequent leadership of an ambitious computer-building movement among the academia and scientific institutions.

From this perspective, as I have commented in Part 5 (ii), in 1961-1962 Aiken missed a second chance to attain some sort of “father” status of a new generation of computers, namely microcomputers, and the chance perhaps to share some glories of founding Silicon Valley with distinguished figures such as Stanford University engineering dean and provost Frederick Terman who had in the 1930s mentored the founders of the Hewlett-Packard Company, and such as 8 young scientists and engineers who had in 1957 rebelled against the difficult management style of their mentor, 1956 Nobel Physics Prize laureate William Shockley, and founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.

The 1939 founding of Hewlett-Packard by Stanford University graduates William Hewlett and David Packard in a garage in Palo Alto has since been recognized as the birth of the Silicon Valley, as noted in Part 5 (ii).

A co-winner of the 1956 Nobel Physic Prize for his role in inventing the transistor, William Shockley had in late 1955 started the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View near Stanford, marking the arrival of the semiconductor industry that would give Silicon Valley its name; but it was the 1957 rebellion of the 8 disciples at the Shockley Semiconductor Lab, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Julius Bank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last and Sheldon Roberts, and their founding of Fairchild Semiconductor that led to that industry’s success, as previously quoted in Part 5 (ii):

“In September 1955 William Shockley and Arnold Beckman agreed to found the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a Division of Beckman Instruments … Shockley rented a building … in Mountain View… attracted extremely capable engineers and scientists, including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, Julius Blank, who learned about and developed technologies and processes related to silicon and diffusion while working there. In December 1956 Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the transistor, but his staff was becoming disenchanted with his difficult management style. They also felt the company should pursue more immediate opportunities for producing silicon transistors rather than the distant promise of a challenging four-layer p-n-p-n diode he had conceived at Bell Labs for telephone switching applications.

After unsuccessfully asking Beckman to hire a new manager, eight Shockley employees – including Moore and Noyce plus Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last and Sheldon Roberts – resigned in September 1957 and founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in Palo Alto. Many other employees, from technicians to PhDs, soon followed. Over the next decade, Fairchild grew into of the most important and innovative companies in the semiconductor industry, laying the technological and cultural foundations of Silicon Valley while spinning off dozens of new high-tech start-ups, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel. …”

(“1956: Silicon Comes to Silicon Valley”, The Silicon Engine, Computer History Museum)

As quoted, Shockley’s 8 disciples had become “disenchanted with his difficult management style” and also wanted “more immediate opportunities for producing silicon transistors”.

In 1956 von Neumann, by this time a U.S. Atomic Energy Commissioner and a leading scientific adviser to the U.S. Air Force on nuclear weapons and nuclear missiles development, was in hospital for cancer treatment and made a decision to move from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to the University of California but, as in Part 5 (ii), the move did not materialize as von Neumann soon died in February 1957 – in the year Fairchild Semiconductor was founded.

Had von Neumann moved, it would likely have been to UCLA in Southern California rather than UC Berkeley in Northern California, as reviewed in Part 5 (ii): with Southern Californian military aerospace companies active in computer development, and the Santa Monica-based Cold War think-tank RAND Corporation having him as a leading strategist and having built the JOHNNIAC computer named for him, von Neumann and RAND could have started a ‘Computer Beach’ there – at a time when Northern California’s Silicon Valley-founding Hewlett-Packard did not yet have computer development in its vision.

A few years later in 1961 Aiken’s new company, Howard Aiken Industries, was founded and named for himself similarly to William Shockley’s Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory; but while Aiken’s was ambitiously broader in its industry scope, it was neither in computer development – the field of Aiken’s academic prominence – nor in Silicon Valley.

Hurd later appeared to blame Aiken’s interest in getting rich for their, or perhaps just Hurd’s, not moving forward with their plan to start a microcomputer company, as previously quoted in Part 5 (ii):

“… Hurd said that he had never discussed this matter with Aiken, but that on two or three occasions when Aiken was in California, where he was a regular consultant for the Lockheed Missile and Space Division, the two of them had “talked at great length about organizing a company.” “If we had done it and if it had been successful,” Hurd mused, “it would have been the first microcomputer computer company in the world.” Hurd told me that “an Assistant Director of Engineering at Lockheed . . . was doing the design work,” and that “Howard, along with that man and me” would form the new company. Aiken, Hurd continued, “wanted me to help raise the money.” They “never followed through” with this plan. “I thought that maybe he wanted to be rich,” Hurd concluded, “and was thinking about starting the company for that reason.””

(I. Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer, 2000, The MIT Press)

So Aiken “wanted to be rich” and was “thinking about starting the company for that reason”. But what if a scientist wanted to put innovative work into commercial industrial production and needed to start a company for this purpose?

In 1957 the 8 young men abandoning William Shockley wanted exactly that, “more immediate opportunities for producing silicon transistors” as quoted earlier.

Unfortunately, the “Shockley Eight” found it very difficult to get financing, and their adventure nearly failed as their rebellion against their Nobel laureate mentor made them unacceptable to the investment firms that otherwise might take a chance on them – until eventually their case was brought to the attention of a wealthy and prominent playboy businessman, Sherman Fairchild: 

“Most of the transistor entrepreneurs had been backed by family money or other private capital resources. Arthur Rock at Hayden, Stone soon came to appreciate why. Every company he approached on behalf of the group of eight turned the idea down flat, without even asking to meet the men involved. Some firms may have found the pith of the letter–please give a million dollars to a group of men between the ages of 28 and 32 who think they are great and cannot abide working for a Nobel Prize winner–unpalatable. …

Undaunted, Bud Coyle mentioned the scientists to playboy-millionaire-inventor Sherman Fairchild. A meticulous man in his sixties, Fairchild was a bon vivant who frequented New York’s posh 21 Club and wore “a fresh pretty girl every few days like a new boutonniere,” according to Fortune. …

…

Sherman Fairchild was not involved with day-to-day operations at his companies, but he suggested to the senior management at Fairchild Camera and Instrument that it might explore the prospects of the West Coast technologists. …”

(Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, 2005, Oxford University Press)

Thus was born the Fairchild Semiconductor, a new company in the name of a famous playboy businessman who invested $1.5 million – twice as requested by the 8 Shockley mutineers – on the condition that he later could choose to acquire the full ownership for a pre-agreed $3 million:

“Fairchild readily put up $1.5 million to start the new company—about twice what the eight founders had originally thought necessary—in return for an option deal. If the company turned out to be successful, he would be able to buy it outright for $3 million.”

(Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, 2014, Simon and Schuster)

Sherman Fairchild was a good match as an investor for the Shockley Eight, because he himself was a scientific inventor, though not in the semiconductor field, and was the largest shareholder of IBM through family inheritance:

“It was a fine match. Fairchild, the owner of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, was an inventor, playboy, entrepreneur, and the largest single stockholder in IBM, which his father had cofounded. A great tinkerer, as a Harvard freshman he invented the first synchronized camera and flash. He went on to develop aerial photography, radar cameras, specialized airplanes, methods to illuminate tennis courts, high-speed tape recorders, lithotypes for printing newspapers, color engraving machines, and a wind-resistant match. In the process, he added a second fortune to his inheritance, and he was joyful spending it as he had been making it. …”

(Walter Isaacson, 2014, Simon and Schuster)

Like Aiken, Fairchild had attended Harvard, but never earned a degree from attending universities, including the University of Arizona and Columbia University.

(Frank and Suanne Woodring, Fairchild Aircraft, 2007, Arcadia Publishing)

In contrast to what Fairchild, a businessman and IBM’s largest shareholder living a playboy lifestyle, would easily do, namely financing the start of a new technology company, wasn’t Cuthbert Hurd, an IBM executive himself, too idealistic as reviewed in Part 5 (ii) or simply too harsh about Aiken’s interest in getting rich, when the first major semiconductor company of the fledgling Silicon Valley had already been founded in the name of someone famously wealthier, more debaucherous and less related to that company’s technological work?

Absolutely so, especially when Sherman Fairchild and his father George were the kind of legendary IBM figures like the bosses Hurd liked to talk about as in Part 5 (i), namely Thomas Watson father and son:

“… His father had preceded Tom Watson as the chief executive of the company that would become International Business Machines, and thanks to the vagaries of inheritance (Tom Watson had several children, while George Fairchild had only Sherman), he was the largest shareholder in IBM.”

(Leslie Berlin, 2005, Oxford University Press)

As the executive committee chairman on IBM’s board of directors, Sherman Fairchild immediately helped the new Fairchild Semiconductor get its first industry sales order – from IBM:

“Fairchild Semiconductor reached an important milestone on 2 March 1958, when it received a purchase order from IBM Owego accepting Fairchild’s quote to provide 100 core driver transistors at the price of $150 each. The firm had booked its first sale. With IBM’s purchase order, Fairchild Semiconductor instantly gained a measure of credibility in the electronics industry. IBM, a notoriously selective and demanding customer, had chosen to buy devices from the start-up. Helping Fairchild Semiconductor to secure this order from IBM was, reportedly, a timely visit by Sherman Fairchild (the founder of Fairchild Camera and Instrument and its majority owner) and Richard Hodgson to IBM’s president, Thomas Watson Jr. Managers at IBM Owego had concerns about Fairchild’s production capabilities and financial soundness. To overcome these reservations, Sherman Fairchild—who was also IBM’s largest individual shareholder and who chaired the executive committee of IBM’s board of directors—met with Watson and asked him to buy silicon transistors from the new venture. Fairchild Semiconductor received its order from IBM shortly thereafter.”

(Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock, with forward by Jay Last, Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor, 2010, The MIT Press)

With the IBM management, of which Cuthbert Hurd was a part, so well accustomed to a wealthy son of an IBM co-founder wielding influences on the company’s board, how ‘impure’ in comparison was the early computer pioneer Howard Aiken’s goal of getting rich?

Given that Fairchild, an inventor and businessman, could easily help young scientists start a new technology company that would lay “the technological and cultural foundations of Silicon Valley”, as quoted earlier, and given that Shockley, a scientist inventor, had been able to start a new technology company, in my opinion Aiken, a scientist inventor turning into a businessman with a similar ambition, should be given the chance to try.

But as much as Hurd’s educational institutional career perspectives may have biased him toward Aiken’s interest in money as reviewed in Part 5 (ii), Hurd likely would have needed IBM’s support to co-launch a new computer company with Aiken.

Therefore I have to wonder if IBM, by the 1960s, still harboured trepidation about Aiken’s ambition: as in Part 5 (ii), Thomas Watson, Jr.’s late father and IBM-president predecessor had in 1944 witnessed the inclination of Harvard and Aiken to claim all the Mark I credits for themselves.

The Shockley Eight who founded Fairchild Semiconductor were viewed as the “Traitorous Eight” by William Shockley, but Shockley’s own difficult management style and orthodox scientific focus not only triggered their departure but also led to his company’s eventual failure. Spending the rest of his career as a Stanford professor, Shockley further descended into an openly “racist” scholar detested by many:

“Dubbed “the traitorous eight,” Noyce and his posse set up shop just down the road from Shockley on the outskirts of Palo Alto. Shockley Semiconductor never recovered. Six years later, Shockley gave up and joined the faculty of Stanford. His paranoia deepened, and he became obsessed with his notion that blacks were genetically inferior in terms of IQ and should be discouraged from having children. The genius who conceptualized the transistor and brought people to the promised land of Silicon Valley became a pariah who could not give a lecture without facing hecklers.”

(Walter Isaacson, 2014, Simon and Schuster)

Free of the difficult man as their boss, the Shockley Eight managed to start their new company at an incredibly right time; 3 days after Fairchild Semiconductor’s founding on October 1, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched the world’s first satellite, the Sputnik, spurring a fierce scientific and technological race in the United States to keep up with its Cold War nemesis:

“The traitorous eight who formed Fairchild Semiconductor, by contrast, turned out to be the right people at the right place at the right time. The demand for transistors was growing because of the pocket radios that Pat Haggerty had launched at Texas Instruments, and it was about to skyrocket even higher; on October 4, 1957, just three days after Fairchild Semiconductor was formed, the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite and set off a space race with the United States. The civilian space program, along with the military program to build ballistic missiles, propelled the demand for both computers and transistors. It also helped assure that the development of these two technologies became linked. Because computers had to be made small enough to fit into a rocket’s nose cone, it was imperative to find ways to cram hundreds and then thousands of transistors into tiny devices.”

(Walter Isaacson, 2014, Simon and Schuster)

In 1959 at Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce became an inventor – co-inventor independently with Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments – of the integrated circuit:

“When the transistor was invented in 1947 it was considered a revolution. Small, fast, reliable and effective, it quickly replaced the vacuum tube. …

…

With the small and effective transistor at their hands, electrical engineers of the 50s saw the possibilities of constructing far more advanced circuits than before. However, as the complexity of the circuits grew, problems started arising.

When building a circuit, it is very important that all connections are intact. …

Another problem was the size of the circuits. …

…

In the summer of 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments found a solution to this problem. …

… Kilby presented his new idea to his superiors. He was allowed to build a test version of his circuit. In September 1958, he had his first integrated circuit ready. It was tested and it worked perfectly!

Although the first integrated circuit was pretty crude and had some problems, the idea was groundbreaking. …

…

Robert Noyce came up with his own idea for the integrated circuit. He did it half a year later than Jack Kilby. Noyce’s circuit solved several practical problems that Kilby’s circuit had, mainly the problem of interconnecting all the components on the chip. … This made the integrated circuit more suitable for mass production. …”

(“The History of the Integrated Circuit”, May 5, 2003, Nobelprize.org)

I note that this milestone status of Robert Noyce’s co-inventing the integrated circuit matched his former mentor William Shockley’s co-inventing the transistor.

In 2000 when Kilby learned he was to be awarded the Nobel Physics Prize for inventing the integrated circuit, he immediately mentioned Noyce, who had died 10 years earlier:

“When Kilby was told that he had won the Nobel Prize in 2000, ten years after Noyce had died, among the first things he did was praise Noyce. “I’m sorry he’s not still alive,” he told reporters. “If he were, I suspect we’d share this prize.” ….”

(Walter Isaacson, 2014, Simon and Schuster)

Ironically, Noyce had died of a heart attack, on June 3, 1990 at the age of 62, in Austin, Texas, i.e., in the home state of Texas Instruments, Fairchild Semiconductor’s industry rival, where he led an American research consortium competing with the Japanese in the semiconductor industry:

““He was considered the mayor of Silicon Valley,” said Jim Jarrett, a spokesman for Intel. A founder of the Semiconductor Industry Association in 1975, Dr. Noyce was frequently in Washington to lobby on behalf of semiconductor manufacturers.

At the time of his death, Dr. Noyce was the president and chief executive of Sematech Inc., a research consortium in Austin that was organized by 14 corporations in an attempt to help the American computer industry catch up with the Japanese in semiconductor manufacturing technology.”

(“An Inventor of the Microchip, Robert N. Noyce, Dies at 62”, by Constance L. Hays, June 4, 1990, The New York Times)

The immediate boost the integrated circuit invention provided, in the early 1960s, was not to the commercial computer industry but to the U.S. military’s nuclear missiles development:

“The first major market for microchips was the military. In 1962 the Strategic Air Command designed a new land-based missile, the Minuteman II, that would each require two thousand microchips just for its onboard guidance system. Texas Instruments won the right to be the primary supplier. By 1965 seven Minutemen were being built each week, and the Navy was also buying microchips for its submarine-launched missile, the Polaris. With a coordinated astuteness not often found among military procurement bureaucracies, the designs of the microchips were standardized. Westinghouse and RCA began supplying them as well. So the price soon plummeted, until microchips were cost-effective for consumer products and not just missiles.”

(Walter Isaacson, 2014, Simon and Schuster)

As shown in the above quote, Texas Instruments quickly reaped big benefits from selling to the military missiles program.

In comparison, Fairchild Semiconductor carefully kept a distance from directly supplying military projects, instead gaining a major role supplying the U.S. civilian space program’s poster child, the Apollo missions to the moon:

“Fairchild also sold chips to weapons makers, but it was more cautious than its competitors about working with the military. In the traditional military relationship, a contractor worked hand in glove with uniformed officers, who not only managed procurement but also dictated and fiddled with design. Noyce believed such partnerships stifled innovation: “The direction of the research was being determined by people less competent in seeing where it ought to go.” He insisted that Fairchild fund the development of its chips using its own money so that it kept control of the process. If the product was good, he believed, military contractors would buy it. And they did.

America’s civilian space program was the next big booster for microchip production. In May 1961 President John F. Kennedy declared, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” The Apollo program, as it became known, needed a guidance computer that could fit into a nose cone. So it was designed from scratch to use the most powerful microchips that could be made. The seventy-five Apollo Guidance Computers that were built ended up containing five thousand microchips apiece, all identical, and Fairchild landed the contract to supply them. The program beat Kennedy’s deadline by just a few months; in July 1969 Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. By that time the Apollo program had bought more than a million microchips.”

(Walter Isaacson, 2014, Simon and Schuster)

For the Apollo moon landing missions, Fairchild’s microchips achieved a major milestone by beating out IBM computers, which did not use integrated circuits, to be the choice of the onboard Apollo Guidance Computer, thanks to the perseverance of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

“… One of the most interesting examples of these decisions concerned the Apollo Guidance and Navigation system, controlled by the Apollo Guidance Computer. Due to size, weight, and power constraints, the Command and Lunar Modules would each carry only one computer, which had to work. What was more, the designers of the computer, at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, decided to build the computer using the newly-invented integrated circuit, or silicon “chip” as we now know it. … MIT’s decision did not go unchallenged. Early in the Apollo program, NASA contracted with AT&T to provide technical and managerial assistance for select technical issues. AT&T in turn established Bellcomm, an entity that carried out these analyses. In late 1962, Bellcomm recommended that IBM, not MIT, supply the computers for the Apollo Command and Lunar Modules. … Bellcomm’s recommendation was due in part to IBM’s role as supplier of the computer that guided the Saturn V rocket into Earth orbit and then to a lunar trajectory. The IBM Launch Vehicle Digital Computer did not use integrated circuits, but rather a more conservative circuit developed at IBM called “Unit Logic Device.” What was more, the circuits in the computer were installed in threes—so called “Triple Modular Redundancy” so that a failure of a single circuit would be “outvoted” by the other two.

The engineers at the MIT Instrumentation Lab mounted a vigorous defense of their design and were able to persuade NASA to not use the IBM computers in the Command and Lunar Module. … The Lab worked closely with Fairchild Semiconductor, the California company where the integrated circuit was invented, to ensure reliability. Chips were tested under rigorous conditions of temperature, vibration, contamination, and so on. If a chip failed these tests, the entire lot from which it came from was discarded. … Although Fairchild was offering a line of chips that could be used to make a computer, MIT chose only one type, giving them an ability to test it more thoroughly and to allow the manufacturer to build up more experience making them reliably. No Apollo Guidance Computer, on either the Command or Lunar Modules, ever experienced a hardware failure during a mission.

MIT did not entirely prevail, however, as NASA specified that primary navigation for Apollo would be conducted from Houston, using its array of large mainframe computers (supplied by IBM), with the on-board system as a secondary. The wisdom of that decision was proven during Apollo 13 when the Command Module’s power was lost. In other missions, the on-board computers and navigation systems worked perfectly and worked more in tandem with Houston than as a backup. It also functioned reliably during the burns of the Service Module engine behind the Moon, when there was no communication with Houston. …”

(“Apollo Guidance Computer and the First Silicon Chips”, by Paul Ceruzzi, October 14, 2015, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum)

In the end, the Apollo Guidance Computer microchips designed by Fairchild Semiconductor were mass-manufactured by Philco, a company based in Philadelphia; nonetheless, the growth of Fairchild Semiconductor and the growth of Silicon Valley benefited significantly from the Apollo space program:

“… Grumman Aerospace, the builder of the Lunar Module, insisted that a small back-up controller be installed in case of a computer failure. Grumman envisioned this “Abort Guidance System” (AGS) as a modest controller intended only to get the crew off the Moon quickly and into Lunar Orbit, where they would be rescued by the Command Module pilot. As finally supplied by TRW Inc., it grew into a general-purpose computer of its own, with its own display and keyboard. Like the Apollo Guidance Computer, it also used integrated circuits. It was tested successfully during the Apollo 10 mission, but it was never needed.

… The area of Santa Clara County, where Fairchild and its competitors were located, began going by the name “Silicon Valley” by the end of the decade. The Apollo contract was not the sole reason for the transformation of the Valley, but it was a major factor. In truth, Fairchild ended up not being the main supplier of Apollo chips after all. Their design was licensed to Philco of suburban Philadelphia, which supplied the thousands of integrated circuits used in all the Apollo Guidance Computers. And because the Abort Guidance System was specified a year or two after the Apollo Guidance Computer, its designers were able to take advantage of newer circuit designs, not from Fairchild but from one of its Silicon Valley competitors, Signetics. …”

(Ceruzzi, October 14, 2015, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum)

As summarized in the above two quotes, the Apollo program’s use of computers consisted of: 1) IBM mainframe computers in the Houston control center; 2) MIT-developed Apollo Guidance Computers using Fairchild-designed integrated-circuit chips manufactured by Philadelphia-based Philco, onboard the Command and Lunar Modules; and 3) TRW-developed computers, with microchips designed by another Silicon Valley semiconductor company Signetics, for the emergency Abort Guidance System.

As in Part 5 (ii), Philco was a company that produced transistors and computers for the military and for the commercial market, a company where Saul Rosen, a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. and former Wayne State University professor, had worked before becoming one of the 2 initial founding members of Purdue University’s computer science department – the first such department of any U.S. university.

Also as in Part 5 (ii), Sam Conte, Purdue computer science department’s founding chairman and Rosen’s former Wayne State colleague, had worked at the military aerospace company Space Technology Laboratories; STL was a part of TRW, which was the leading contractor for the U.S. Air Force’s intercontinental ballistic missiles development.

(“Former TRW Space Park, now Northrop Grumman, designated as historic site for electronics and aerospace work”, by John Keller, December 18, 2011, Military & Aerospace Electronics)

The fact that 2 of the technology companies where the 2 Purdue computer science department founding members had worked later played key roles for the Apollo space program indicates that Purdue, in 1962 hiring these 2 former Wayne State professors to establish the first academic computer science department in the United States, had insight into the computer industry.

Fairchild Semiconductor kept a distance, in fact, from directly supplying military as well as other government contracts. In the company’s first 2 years, only 35% of sales were direct government purchases even though, in 1960 for instance, 80% of its transistors and 100% of its integrated circuits ended up in military use; by 1963, less than 10% of its business was direct contracts with the government; as also quoted earlier, Fairchild Semiconductor did not use government funding for its research and development, despite other companies’ use of government money as their primary source of R&D funding:

“Ever since Fairchild’s inception, the focus on innovation had led the company to reject most direct government contract work. Of course, Noyce knew that without the government—specifically, the Department of Defense—Fairchild Semiconductor would not exist. In the company’s first two years, direct government purchases accounted for 35 percent of Fairchild Semiconductor’s sales, and well over half of the company’s products eventually found their way into government hands. The multimillion-dollar Minuteman contract for transistors cemented the company’s success, and the vast majority of Fairchild’s other early customers were aerospace firms buying products to use in their own government contract work. In 1960, 80 percent of Fairchild’s transistors went to military uses, and fully 100 percent of the company’s early integrated circuits were used in defense functions as well. The company worked closely with military contractors in designing and building its products. …

Though Noyce welcomed the government as a customer and appreciated that federal mandates—such as one issued in April 1964, that required all televisions be equipped with UHF tuners, a law that effectively forced the introduction of transistors into every television in the United States—could benefit Fairchild Semiconductor, he believed there was something “almost unethical” about using government contract money to fund R&D projects. “Government funding of R&D has a deadening effect upon the incentives of the people,” he explained to a visitor in 1964. “They know that [their work] is for the government, that it is supported by government dollars, that there is a lot of waste. This is not the way to get creative, innovative work done.” …

… “A young organization, especially in the electronics industry has to be fast moving,” he explained in 1964. “It runs into problems with the unilateral direction mandated by government work.” By this point, the company was relatively well established, and Noyce reminisced, “We were a hard, young, hungry group. [Our attitude was] ‘We don’t give a damn what [money] you have [to offer], buddy. We’re going to do this ourselves.’” Gordon Moore shared Noyce’s beliefs. Consequently, while other firms in the early 1960s used government contracting as the primary source of R&D funding, less than 10 percent of business at Fairchild was contracted directly by the government in 1963. “And we like it that way,” Noyce hastened to tell a reporter.”

(Leslie Berlin, 2005, Oxford University Press)

As quoted earlier from a book by Walter Isaacson, in the early 1960s the U.S. military’s strategic nuclear missiles that immediately benefited from the invention of the integrated circuit were the land-based Minuteman II and the submarine-based Polaris.

Polaris was developed and produced by Lockheed Missiles and Space Company founded in 1956 in Sunnyvale of the nascent Silicon Valley region, as cited in a quote in Part 5 (ii) – a company for which Howard Aiken was a regular consultant for over a decade until 1973, the year of his death, as in Part 5 (ii).

But Aiken’s relationship with Lockheed had started before the creation of this missiles and space branch, with his consulting for the military aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Corporation in Los Angeles, according to an interview of him by Henry Tropp and Bernard Cohen in February 1973 – just over 2 weeks before his death as in Part 5 (ii):

“TROPP:

Well I’ve run across some interesting unpublished documents, many of them in another environment that’s related, in terms of what happened in the computer revolution, and had similar occurrences to Harvard, because people were starting clean. That’s the aircraft industry primarily in the Los Angeles area. Communications were different in that period. The East Coast had its computing environment and the West Coast tended to be separate and distinct and they almost grew up by themselves. But there were links back and forth and one of the questions that I was going to ask you was who were some of the people from that aerospace industry who visited the Harvard Computational Lab?

AIKEN:

The first man that I can think of is Louis Ridenhauser, with whom I was very closely associated. Louis was the Vice-President of Lockheed and he almost clubbed the Board of Directors of Lockheed into starting electronics machinery. And I was associated with him in that venture and was a Lockheed consultant for many years. I was always hopping out there to Los Angeles for a week nearly every month.

Then, I was in and out of Los Angeles for the Bureau of Standards operation.

TROPP:

That’s right. That was at UCLA. Did people come from Northrop and from Hughes in the late forties? Did any of that group come to Harvard?

AIKEN:

I saw Lehmer very frequently.

TROPP:

How about Harry Huskey? Did he come?

AIKEN:

Yes, yes. He was at our place. In fact, he attended one of these symposia.”

(“Interviewee: Howard Aiken (1900-1973) Interviewers: Henry Tropp and I.B. Cohen”, February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

Per his recollection as above, Aiken consulted for Lockheed in close association with then Lockheed vice president Louis Ridenhauser, who convinced the Lockheed board of directors to start “electronics machinery”, and was a very important aerospace industry figure among the visitors to Aiken’s Harvard Computation Lab; Aiken went to Lockheed in Los Angeles for a week of consulting in nearly every month, and was then in and out of Los Angeles for “the Bureau of Standards operation” at UCLA where he saw Lehmer very frequently; Harry Huskey also visited his Harvard lab.

As in Parts 5 (i) & (ii), UC Berkeley computational mathematicians Derrick Lehmer and Harry Huskey had been with the Institute for Numerical Analysis, located at UCLA and managed by the National Bureau of Standards, where Lehmer was the director in the early 1950s and Huskey led the development of its SWAC computer completed in 1950; the INA was terminated in 1954 due to McCarthyism-type politics, Lehmer returned to Berkeley in August 1953 and in 1954 recruited Huskey to UC Berkeley.

By this timeline, Aiken first started as a Lockheed consultant before INA’s closure in 1954, helping Lockheed getting into “electronics machinery” development.

I would not doubt that Howard Aiken had frequented the INA as recalled in his 1973 interview; however, in the comprehensive 1991 book by Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd on INA history, extensively quoted in Parts 5 (i) & (ii), there exists only one reference to Aiken, and in a negative light – about his opposition to the NBS’s development of computers, as recalled by Harry Huskey (Aiken name underline emphasis added):

“The success of the ENIAC had excited mathematicians and other scientists to the possibilities now opening before them. … Government agencies, quick to see the potentials of an electronic computer, were eager to acquire one. However, the field was new, there was no background of experience… Therefore, government agencies were glad to ask the NBS to assist them in negotiating with computer companies. In early 1948, the Bureau had begun negotiating with the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and the Raytheon Corporation, and later with Engineering Research Associates.

The computers were slow in being developed. New techniques were being tried and often they did not work as well, or as soon, as had been first thought, or hoped. The personnel of the Applied Mathematics Laboratories became impatient with this slow development, and decided that they could build one faster with the help of the Electronics Laboratory at the Bureau. Also, it had become clear that in order to be able to judge effectively the probability of a new technique working they would need more “hands-on” expertise. Dr. Edward Cannon and the author convinced Dr. Curtiss that this “gamble” was worth trying, and Dr. Mina Rees of the Office of Naval Research backed them up. This was in spite of the advice of a committee, consisting of Dr. George Stibitz, Dr. John von Neumann, and Dr. Howard Aiken, which had been asked by Dr. Curtiss to consider the Bureau’s role in the computer field. Their advice had been that the NBS shouldn’t really work on computers, but should confine its work to improving components.

In May 1948, the decision was made at the Executive Council to build a machine for the Bureau’s own use in Washington. … at the October 1948 meeting of the Executive Council it was decided that the Bureau should build a second computer at the Institute for Numerical Analysis, which had by now been located in a reconverted temporary building on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. This machine was to be built under the direction of the author, who had joined Curtiss’s group in January 1948. He had spent the previous year at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, working under Alan Turing with James Wilkinson and others on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) project. He had been offered the job there on the recommendation of Professor Douglas Hartree, whom he had met while working on the ENIAC project.”

(“The SWAC: The National Bureau of Standards Western Automatic Computer”, by Harry D. Huskey, in Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, Mathematicians Learning to Use Computers: The Institute for Numerical Analysis UCLA 1947-1954, 1991, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce)

As reviewed in Part 5 (i), the NBS built 2 computers in 1950, the SEAC computer in Washington, D.C. and the SWAC computer at the INA at UCLA; both were electronic computers, and influenced by John von Neumann’s design, including the “stored program” concept he advocated. The INA operation was overseen by John Curtiss cited above, who was head of the NBS’s applied mathematics division and Mina Rees, cited above as supportive of NBS’s interest in computer development, was the head of the mathematics division at the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research, as in Part 5 (ii).

And as Huskey recalled in the quote above, to get into computer development the NBS had to go against the advice of a committee of 3 prominent computer pioneers, including Aiken and von Neumann.

Of the 3 committee members, Howard Aiken and George Stibitz were part of a powerful scientific establishment, led by the U.S. government’s leading science adviser Vannevar Bush discussed about in Parts 5 (i) & (ii), that had strongly opposed the development of the first general-purpose electronic computer ENIAC during World War II – the project von Neumann, the other committee member, had played a key role in – and continued to oppose later electronic computer projects:

“The decision to build the ENIAC resulted from the Army’s pressing wartime needs. The established scientific community within the government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Vannevar Bush, fiercely opposed the Eckert-Mauchly project. At issue were both the digital design of their proposal (an advanced analog differential analyzer was being built at MIT at the time) and their proposed use of electronic circuit elements. Samuel H. Caldwell, Bush’s MIT colleague, wrote, “The reliability of electronic equipment required great improvement before it could be used with confidence for computation purposes.” Stibitz, at the Bell labs, expressed similar sentiments and suggested using electromechanical relay technology.

After the war, when Eckert and Mauchly turned to more advanced designs, opposition from established figures in computing continued. Howard Aiken, who had struggled at Harvard before the war to seek support for constructing a large electromechanical calculator, opposed their projects, …

Well before ENIAC was finished, Eckert and Mauchly’s group began thinking about a new and improved machine. …

By then, an important addition to the Moore School team had been made. The famous mathematician John von Neumann had learned of the existence of the project and had immediately begun regular visits. Von Neumann, a superb mathematician, had become a powerful voice in the scientific establishment that ran the U.S. war effort’s research and development program. …

Von Neumann’s presence stimulated a more formal and rigorous approach to the design of the successor machine, dubbed the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC). …”

(Kenneth Flamm, Creating the Computer: Government, Industry and High Technology, 1988, Brookings Institution)

As described above, the powerful U.S. scientific establishment’s leading conservative views were very much like Aiken’s reviewed in Part 5 (ii), namely that electronic components were unreliable, and that the Aiken type of electromechanical delay machines should be the choice instead.

Even decades later, in the 1973 interview shortly before his unexpected death, Aiken continued to make the same point, that electronic computers built with vacuum tubes were “absolutely worthless” because they were unreliable, asserting that electronic computers became successful really only after transistors had become available:

“AIKEN:

Yes. You see, a computing machine is not reliable. It’s worthless, absolutely worthless. You can’t trust the results. And that was the reason that we checked everything that we did. Even today, people don’t go to all lengths to check what they did. … Well, we were conscious that we had ________ and the ENIAC didn’t. We had program facilities which they didn’t. We had input and output which they didn’t bother to worry about. … So that we used to say, “What’s all this speed for? What does it accomplish? We get there sooner.”

And yet, you know, I really question if electronic computation would ever have become a great success had it not been for the transistor.”

(February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

So, even assuming that in 1948 John von Neumann was sympathetic toward the NBS’s intent on developing computers, his view was unfortunately in the minority on the committee making the recommendation – with Howard Aiken and George Stibitz staunch opponents – just like his view having been in the minority among the leading circle of the U.S. scientific establishment in their attitudes toward the ENIAC project.

Nonetheless, like the U.S. Army had done starting the ENIAC project during World War II, in 1948 the NBS decided against the expert committee’s negative advice and started the SEAC computer project in Washington, D.C. and the SWAC computer project at the INA at UCLA.

As in Part 5 (i), von Neumann was among the “distinguished visitors” at the INA at UCLA as reported in the book of Hestenes and Todd; but that detailed INA history account published in 1991 made no other mention of Aiken, i.e., other than his on the committee opposing NBS computer development – despite his own claim in the 1973 interview that he had frequented INA.

While I do not doubt the validity of Aiken’s claim, it apparently has been ignored by former INA members who have told their stories in the 1991 book. Given Aiken’s prominence in the computing field nearly rivaling von Neumann’s, I would infer that he frequented Los Angeles as a computer consultant for Lockheed as recalled in his 1973 interview, and while there also visited INA in an informal capacity, and therefore his visits have not been mentioned in the more recent book on INA history.

But now a related question arises: with his frequent consulting trips to Lockheed for many years since the early 1950s, what contributions did Howard Aiken actually make to Lockheed in electronic computer development – or “electronics machinery” as he called it in the 1973 interview quoted earlier?

The answer may be that, at least during his consultancy in the 1950s, Aiken did not help Lockheed develop any electronic computer.

Firstly, given Aiken’s conservatism, i.e., his viewing electronic computers as “absolutely worthless”, he was slow to embrace the vacuum tube technology for electronic computers even though, as in Part 5 (ii), his 1930s’ Harvard Ph.D. research had been in vacuum tubes.

Secondly, as quoted earlier from Nobelprize.org on the history of the integrated circuit, the transistor had only been invented in 1947, and despite the story previously cited in Part 5 (ii) that Aiken used some transistors with Mark III and Mark IV, in his 1973 interview Aiken seemed to deny it, stating that he had never utilized the transistor, and that their quality had been very bad:

“COHEN:

But this was still vacuum tube.

AIKEN:

Mark III was. You see, I never had anything to do with the transistor.

…

AIKEN:

The first transistors we purchased in the computer laboratory were purchased in France._____________________________________, and they were yea big, and they looked like little plastic things with three wires sticking out of them. That happens to be exactly what they were. They sold those damn things in a number of plastic molds with three wires sticking out of the thing; they had no circuit capability whatsoever at all. And like everybody else, we didn’t find that out until we paid for it.

Then I wrote to the United States Chamber of Commerce in Paris to complain, and several other people must have done the same thing because I got a letter back, saying, “Well, these people are no longer in business.” But they ripped quite a few people with their technique.”

(February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

Thirdly, in Part 5 (i) I have reviewed the computer development activity of the late 1940s and early 1950s at aerospace companies in Southern California, and Lockheed is not mentioned in that history, as previously quoted in Part 5 (i):

“One other pocket of activity, in historical hindsight, looms in importance as a transporter of computer technology from laboratory to market. Located on the West Coast of the United States and tied closely to the aerospace industry in Southern California, which, in turn, was very dependent on government contracts, this activity focused on scientific and engineering computing. The design of aircraft inherently required extensive mathematical calculations, as did applications such as missile guidance. Early efforts (late 1940s) were primarily housed at Northrop Aircraft and to a lesser extent at Raytheon. Both had projects funded by the U.S. government: Northrop for its Snark missile and Raytheon for a naval control processor, for example. Northrop worked with an instrument supplier (Hewlett-Packard) on early digital projects. Then, in 1950, a group of Northrop engineers formed their own computer company called Computer Research Corporation (CRC). Like ERA, it had a military sponsor the U.S. Air Force for which it built various computers in the first half of the 1950s.”

(James W. Cortada, The Computer in the United States: From Laboratory to Market, 1930 to 1960, 1993, M.E. Sharpe)

As quoted, aircraft design and missile guidance were two applications that “required extensive mathematical calculations” and would benefit from computing power.

But as it appeared in the above history account, Northrop and Raytheon were centers of computer development activity in that earlier period, but likely not Lockheed.

However, Lockheed did purchase 2 IBM 701 computers – IBM’s first commercial computer, the development of which Cuthbert Hurd played a key role for as in Parts 5 (i) & (ii) – for its Southern Californian aircraft business in 1953 and 1954 – No. 3 and No. 18 on a full list of 19 IBM 701 computers produced per IBM’s archival records, including No. 1 for IBM itself.

(“701 Customers”, International Business Machines Corporation)

And fourthly, despite Aiken’s consultancy for Lockheed in Los Angeles on “starting electronics machinery”, in 1956 when Lockheed Missiles and Space Division was founded in the fledgling Silicon Valley region, the Lockheed engineers there relied solely on mechanical calculators as previously quoted in Part 5 (ii):

“The Bayshore Freeway was still a two-lane road, and 275 acres of bean fields adjacent to Moffett Field were purchased in 1956 to become the home of Lockheed Missile & Space Division (now Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company). …

…

… the first reconnaissance satellite, called Corona, and the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) were designed and built in just a few short years by the company’s engineers and scientists — armed only with slide rules, mechanical calculators, the basic laws of physics and an abundance of imagination.”

(“Lockheed grew up with Sunnyvale”, Myles D. Crandall, February 25, 2007, Silicon Valley Business Journal)

Given the four aspects of evidence listed above, encompassing Aiken’s own dismissive attitudes toward electronic components, Lockheed’s lack of computer development activity and the absence of computer use in the early years at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale where Aiken became a consultant at some point, Lockheed most likely did not develop electronic computers during the 1950s and Aiken did not help in that regard.

Then the next logical question is: what did Howard Aiken actually do in his consulting for Lockheed, which he later referred to in his 1973 interview, quoted earlier, as the venture of “starting electronics machinery”?

An answer may be that Aiken helped with developing special circuits for the application of missile guidance, i.e., for the Polaris nuclear missiles developed and produced by Lockheed Missile and Space Company.

This is because, as quoted earlier, in the early 1960s the Polaris missiles utilized a lot of microchips after the integrated circuit’s invention by Texas Instruments’ Jack Kilby and Fairchild Semiconductor’s Robert Noyce.

In fact, the title of a 1962 conference co-organized by Aiken and William Main – a person Aiken and Hurd wanted to start a computer company with in 1970 as mentioned in Part 5 (ii) – and hosted by the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, previously cited in Part 5 (ii), referred to “Switching theory in space technology”.

(Howard Aiken and William F. Main, eds., Switching theory in space technology: [Symposium on the Application of Switching Theory in Space Technology, held at Sunnyvale, California, February 27-28 and March 1, 1962], 1963, Stanford University Press)

What is switching theory? It is the theory of circuit switching of data for rapid decision making – like the computer’s logical functioning but not necessarily requiring a general-purpose computer to accomplish:

“Switching theory, Theory of circuits made up of ideal digital devices, including their structure, behaviour, and design. It incorporates Boolean logic (see Boolean algebra), a basic component of modern digital switching systems. Switching is essential to telephone, telegraph, data processing, and other technologies in which it is necessary to make rapid decisions about routing information.”

(“Switching theory”, by the Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica)

One can understand that “rapid decisions” were critically needed on flying missiles as they were on a telephone network.

In his 1973 interview, Aiken emphasized that switching theory did not have to rely on transistors, because the switching circuits could also be made of mechanical relays or vacuum tubes:

“AIKEN:

This was the beauty of switching theory, you see. You had switches and you could take a relay or a vacuum tube or a transistor or anything else, a magnetic core, and make diagrams and draw pictures for a machine completely on the logic of it. …”

(February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

So the various pieces of evidence suggest that in the 1950s before the integrated circuit’s invention, Howard Aiken did not get to develop electronic computers as a Lockheed consultant but helped the company develop switching circuits for missile guidance, probably using electromechanical relays at first – his conservative Harvard Mark I specialty – and later using integrated circuits during the 1960s.

In an earlier quote from Walter Isaacson’s book on innovators in digital revolution, there was the statement that, “computers had to be made small enough to fit into a rocket’s nose cone”.

Regarding that is an important point of distinction related to Aiken’s recognized contributions to the computer field: those “computers” were not necessarily general-purpose computers that one commonly knows, i.e., not of “von Neumann architecture” as discussed in Part 5 (i) but special switching circuits built with electronic components; such circuits would certainly be “electronics machinery” as Aiken called them in his 1973 interview, and have sometimes been referred to as computers of “Harvard architecture”, also known as “Aiken architecture” as previously quoted in Part 5 (ii):

“… Aiken is sometimes held to be reactionary because he was always wary of the concept of the “stored program” and did not incorporate it into any of his later machines. This stance did put him out of step with the main lines of computer architecture in what we may call the post-Aiken era, but it must be kept in mind that there are vast fields of computer application today in which separate identity of program must be maintained, for example, in telephone technology and what is known as ROM (“read-only memory”). In fact, computers without the stored-program feature are often designated today (for instance, by Texas Instruments Corporation) as embodying “Harvard architecture,” by which is meant “Aiken architecture.””

(“Howard Hathaway Aiken”, by J. A. N. Lee, 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.)

Unfortunately for Howard Aiken, in 1959 just as the integrated circuit was invented and a giant leap of technological advancement would soon take place in the applications of switching circuits and computers in the missile and space fields, his close friend and Lockheed sponsor, Lockheed vice president Louis Ridenhauser who had gotten the company’s board to start “electronics machinery”, as cited earlier, unexpectedly died as Aiken later recalled in his 1973 interview:

“AIKEN:

Have you ever heard Louis Ridenhauer’s definition of an airplane company? He says it’s a place where well-informed brash old men sit around all day in conference discussing irrational things. I was very, very fond of Louis. I was with him the evening he died, in Washington. It was a very unusual thing.

There was a young man who was interested in very low temperature devices in computers— what was his name?

TROPP:

I don’t know.

COHEN:

I do.

AIKEN:

Well at any rate, he and Ridenhauer and I talked ____________________________________________, and we went to Washington. I met Ridenhauer and we bummed around Washington all evening with him. And the last thing he said to me before he left was, “You’re going to the Cosmos Club. I wish I was going to the Cosmos Club but I can’t go because I’m now Vice-President of Lockheed and I’ve got that two-room suite,” and he shoved off and ________________________________________. And the next morning, I got up at a quarter to eight and Ridenhauer didn’t show up and this other man didn’t show up. Somebody wanted to know where they were and I said, “Well don’t worry about Louis, he probably has a hangover this morning.” And a couple hours later, the Manager of the Statler called up looking for me and telling me that Louis had died in bed. And almost immediately after that, we got a telegram that ________ was dead, so we just folded the meeting and everybody went home. It didn’t seem very worthwhile to go on.

COHEN:

You know who he was, don’t you?

…

AIKEN:

He was Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Illinois when he was 28 or some thing like that, after having been Chief Scientist in the United States Air Force.”

(February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

Recall as in Part 5 (ii) that both Howard Aiken, who passed away at 73 in a St. Louis hotel during a March 1973 consulting trip at Monsanto, and his former Harvard underling, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper who passed away at 86 on New Year 1992, died while in their sleep.

Thus in his February 1973 interview two weeks before his own unexpected death, Aiken unwittingly told of an earlier precedent as quoted above, that his Lockheed vice-president friend Louis Ridenhauser had died in bed in a 2-room hotel suite in Washington, D.C., after a night of drinking with Aiken and another man.

By Aiken’s description, his friend Ridenhauser, a former “Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Illinois ” and former “Chief Scientist in the United States Air Force”, was probably quite young when he died.

The Aiken friend’s age and year of death can be found from a different source, where his name is identified as Louis Ridenour, and the biography includes his positions at the University of Illinois and at the U.S. Air Force similar to what Aiken said:

“1911, Nov. 11

Born, Montclair, N. J.

1932

B.S. in physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill.

…

1936 1938

Instructor in physics, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

1938

Ph.D. in physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

1938 1941

Professor of Physics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.

1941 1944

Assistant director, Radiation Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, Mass.; headed team that developed SCR 584 gun laying radar

1942 1946

Consultant to the secretary of war; field duty as chief radar advisor in North African, European, and Pacific theaters of World War II

1947 1951

Professor of physics and dean of graduate college, University of Illinois, Urbana, Ill.

Editor-in-chief, Radiation Laboratory series of technical books

1948 1952

Chairman, scientific advisory board to the chief of staff, United States Air Force

1951 1954

Vice president, International Telemeter Corp., Los Angeles, Calif.

1952 1953

Visiting professor of engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Calif.

…

1955

Director of program development, Missile System Division, Lockheed Aircraft Corp., Burbank, Calif.

1955 1957

Director of research, Missile System Division, Lockheed Aircraft Corp., Burbank, Calif.

1957 1959

Assistant general manager and chief scientist, Lockheed Aircraft Corp., Burbank, Calif.

1959

Vice president and general manager, Electronics and Avionics Division, Lockheed Aircraft Corp., Burbank Calif.

1959, May 21

Died, Washington, D.C.”

(“Ridenour, Louis N. (Louis Nicot), 1911-1959”, Social Networks and Archival Context)

Louis Ridenour was only 47 when he died in May 1959, several years younger than John von Neumann, another top scientific adviser to the U.S. Air Force, at 53 at the time of death in February 1957.

The timing of Ridenour’s death, i.e., in the year he was promoted to a Lockheed vice presidency, is reminiscent of the 1997 death of Diana Forsythe as in Part 5 (ii), whose late father George had been Stanford computer science department’s founding chairman and the most influential person in the emergence of computer science as an academic discipline: Diana drowned during a Alaska backpacking trip in the year she was given an associate professorship at the University of California, San Francisco, following a string of short-term academic jobs in the Stanford area.

Aiken’s 1973 interview quoted earlier mentioned that another person died around that time, whose name has not been disclosed in the online copy of the interview cited.

As a matter of fact, 3 days after Ridenour’s May 21 death in Washington, D.C., a prominent American died in his sleep in the U.S. capital area, at the same hospital where John von Neumann had died; but like von Neumann and unlike Ridenour, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had been stricken of cancer:

“Washington, May 24—John Foster Dulles died in his sleep Sunday morning, 39 days after his resignation as secretary of state.

The 71 year old statesman succumbed to cancer complicated by pneumonia, at 7:49 a. m. The end came quietly. He had been comatose under pain-relieving drugs for more than a week.

At the bedside in the Presidential suite of Walter Reed army hospital were his wife of 47 years, Janet; his sons, John and Avery, the latter a Jesuit priest; his brother, Allen, and his sister, Eleanor.

Ike Leaves Farm

The news was flashed first to President Eisenhower, spending a week-end at his Gettysburg, Pa., farm. He cut short his stay and returned to Washington in mid-afternoon. …”

(“Succumbs in Sleep during Cancer Fight: Military Service Scheduled at Arlington”, by Willard Edwards, May 25, 1959, Chicago Daily Tribune)

As discussed in Part 2, the mathematician John Nash, like Dulles a Princeton University alumnus, was in his first psychiatric committal at the time of Dulles’s death, having failed in his attempts to start a world peace movement at MIT and been diagnosed as a “paranoid schizophrenic” instead.

But at least Dulles and Nash were trying hard on world politics, rather than drinking heavily.

With a Ph.D. degree in physics from California Institute of Technology in Southern California, Ridenour’s distinguished academic career included faculty positions at Princeton and University of Pennsylvania, wartime military research management at MIT, and as graduate dean at the University of Illinois, according to the biography quoted earlier; his chairmanship of the scientific advisory board to the Air Force chief of staff was what Aiken referred to as former U.S. Air Force “chief scientist”.

However, there is a time discrepancy in Ridenour’s time of service at Lockheed and Aiken’s recollection of it in his 1973 interview: Ridenour’s biography quoted indicates he had started working at Lockheed in 1955; but Aiken said in his 1973 interview, as quoted earlier, that he had visited Lockheed in Los Angeles regularly as a consultant and then also frequented the “Bureau of Standards operation” at UCLA, i.e., the Institute for Numerical Analysis, which as mentioned earlier was terminated in 1954, i.e., even before Ridenour had started working at Lockheed.

Perhaps Aiken was unclear in his recollection of the history with Ridenour: he also gave the wrong chronological order regarding Ridenour as graduate dean of Illinois and as chief scientist of the Air Force.

Or Aiken could have already been a consultant at Lockheed even before Ridenour’s arrival.

After his Air Force chief scientist stint Ridenour was a visiting professor of engineering at UCLA during 1952-1953, and the two could have connected there at the INA.

Regardless, consistent with my earlier analysis’s conclusion that Aiken’s consultancy work at Lockheed was helping develop switching circuits for missile guidance, his close friend Ridenour’s Lockheed management responsibilities were in the missile field from 1955 to 1957, as a director within the Missile System Division – I note that Lockheed Missiles and Space Company was founded in Sunnyvale during this period.

But Ridenour’s persuading the company board to start “electronics machinery”, a venture Aiken was “associated with” as described in Aiken’s 1973 interview, may have come later in 1957 when Ridenour became Lockheed chief scientist, and surely by 1959 when he became Lockheed vice president in charge of the Electronics and Avionics Division, not long before his sudden death which Aiken was also ‘associated with’.

Before his death, Ridenour had also played a key role in Lockheed’s winning an Air Force satellite contract that would help put Lockheed in a “commanding position in the aerospace market”:

“… Before his untimely death, Ridenour won for Lockheed the Air Force satellite contract that would contribute greatly in the years afterward to that firm’s commanding position in the aerospace market.”

(R. Cargill Hall and Jacob Neufeld, eds., The U.S. Air Force in Space, 1945 to the 21st Century, September 21-22, 1995, Proceedings, Air Force Historical Foundation Symposium)

I would think that this Air Force satellite contract was a business basis for Lockheed Missiles and Space Company’s sponsorship of a 1962 symposium co-organized by Aiken, cited earlier, on “switching theory in space technology”.

In what could be another, if partial, credit due Ridenour, in 1959, namely the year he was promoted to be Lockheed vice president and general manager of its Electronics and Avionics Division, Lockheed started an electronics business, taking over an engineering company in Plainfield, New Jersey, and renaming it Lockheed Electronics Company:

“In 1953, Stavid Engineering built an 80-acre industrial site that sits in the boroughs of Watchung and North Plainfield, N.J. Lockheed Corporation, a predecessor to Lockheed Martin Corporation, acquired the engineering company six years later.

From 1959 to 1989, Lockheed Electronics Company manufactured, tested and assembled electronic components at the site. Lockheed closed the operation in 1989, …”

(“NORTH PLAINFIELD, NEW JERSEY”, Lockheed Martin Corporation)

Rather ironically in light of the computer-pioneer rivalry between Aiken and von Neumann mentioned earlier and detailed in Part 5 (ii), in 1959 the new Lockheed Electronics Company was set up not in California where Aiken was a Lockheed consultant in Sunnyvale, but in New Jersey where von Neumann had led his IAS computer project in Princeton.

This history related to him, as reviewed so far, suggests that in 1961 when Howard Aiken took early retirement from Harvard to become a businessman in the industry, he had specific reasons in wanting to partner with Cuthbert Hurd to start a new computer company – reasons beyond his business ambition in general or his interest in making computers smaller as discussed in Part 5 (ii).

Firstly, after his years of consulting for Lockheed in “electronics machinery”, Lockheed was still not doing computer development, and its new electronics branch was set up in New Jersey, separate and away from California where Aiken did missiles-and-space consulting. The recent invention of the integrated circuit led to greater potential for computer development, which had been Aiken’s specialty and was likely more desirable to him than consulting on switching theory for missiles and space applications; Aiken’s predicament thus became similar to William Shockley’s focus on difficult telephone switching applications in 1957 when eight of Shockley’s disciples decided to split with him – except that in Aiken’s case it was not his choice but Lockheed’s decision.

Secondly, Aiken’s close friend, vice president Louis Ridenour at Lockheed headquarters had died in 1959, and now at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company Aiken socialized with persons lower in statue and lesser in influence, such as, as discussed in Part 5 (ii), George Garrett, Hurd’s former Oak Ridge National Laboratory colleague and Lockheed Missiles “Director of Computer Activities” according to Hurd, or “director of information processing” per Garrett’s obituary. Hurd, the director of Electronic Data Processing Machines Division at the computer company IBM, by this time would be an important connection to Aiken.

Thirdly, as discussed earlier, Hurd’s IBM management role meant the potential of support for their new microcomputer company venture by the leading computer company which had made Aiken’s Harvard Mark I project possible as in Part 5 (ii) – I note that IBM’s largest shareholder and influential board member Sherman Fairchild had helped Shockley’s “Traitorous Eight” found Fairchild Semiconductor in the fledgling Silicon Valley where Aiken was doing his Lockheed consulting.

And lastly, with the prominence of his computer pioneer status and now industry consulting expertise, if Aiken wanted to undertake computer development in the industry he could and should launch a new company, given that Lockheed had set up its electronics company at a faraway location, whereas “an Assistant Director of Engineering at Lockheed” in Sunnyvale was doing computer design work, as mentioned earlier, for starting a new computer company with him and Hurd.

So Howard Aiken must have felt that it was a good time to do it, except that the new computer venture did not then materialize.

The scenario put forth in Part 5 (ii) is that in the early 1960s Hurd was unhappy with what little Aiken would offer him, namely that Aiken wanted a new company of his own and wanted Hurd only to “help”, i.e., likely not giving Hurd a good share of the ownership – especially in light of the historical precedent of Harvard and Aiken the inventor attempting to claim sole credit for Mark I despite that it was built by IBM.

Indeed, even by the time of his 1973 interview shortly before his death Aiken continued to express scorn of IBM, about IBM’s lack of mathematical abilities at the time of the Mark I project, reminiscing that IBM personnel didn’t know how to calculate basic arithmetic division and that he had to invent a technique for it overnight in his hotel room:

“AIKEN:

…

I went up to Endicott after this began to be formalized at IBM over the years. During the conversations with Lake and Durfee about what kind of machine this was that we were talking about. It was, oh I guess I made eight or ten such trips before I learned that IBM didn’t know how to divide. And that was a terrible blow. They could add, they could multiply, but by god, they didn’t know how to divide. It was almost like the bottom had dropped out. Maybe I ought to get back to Monroe—they knew how to divide.

So I stayed at a hotel in Binghamton and I can’t remember the name of it. That night when I found out that they didn’t know how to divide, I was up nearly all night, and it was that night that I invented the technique of dividing by computing by reciprocals. This is a scheme by which you can compute reciprocals, knowing how to add and multiply and you know how to do it. You could add and multiply by computing reciprocals and all you need is a first guess, and a first guess, when you are dealing with an independent variable that proceeds by fixed intervals ________, the first guess is always the reciprocal of the last name, and the convergence is beautiful. You double the number of digits of precision at each iteration.

So it was around three o’clock in the morning when this all came clear. The next day I walked into IBM and said “Well, you don’t need to worry about not being able to divide because I know how to divide with an adder and a multiplier.” And I started to derive this expression using the ___________________. And it became very clear that this was a waste of time because these men couldn’t understand this. They knew no mathematics. Even high school algebra was too much for them.”

(February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

Aiken also asserted that had Thomas J. Watson, Sr. – IBM president in the era of the Mark I project as in Part 5 (ii) – not relinquished authority to his son soon enough, IBM would not have become a top computer company:

“TROPP:

No, but the vision didn’t start until much later than the SSEC, it was in the 1950’s.

COHEN:

Oh, I see. That’s their statement.

TROPP:

It started after the defense calculator came into being.

COHEN:

Oh, yes.

AIKEN:

IBM got going in the computer business when young Tom was made president.

TROPP:

That’s right.

AIKEN:

And as he told me one time, the first thing that he did when he became President of the Company, replacing his father, was to sense the embarrassment the Corporation faced because Remington Rand was getting all the credit for going ahead. So that if the senior Watson had remained active for say, another two years, chances are pretty good that Sperry Rand would be the big computer company today. It was changed by young Tom.”

(February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

In any case, as cited in Part 5 (i), Watson, Sr. died 2 months after handing over IBM’s reign to Watson, Jr. in 1956.

The “SSEC” mentioned in the above quote was IBM’s own version of a electromechanical relay machine, made in collaboration with Columbia University, after the company’s dispute with Harvard and Aiken over the Mark I credit:

“… the SSEC contained over 21,000 electromechanical relay switches with physically moving parts.

… In these features of its physical layout, quite apart from its hardware and system architecture, the SSEC was the ancestor of IBM mainframe systems to come—after the ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) or Mark I, that is. IBM had built that machine with researchers at Harvard using a team led by Howard Aiken and including Grace Hopper. T.J. Watson, Sr. believed that IBM had subsequently been given insufficient credit for the machine. Competition with its own Harvard Mark I was the impetus for IBM’s building the SSEC—and the new computer was pointedly created through a new arrangement with another Ivy League institution, Columbia, in a collaboration between IBM engineering in Endicott, New York, and the newly formed (1945) Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia.

The Lab at Columbia was directed by the first Director of Pure Science at IBM, Wallace Eckert (no relation to Presper Eckert, the well-known developer of the ENIAC), an astronomy professor at the university. In 1944 T. J. Watson, Sr. recruited Eckert as the first IBM employee with a PhD and Eckert helped to hire a team that included the second PhD at IBM, another astronomer, Herb Grosch, as well as Robert R. (“Rex”) Seeber, who had worked on the Harvard Mark I. …”

(Steven E. Jones, Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards, 2016, Routledge)

The above-quoted history account does corroborate that at the time of the Mark I project IBM personnel likely knew very little advanced mathematics or advanced science: only after the slight by Harvard and Aiken did IBM hire its first two Ph.D.s – recruited through Columbia.

As in the last quote earlier from Aiken’s 1973 interview, after the SSEC machine IBM developed the “defense calculator”. As in Part 5 (i), the IBM 701 Defense Calculator was IBM’s first commercial line of general-purpose computer, made during Watson, Sr.’s time; as cited earlier, Lockheed bought 2 of them in 1953 and 1954; and most importantly as in Part 5 (ii), Cuthbert Hurd was a driving force behind the development of IBM Defense Calculator, who had a Ph.D. degree, had been head of technical research at the Oak Ridge National Lab and then founded IBM’s Applied Science Department, and later became director of IBM’s Electronic Data Processing Machines Division.

Therefore, co-launching a new computer company with Hurd, Howard Aiken would be collaborating with the best of IBM managerial talent in applied science and in electronic computer development, and also the best of Lockheed Missiles engineering talent as in the “assistant director of engineering” already doing computer design work for this potential new venture.

That might be the case, but Aiken likely did not regard it as much: in the last quote earlier from his 1973 interview: when the interviewer Henry Tropp mentioned the Defense Calculator Aiken did not even respond to it let alone mention Hurd, only crediting Thomas Watson, Jr. for turning around IBM’s fortune.

Howard Aiken’s sense of self-importance was brimming beyond naming his new company after himself. Later in his 1973 interview, he cited the example of how busy he had been as president of Howard Aiken Industries, Inc., not having the time to personally accept a prestigious scientific award, at the Franklin Institute, after attending dinner – presumably the award dinner – and later never taking the time to view that award, or to wear any of his awards:

“TROPP:

Have you ever had occasion to wear all those awards?

AIKEN:

I’ve never had occasion to wear one of them.

TROPP:

This looks like the Franklin Medal.

AIKEN:

That is the Edison Medal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. I got an award from the Franklin Institute.

TROPP:

Yes, it’s listed here.

AIKEN:

That’s in the Harvard Archives.

TROPP:

It’s the John Price Award.

AIKEN:

Yes. The night I was to go and get that award, I also had to fly away to Madrid, and so I went to St. Louis and stayed for a short time at the Franklin Institute, and then out to the airport, and my plane that I had as President of Aiken Industries at the time, flew to Boston to meet TWA to go on to Madrid. I changed out of my dinner clothes on the plane. We left Philadelphia in the aero commander after TWA left New York, and we got there and so I made the flight. So Tony Ottinger picked up the Franklin Institute Award in my place and took it to Harvard and I’ve never seen it myself.”

(February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

As told in the quote above, Aiken visited the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia briefly for an award event, and most likely attended a formal dinner in “dinner clothes”, but did not have the time to accept the award, instead hurrying in his Aiken Industries’ ‘presidential plane’ to catch a TWA flight to Madrid, Spain; his former Harvard Ph.D. student Tony Oettinger, previously mentioned in quotes in Part 5 (ii), accepted the award on his behalf and took it to Harvard, and Aiken never bothered to view it afterwards.

The John Price Award Aiken was given was not the most well-known award of the Franklin Institute, which would be the Franklin Medal mentioned in the above quote. In the year 1964 when Aiken was one of four co-recipients of the John Price Award, also known as the John Price Wetherill Medal, the Franklin Medal was awarded to Gregory Breit.

(“John Price Wetherill Medal”, and, “Franklin Medal”, Wikipedia)

The physicist Gregory Breit led the early stage of atomic bomb development during World War II, resigning in 1942 with the role later taken over by the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, under whose leadership the Manhattan Project was successful, and two of the bombs were then used against Japan in war.

(“Gregory Breit”, and, “J. Robert Oppenheimer”, Atomic Heritage Foundation)

In my review in Part 5 (i) it has been noted that John von Neumann and the physicist Enrico Fermi, both important members of the Manhattan Project, died of cancer at the same age of 53, whereas Oppenheimer later died “10 years older at the age of 63”. But a more careful inspection shows that Oppenheimer was about 2 months short of his 63th birthday of April 22 when he died on February 18, 1967.

Though it was not “10 years older”, I note that Oppenheimer’s death was precisely 10 years and 10 days past von Neumann’s death on February 8, 1957.

(“John von Neumann”, Atomic Heritage Foundation)

And there were other interesting numbers of coincidences: the early computer pioneer Howard Aiken’s age of 73 at death was 20 years more than “father of computers” John von Neumann’s age of 53 at death; and the early atomic bomb development leader Gregory Breit’s age of 82 at his death on September 13, 1981, having been born on July 14, 1899, was also 20 years more than “father of the atomic bomb” Robert Oppenheimer’s age of 62 at death.

Considering that the other co-recipients of the 1964 John Price Award, John Eugene Gunzler, John Kenneth Hulm and Bernd T. Matthias, were all physicists awarded for achievements in the research frontier of “superconductive materials”, Howard Aiken was in good company indeed for an honor in memory of “America’s first scientist, Benjamin Franklin”.

(“Dr. Bernd T. Matthias to be honored by Franklin Institute”, October 7, 1964, UC San Diego, and, “JOHN EUGENE GUNZLER”, “JOHN KENNETH HULM”, and, “MISSION & HISTORY”, The Franklin Institute)

But the ambitious Howard Aiken probably did not view it that way.

In Part 5 (ii) I have offered the opinion that Aiken should have been given the Association for Computing Machinery’s A. M. Turing Award – considered the highest honor in computer science – had he not changed his career from academia to business.

However, in his 1973 interview shortly before his unexpected death, Aiken stated that from the beginning he had opposed the establishment of an organization like the ACM, that von Neumann had agreed with him, and that he now still opposed it:

“COHEN:

…

The other person that I was interested in, I know that you had at least two contacts with him, but for reasons that are fairly obvious, I think it would be fascinating to know what your relations with him were, when you first heard of him, was von Neumann. Now I know that Warren Weaver sent you some computations for von Neumann for the Mark I on inclusion. Secondly, you were with him on that National Academy of Sciences Commission. I have no idea what kind of relations you might have had or where you first heard of him.

AIKEN:

Well, let’s take the Commission first. Who all was in that Committee, let’s see.

TROPP:

There was you and von Neumann and Stibitz. Was Sam Alexander on that?

AIKEN:

Maybe. But there was a mathematician and what was his name? He’s presently at Miami University.

TROPP:

Oh, John Curtiss.

AIKEN:

That’s right— John Curtiss. John Curtiss proposed that we should all get together and start an association for people interested in computing machines, a new scientific society. And I said, “No, we shouldn’t do that because computation was a universal thing.” I said that what we should do was to help the mathematical economists to publish papers in their journals, using computational techniques and astronomers with theirs and the physicists with theirs and so on. That our best interests and the best interests of the scientific community as a whole would be better served to assist everybody to use machinery and to publish their work. And after all, we were tool makers, and it didn’t make very good sense for all of us specialists to get together and talk about the tools they used.

Von Neumann agreed with that completely, and so this proposal of Curtis’s’ was voted down. Curtiss then went out and formed the Association for Computing Machinery.

TROPP:

That was the Eastern Association, the original one.

AIKEN:

Yes. And neither John von Neumann during his lifetime, nor I have ever joined the Association for Computing Machinery. We opposed it and I still oppose it. Now, the basis for the opposition today is, of course, far less, because now you get all the machine builders and there are thousands and thousands of specialists, and they do have something going for them. But as of the time that it was proposed, it didn’t make very good sense, and as I say, von Neumann refused to have anything to do with it and I’m just as stubborn as von Neumann, and I never joined.

COHEN:

Did he ever come up to your Laboratory?

AIKEN:

Yes, many, many times. We did several problems for him. Then, we had a lot going back and forth. As long as he was using computing machines and helping to lead us in the discovery of numerical methods, which in some of the problems that we did, Dick Block did the programming by the way…”

(February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

Oh well, in that case, there was no reason for the ACM to award Aiken the Turing Award – when Aiken himself did not even see merits for ACM’s existence.

In this context, I begin to wonder why the Turing Award to Alfred Brooks, founding chairman of the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill’s computer science department and “one of Aiken’s most devoted disciples” as in Part 5 (ii), was given to Brooks rather late, in 1999, when the most important of his achievements had been made at IBM in the early 1960s as the leader of its development team for the important and successful System/360 computer.

I notice that 1999 was 2 years after 1997, the year John Weber Carr, III died of cancer as in Part 5 (ii), who had in 1956 become the first current academic – a University of Michigan mathematics associate professor – to serve as ACM president, and in 1959 become UNC Chapel Hill’s computation center director, but then left in 1962 before UNC Chapel Hill invited Brooks from IBM in 1964 to found what was the second academic computer science department in the U.S.

I cannot confidently assert that Carr opposed awarding ACM’s Turing Award to Brooks, and that Brooks could not get it due to Carr’s statue and influence as a former ACM president until after Carr’s death; but given how opinionated and stubborn some of these personalities were, Aiken in particular as extensively illustrated, I would not be surprised if this scenario was indeed the case.

A consequence of such egotism on Howard Aiken’s part was that, in the scenario when he and Cuthbert Hurd considered launching a computer company together in the early 1960s, if he viewed himself like William Shockley and treated Hurd like a disciple, or if he viewed himself like Sherman Fairchild and treated Hurd like only a manager under him, Hurd likely would not agree and would not accept less than a real share of the ownership.

The lack of ownership equity had in fact been an important reason why in 1956-1957 the 8 disciples of William Shockley mutinied, left Shockley Semiconductor and founded Fairchild Semiconductor with financing from Sherman Fairchild. Besides their opposition to Shockley’s difficult management style and orthodox scientific focus as previously discussed, they aspired for higher compensations, including not only salaries but stock options, for their work; and in making Fairchild Semiconductor a success, the 8 started the trend of venture capital financing for technological start-ups founded by Silicon Valley scientists and engineers:

“When William Shockley founded his company in Stanford University’s Research Park in 1955, no one knew then that he was starting an industry that was to give a whole region its name: Silicon Valley. Shockley chose Palo Alto as the site for his company partly because it was where he grew up and his mother still lived there, partly because he was aware that entrepreneurial electronics companies were hatching there, and partly because Arnold Beckman, his financial backer and founder of Beckman Instruments, had located one of his divisions in the Stanford Research Park.

One of Shockley’s motivations for starting his transistor company in 1955 was his conclusion that “the most creative people were not adequately rewarded as employees in industry.” Shockley attracted to his transistor company the brightest and best young men, who formed the nucleus of entrepreneurial scientists and engineers that built the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley. But they didn’t make their fortunes at Shockley’s company. Wealth came later when they started and built their own companies.

In 1957, eight of them left to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Robert Noyce was one of them. According to Noyce, one of their principal reasons for leaving was that they could get equity in a startup company rather than simply working for a salary for the rest of their lives. They weren’t disappointed. Seven years later, each of the eight received about $250,000 when Fairchild Semiconductor was bought out by its parent, Fairchild Instrument and Camera—not a shabby return on their original investments of $500 each. …

When the Shockley Eight launched the first company to focus exclusively on silicon devices (rather than those of germanium), they were financed by Sherman Fairchild. At the time he was the largest individual stockholder of IBM through stock inherited from his father who was one of IBM’s founders. Sherman owned Fairchild Instrument and Camera, which set up the Shockley Eight as Fairchild Semiconductor. Venture capitalist Arthur Rock helped arrange the financing.

Thus, we see a pattern emerging at the start of the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley: a scientific breakthrough followed by commercial exploitation by entrepreneurial scientists and engineers financed with venture capital from technologically savvy, wealthy investors. …”

(William D. Bygrave and Jeffry A. Timmons, Venture Capital at the Crossroads, 1992, Harvard Business School Press)

As quoted, each of the Shockley Eight’s $500 initial investment in Fairchild Semiconductor became $250,000 when Sherman Fairchild bought the ownership 7 years later.

It is not known much equity Howard Aiken would have been willing to give Cuthbert Hurd in a new computer company had it gotten off the ground in the early 1960s. But I can see Hurd wanting a larger share than any one of the 8 scientists starting Fairchild Semiconductor, given that Hurd already had a distinguished record as an IBM executive, and that Aiken himself could not provide the level of financing Sherman Fairchild had provided.

But as reviewed earlier, when Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in 1957 Sherman Fairchild had reserved the option of buying its full ownership. 7 years later his paying a pre-agreed $3 million – a figure cited earlier – to the company, with each of the 8 young founders receiving $250,000, materialized that objective, and from this point on neither the 8 nor anyone else other than Fairchild’s parent company owned shares.

In 1968 two of the 8, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, decided to leave Fairchild Semiconductor to form their own company. The money they had made from the ownership buyout and the experiences they had gained at Fairchild Semiconductor positioned them to launch the next big, more independent venture, the Intel Corporation; and their move spurred the next big wave of venture capital-financed start-ups in Silicon Valley, many of which, Intel the most famous, became known as “fairchildren” – companies founded by persons who had worked at Fairchild Semiconductor:

“Intel: The Fairest of the “Fairchildren”

There can be little doubt that Fairchild was the breeding ground for the technology entrepreneurs—sometimes dubbed “Fairchildren”—who built the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley. About half the firms can trace their roots in Fairchild. It is a distinguished list of movers and shapers, among them, Intel, National Semiconductor, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). But the fairest of them all is Intel.

In the summer of 1959, Noyce, then director of R&D at Fairchild, invented the integrated circuit. (Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments independently discovered the same concept a few months earlier. Today, Kilby and Noyce are recognized as the co-inventors of the integrated circuit.) The importance of the integrated circuit to the development of the semiconductor industry was second only to the invention of the transistor itself. So Noyce was already a legendary figure when he and Gordon Moore resigned from Fairchild in 1968.

Noyce and Moore, with Rock as their venture capitalist, launched their next semiconductor company, Intel. Rock as lead investor raised $2.5 million and Noyce and Moore each invested about $250,000. Through years of tireless endeavor, they multiplied their original investments of $500 in Fairchild a hundred-thousand-fold. In 1982, Moore owned 9.6% of Intel, with a market value of more than $100 million, and Noyce owned 3.6%. No one deserved it more. They had been at the forefront of building a new industry. Their companies were responsible for breakthroughs that transformed not only the semiconductor industry but society itself.

…

Before Rock launched Intel, there had been only a handful of venture-capital-backed startups. But that was about to change. Other budding entrepreneurs were making proposals to other venture capitalists. Between 1967 and 1972, about thirty companies were started with venture capital … including such luminaries as National Semiconductor—which was started the year before Intel—and Advanced Micro Devices.”

(William D. Bygrave and Jeffry A. Timmons, 1992, Harvard Business School Press)

In addition to National Semiconductor, Intel and AMD mentioned above, one of the “Fairchildren” of note was Signetics, which as mentioned earlier designed the computer chips for the Apollo moon landing program’s emergency onboard Abort Guidance System.

(“NXP Semiconductors”, 2008, Silicon Valley Historical Association)

I note that when starting Intel, Noyce and Moore reinvested the same amount of money they had made from their Fairchild Semiconductor equity – $250,000 each, after 7 years from a $500 initial investment – into the new start-up, and 14 years later in 1982 Noyce owned 3.6% of Intel, and Moore 9.6%. With Moore’s valued at more than $100 million, Noyce’s would be more than $37.5 million.

In the corporate culture of the earlier time back in 1957, when the Shockley Eight sought investment for their new venture, not only that their rebellion against their Nobel laureate mentor made them unpalatable to the investment community, but that their request for equity and management power was also considered inappropriate:

“… Some firms may have found the pith of the letter–please give a million dollars to a group of men between the ages of 28 and 32 who think they are great and cannot abide working for a Nobel Prize winner–unpalatable. Even if a firm thought the proposal was interesting in theory, no standard operating procedure existed for the company-within-a-company undertaking Rock and Coyle recommended. What accounting procedures would be used? How could the funding firm allow this group of unknown young men to run their own operation, according to criteria of their own devising, and not permit other employees the same autonomy? In the 1950s, with its ethos of conformity, this smacked of unseemly preferential treatment.”

(Leslie Berlin, 2005, Oxford University Press)

“Company-within-a-company undertaking”? In my understanding, if it had been a group of former corporate managers requesting the same kind of power in a new company then it would have been alright in the eyes of an investment firm, because they knew the accounting procedures, they were not unknown to the investment firm, and allowing them but not other employees to run the company was simply a matter of the management right. The problem was, therefore, that scientists and engineers with special technological expertise were still viewed only as employees.

Ironically, such prevailing corporate view of the 1950s was compatible with Cuthbert Hurd’s interest in co-launching a company with Howard Aiken: Hurd had been an established IBM executive; and if he also helped “raise the money” then he probably would not think of Aiken’s computer pioneer status and expertise as worthy of a Sherman Fairchild level of ownership power.

In both the investment firm’s view in the Shockley Eight case and Hurd’s view in the Aiken case, they also had the politically correct ground: for the investment firm, the “ethos of conformity” did not permit “unseemly preferential treatment” for some employees but not for others; and for Hurd, Aiken’s “thinking about starting the company” in order “to be rich” was not a deserving motivation.

But the issue of fairness aside, namely to bright scientists like the Shockley Eight, and to the prominent computer pioneer Howard Aiken aspiring to succeed in business, there is still a question of practicality regarding a company run by scientists and engineers with special technological expertise: would such management be more beneficial to the other employees of the company?

The history of Fairchild Semiconductor seemed to suggest that the answer should be affirmative in regards to the company’s commercial success. The Shockley Eight started Fairchild Semiconductor not only with them as part-owners but also with some at the helm of the management, and it turned out good enough that 7 years later Sherman Fairchild exercised his $3 million buyout option to acquire the company.

In fact, Fairchild Semiconductor was very successful in the civilian commercial market sectors, such as the television market, and in the 1960s became the U.S. market leader in integrated circuits – something the company had invented independently along with Texas Instruments as discussed earlier – with a market share of 55%:

“Responding to a decline in the military demand for electronic components in the early 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor created new markets for its transistors and integrated circuits in the commercial sector. To meet the price and volume requirements of commercial users, Fairchild’s engineers introduced mass production techniques adapted from the electrical and automotive industries and set up plants in low labor cost areas such as Hong Kong and South Korea. The firm’s application laboratory also developed novel systems such as an all-solid state television set and gave these designs at no cost to its customers, thereby seeding a market for its products. … By 1966, Fairchild had established itself as a mass producer of integrated circuits and controlled 55% of the market for such devices in the United States.”

(“Technology and Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley”, by Christophe Lécuyer, December 3, 2001, Nobelprize.org)

But to really answer the question posed earlier, one needs to determine how much Fairchild Semiconductor’s commercial success under the leadership of the founding scientists group translated into improved incomes for the regular employees.

It is unclear where the rest of the $3 million Sherman Fairchild’s parent company paid to Fairchild Semiconductor was distributed, i.e., other than the $2 million paid to the 8 founders. After that, the company was in the hands of Sherman Fairchild. From this perspective, if one considers better employee compensations as not only earning wages but also gaining ownership equity, i.e., stock options, then after the first 7 years no employee owned anymore equity at Fairchild Semiconductor.

And that was an important rationale behind the decision by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore to leave Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968 and found Intel, a new company where they would institute a much more egalitarian corporate structure and culture, in which not only they would not be working for a wealthy businessman in the end, but also every employee could own equity:

“In preparation for the IPO, Noyce consulted with attorneys and bankers, reviewed drafts of the prospectus, met with auditors, signed the certificates necessary for the offering, wrote explanatory letters to employees and current investors, invited employees to buy stock in the offering as “friends of the company,” …

SEC rules for public offerings required Intel to cancel the stock-purchase plan set up at the company’s establishment. Noyce dreamed of replacing this plan with options packages that would be distributed to every employee, “including janitors.” He worried, though, if people with limited educations could understand what a stock option was and how volatile the market could be. He and Moore finally decided that once a plan could be developed that met SEC guidelines for publicly held companies, Intel should reinstitute a stock-purchase plan, rather than options, for nonprofessional employees. Under this plan, which was implemented in 1972, every employee would be allowed to take up to 10 percent of base pay in Intel stock, which could be bought at 15 percent below market rates. The stock purchase plan met Noyce and Moore’s goals of giving employees a stake in the company without requiring the sophisticated financial knowledge associated with stock options.”

(Leslie Berlin, 2005, Oxford University Press)

The nonprofessional employees of Intel, “including Janitors” as quoted above, were allowed to use up to 10% of their wage to buy company stocks at 15% below market prices – as quoted earlier Intel earned the reputation of being “the fairest of the “Fairchildren””.

Intel’s egalitarian culture influenced, and spread to, the entire Silicon Valley, according to Robert Noyce’s widow Ann Bowers speaking in a February 2013 event remembering the pioneers of Silicon Valley; Bowers herself also brought some of that culture to Apple Computer:

“Ann Bowers knew Bob Noyce, the “mayor of Silicon Valley,” better than anyone. She was married to the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and witnessed the magnetic effect he had on the people who followed him to the region that will be chronicled in an American Experience history documentary on PBS on Tuesday (Feb. 5) at 8 pm. The film is called Silicon Valley: Where the Future Was Born, and it captures the people like Noyce, who died in 1990, and how they made such a mark that their impact is still reverberating today.

Last week, Bowers … spoke about Noyce on stage at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., where the surviving pioneers of Silicon Valley gathered to celebrate the film and the man at the center of it. …

Noyce isn’t depicted as some superhero, since he had his flaws. But, like David Packard and Bill Hewlett before him, he was a very big part of the fuel that set the valley on fire. …

At the start of the event, host Hari Sreenivasan asked Bowers about the many talents of Noyce. He played the oboe. He was the state diving champion. He lettered on the swim team. He was in the drama club. And he knew more about transistors than just about anyone on the planet. Bowers smiled and answered a quick “yes” to each one of the facts.

…

Noyce had migrated to the Santa Clara Valley to work for William Shockley, the Nobel-prize winning physicist who co-invented the transistor and moved West to Palo Alto, Calif., to set up Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory — and be near his mother.

But Noyce, Gordon Moore, and six other colleagues broke away, since they didn’t like his erratic behavior. They were deemed “the traitorous eight” … by Shockley. They founded Fairchild Semiconductor, a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument.

In 1957, the Russians scared America with the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik. President Eisenhower created NASA within the next year and launched the American space program.

Noyce’s team at Fairchild was positioned to make the chips that would go into the rockets and space ships. The federal government had an “insatiable need” for what Fairchild would produce, said Leslie Berlin, author of The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.

…

In contrast to Shockley’s dictatorship and the East Coast profit-milking of Fairchild’s parent company, Noyce and co-founder Gordon Moore founded Intel in 1968 and gave out stock options. They managed in a way that was more egalitarian, building a company based on meritocracy. Bowers gave credit for that culture to Moore as well as Noyce. They infused this egalitarianism in the rest of the Valley, which came to be a collection of many companies that spun out of Fairchild. Today’s valley is littered with descendants, or Fairchildren, such as Advanced Micro Devices.

Noyce once said that the stock option money didn’t seem real.

“It’s just a way of keeping score,” he said.

The Pied Piper of his generation, Noyce counseled his employees to “go off and do something wonderful.”

…

Bowers held jobs such as director of personnel for Intel, and she was the first vice president of  human resources for Apple. She currently serves as the chair of the Noyce Foundation.”

(“Widow speaks about Bob Noyce, telling the human side of the mayor of Silicon Valley (video)”, by Dean Takahashi, February 4, 2013, Venture Beat)

The history view of Silicon Valley as presented by Ann Bowers cited above says that William Shockley’s management, which the “Traitorous Eight” rebelled against, was a “dictatorship, and subsequently the Sherman Fairchild parent company’s oversight of Fairchild Semiconductor founded by the 8 was “East Coast profit-milking”.

Bowers’s view is supported by Arthur Rock, a venture capitalist instrumental in helping to start both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel as mentioned in earlier quotes, who in a Harvard Business School interview expressed a similar opinion about East Coast business style:

““… Fairchild Camera and Instrument was really an eastern-type company; they wanted to run things their way. That’s why people then left Fairchild Semiconductor and formed Intel and other companies. …”

(“ARTHUR ROCK”, Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School)

Rock explained what “eastern-type” business was like, that it was “old establishment and old money”:

“The problem at Fairchild Semiconductor had to do with incentives. The whole idea of giving people incentives was something foreign to most companies. That’s one of the reasons, of course, that I came out to California; I saw that people were a lot more adventuresome in California than they were in the East. In the East, it’s the old establishment and old money. People have been doing things one way for a long time and it’s very hard to change. It actually took many, many years for them to change, whereas people who came out West had some of the “Go West, young man,” Wild West aura about them, and they were willing to do things to test new ideas. I found that really the brighter, more imaginative, adventuresome people were out here rather than in the East.”

(Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School)

As quoted, Rock contrasted the East Coast’s “old establishment and old money” with Californians’ “adventuresome” spirit.

In this Harvard Business School interview, Arthur Rock recalled how he met the Shockley Eight and decided to help, stating that starting a new company was actually his idea, except that he and his firm then approached some 35 investment firms and none would help, before he was introduced to Sherman Fairchild:

“I had done financings for a number of small companies based around New York and Boston, and I liked doing that. I liked the people who ran those companies. I liked the scientific-type person. So Eugene Kliner wrote a letter to his father’s broker who was at Hayden Stone. And that broker, knowing of my interest in these kinds of companies, showed me the letter.

… seven of whom got together and asked Eugene Kliner to write this letter. Actually, the letter was typed by Kliner’s wife. The letter said that they were unhappy with Shockley and they were going to quit, but did we know of anyone who might hire them together as a group? They weren’t looking especially to form a company. That was my idea. I came out to see them with one of the partners of Hayden Stone and we talked to them. They had all been chosen by Shockley, so I knew they were probably pretty good people, and then when we met them I was very impressed and thought we could help them. I suggested to them that they might want to set up a company, and we told them we would see if we could get financing for the company. We had a couple more meetings with them. Then they brought along an eighth fellow who was Bob Noyce, so that was the “traitorous eight.”

We, Hayden Stone together with the eight of them, put together a list of companies that might finance this group. We had about thirty-five companies, all of whom had expressed an interest in going into new fields. We talked to each of these thirty-five companies. I personally visited most of them. And their reply was, well, this is a great idea, but if you set up a separate company, then what will our other employees think; it will just upset our organization, so we don’t want to do it. So we crossed out all thirty-five and were at our wit’s end when somebody introduced me to Sherman Fairchild.”

(Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School)

Rock pointed out that Fairchild had wealth, an inventor background, and a liking for young people, that were favorable factors for his decision to finance the 8 scientists to start the new company:

“Sherman Fairchild was one of the largest shareholders of IBM stock. His father had gone into partnership with Tom Watson in setting up IBM, and since Tom Watson’s family consisted of three or four children and Sherman Fairchild was the only heir in his family, he owned a lot of stock. So he had a lot of cash and he was an inventor. He had invented the aerial camera, and as a result had formed Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company. And then he had to invent the airplane that could hold the camera, so that was the basis for Fairchild Aviation. He also liked young people and saw the merit in our idea, so he agreed that Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company would finance this group. They advanced what we then named Fairchild Semiconductor a million and a half dollars in return for an option to buy all of our stock for $3 million. We then split up Fairchild Semiconductor: 10 percent to each of the eight and 20 percent to Hayden Stone.”

(“ARTHUR ROCK”, Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School)

As recalled by Arthur Rock, Sherman Fairchild’s company provided $1.5 million financing on the condition that the parent company had the future option to buy the entire Fairchild Semiconductor for $3 million, but otherwise did not hold any initial ownership at all: 80% of the initial ownership belonged to the Shockley Eight at 10% each, and the other 20% belonged to Rock’s investment company Hayden Stone.

So it was a bold start-up arrangement, that the 8 actually owned 80% of Fairchild Semiconductor from the start, except that the company was obliged to be, and later indeed was bought out by the East-Coast parent company.

Rock offered the reflection that had he and Sherman Fairchild not helped the Shockley Eight, “there would not have been any silicon in Silicon Valley” and “a lot of them would have ended up with Texas Instruments”:

“… But there would not have been any silicon in Silicon Valley if it hadn’t been for the formation of Fairchild Semiconductor because the “treacherous eight” would probably have just and gone off and gotten jobs individually. My guess is a lot of them would have ended up with Texas Instruments, which had a similar but less successful enterprise going in Texas.”

(Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School)

As discussed earlier, Texas Instruments was Fairchild Semiconductor’s main competitor in integrated circuit invention, and did much better in the direct supply of U.S. military aerospace demands.

While the U.S. civilian space program and NASA, started in 1957-1958 by President Dwight Eisenhower as quoted earlier, fuelled the demand for semiconductors, the rapid growth of consumer electronics would drive the market to much larger. As cited earlier, Fairchild Semiconductor played a significant role in the 1960s developing the U.S. civilian and commercial market sectors for integrated circuits and consumer electronics.

During this period, the rapid growth of consumer electronics far outpaced the growth in military demands, and permanently ended the U.S. military’s dominance in the semiconductor market, reducing the military share from, for instance, 72% of annual semiconductor sales in 1965 to just 21% in 1970:

“Prior to the outpouring of new firms and new products, semiconductors were part of the defense industry. By the end of the 1960s, consumer and industrial applications of microelectronics were expanding much more rapidly than DoD purchases. Defense sales grew relatively slowly, and quickly dropped below 20 percent of the total (Table 8-1). …

…”

(John A. Alic, Lewis M. Branscomb, Harvey Brooks, Ashton B. Carter and Gerald J. Epstein, Beyond Spinoff: Military and Commercial Technologies in a Changing World, 1992, Harvard Business School Press)

Howard Aiken’s retirement from the academia and adventure in business, mentioned earlier and discussed in some details in Part 5 (ii), took place during this same period of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Upon his early retirement from Harvard in 1961, Aiken started Howard Aiken Industries, specialising in buying, fixing and selling companies. He and Cuthbert Hurd also discussed a plan of starting a new computer company that would have been the first in the world to develop computers of smaller sizes referred to as “microcomputers”, and a Lockheed assistant director of engineering was doing the design work; but they did not follow through with the plan, with Hurd later commenting somewhat scornfully about Aiken’s motivation, as quoted earlier: “I thought that maybe he wanted to be rich,”, “and was thinking about starting the company for that reason”.

Then in 1967 Aiken retired from heading his company, became its board vice chairman – his Aiken Industries was at some point renamed Norlin Technologies as cited in Part 5 (ii) –and re-engaged in active consulting, now for Monsanto Company in addition to Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, as previously quoted in Part 5 (ii),:

“During the 1973 interview, Hank Tropp questioned Aiken about aspects of his life and career after leaving Harvard. Aiken referred, first of all, to his “forming Aiken Industries, beginning in 1961” and his becoming “vice-chairman of the board” in 1967. “So now,” Aiken said, “I go to board meetings, but I’m not going at it the way I used to. . . . When they kicked me out of Harvard, I had to find a new job and that was Aiken Industries. And when they kicked me out, I had to find a new job and went into the consulting business. So now I spend a good deal of time at Monsanto.” … Aiken said that he had been a consultant at Lockheed “for many years,” but that he had “quit that this year.””

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

What is especially interesting but not yet reviewed here is Aiken’s work during the 1960s and early 1970s in the context of the field of computer development of that period.

As mentioned earlier, in 1959 while Aiken was a Harvard professor and a consultant for Lockheed, the company had started the Lockheed Electronics Company in New Jersey, away from California where Aiken did consulting on switching circuits for missiles and space applications.

Just 2 years after Aiken’s return to active computer consulting, in 1969 the Lockheed Electronics Company produced its first commercial computer, a “minicomputer”:

“Lockheed Aircraft can trace its history back to 1912. It entered the computer field in 1969 when it produced a small process control computer, the MAC-16 (also referred to as the LEC-16). The MAC was used for instrument control in large laboratory settings and for applications such as air traffic control.

The Lockheed Data Products Division supported the MAC (and its successors, MAC Jr., Sue, and System III) until the mid 1970s when Lockheed decided that they should concentrate on their core capabilities and left the commercial computer business.”

(“Company: Lockheed Electronics Company, Inc.”, Computer History Museum)

So, without Howard Aiken’s consultancy participation Lockheed got into the computer development field and produced a “minicomputer” for the commercial market, one that was useful in laboratory settings.

Minicomputers were smaller than the typical mainframe computers up to that point in time, such as the various IBM systems mentioned before, but not as small as what a “microcomputer” is today, which is typically a PC, i.e., personal computer.

(“Supercomputers, Mainframes, Minicomputers and Microcomputers: Oh My!”, December 14, 2011, Turbosoft)

It was at this stage that in 1970 Howard Aiken again discussed with Cuthbert Hurd about launching a computer company to make smaller computers, this time with “the idea of what was to become a microprocessor and personal computer”, quoted previously in Part 5 (ii):

“Hurd… recalled that he, Aiken and William Main had met several times in 1970 “to discuss the formation of a corporation to be called PANDATA.” The three had “discussed the idea of what was to become a microprocessor and personal computer.” Aiken, according to Hurd, “had an early vision of the usefulness of such devices,” “believed that they could be mass produced at a low cost,” and “wished to form an integrated company to manufacture and sell them.” Aiken wanted Hurd “to help form the company, be chairman of the board, and raise the money.” Aiken himself “wished to make a considerable investment in the new company.” …”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

I note that the first time, probably around 1961, when Aiken and Hurd discussed about starting the “first microcomputer computer company in the world” as quoted earlier, there was no mention of “microprocessor”, and then in 1970 when they again discussed starting a computer company, “microprocessor and personal computer” were in Aiken’s vision.

That is interesting, because the modern definition of a microcomputer, like a personal computer, includes that of a microprocessor as its central processing unit:

“Microcomputer, an electronic device with a microprocessor as its central processing unit (CPU). Microcomputer was formerly a commonly used term for personal computers, particularly any of a class of small digital computers whose CPU is contained on a single integrated semiconductor chip. … Smaller microcomputers first marketed in the 1970s contain a single chip on which all CPU, memory, and interface circuits are integrated.”

(“Microcomputer”, Encyclopædia Britannica)

Aiken’s “early vision”, as Hurd called it, was quite impressive. They had planned to start a “microcomputer computer company” probably a decade before small microcomputers were “first produced marketed in the 1970s”, as quoted above.

But to start the world’s first “microcomputer computer company” so early, that company would have to produce a small computer without relying on a microprocessor – despite the modern technical definition quoted above requiring a microprocessor for a “microcomputer” – because, even by 1970 when they talked about starting a company to mass-produce “microprocessor and personal computer”, the microprocessor was not yet invented.

Around that time in 1970, something like the microprocessor was only in the process of being invented, by none other than Intel, the Silicon Valley semiconductor company founded 2 years earlier by two of the Shockley Eight, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.

More specifically, in 1969-1970 Intel was doing a project for an advanced Japanese calculator design, and in that process Intel chip designer Marcian “Ted” Hoff proposed a new design to consolidate several central components onto a single chip, as Hoff later recalled:

“Intel was founded with the idea of doing semiconductor memory. Up until that time, most computer memory used small magnetic cores strung onto wire arrays. In most cases, they were wired by hand and some of these cores weren’t much bigger than the tip of a mechanical pencil. … While developing memory products, there was a feeling within Intel’s management that it might take a while before the computer industry would accept semiconductor memory as an alternative to cores. So it was felt that we should undertake some custom work, that is, to build chips to the specifications of a particular customer. We were contacted by a Japanese calculator company whose calculators came out under the name Busicom. They said that they would like to have us build a family of chips for a whole series of different calculator models, models that would vary in type of display, whether they had a printer or not, the amount of memory that they had and so on. A contract to make their chips was signed in April of 1969. … I was curious about the calculator design. I knew little about it, although I was fairly familiar with computer architectures and I had been at the sessions where the project had been discussed. The more I studied the design, the more concerned I became, based on what I had learned about Intel’s design and package capability and costs. It looked like it might be tough to meet the cost targets that had been set in April. The Japanese design was programmable, using read-only memory, but it seemed to me that the level of sophistication of their instruction set was too high, because there was a lot of random logic and many interconnections between different chips. There was a special chip to interface a keyboard, another chip for a multiplexed display and yet another chip for one of those little drum printers. It seemed to me that improvements could be made by simplifying the instruction set and then moving more of the capability into the read-only memory, perhaps by improving the subroutine capability of the instruction set. I mentioned some of my concerns and ideas to Bob Noyce. He was really encouraging, saying that if I had any ideas to pursue them because it was always nice to have a backup design. I did so throughout the months of July and August. … In October, the management of the calculator company came over to the U.S. for a meeting in which both approaches were presented. At that point they said they liked the Intel approach because it represented a more general purpose instruction set, a simpler processor, fewer chips to be developed and had a broader range of applications. Our proposal reduced the number of chips needed from around a dozen to only four.”

(“Ted Hoff: the birth of the microprocessor and beyond: Alumni Profile”, Alumni Profile, Stanford Engineering)

As Ted Hoff explained above, by using his new design the Japanese calculator needed only 4 semiconductor chips instead of “around a dozen” chips in the Japanese design, and – as he implied – the number of “interconnections”, i.e., wirings between the chips, would also be reduced as a result.

Subsequently in 1970-1971 Intel turned this new idea, of using a single chip to integrate different functionalities previously spread over several chips, into a general-purpose microprocessor for computers:

“Our initial goal was never to make a microprocessor, only to solve this particular customer’s problem, this calculator design problem. But there were several aspects of the design that became more evident as it was pursued. One was, being more general purpose and faster than the original design, we figured it might be useful for a broader range of applications than just the calculator family. Dr. Federico Faggin was hired around in April of 1970 and given the responsibility for chip circuit design and layout, to turn this architecture into a physical transistor layout. … He had working parts by around January of 1971.”

(Alumni Profile, Stanford Engineering)

As Intel’s Japanese calculator example illustrates, back in the 1960s when Howard Aiken and Cuthbert Hurd discussed starting the world’s first “microcomputer computer company”, making a small microcomputer without the microprocessor – unlike the modern definition of microcomputer – was possible but the technical work would have been more complicated, the computer’s size likely not as small and its performance likely not as good.

Then by the next time, in 1970, when the two discussed launching a computer company to develop “a microprocessor and personal computer”, Intel, a company that had started only in 1968 – one year after Aiken returned to active computer consulting – was already in the process of developing the first microprocessor.

Thus, in 1970 it was too late for a yet-to-be-founded company to invent the microprocessor.

The personal computer, on the other hand, did not become a reality even by the time of Aiken’s death in 1973. Hence a new company of Aiken’s and Hurd’s could have become the first to develop and mass-produce it.

As reviewed in Part 5 (ii), Aiken died in his sleep in a St. Louis hotel during a March 1973 consulting trip to Monsanto on memory technology – also a main interest of Intel’s – with the goal of making computers smaller; Aiken had just quit consulting for Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Silicon Valley – presumably also abandoning the hope of starting a new company with Hurd and with help from Lockheed engineers.

Commenting on that missed prospect for Aiken to develop smaller computers, Hurd later said that Aiken died before it could happen, as previously quoted in Part 5 (ii):

“… Hurd reported, however, that he “was busy at the time with other activities” and that Aiken “died before the venture could be launched.””

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

But like I have remarked in Part 5 (ii), there were 3 years from 1970 t0 1973 for Hurd to act on their collaboration plan, and I would only think that Hurd had the sense to know well that at the age of over 70 – Howard Aiken was born in 1900 as in Part 5 (ii) – there simply wasn’t much working time left to waste if Aiken was to realize his ambition.

In the end, past Howard Aiken’s lifetime, the work of developing microcomputers and personal computers and the glory of making them a success went to a younger generation of scientists and engineers, most notably among them computer designer and Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak:

“Stephen Gary Wozniak, (born Aug. 11, 1950, San Jose, Calif., U.S.), American electronics engineer, cofounder, with Steven P. Jobs, of Apple Computer, and designer of the first commercially successful personal computer.”

(“Stephen Gary Wozniak”, by William L. Hosch, Encyclopædia Britannica)

Stephen Gary Wozniak also happened to be the son of a Lockheed Missiles and Space Company engineer:

“Wozniak—or “Woz,” as he was commonly known—was the son of an electrical engineer for the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, Calif., in what would become known as Silicon Valley. …”

(William L. Hosch, Encyclopædia Britannica)

I note that in Part 5 (ii) a similar case of a generation-long time frame before a goal was finally realized has been noted: Alain Fournier, a University of British Columbia computer science professor specializing in computer graphics when I taught at UBC in the late 1980s and early 1990s, had in the 1970s been a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Dallas interested in studying computer graphics with faculty member Henry Fuchs, without realizing that wish as Fuchs soon left for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; then at UBC in 1990, Fournier brought in new Stanford Ph.D. Jack Snoeyink to fill a tenure-track faculty position, and it practically ended my hope of getting a tenure-track position there; finally in 2000, as Fournier was dying of cancer, Snoeyink landed a UNC Chapel Hill professorship and became a colleague of Fuchs, the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill, in the computer graphics field.

It turned out that even though Intel invented the microprocessor by 1971, i.e., while Aiken was still alive and had in 1970 talked with Hurd about developing it, it was not commercially available until after Aiken’s death; when the Intel 8080 microprocessor became available in 1975, Wozniak, a university dropout including from UC Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a Hewlett-Packard computer designer, began designing a microcomputer he hoped HP would produce; but HP was not interested:

“… A precocious but undisciplined student with a gift for mathematics and an interest in electronics, he attended the University of Colorado at Boulder for one year (1968–69) before dropping out. Following his return to California, he attended a local community college and then the University of California, Berkeley. In 1971 Wozniak designed the “Blue Box,” a device for phreaking (hacking into the telephone network without paying for long-distance calls) that he and Jobs, a student at his old high school whom he met about this time, began selling to other students. Also during the early 1970s Wozniak worked at several small electronics firms in the San Francisco Bay area before obtaining a position with the Hewlett-Packard Company in 1975, by which time he had formally dropped out of Berkeley.

Wozniak also became involved with the Homebrew Computer Club, a San Francisco Bay area group centred around the Altair 8800 microcomputer do-it-yourself kit, which was based on one of the world’s first microprocessors, the Intel Corporation 8080, released in 1975. While working as an engineering intern at Hewlett-Packard, Wozniak designed his own microcomputer in 1976 using the new microprocessor, but the company was not interested in developing his design. …”

(William L. Hosch, Encyclopædia Britannica)

This is not the first example of Hewlett-Packard’s slow response to the prospect of developing new products. As discussed in Part 5 (i), 20 years earlier in 1956-1957 Silicon Valley computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart was looking for a job in computer development and HP let him know that it had no plan for such, and only after another 10 years in 1966 that HP started its own computer product line. Now another 10 years later in 1976, HP was again uninterested in something new, namely Wozniak’s personal computer design.

Wozniak later recalled that as an HP employee he had pitched his personal computer design to the company no fewer than 5 times and been rejected every time, before accepting his friend Steve Job’s suggestion to start their own personal computer company:

“His loyalty to Hewlett Packard made him reluctant to leave the company to start Apple with Jobs. Wozniak reminded reporters last week at the Computer History Museum that he had proposed his idea for the Apple I computer to Hewlett Packard, but they “turned him down 5 times.”

According to a 2008 interview with The Telegraph, Wozniak originally thought he owed it to HP to stay, until Jobs persuaded Wozniak’s family to convince him to do it.”

(“Apple co-founder offered first computer design to HP 5 times”, by Josh Ong, December 6, 2010, Apple Insider)

As quoted, Jobs needed to get Wozniak’s family to convince Wozniak to start Apple Computer with him.

Though a university dropout, Wozniak was a proven designer of video games, having worked with Jobs in the early stage of that field, including building his own version of the Pong game, one of the earliest video games, and designing the original Breakout game for the company Atari that had hired Jobs on the basis of the Pong game credit:

“… Wozniak related the story of one of his first collaborative projects with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. After Wozniak built his own version of Pong, one of the earliest video games, Jobs then took the game to Atari and got a job. “They had Steve working at night so he wouldn’t be around other people,” joked Wozniak.

“Then he got us a job,” Wozniak continued, “I designed the first Breakout game for Atari. So I didn’t really work there. They tried to hire me, but I said ‘Never leave Hewlett Packard, I love my company, I’m loyal.’” Wozniak added that it took them 4 straight days and nights to design the game. “We both got the sleeping sickness, mononucleosis,” said Wozniak.”

(Josh Ong, December 6, 2010, Apple Insider)

Now together the two started Apple Computer, and the popular Apple II computer was produced in 1977:

“… Jobs, who was also a Homebrew member, showed so much enthusiasm for Wozniak’s design that they decided to work together, forming their own company, Apple Computer. Their initial capital came from selling Jobs’s automobile and Wozniak’s programmable calculator, and they set up production in the Jobs family garage to build microcomputer circuit boards. Sales of the kit were promising, so they decided to produce a finished product, the Apple II; completed in 1977, it included a built-in keyboard and support for a colour monitor. The Apple II, which combined Wozniak’s brilliant engineering with Jobs’s aesthetic sense, was the first personal computer to appeal beyond hobbyist circles. …”

(William L. Hosch, Encyclopædia Britannica)

The critical importance of collaboration among a pair of technology pioneers is highlighted in the contrasting examples of Howard Aiken and Cuthbert Hurd versus Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs: despite Aiken’s prominent computer pioneer status and early retirement from Harvard with an intense interest in starting a computer company, his close associate and former IBM executive Hurd only talked about collaboration plans with him but never put them into action; on the other hand, Wozniak the talented young computer designer did not want to leave his employer Hewlett-Packard at all, and yet the entrepreneurial adventurer Jobs persuaded Wozniak’s family to convince Wozniak to do it.

Without financing, Jobs and Wozniak started their company at Jobs’s family home garage, just like William Hewlett and David Packard had started theirs in a house garage in 1939 as noted in Part 5 (i).

Hewlett later commented on HP’s decision in 1976 not to pursue Wozniak’s personal computer idea by saying, “You win some, you lose some”:

“Regarding the missed opportunity, HP co-founder Bill Hewlett reportedly said, “You win some, you lose some.””

(Josh Ong, December 6, 2010, Apple Insider)

Glimpses into Hewlett-Packard’s own history may help shed light on William Hewlett’s circumspect and somewhat philosophical comment regarding HP’s missed opportunity with Steve Wozniak and the personal computer.

Back in 1939, it was in the garage of David Packard’s rented house in Palo Alto that Packard and Hewlett started their company, a garage since recognized as “the birthplace of Silicon Valley” by the State of California in 1989:

“In 1938 David and Lucile Packard got married and rented the first floor of the house at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. The simple one car garage became the HP workshop and the little shack out back became Bill Hewlett’s home. In 1989 California named the garage “the birthplace of Silicon Valley” and made it a California Historical Landmark.

…

Dave Packard had gone to Schenectady to work at General Electric. He was told that there was no future in electronics at General Electric and that he should instead concentrate on generators, motors and other heavier equipment. Bill Hewlett was finishing up his graduate work at Stanford and the two decided to pursue their earlier plan of starting their own business. The name HP (vs. PH) was chosen by a coin toss. For $45 per month, the Packards rented the first floor of the house, which was chosen specifically because it had a garage that they could work in. Bill Hewlett moved into the little shack next to the garage.”

(“The HP Garage – The Birthplace of Silicon Valley”, The Museum of HP Calculators)

As reviewed in Part 5 (ii), the founding of Hewlett-Packard was greatly encouraged by Stanford engineering professor Frederick Terman, a protégé of leading U.S. government science adviser Vannevar Bush of the World War II era, and an influential academic administrator who grew Stanford’s scientific research by utilizing Cold War-oriented research funding.

By the early 1950s, as quoted earlier from a book by James W. Cortada on U.S. computer development history, Hewlett-Packard was an “instrument supplier” for some of the Southern California aerospace companies actively engaged in computer development activity – even though at the time HP itself had no such ambition as recalled by Douglas Engelbart.

HP’s technological expertise in instrumentation was in serious demand in the arena of military weapons research:

“Although the company never developed weapons systems, it depended heavily throughout its history on military spending, because its instrumentation has been used to develop and test military products, particularly as weapons systems have become more dependent on electronic and semiconductor technologies. The military expertise of Hewlett-Packard was underscored in 1969 when U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon appointed Packard deputy secretary of defense, in which position he oversaw the initial plans for the development of two of the country’s most successful jet fighter programs, the F-16 and the A-10.”

(“Hewlett-Packard Company”, by Mark Hall, Encyclopædia Britannica)

The Encyclopædia Britannica article on Hewlett-Packard quoted above relates the history of HP’s benefiting from military spending on weapons development to David Packard’s rise in the national political scene – from a co-founder of a leading electronics and computer company in the growing Silicon Valley to serving as the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense under President Richard Nixon.

Packard was noted not only for overseeing the initial planning of the development of the U.S. Air Force’s important fighter jets the F-16 and the A-10, but also for overseeing the revision of military acquisition policy in 1969-1971 following a public controversy, just prior to the Nixon presidency, of cost overruns in the Air Force’s C-5A cargo aircraft project contracted to the Lockheed Corporation:

“… As it happened, when Nixon took office in 1969, the acquisition community was already in turmoil, the result of a high-profile controversy that began in mid-1968, when A. Ernest Fitzgerald, deputy for Management Systems in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management, first testified before Congress about cost overruns on the C-5A cargo aircraft program. His appearances before congressional panels resulted in a series of investigations that proved to be very embarrassing for the Air Force and the Lockheed Corporation, prime contractor for the C-5A. Subsequent allegations were made that, after testifying, Fitzgerald was the subject of career reprisals by the Air Force’s senior leadership. These accusations only drew more public attention to the controversy. …

…

In this connection, President Nixon appointed David Packard, one of the founders of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation and a veritable legend in American business circles, to the post of deputy secretary of Defense in January 1969. With an extensive business background and a hands-on management style that stood in stark contrast with that of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Packard seemed like a logical choice to tackle the problems of defense acquisition by revising policy and working closely with subordinates to repair the cultural rift that had developed between the services and OSD during McNamara’s tenure. One observer, writing in 1972, suggested that Packard was the embodiment of a “cult of personality in reverse,” a hero called upon to “put things right for the future.” …

…

… Shortly after taking office, Packard had formed the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council (DSARC) as an advisory body reporting to the secretary of Defense. The council, formed in May 1969, established three progress milestones for acquisition programs, an important enhancement to the acquisition process. The milestones were defined as “program initiation decision,”, “full-scale development decision,” and “production decision.” … The DSARC was part of a long-term scheme to promote a kind of “decentralized centralization” over defense acquisition activities. OSD retained oversight authority over new acquisition programs, but Packard wanted the services to assume a larger role in the management of the acquisition process, with many functions devolving to the services. …

The spirit of “decentralized centralization” also could be found in the language of the landmark May 1970 memo, in which Packard articulated new principle for managing acquisition in the coming years. “The prime objective of the new policy guidance is to enable the services to improve their management of programs . . . . [T]he services have the responsibility to get the job done,” wrote Packard. “[I]t is the responsibility of OSD to approve the policies which the services are to follow, to evaluate the the performance of the services in implementing the approved policies, and to make decision on proceeding into the next phrase in each major acquisition program.” …”

(Shannon A. Brown with Walton S. Moody, “Defense Acquisition in the 1970s: Retrenchment and Reform”, in Shannon A. Brown, ed., Providing the Means of War: Historical Perspectives on Defense Acquisition, 1945-2000, 2005, United States Army Center of Military History and Industrial College of the Armed Forces)

I note that David Packard’s reform vision of “decentralized centralization” cited above gave the U.S. military “services”, i.e., branches, more powers in defense acquisitions.

These powers had rested with the Office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara during the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson presidencies; the above quote cited an observer describing Packard as the embodiment of a “cult of personality in reverse” from Robert McNamara.

Under McNamara, the Pentagon had centralized its decision-making powers:

“One of the most important elements in the McNamara approach to management during the 1960s was in the commitment to centralized decision making in OSD. The new Planning, Programming, Budgeting System correlated resource inputs with categories of performance … The newly created office of assistant secretary of defense for systems analysis employed more than one hundred professional personnel preparing and using parametric cost estimates in cost-benefit analyses for use by the secretary of defense and other decision makers in the Pentagon. …”

(J. Ronald Fox, Defense Acquisition Reform, 1960-2009: An Elusive Goal, 2011, Center of Military History, United States Army)

Interestingly, the former defense secretary who had taken a centralization approach to modernizing Pentagon’s decision making under Democratic presidents Kennedy and Johnson was actually a Republican, and was also a former president of a top U.S automaker just like earlier President Eisenhower’s secretary of defense Charles Wilson reviewed in Part 5 (i):

“As a registered Republican, McNamara became the first Republican appointed to Kennedy’s Cabinet. He was a Presbyterian, married, and father of three. His rapid rise at Ford had been through the financial and accounting side of the business, where he was brought in by Henry Ford II as one of a team known as “whiz kids” right after World War II.

…

… He had been president of Ford just over a month; he’d been selected the day after Kennedy was elected President. And McNamara was not the first Secretary of Defense to be plucked from Detroit. Charles Wilson, President Eisenhower’s first Secretary of Defense, was a former president of General Motors.”

(“Kennedy Selects Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense”, by David Coleman, HistoryinPieces.com)

Cases such as the U.S. Army’s initiating the ENIAC electronic computer project at the University of Pennsylvania during wartime – over the serious objection of the U.S. scientific establishment led by Vannevar Bush, as discussed earlier – and establishing the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in peacetime as reviewed in Part 5 (i), suggest that the flexibility of acquisition decision making at the level of the military services could benefit companies like Hewlett-Packard that procured to military contracts directly or indirectly in the weapons technology arena.

But such focuses on the part of Hewlett-Packard and its co-founder David Packard, namely on military research and development and their benefits to the company, by the 1970s were a far distance from the aspirations of a younger generation of computer designers like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

At their first-ever published press interview, Jobs proclaimed that Apple Computer would like to donate computers to schools for the education of kids, so that “there would be an Apple in every classroom and on every desk” – an ambitious statement later recalled by tech writer Sheila (Clarke) Craven, who had conducted the interview in Apple’s start-up garage for her February 1977 article published in Kilobaud, The Small Computer Magazine:

““My interview with the two Steves took place while they were still in the folks’ garage,” Craven tells Business Insider. She remembers it this way:

…

One of the things Jobs told me was that they would make certain there would be an Apple in every classroom and on every desk, because if kids grew up using and knowing the Apple, they would continue to buy Apples and so would their kids. The computers would be donated by Apple Computer. I understand that when that article came out, orders starting pouring in, and Apple Computer was seriously launched.

At the time, Apple consisted of just the two Steves in Jobs’ parents’ garage. There was no office, Craven says. Craven spent four hours with the pair, including lunch. After Wozniak booted up the machine, Jobs loaded a game of Blackjack onto it to demonstrate its powers.”

(“This is the first news article ever written about Apple”, by Jim Edwards, May 5, 2015, Business Insider)

Quite different from making computers for kids to learn at school and to play video games, as the deputy defense secretary David Packard had held steadfast the stability of the civil society as a priority; in 1971, he authored a Pentagon document to justify, on the ground of “constitutional exceptions”, the use of military rule in the United States to handle civil disturbances:

“… The United States has contingency plans for establishing martial law in this country, not only in times of war, but also if there is what the Defense Department calls “a complete breakdown in the exercise of government functions by local civilian authorities.” What’s more, there’s a little-known 1971 memorandum prepared by the deputy secretary of defense which also provides justification for military control similar to martial law.

… Martial law is expected to be proclaimed by the president, although “senior military commanders” also enjoy the power to invoke it in the absence of a presidential order, according to a Department of Defense Directive signed in 1981 by Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci—who has since become the secretary of defense. Despite the existence of these martial law contingency plans, Justice Department spokesperson John Russell says martial law could never be invoked in the United States, pointing to “the Posse Comitatus Act, [which] bars the military from engaging in law enforcement.”

The Posse Comitatus Act provides small comfort, however, because another Pentagon document, authored by Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard in 1971, cites two “Constitutional exceptions” to the act’s restrictions. …

The Packard directive claims that Congress intended for there to be an exception to Posse Comitatus “when unlawful obstructions or rebellion against the authority of the United States renders ordinary enforcement unworkable. . . .” Like the Carlucci document, Packard’s directive says turning over law enforcement to the army will “normally” require a Presidential Executive Order, but that this requirement can be waived in “cases of sudden and unexpected emergencies . . . which require that immediate military action be taken.”

During last year’s congressional hearings into the Iran-contra scandal, a brief reference was made to planning efforts by FEMA and by Lt. Col. Oliver North at the National Security Council to outline a martial law scenario premised upon, among other things, a domestic crisis involving national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad. …”

(“Could It Happen Here?”, by Dave Lindorff, April 1988, Mother Jones)

Judging from what the Reagan White House National Security Council official Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North did planning for during the 1980s, namely the use of martial law to handle a crisis arising from domestic opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad, and what the 1971 Packard document had outlined, I can imagine that domestic military rule would have occurred in the Nixon era, or the Reagan era, had there been the Johnson-era nationwide escalating anti-Vietnam War protests – as in Part 2, in 1965 Stephen Smale, later my Ph.D. adviser, was a leader in starting the UC Berkeley anti-war movement that inspired the growth of the national protests, but before long returned to concentrating on mathematical research.

Given Hewlett-Packard’s history and focuses as reviewed here, Bill Hewlett made sense when he later mused about not taking up Steve Wozniak’s personal computer idea in 1976, “You win some, you lose some”.

And I would ponder and wonder: what could the win be for Mr. Hewlett and for Mr. Packard to make it easier for “kids” to play the “Pong” game and the “Breakout” game?

Besides, for HP there was the irony that Wozniak was the son of a weapons development engineer at Lockheed – the company that had spent too much Pentagon money that Nixon decided to bring in Packard to correct it.

As for Steve Wozniak, being a Hewlett-Packard loyalist at the time he may not have taken adequate notice – but for Steve Jobs’s worldly enthusiasm and persistence – of the cultural evolution of Silicon Valley over the years, from the ethos of HP as its founding company to Fairchild Semiconductor’s championing of civil and commercial industrial developments, and further to the plurality of start-up companies springing up since the late 1960s, as reviewed earlier.

So Hewlett-Packard didn’t help Wozniak in his quest to develop and market a personal computer. But paradoxically, neither did the Silicon Valley-trendsetting Intel, “the fairest of the “Fairchildren”” with its entrepreneurial spirit and egalitarian culture, and the inventor of the microprocessor, help Apple Computer with it – in the sense that although Wozniak based his initial personal computer design on the Intel 8080 microprocessor it was too expensive to be used in the early Apple computers:

“Steve Wozniak made a decision very early on at Apple that would prove one of the company’s most fateful ever. When “Woz,” a prank-loving 26-year-old who loved to tinker with machines, designed the very first Apple computer, he decided to use a microprocessor called the MOS Technology 6502, based on the design of Motorola Inc.’s 6800, essentially because it was cheaper than anything else he could find. Intel’s 8080 chip was selling for $179 at the time, and Motorola’s 6800 fetched $175. The MOS Technology chip, made by a Costa Mesa, California, company, cost only $25. …

The decision to go with the Motorola technology was fateful, because Intel would gain the license from IBM to make the microchips that went into almost every IBM-compatible computer. Motorola was a big company in its own right, a giant in cellular phones and pagers. But Apple, which soon after that first design by Woz began using Motorola chips exclusively, became Motorola’s only sizable customer for personal computer microprocessors. Intel’s whole life, on the other hand, revolved around microchips. In fact, it had been a young Intel engineer named Marcian E. Hoff Jr. who had invented the microchip in 1971, making the PC revolution possible.”

(“They Coulda Been a Contender”, by Jim Carlton, November 1997, Issue 5.11, WIRED)

As quoted, Wozniak chose a $25 MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor based on the design of Motorola’s $175 6800 microprocessor, and not Intel’s $179 8080 microprocessor, a fateful decision with the consequence that Intel then became the microprocessor supplier for IBM but not Apple.

Wozniak had in mind making Apple computers affordable for students and teachers, with his first Apple computer debuting in a math class at Windsor Junior High School in Windsor, California:

“Before the iPod, the Macintosh, or even the formation of Apple Computer Company on April Fool’s Day 1976, there was the Apple I. Designed by Steve “Woz” Wozniak, then an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, it was less a personal computer than the bare essentials of one: the circuit board you see in the image at left is the Apple I (buyers had to hook up their own keyboards, displays, and power supplies). This computer, the very first Apple I made, was first used in a math class at Windsor Junior High School in Windsor, CA, in 1976 and donated to the LO*OP Center, a nonprofit educational organization run by Liza Loop. …

… Wozniak pored over ­integrated-­circuit specifications and engineered the Apple I so that different processes could share the same chips, reducing the overall part count. This, plus the use of cheaper items such as a $20 MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor rather than the more common $175 Motorola 6800, enabled him and Steve Jobs to offer the Apple I for the somewhat affordable price of $666.66… Loop, who is also the director of the History of Computing in Learning and Education Project, agrees: “Woz wanted this simple, low-cost design so that the Apple would be affordable for students and teachers.””

(“Hack: The Apple I”, by Daniel Turner, May 1, 2007, MIT Technology Review)

It looked like launching a great adventure on April Fool’s Day was not an unpopular move, preferred by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak starting Apple Computer and not just by Stephen Hawking who, as in Part 4, had his first popular book, A Brief History of Time, published on that day in 1988.

The second previous quote above, from a Wired magazine article, cited the company MOS Technology that made the cheap microprocessor chip Wozniak selected as based in Costa Mesa, which is in Southern California.

So would it not appear that, with all that had been achieved by major Silicon Valley semiconductor companies like Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, in the 1970s Southern California was still more productive than Northern California in semiconductor chip production?

Not exactly, because MOS Technology was really based in, and its 6502 microprocessor designed and manufactured in, Valley Forge just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, even though a lower-power version, CMOS 6502, was developed in Costa Mesa for use in “hand-held” calculators:

“VALLEY FORGE, PA—Back in the fall of 1976, before there was any microcomputer market to speak of, Commodore International acquired MOS Technology to help its struggling calculator business. MOS had designed the 6502 chip, which is found today in innumerable microcomputers, including models by Apple, Atari and Hewlett-Packard.

…

What finally leaves the MOS plant is integrated circuits, which then go to Japan or California for final assembly into computers.

There is also a systems/assembly facility in Santa Clara, California (see related article on page 18). A support facility in Costa Mesa, California, is working on a CMOS version of the 6502 and 6500 series of microprocessors that will provide lower-power, “equal- or better-speed microprocessor” for “use in hand-held applications”…”

(“MOS Technology is Commodore’s ‘edge’”, by David Needle, April 26, 1982, Volume 4, Number 16, InfoWorld)

So it was near Philadelphia, the birthplace of the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer ENIAC, that the MOS 6502 was designed and manufactured so cheaply that it operated in so many microcomputers, including Apple computers, computers by Atari which Jobs and Wozniak had done video-game design for, and even Hewlett-Packard microcomputers!

Apparently Steve Wozniak started the personal computer trend very well and subsequently Hewlett-Packard in 1980 entered the market with the HP 85 personal computer.

(“HP-85 personal computer, 1980”, Hewlett-Packard)

As mentioned earlier, microchips designed in the 1960s by Fairchild Semiconductor for the American moon-landing program’s Apollo Guidance Computers were also manufactured by a Philadelphia-based company, Philco.

In the year 1980 when HP entered the personal computer market, Apple’s annual sales were already in the tens of millions of dollars and growing fast; IBM was also jolted into immediate action; in that year, Apple Computer shares began trading on the stock market, instantly making Apple a billion-dollar company and turning Jobs and Wozniak into $100 millionaires:

“The Apple II was first sold in 1978 and made $700,000 worth of sales that year. The following year, sales were $7 million, and year after $48 million. In 1980, sales doubled again and the Apple company went public, giving Jobs and Wozniak $100 million each.

IBM couldn’t ignore that. In July 1980, it set up a project to get into the personal computer business within a year. Because of the time constraint, the project team scrapped the usual IBM practice of making every major component in the computer themselves and decided to build their computer from standard components that anyone could buy.”

(David Manners and Tsugio Makimoto, Living with the Chip, 1995, Chapman & Hall)

Besides Jobs and Wozniak, Apple Computer’s stock market debut produced around 300 instant millionaires, about 40 of them Apple investors and employees; that was more millionaires than any other company had produced in history up to that point:

“On December 12, 1980, Apple launched its IPO (initial public offering) of its stock, selling 4.6 million shares at $22 per share with the stock symbol “AAPL” on the NASDAQ market.

The shares sold out almost immediately and the IPO generated more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956. Instantly, about 300 millionaires, some 40 of which are Apple employees and investors, are created. That is more millionaires than any company in history had produced at that time. Steve Jobs, the largest shareholder, made $217 million dollars alone.

By the end of the day, the stock had increased in value by almost 32% to close at $29, leaving the company with a market value of $1.778 billion.”

(“Apple IPO makes instant millionaires, December 12, 1980”, by Suzanne Deffree, December 12, 2015, EDN Network)

As quoted, Apple Computer raised more capital in the IPO, i.e., initial public offering, of its stock than any other company after Ford Motor Company in 1956.

So, within a few short years after HP’s rejection of Wozniak’s personal computer idea, he and Jobs had surpassed Hewlett and Packard as successful industrial entrepreneurs – reaching a level of fame closer to Henry Ford and Robert McNamara.

After Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, Apple started something in entrepreneurship and in technological progress with a revolutionary impact on not only Silicon Valley but American consumers: according to the U.S. Census Bureau data, by 1984, 8.2% of American households had a computer; 5 years later in 1989, the figure grew to 15%; by 1993, it was 22.8%; it then became 36.6% in 1997 and 42.1% in 1998; and by 2000, over half of the American households, or 51%, had a computer.

(“Home Computers and Internet Use in the United States: August 2000”, September 2001, U.S. Census Bureau)

Still, credits to Apple’s innovative success are due not only Jobs, Wozniak and Apple’s employees, but also others outside of Apple, such as Silicon Valley pioneer Douglas Engelbart who in the mid-1950s, as in Part 5 (i), had encountered the lack of interest in computer development on the part of UC Berkeley, Stanford and Hewlett-Packard, but persevered and in the early 1960s invented the computer mouse; after Engelbart, it was a group of graduates of Stanford’s interdisciplinary product design program who in the early 1980s turned the expensive and unreliable mouse into an inexpensive and very helpful user device Steve Jobs wanted:

“Dean Hovey was hungry. His young industrial design firm, Hovey-Kelley Design, had been working on projects for Apple Computer for a couple of years but wanted to develop entire products, not just casings and keyboards. Hovey had come to pitch Apple co-founder Steven Jobs some ideas. But before he could get started, the legendary high-tech pioneer interrupted him. “Stop, Dean,” Hovey recalls Jobs saying. “What you guys need to do, what we need to do together, is build a mouse.”

Hovey was dumbfounded. A what?

Jobs told him about an amazing computer, code-named Alto, he had just seen at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In early 1980, most computers (including Apple’s) required users to memorize text commands to perform tasks. The Alto had a graphical user interface—a symbolic world with little pictures of folders, documents and other icons—that users navigated with a handheld input device called a mouse. Jobs explained that Apple was working on two computers, named Lisa and Macintosh, that would bring that technology to market. The mouse would help revolutionize computers, making them more accessible to ordinary people. …

Just one problem: a commercial mouse based on the Xerox technology cost $400, malfunctioned regularly and was nearly impossible to clean. That device—a descendant of the original computer mouse invented by Douglas Englebart at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1960s—was a masterpiece of high-concept technology, but a hopeless product. Jobs wanted a mouse that could be manufactured for $10 to $35, survive everyday use and work on his jeans.

“We thought maybe Steve wasn’t getting enough meat in his diet,” says Jim Sachs, a founding member of Hovey-Kelley, “but for $25 an hour, we’d design a solar-powered toaster if that’s what he wanted.” …

They did. The mouse’s evolution “from the laboratory to the living room,” as one of its designers puts it, is not well known—even some Apple fanatics aren’t familiar with it—but it reveals something of the personalities of its designers, the Stanford program that trained them and even the history of Silicon Valley. Everyone knows that the University has helped shape the region, but the influence is often described as a function of great individuals like Frederick Terman…

When Hovey-Kelley was asked to design the Apple mouse, the firm was a two-year-old start-up. Hovey and David Kelley, as well as most of the firm’s other early members, had met as graduate students in Stanford’s product design program. An interdisciplinary program that combines mechanical engineering, art and, often, math, physics and psychology, it was founded in 1958 by Robert McKim. …

…

… The Apple mouse transformed personal computing. Although the expensive Lisa flopped, the Macintosh, released in 1984, made the graphical user interface the industry standard. Microsoft responded with Windows, and its own mouse—also engineered by Jim Yurchenco. “We made a mouse mass-producible, reliable and inexpensive,” says Sachs, “and hundreds of millions of them have been made.””

(“Mighty Mouse”, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, March/April 2002, Stanford Magazine)

For his part, Steve Wozniak credited his success in building the first Apple computer to his having been “extremely lucky”:

“I built the first Apple prototype myself, before there was suggestion to start a company. I gave out schematics and code listings of it at the Homebrew Computer Club. …

…

In 1975 I decided to build a full computer, that would be able to run a programming language. In 1970 I’d told my dad that someday I’d own a 4K computer capable of running Fortran programs, which was my favorite high school pastime. We didn’t have computers in our high school, but my electronics teacher arranged for me to visit a company in Sunnyvale and program a computer there once a week. Due to not having money, I couldn’t consider a $370 Intel 8080 microprocessor. But MOS Technology came out with the 6502 for $20. More important, in a day when there was no store where you could actually buy a microprocessor, the new 6502 was to be introduced and sold over the counter at a show, Wescon, in San Francisco. All of this was extremely lucky for me.

So to build my first Apple computer (I’d actually built a smaller computer of my own design with no microprocessor, the “Cream Soda Computer,” in 1970) by joining my terminal (input and output) with the 6502 microprocessor and some RAM. I chose dynamic RAM whereas all the other cheap hobbiests chose static RAM. My goal in any design was to minimize the board space and chip count. Well, the new 4K-bit dynamic RAMs were the first RAMs to be cheaper, per bit, than magnetic core memories. It was a change in technology as significant as the scientific calculators of Hewlett Packard (which I helped design), which totally replaced slide rules.”

(“Letters-General Questions Answered”, last updated: July 18, 2001, Woz.org)

From what he said above, Wozniak’s extreme luck came because of the MOS Technology microprocessor that not only came out onto the market just when he wanted to build a full computer, but that was being shown at the Wescon show in San Francisco so he could go buy it for $20, when other microprocessors were not only expensive but unavailable at any retail store.

Besides these, Wozniak mentioned several favorable factors: he had programmed computers since high school, with the help of his electronics teacher to access a computer in a Sunnyvale company; he had had chats with his father about computers; he had designed and built a small computer, the “Cream Soda Computer”, without a microprocessor in 1970; he had experiences at Hewlett-Packard helping design scientific calculators; and, when he chose to use dynamic RAMs as the computer memory, there was the new 4K-bit dynamic RAMs that were “the first RAMs to be cheaper, per bit, than magnetic core memories” – not unlike the MOS Technology microprocessor being not only a new but affordable product.

Of these factors, I would say that the emergence of the MOS Technology microprocessor and the emergence of the new 4K-bit dynamic RAMs were “lucky” for Wozniak, because the timings of market availability and affordability of new products coincided with his needs for them. The other factors were primarily consequences of his talent, skills and studious work: he got to do calculator design at HP because he had the technical skills and prior experience designing and building a small computer without the microprocessor in 1970, and that prior experience no doubt had benefited from his familiarity with computers, having done programming regularly in his high school years.

Of particular interest to my comment earlier about Howard Aiken’s intent of starting a microcomputer company long before the microprocessor was invented, Wozniak showed in 1970 that one could build a small computer without having a microprocessor.

In addition, though Wozniak did not delve into details in the above quote from his response to an email question, his “favorite high school pastime” of computer programming and later building a computer on his own probably had a family influence, given that his father, with whom he had discussions as quoted, was an electrical engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company.

In fact, on other occasions Wozniak has described in great details about his having been nurtured passionately by his father during childhood and youth; his father tutored him on electronics since when he was 3 years old, and taught him to start his first electronics building project at the age of 6, something that instilled in him an exciting sense of superiority over other kids; from there on it was project after project, through elementary school and through 8th grade of high school, guided by his “single greatest influence” – his father:

“The other thing my dad taught me was a lot about electronics. Boy, do I owe a lot to him for this. He first started telling me things and explaining things about electronics when I was really, really young—before I was even four years old. This is before he had that top secret job at Lockheed, when he worked at Electronic Data Systems in the Los Angeles area. One of my first memories is his taking me to his workplace on a weekend and showing me a few electronic parts, putting them on a table with me so I got to play with them and look at them. …

…

… In fact, my very first project—the crystal radio I built when I was six—was really all because of my dad. It took me a very long time in my life to appreciate the influence he had on me. He started when I was really young, helping me with these kinds of projects.

…

Dad was always helping me put science projects together, as far back as I can remember. When I was six, he gave me that crystal radio kit I mentioned. It was just a little project where you take a penny, scrape it off a little, put a wire on the penny, and touch it with some earphones. Sure enough, we did that and heard a radio station. Which one, I couldn’t tell you, but we heard voices, real voices, and it was darned exciting. I distinctly remember feeling something big had happened, that suddenly I was way ahead—accelerated—above any of the other little kids my age. And you know what? that was the same way I felt years later when I figured out how resistors and lightbulbs worked.

…

All through elementary school and through eighth grade, I was building project after electronic project. There were lots of things I worked on with Dad; he was my single greatest influence.”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

In the above quoted from his autobiography, “Woz” mentioned that his father’s work at Lockheed was a “top secret job”.

His dad was in the missile program and never told him any details about it, in an era when even the space program was “top secret”, as Woz explained:

“I did know Dad was an engineer, and I knew he worked in the missile program at Lockheed. That much he said, but that was pretty much it. Looking back, I figure that because this was in the late 1950s and early 1960s at the height of the Cold War, when the space program was so hot and top secret and all, probably that’s why he couldn’t tell me anything more about it. What he worked on, what he did every day at work, he’d say absolutely nothing about. Even up to the day he died, he didn’t give so much as a hint.”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

The space program could not have made Woz’s dad so tight-lipped all his life, could it? His father’s was Lockheed’s submarine-based Polaris missile program, mentioned earlier, as Woz later figured out:

“Now, on my own, I managed to put together little bits and pieces. I remember seeing NASA-type pictures of rockets, and stuff related to the Polaris missile being shot from submarines or something, but he was just so closemouthed about it, the door slammed there.

I tell you this because I’m trying to point out that my dad believed in honesty. Extreme honesty. Extreme ethics, really. That’s the biggest thing he taught me. …”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

As discussed earlier and in Part 5 (ii), Lockheed Missiles and Space Company was founded in 1956 in the nascent Silicon Valley region around the time of the semiconductor industry’s arrival there.

Woz’s father came to this company in 1958 from Southern California when Waz was 7 years old, moving to a house on Edmonton Avenue in Sunnyvale, “in the heart of” Silicon Valley and in “the best climate in America”:

“We spent most of my early years in Southern California, where my dad worked as an engineer at various companies before the secret job at Lockheed.

But where I really grew up was Sunnyvale, right in the heart of what everyone now calls Silicon Valley. Back then, it was called Santa Clara Valley. I moved there when I was seven. … Our street, Edmonton Avenue, was just a short one-block street bordered by fruit orchards on three of four sides. …

When I think of that street, looking back, I think it was the most beautiful place you could imagine growing up. It wasn’t as crowded back then, and boy, was it easy to get around. It was as moderate of temperature as anywhere else you could find. In fact, right around the time I moved there—this was 1958—I remember my mother showing me national articles declaring it to be the best climate in America. …”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

Woz told how his father, “an extremely good teacher and communicator”, gave him “classical electronics training” from the beginning starting when he was 7:

“Because my dad was an engineer, there were all kinds of interesting things lying around my house. And when you’re in a house and there are resistors lying around everywhere, you ask, “What’s that? What’s a resistor?” And my dad would always give me an answer, a really good answer even a seven-year-old could understand. He was just an extremely good teacher and communicator.

He never started out by trying to explain from the top down what a resistor is. He started from the beginning, going all the way back to atoms and electrons, neutrons, and protons. He explained what they were and how everything was made from those. I remember we actually spent weeks and weeks talking about different types of atoms and then I learned how electrons can actually flow through things—like wires. Then, finally, he explained to me how the resistors work—not by calculations, because who can do calculations when you’re a second grader, but by real commonsense pictures and explanations. You see, he gave me classical electronics training from the beginning. …”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

With the training and guidance by his father, Woz excelled in science projects at the elementary school age. In a 2012 article, he described his accomplishments in the elementary school years:

“I enjoyed early electronic kits with buttons and buzzers but that was a mild start which could have gone in other directions. Science fair projects in elementary school, really solidified my direction. A couple of simple projects, a flashlight apparatus with rubber bands instead of solder, and an electrolysis project were also not determining of my real interest. But I found a journal in a hall closet with descriptions of binary numbering and logic gates and storage devices.

When I discovered that a 9-year old could understand this stuff, I knew it would be my passion forever. I didn’t think there were jobs in computers but I would love them as a pastime. This interest was solidified by large construction projects (ham radio transmitter and receiver from kits after learning and getting my license), atomic electron orbital display (92 lights, 92 switches, tons of relays, some diodes for logic), a tic-tac-toe computer (about 100 transistor circuits for rules that I made from playing games, although later in life I minimized it to about 10-20 rules for simplicity), a 10-bit binary adder-subtractor. In no case did I copy existing logic or circuits and that forced me to learn it all well.”

(How Steve Wozniak Became the Genius Who Invented the Personal Computer, by Steve Wozniak, July 17, 2012, Gizmodo)

Very impressive, Woz not only played the tic-tac-toe game but built a “tic-tac-toe computer” with about 100 transistor circuits for playing the game – well over a decade before building his own version of the early commercial video game “Pong” and designing the first version of the “Breakout” video game as mentioned earlier. Most impressively as recalled, Woz did the projects by learning it well and doing it on his own, not copying existent designs.

In building his “tic-tac-toe computer”, Woz benefited from not only his father’s teaching on the logics of transistors and circuits and on how to build them, but also the assistance of none other than the Silicon Valley-trendsetting Fairchild Semiconductor, which gave Woz a large quantity of “cosmetic defects” transistors for free, courtesy of his father:

“In sixth grade my father taught me how transistors work, leading into logic circuits. I learned how to fashion OR gates from resistors or diodes, AND gates from diodes, and invertors from transistors.

Although they were still expensive, my dad got local transistor companies (Fairchild) to donate “cosmetic defects” of hundreds of diodes and transistors to me. My dad taught me how gates could make decisions based on inputs. He said how you could combine all the inputs of a tic-tac-toe game (which squares had “X”, which had “O” and which were empty) and gates could decide the best response. Unfortunately I didn’t come up with a great simplification (along the lines I used for my 6th graders last year) and it took hundreds of gates laid out on a 3’ by 4’ piece of plywood with components soldered to nails. I tried hard but couldn’t get the “tic-tac-toe computer” into the 6th grade science fair.”

(“THE WOZ INTERVIEW!”, by Auri Rahimzadeh, 1995, Woz.org)

Steve Wozniak was born on August 11, 1950, as in his Encyclopædia Britannica biography cited earlier. In his 6th grade, typically 11-12 years old, Woz’s “tic-tac-toe computer” was probably made in 1961-1962. That would be the time when Howard Aiken retired from Harvard and most likely discussed with Cuthbert Hurd about starting a “microcomputer computer company”, with a Lockheed assistant director of engineering doing the design work – in Sunnyvale where Aiken was a consultant at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company.

Aiken’s goal unfulfilled in his lifetime would eventually be achieved by a Lockheed Missiles and Space Company engineer’s son, a 6th grader at that earlier time but already making a special “tic-tac-toe computer”.

In his high school years, Wozniak learned not only programming but designing computers on his own, as he recalled in the 2012 article cited earlier:

“In high school I got to program a computer and came across a manual for an existing minicomputer. I took my elementary school logic experience and tried to teach myself how to design a computer, given its architecture. I had no books on how to do this. I shut my door and worked alone. After a few tries over months, I had a pretty decent design with the chips of the day.

Then I started designing every minicomputer made. I’d design them over and over, making a game to save parts. I had no books but came up with good techniques because it was for myself. …”

(Steve Wozniak, July 17, 2012, Gizmodo)

The first machine Woz designed and built that was close to a real computer was an Adder/Subtractor in his 8th-grade year. To Woz’s disappointment, it won him only an honorable mention at the Bay Area Science Fair, where his experience made him feel that the competition’s judging outcomes were unfairly predetermined:

“The Adder/Subtractor wasn’t more complicated in terms of size or construction time than the tic-tac-toe machine, but this project actually had a goal that was closer to real computing. A more important purpose than tic-tac-toe. …

My project had a function, a real function that was useful. You could input numbers, add or subtract one, and see your answer.

…

But here’s the thing. I took it down to the Bay Area Science Fair one night, to set it up before the day of judging. Some people showed me where to put it and asked me if I’d like to tell them about it. I told them no, figuring that I’d just tell them the story on judging day. By then I’d gotten kind of shy. Looking back, I think I may have turned down the judges without knowing it.

When I showed up on judging day, all the projects already had their awards. The judging had already happened somehow! I had an honorable mention, and there were three exhibits that had higher awards that mine. I saw them and remember thinking they were trivial compared to mine, so what happened? I then looked in the fair brochure and those three were all from the school district that was putting on the fair.

I thought, Hey, I’ve been cheated. But that night, I showed the machine and talked to lots of people—including, I’m sure, the real judges—and it seemed like they really understood how big my project was, I mean, it was great and I knew it and everyone knew it. I was able to explain how I’d used logic equations and gates and how I’d combined gates and transistors with binary number (1s and 0s) arithmetic to get the whole thing working.”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

Fortunately for Woz, the U.S. Air Force gave him its top award for the Bay Area Science Fair. The ‘VIP’ treatment coming with the award from the Air Force gave this 13-to-14-year-old a real boost of confidence as well as his “love for flying”; as Woz recalled in his autobiography, “that Adder/Subtractor was such a key project in my getting to be the engineer who ended up building the first personal computer”:

“After that, the Air Force gave me its top award for an electronics project for the Bay Area Science Fair, even though I was only in eighth grade and the fair went up to twelfth grade. As part of the award, they gave me a tour of the U.S. Strategic Air Command Facility at Travis Air Force Base. And they gave me a flight in a noncommercial jet, my first-ever flight in any plane. I think I might have caught my love for flying then.

When I look back, that Adder/Subtractor was such a key project in my getting to be the engineer who ended up building the first personal computer. This project was a first step to that. …”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

Or as noted earlier that in his autobiography Wozniak referred to his Lockheed missiles engineer father as his “single greatest influence”, in awarding Woz for his 8th-grade invention that would become his first step towards “the engineer who ended up building the first personal computer”, the U.S. Air Force likely saluted not only Woz’s accomplishment but also his father’s engineering career associated with the Air Force.

In fact, his father had helped him come up with the initial idea of building the Adder/Subtractor, according to Woz in an interview over a decade before his autobiography:

“In eighth grade my dad showed me a book of computer reports which were all interesting to me. I learned Boolean Algebra basics there. The book had logic diagrams of a binary adder (1 bit with carry in and out) and of a binary subtractor. We came up with the idea of building one. …”

(Auri Rahimzadeh, 1995, Woz.org)

Courtesy of his father, during his high school years Fairchild Semiconductor, which had given him “cosmetic defects” transistors for his 6th-grade tic-tac-toe computer, continued to provide Woz with help in designing computers:

“… One time in high school, I was trying to get chips for a computer I’d designed. My dad drove me down to meet an engineer he knew at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that invented the semiconductor. I told him I’d designed an existing minicomputer two ways. I found out that if I used chips by Sygnetics (a Fairchild competitor), the computer had fewer chips than if I used Fairchild chips.

The engineer asked me which Sygnetics chips I’d used.

I told him the make and model number.

He pointed out that the Sygnetics chips I’d used in the design were much larger in physical size, with many more pins and many more wires to connect, than the equivalent Fairchild chips.

I was stunned. Because he made me realise in an instant that the simpler computer design would really have fewer connections, not simply fewer chips. So my goal changed, from designing for fewer chips to trying to have the smallest board, in square inches, possible.

Usually fewer chips means fewer connections, but not always.”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

As Wozniak recalled, even in high school years he already had the goal of designing computers that were small in size, and a conversation with a Fairchild Semiconductor engineer gave him the right technical perspective in the subject matter.

Thus, naturally, designing and building a microcomputer or personal computer was the next step for Wozniak when the technological components, most importantly the microprocessor, became available, as he recalled:

“… The Data General NOVA came out and had a very different architecture which wound up taking half as many chips, due to being designed around available parts very well. it was a very structured architecture. I told my dad I’d someday have a 4K NOVA (enough for a programming language). He said it cost as much as a house down payment. Throwing down the gauntlet, I countered that I’d live in an apartment.

The day I discovered that microprocessors were much like these minicomputers I’d designed back in high school, the formula for an affordable 4KB computer popped into my head instantly, remembering my old goal. Thankfully I’d been through a lot of stages leading up to this, building games around my TV (the only free output device) and terminals for the Arpanet. You do a lot when you love electronics and have little chance of ever having a girlfriend or wife.”

(Steve Wozniak, July 17, 2012, Gizmodo)

As Wozniak indicated, even after he became an experienced amateur computer designer, he continued to consult his father on important projects he would like to do.

And of course, as discussed earlier, in order to persuade Steve Wozniak to start Apple Computer with him, Steve Jobs went to persuade Wozniak’s family first – no doubt as I have reviewed, Woz’s father was the key!

A reason why Woz’s electrical engineer father had so much influence in the son’s personal development in the computer field may be that the father was in fact a pioneer in the field of integrated circuits, as Woz recalled:

“Because my father was involved with the earliest IC’s in regard to his lockheed work, I went to trade shows when only 10 years old and saw the first chips with 2 transistors on one chip of silicon (germanium), and the promise of 6 to 10 transistors on a chip in the near future. Over the years, my father had manuals around the house that caught my attention, with the early IC’s. During high school I discovered minicomputer manuals and started putting chips together to make computer designs. I was totally self taught in this regard, designing alone in my room.”

(Auri Rahimzadeh, 1995, Woz.org)

Recall that the integrated circuit was invented by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, independently in 1958-1959. In Woz’s case, when he was 10 years old – presumably in 1960 or 1961, not long before starting his tic-tac-toe computer project – his father was involved in IC development at Lockheed and he got to attend trade shows with his father; then over the years, his father brought home various IC manuals and minicomputer manuals, and Woz got to read them and learn to design computer alone in his room.

As reviewed earlier, the Harvard early computer pioneer Howard Aiken’s later consultancy for Lockheed Missiles and Space Company focused on switching circuit design. I would not be surprised if, in fact, Aiken was a consultant for some of the projects Wozniak’s father was a member of – as quoted earlier from Woz’s autobiography, due to secrecy his father never told him much about the work.

A very relevant and intriguing question arising from my review of this history is: had Aiken and Cuthbert Hurd, and the Lockheed assistant director of engineering already doing the computer design work, in the 1960s, gone forward in starting a new company, would Woz’s father have been a prospective top engineer to be recruited to this “first microcomputer computer company in the world”?

I understand that Woz’s father could be only one of many engineers Lockheed had in this field, and not as distinguished as Aiken the consultant with a prominent pioneer status. So what could be the chance that this one engineer, with a talented young son learning to do electronics projects at home, be chosen for such a brave new venture in those early years?

One may reason that Steve Wozniak’s father was already famous, in some way, that could be a factor favoring him. In his autobiography, Woz told of his father’s former fame at California Institute of Technology as the best football quarterback that university ever had:

“According to my birth certificate, my full name is Stephan Gary Wozniak, born in 1950 to my dad, Francis Jacob Wozniak (everyone called him Jerry), and to my mom, Margaret Louise Wozniak. My mother said she meant to name me Stephen with an e, but the birth certificate was wrong. So Stephen with an e is what I go by now.

…

I forgot to mention before that my dad was kind of famous, in his own way. He was a really successful football player at Caltech. People used to tell me all the time that they used to go to the games just to see Jerry Wozniak play. …

…

Once, at De Anza, my quantum physics teacher said, “Wozniak. That’s an unusual name. I knew a Wozniak once. There was a Wozniak who went to Caltech.”

“My father,” I said, “he went to Caltech.”

“Well, this one was a great football player.”

That was my father, I told him. He was the team’s quarterback.

“Yes,” the teacher said. “We would never go to football games. but at Caltech, you had to go just to watch Jerry Wozniak. He was famous.”

You know, I think my dad was the one good quarterback Caltech ever had. He even got scouted by the Los Angeles Rams, though I don’t think he was good enough to play pro. Still, it was neat to hear from a physics teacher that he remembered my dad for his football. It made me feel like I shared a history with him. The teacher once brought me a Caltech paper from back in those days with a picture of my dad in his uniform. …”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

As told, when Woz was a De Anza College student his quantum physics teacher had known his father Jerry Wozniak from the father’s star football quarterback days at Caltech.

Okay, the fame wasn’t in engineering; but it was rare that a former university star football quarterback became an engineer in the IC/computer fields at a military aerospace company, and it likely made Jerry Wozniak more noticed than his fellow engineers in one respect.

And as Woz’s De Anza quantum physics teacher said, “Wozniak” was “an unusual name” – as a matter of fact it was unusual in the context of the history of early electronic computers.

The first general-purpose electronic computer, the development of which involved Howard Aiken’s competitor John von Neumann, prominent mathematician who has been regarded as “the father of computers” as in Part 5 (i), was named ENIAC for the full name: Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.

As ENIAC was being completed in the mid-1940s, the project group at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering planned for the next computer to be named EDVAC; soon von Neumann, returning to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, started the IAS computer project; and of particular interest, by 1950 the National Bureau of Standards developed the computers SEAC and SWAC as reviewed in Parts 5 (i) & (ii).

Most of these early computer names end with “AC”; but ENIAC was the only one ending with “NIAC”, and the name Wozniak is similar in the sense that it also has two syllables the second of them, “niak”, differs from “NIAC” by only the last letter and is pronounced the same.

While it appeared a random coincidence, that a person with a name similar to the famous first electronic computer became an engineer in the computer field and his son with that name later became famous for developing the first personal computer, there were other interesting coincidences.

As in Part 5 (i), the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, the Cold War think-tank where von Neumann was a leading strategist, in the early 1950s developed a computer following von Neumann’s design, and named it in honor of von Neumann as JOHNNIAC, i.e., also ending with “ENIAC”. JOHNNIAC’s full name is: John v. Neumann Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer.

(“JOHNNIAC”, Wikipedia)

It looks interesting that, of the various early electronic computers with different names, the one named after “the father of computers” John von Neumann also had a name ending in “NIAC”, similar to “niak”, just like the first one von Neumann was involved in developing.

Was there some sort of pattern?

There were only 3 other early electronic computers that had names ending in “NIAC”: MANIAC I, II & III. Their full names are: Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Computer I, II & III.

(“List of vacuum tube computers”)

By inspecting the name acronyms, one can see that many end with “AC” because their names end with “and Computer” or “Automatic Computer”, whereas the few ending with “NIAC” also have “Numerical Integrator” ahead of it.

Like JOHNNIAC, MANIAC I was based on von Neumann’s computer design and the other two were subsequent improvements, MANIAC I & II built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s, and MANIAC III built in the 1960s at the University of Chicago.

(“MANIAC I”, “MANIAC II”, and, “MANIAC III”, Wikipedia)

So these “NIAC”s all had influence from von Neumann in one way or another.

But the influence was more concrete. Besides von Neumann’s taking part in ENIAC’s development, and JOHNNIAC’s naming in his honor, the influence was also a result of von Neumann’s leading roles in both computer development and numerical computing for nuclear bomb development; when ENIAC was completed, von Neumann brought together his ENIAC colleagues and his colleagues at the Manhattan Project, and one of the latter, the physicist Nicholas Metropolis, took up computing on ENIAC for hydrogen bomb development, invented the Monte Carlo method of statistical computing, and then started the MANIAC computer project:

“n 1942 and 1943, Metropolis accepted an appointment as a research instructor at the University of Chicago, where he worked with James Franck. Franck was a Nobel Laureate in physics, having received the award with Gustav Hertz in 1925 for discovering the laws that governed the impact of an electron upon an atom.

In early 1943, Robert Oppenheimer convinced Metropolis to come to Los Alamos. His first assignment was to develop equations of state for materials at high temperatures, pressures, and densities.

During World War II, scientists at Los Alamos used slow, clanking, electromechanical calculators when designing the first atomic weapons. These calculators proved fragile, and soon Metropolis and Richard Feynman were spending some of their time repairing these calculators.

At the end of World War II, mathematician John von Neumann brought together the developers of the first electronic computer, known as ENIAC, and several Los Alamos scientists, Metropolis among them. It then fell upon Stanley Frankel and Metropolis to develop a problem for ENIAC to solve: in 1945, the two men had the computer run complex calculations involving the design of the first hydrogen bomb.

Metropolis returned to Chicago, where he continued to work with ENIAC. Using the germ of an idea conceived by Enrico Fermi some 15 years earlier, Metropolis in 1948 led a team that carried out a series of statistical calculations on ENIAC. These statistical calculations would become collectively known as the Monte Carlo method of calculation, which since then has helped address issues such as traffic flow, economic problems, and the development of nuclear weapons.

…

… The Mathematical Numerical Integrator and Computer—MANIAC for short—became operational on March 15, 1952. …”

(“The Metropolis Fellowship: Who Was Nick Metropolis?”, Issue 2, 2011, National Security Science, Los Alamos National Laboratory)

And so the “NIAC”s received such names because of these early electronic computers’ goal of enabling large-scale numerical computing, as in ENIAC and the MANIACs from “Numerical Integrator and Computer”, and JOHNNIAC from “Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer”.

John von Neumann’s interest and expertise in numerical computing is what had brought him into the World War II Manhattan Project in the first place, and the need for greater computing power then brought him into the ENIAC project, here quoted again from the science historian Liesbeth De Mol but with more details than previously in Part 5 (i):

“Von Neumann got particularly interested in computers for doing numerical calculations in the context of theoretical physics and thus understood, quite early, that fast computing machines could be very useful in the context of applied mathematics.

In 1943, during World War II, von Neumann was invited to join the Manhattan project – the project to develop the atomic bomb – because of his work on fluid dynamics. He soon realized that the problems he was working on involved a lot of computational work which might take years to complete. He submitted a request for help, and in 1944 he was presented a list of people he could visit. He visited Howard Aiken and saw his Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator. He knew about the electromechanical relay computers of George Stibitz, and about the work by Jan Schilt at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University. These machines however were still relatively slow to solve the problems von Neumann was working on. But then he accidentally met Herman Goldstine at Aberdeen railwaystation. While waiting for their train on the platform, Goldstine told him about the top-secret ENIAC project at the Moore school [13]. Von Neumann got very excited, and Goldstine made arrangements (providing the necessary clearance document) so that von Neumann could visit the ENIAC. …”

(“Doing Mathematics on the ENIAC. Von Neumann’s and Lehmer’s different visions”, by Liesbeth De Mol, in E. Wilhelmus, I. Witzke (eds.), Mathematical practice and development throughout History, 2008, Logos Verlag)

Jerry Wozniak probably had nothing to do with numerical computation. But as reviewed earlier, he was an engineer working at various companies in Southern California, where the Cold-War think tank RAND Corporation and its JOHNNIAC was based, when he was recruited in 1958 to the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company founded in Northern California in 1956, that would become a top developer of nuclear missiles. Moreover, von Neumann who had died in February 1957 had become the U.S. Air Force’s “principal adviser” on nuclear weapons, including on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), as previously quoted in Part 5 (i):

“… The principal adviser to the U.S. Air Force on nuclear weapons, Von Neumann was the most influential scientific force behind the U.S. decision to embark on accelerated production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. …”

(“Passing of a Great Mind: John von Neumann, a Brilliant, Jovial Mathematician, Was a Prodigious Servant of Science and His Country”, by Clay Blair, Jr., February 25, 1957, Volume 42, Number 8, Life)

To be specific, what Lockheed Missiles and Space Company produced, as noted in Woz’s autobiography and in my earlier review of Howard Aiken’s Lockheed consultancy, was the more specialized Polaris nuclear missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles known as SLBM rather than ICBM:

“Polaris missile, first U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and the mainstay of the British nuclear deterrent force during the 1970s and ’80s.”

(“Polaris missile”, Encyclopædia Britannica)

In any case, when the Los Angeles area-based Lockheed Corporation recruited the local Caltech’s former star football quarterback Jerry Wozniak to its new missiles company in Northern California in 1958, it could have been a pure coincidence that his name had “niak” like “NIAC”, but conceivably it could have occurred to the Lockheed management that taking an engineer with a name resembling those of computers closely associated with von Neumann, to the computer field in the missiles program, could be a modest ‘memorial rite’ in honor of the recently deceased “great man” – dubbed by the early computer science pioneer Louis Fain as in Part 5 (ii) – and a scientific leader of the computer and nuclear missile fields.

In this ‘memorial rite’ scenario, the fact that the 3 MANIC computers had been developed by von Neumann’s former colleague named “Metropolis” could be relevant because, in a similar word, the name Wozniak is ‘Polish’:

“August 11, 1950 – Steve Wozniak (Born)

Steve Wozniak, also known as “Woz,” is a Polish American computer engineer who invented the Apple I and Apple II computers. His invention of the Apple personal computer led to the largest computer revolution in history.”

(“Museum’s Historic Reflections Project Part 2”, August/September 2014, The Polish American News, Polish American Cultural Center, Philadelphia)

I also note that Jerry Wozniak was hired by Lockheed in 1958 when Howard Aiken was already a Lockheed consultant and Aiken’s close friend Louis Ridenour was a top Lockheed executive, having been a director at its Missile System Division, as discussed earlier.

In other words, the former U.S. Air Force chief scientist Ridenour, a Caltech Ph.D. in physics, may have had a hand in the hiring of of a famous fellow Caltech alumnus, star football quarterback Jerry “Wozniak”, to become an engineer in computer technology in the new nuclear missiles program in Northern California, for which Aiken was a prominent consultant.

But then when Ridenour unexpectedly died in his sleep, in May 1959 in Washington, D.C. after an evening of drinking with Aiken as reviewed earlier, Aiken likely found that his clout and options suddenly diminished; in other words, starting “the first microcomputer computer company in the world” became harder without the help of his powerful and influential friend Louis Ridenour.

Subsequently, when Jerry Wozniak stayed in the secretive missiles program, i.e., did not get to join any company to develop the microcomputers as Aiken wanted to do, and then later his son became famous for inventing the personal computer, the little ‘memorial rite’, if true, may have turned into a monstrous ‘secret ritual’.

It would have been a pretty good ‘memorial rite’ in the 1960s had Aiken started the “first microcomputer computer company in the world” with the help of Cuthbert Hurd and some Lockheed engineers, and with Jerry Wozniak in a significant engineering role: besides giving some publicity to a “Wozniak”, it would have satisfied Aiken’s desire for leading the development of a new generation of electronic computers – he had been beaten by von Neumann at developing the first generation – and doing so with a “niak”, like “NIAC” as in ENIAC, working under him.

But as extensively reviewed earlier, despite Aiken’s desire such a new computer company was never launched, probably because Hurd was either intellectually empathetic of von Neumann and dismissive of Aiken’s interest in getting rich, or could not agree to ownership terms with Aiken, or because IBM, where Hurd had been a key executive in computer development, was not in favor of a new Aiken computer venture as bad feelings from IBM’s 1940s collaboration with Harvard and Aiken on the Mark I continued to persist.

As I have commented earlier, that both the playboy businessman and influential IBM board director Sherman Fairchild and the Nobel Prize laureate William Shockley got to start new Silicon Valley companies but the Harvard-retired, business goal-driven Howard Aiken could not, did not seem fair to the legendary, albeit conservative, early computer pioneer.

Fortunately, while still in Southern California Jerry Wozniak had begun tutoring his 6-year-old son “Woz” on electronics, and by the 1960s when Aiken and Hurd did not go through with their plan to start a new computer company, the teenage Woz was well on his way to growing into a prolific amateur computer designer.

Along the way, Fairchild Semiconductor gave Woz significant help, the U.S. Air Force gave him an award that critically boosted the young boy’s confidence, and the future would look bright for the next generation of “Wozniak”.

Then in 1970 when Aiken and Hurd again talked about starting a new computer company, this time to develop “a microprocessor and personal computer”, in that same year a 19-to-20-year-old Steve Wozniak already did his own building of a small computer, the “Cream Soda computer” – without the microprocessor as the latter was only being invented by Intel, as discussed earlier.

From that point on, technologically speaking, what Woz needed to develop the world’s first personal computer, that would become popular and commercially successful, was the arrival of the microprocessor plus good dynamic RAM, as earlier cited from him.

But before that became reality, in early 1973 Steve Wozniak moved an important step forward when he got his “dream job” designing calculators at Hewlett-Packard, as he later recalled:

“Now, finally, there was a time in my life—a time right after that third year at Berkeley—that I finally got my dream job. But it wasn’t a job building computers. It was a job designing calculators at Hewlett-Packard. And I really thought I would spend the rest of my life there. That place was just the most perfect company.

This was January of 1973, and for an engineer like me, there was no better place to work in the world. Unlike a lot of technology companies, Hewlett-Packard wasn’t totally run by marketing people. It really respected its engineers. And that made sense, because this was a company that had made engineering tools for years—meters, oscilloscopes, power supplies, testers of all types, even medical equipment. It made all the things engineers actually used, and it was a company driven by engineers on the inside so far as what engineers on the outside needed. Man, I loved that.

…

… the HP 35 was the first scientific calculator, and it was the first in history that you could actually hold in your hand. …”

(Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, 2006, W. W. Norton & Company)

After in his earlier years receiving, through his father’s connection, help from Silicon Valley’s technologically and culturally trendsetting company Fairchild Semiconductor, in January 1973 Woz officially became a designer at the Silicon Valley-founding Hewlett-Packard, and so was now ready for Silicon Valley – except that the company he wanted to stay in for life would repeatedly turn down his requests to develop the personal computer there, and it was his friend Steve Jobs on the outside who persuade his family to convince him to do it with Jobs, on their own.

Two months after Wozniak’s hiring by HP, on March 14, 1973 Howard Aiken died in his sleep at a hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, as reviewed, during a consulting trip at Monsanto, having just quit consulting for Lockheed but continuing to persist in his quest to make computers smaller.

Recall that in Part 5 (ii), a critical interview with the early computer science pioneer Louis Fein, conducted by Pamela McCorduck on May 9, 1979, has been extensively quoted and reviewed, giving significant glimpses into academic politics in the early years of the emergence of computer science as an academic discipline, from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.

I met Pamela in the mid-1980s after becoming acquainted with her husband Joseph Traub, who had in that earlier year, namely 1979, founded the computer science department at Columbia University.

In around 1990, Joe told me that Caltech gave him “one of their Fairchild Scholars”, i.e., a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholarship for an academic visit and a short period of stay at Caltech.

Now reading a Caltech brochure I notice that, surprise, a Sherman Fairchild Foundation grant started its Fairchild Scholars program in 1973 – the year Steve Wozniak got his dream job at Hewlett-Packard and Howard Aiken died – and the scholarship was the original idea of Caltech professor Francis Clauser – someone with a same name as Woz’s father Francis Jacob Wozniak:

“This program was established back in 1973 by the gift of $7.5 million from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. It was named in honor of the founder of the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation and of Fairchild Industries, a man who would himself have been an ideal Fairchild Scholar. He was a pioneer – and an indefatigable inventor – in the fields of photography, aviation, and sound engineering.

Under the terms of the grant, the money was to be used over a period of ten years to underwrite the costs of visits to the Caltech campus of distinguished scholars or of young persons of outstanding promise from the worlds of academia, industry, and government. The appointments were to be made for periods ranging from a term to a year. Francis Clauser, Clark Blanchard Millikan Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, who originally suggested the idea, pointed out how much the members of the Caltech community would benefit from the opportunity to interact with the world’s intellectual leaders. And, of course, the sharing of wisdom and ideas would go both ways.”

(“The Fairchild Scholars Program”, 1981, Engineering & Science, Caltech Office of Public Relations)

In the timeline of this history, the erection of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholars program at Caltech brought together Jerry Wozniak’s alma mater and the inventor status of the businessman who had financed the start of Fairchild Semiconductor, subsequently a co-inventor of the integrated circuit, in the same year 1973 when Jerry’s son Woz became officially employed as a calculator designer at Hewlett-Packard.

This timeline was significant to the Wozniak family because: Fairchild Semiconductor had given Woz important help in his personal growth into an amateur computer designer, and Jerry, a former star football player at Caltech, had involvement in the early integrated circuit development – not at the place of original invention Fairchild Semiconductor but at the secretive Lockheed missiles program.

I hope in 1973 the newly interred Aiken did not take it as a slight by Sherman Fairchild – largest shareholder and powerful board member of IBM, a company excelling and leading in building computers even though its original collaborator, namely Howard Aiken on Mark I at Harvard, did not get to go further.

No, it couldn’t be a put-down by Sherman Fairchild, because he had passed away on March 28, 1971 – just 10 days short of the 75th birthday in comparison to Aiken’s 5 or 6 days past the 73rd birthday of March 8 or 9 as cited in Part 5 (ii).

(Frank and Suanne Woodring, 2007, Arcadia Publishing)

Still I would remark, in relation to an observation in Part 5 (ii) regarding my first arrival in America and the death of Diana Forsythe, that Sherman Fairchild had lived twice as many final March days as Howard Aiken did.

(Continuing to Next Part)

A review of postings about scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, with observations regarding elite centrism – Part 5: inventions, innovations, and ushering of ‘the new normal’ (ii)

(Continued from Part 5 (i))

In 1982 receiving my bachelor’s degree in computer science at Sun Yat-sen University in China, my first choice for Ph.D. study was not a mathematics department, as much as the world’s largest and one of the best UC Berkeley’s was where I later received my Ph.D., but the Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics program in the Stanford University computer science department, as discussed in Part 4.

Stanford’s computer science department, then considered the best in the world as I recall, also had its intellectual origin in the National Bureau of Standards’ Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA, a historically unique mathematical computing research institution reviewed in Part 5 (i).

George Forsythe, a Stanford numerical analyst instrumental in establishing the department and serving as its founding chairman, had been a key member of the INA at UCLA until the institute was terminated in 1954, at which point he became a UCLA mathematics professor until moving to Stanford in 1957:

“George E. Forsythe was the first regular member of research staff of INA. He came to INA with a strong background in the application of mathematics to meteorology. He was a universalist in the sense that he collaborated with all members of the research staff and with other members of INA. He was very active in the computational aspects of the projects pursued at INA. He also became a leader in the educational program of the Institute. …

…

George E. Forsythe was one of the senior members of INA who remained with NAR. He soon was given a faculty appointment in the Department of Mathematics, where he was in charge of the educational program in numerical analysis. … In 1957 Forsythe received a very attractive offer of a faculty position at Stanford University, which would enable him to set up a program of his own. He accepted this offer. …”

(Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, Mathematicians Learning to Use Computers: The Institute for Numerical Analysis UCLA 1947-1954, 1991, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce)

The NAR cited above which Forsythe remained with after INA’s closure due to McCarthyism-related politics was Numerical Analysis Research, as mentioned in Part 5 (i), the group of former INA members staying as UCLA math faculty members.

While at INA, Forsythe utilized his abilities and expertise to take initiatives and lead research projects:

“… Rosser and Forsythe were chiefly responsible for the study of systems of linear equations. Forsythe, in particular, undertook the task of classifying the various known methods for solving systems of linear equations.

…

Forsythe initiated a study of Russian mathematical progress which led to the publication of a bibliography of Russian books [24]. Pertinent articles by Russians were collected and selected ones were translated into English by C. D. Benster under the editorships of Forsythe and Blanch. Some translations were published commercially [20,42]. Several appeared as NBS reports [49,59,90]. An informal, but important, result of this program was the initiation of a class in Russian for mathematicians at UCLA and INA.”

(Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, 1991, National Institute of Standards and Technology)

The above-mentioned project initiated and led by Forsythe to translate Russian mathematics articles, and for mathematicians to learn the Russian language, must have been quite unusual at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s – it sounded more like in China, as in Part 4, when my future undergraduate thesis adviser Yuesheng Li was a student interpreter for a visiting Russian math professor.

Forsythe’s colleague J. Barkley Rosser mentioned in the above quote, as in Part 5 (i) was at one time INA’s director and later in 1963 became director of the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

My recollection that Stanford’s computer science department was the best in the early 1980s, was true at least in some concrete measure according to the book on INA history by Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, namely that under George Forsythe’s leadership it became “the most influential” CS department in the U.S., attracting almost as many National Science Foundation Fellows as all other CS departments combined:

… In 1961 he became Professor of Computer Science and Chairman of the Department of Computer Science. Under his leadership, this department became the most influential one in the country, attracting almost as many National Science Foundation Fellows as all other such departments combined. …”

(Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, 1991, National Institute of Standards and Technology)

The year cited above, 1961, of Forsythe becoming the computer science department chairman is however incorrect. 1961 was when Forsythe founded the Computer Science Division within the Stanford mathematics department; the computer science department was later founded in 1965, capping Forsythe’s career that had included working as an Air Force meteorologist and introducing automatic computing to the Boeing Company:

“George was born on January 8, 1917, in State College, Pennsylvania, and moved as a small boy with his family to Ann Arbor, Michigan. His undergraduate work was at Swarthmore College, where he majored in Mathematics. His experience there had a strong influence on his life. His graduate study was in Mathematics at Brown University where he received his M.S. in 1938 and his Ph.D. in 1941. He then came to Stanford but his first year here was interrupted by service in the Air Force, in which he became a meteorologist. … He spent a year at Boeing where he introduced what may have been the first use of automatic computing in that company. He spent several years in the Institute for Numerical Analysis of the National Bureau of Standards, a special section located on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined the Institute because he wanted to watch the development of the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC), one of the first of the digital computers. …

Stanford acquired its first computer in 1953, and research and instruction in numerical mathematics and computation began to develop. Soon after this the Mathematics Department began to search for new leadership in this field, and George Forsythe was the unanimous choice of the faculty. It was in 1957 that he returned to Stanford, joining once again the Mathematics Department, this time as Professor. … Under his leadership, the Computer Science Division of the Mathematics Department was formed in 1961, and he began the slow process of gathering an outstanding group of colleagues.

The culmination of this effort was the founding of the Computer Science Department on January 1, 1965, by which time he had succeeded in attracting a nucleus of leading computer scientists. George was very skillful in bringing together many diverse points of view. … Of all his professional activities, building, and leading the department was closest to his heart. He did, however, contribute his leadership to Stanford in other but related tasks. He served as Director of the Stanford Computation Center from 1961 to 1965.  …

George had a nationwide influence on Computer Science education. The emergence of a discipline of Computer Science is due to his efforts more than to those of any other single person. …”

(“MEMORIAL RESOLUTION: GEORGE ELMER FORSYTHE (1917 – 1972)”, Computer Science Department, Stanford University)

As stated in the above 1972 Stanford memorial resolution on the occasion of his death, Forsythe had been more instrumental than any other person in “the emergence of a discipline of Computer Science”. In other words, Forsythe was not only the founder of a computer science department but in some sense a founding figure of the academic discipline of computer science.

Interestingly, this founding figure had been born in State College, Pennsylvania, a state where the electronic computer was later born; and he had grown up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of interest to me as the place of intellectual formation of my Ph.D. adviser Stephen Smale as in Part 2 – and coincidentally also the place the “father of computers” John von Neumann’s daughter Marina von Neumann Whitman has settled in as in Part 5 (i).

Around 1961, Forsythe began to advocate establishing computer science departments in universities, showing clear foresight for their curriculum composition, as recalled by his later Stanford colleague Donald E. Knuth:

“… It is generally agreed that he, more than any other man, is responsible for the rapid development of computer science in the world’s colleges and universities. His foresight, combined with his untiring efforts to spread the gospel of computing, have had a significant and lasting impact; one might almost regard him as the Martin Luther of the Computer Reformation!

…

In 1961, we find him using the term “computer science” for the first time in his writing:

…

By that time Forsythe knew that numerical analysis was destined to be only a part of the computing milieu; a new discipline was crystalizing which cried out to be taught. He had come to Stanford as a professor of mathematics in 1957, but now he and Professor John Herriot wanted to hire colleagues interested in programming, artificial intelligence, and such topics, which are not considered mathematics. Stanford’s administration, especially Dean Bowker (who is now Chancellor at Berkeley), also became convinced that computing is important; so George was able to found the Division of Computer Science within the Mathematics Department in 1961.

During that academic year he lectured on “Educational Implications of the Computer Revolution” at Brown University:

“… To think of a computer as made up essentially of numbers is simply a carryover from the successful use of mathematical analysis in studying models…Enough is known already of the diverse applications of computing for us to recognize the birth of a coherent body of technique, which I call computer science…Whether computers are used for engineering design, medical data processing, composing music, or other purposes, the structure of computing is much the same. We are extremely short of talented people in this field, and so we need departments, curricula, and research and degree programs in computer science…I think of the Computer Science Department as eventually including experts in Programming, Numerical Analysis, Automata Theory, Data Processing, Business Games, Adaptive Systems, Information Theory, Information Retrieval, Recursive Function Theory, Computer Linguistics, etc., as these fields emerge in structure…Universities must respond [to the computer revolution] with far-reaching changes in the educational structure.[60]”

…

… Louis Fein had also perceived the eventual rise of computer science; he had recommended in 1957 that Stanford establish a Graduate School of Computer Science, analogous to the Harvard Business School. …

George argued the case for computer science long and loud, and he won; at Stanford he was in fact “the producer and director, author, scene designer, and casting manager of this hit show.” …”

(“George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science”, by Donald E. Knuth, August 1972, Volume 15, Number 8, Communications of the ACM)

As Knuth pointed out, Stanford’s Dean Bowker, later in 1972 UC Berkeley Chancellor, played an important role facilitating Forsythe’s founding of the computer science division in the math department.

It was thus sad that Forsythe, a distinguished numerical analyst, scientist, and founder figure in computer science, lived to only 55 years of age when he died on April 9, 1972, of pancreatic cancer.

(“George Elmer Forsythe”, by J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, November 2010, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland)

Forsythe, “almost … the Martin Luther of the Computer Reformation” according to Knuth, was only 2 years older than John von Neumann, the “father of computers”, at the time of his death in February 1957 due to cancer as detailed in Part 5 (i).

But at least Forsythe had not been exposed to work-related nuclear radiation like von Neumann had feared about himself, who had been involved in the Manhattan Project of atomic bomb development – rather, Forsythe had introduced automatic computing to Boeing aircraft manufacturing.

It turned out that in the 1960s Forsythe had already had skin cancer; still, his 1972 death came as a shock to his colleagues and former Ph.D. students, as they later recalled in July 1997:

“… Appropriately, a minisymposium at SIAM’s 45th Anniversary Meeting at Stanford commemorated the 25th anniversary of Forsythe’s death.

Rather than a formal review of Forsythe’s accomplishments, the memorial minisymposium, organized by Cleve Moler, chief scientist at The MathWorks and Forsythe’s eighth doctoral student, was a sort of Irish wake that celebrated the man as much as his science. …

To begin the conversation, Moler drew on a presentation about Forsythe given several months earlier by James Varah of the University of British Columbia, Forsythe’s 12th student. Varah had spent considerable time in Stanford’s Forsythe archives gathering material about Forsythe’s life and work.

…

Even after 25 years, the shock of Forsythe’s sudden illness and death seemed fresh to many of his friends. Moler somberly recalled Forsythe “telling me one day in his office that he had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon for a possible ulcer. Two weeks later he was dead.”

Knuth described writing a memorial article for him in the short week between Forsythe’s death and Knuth’s departure for a sabbatical in Norway. “His briefcase was still on top of his desk. In a drawer I found life expectancy rates for skin cancer, a disease he had in the 1960s. He knew he was ill.”

Parlett concurred: “He knew he was dying. He came to Berkeley to see me in 1971, the summer before he died. The visit wasn’t really needed. It was his way of saying goodbye.””

(“Remembering George Forsythe”, by Paul Davis, January 8, 1998, SIAM News, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

As quoted, Beresford Parlett, the Berkeley numerical analysis professor whom I considered a mentor, had been Forsythe’s Ph.D. student, as had been James Varah, the former UBC computer science department head who helped to offer me my job there following my Berkeley Ph.D. in 1988, as in Part 4.

The “minisymposium” in memory of Forsythe was held during SIAM’s 45th Anniversary Meeting at Stanford as cited above. It was the same SIAM meeting in July 1997 mentioned in Part 4 regarding a session, “Moving-Grid Methods for Partial Differential Equations”, which was organized by a former Berkeley math Ph.D. student from China who had prepared my living arrangement before my August 1982 arrival at Berkeley, and which included several numerical analyst presenters of intriguing backgrounds at Berkeley, British Columbia and some U.S. national laboratories.

As if tragedy would strike twice, about a month after the SIAM mini-symposium remembering Forsythe, his daughter Diana died of drowning while backpacking in Alaska, at the age of 49:

“Diana E. Forsythe, ’69, of Palo Alto, August 14, at 49, of drowning while backpacking in Alaska. A scholar who studied the culture of science and technology, she was the daughter of George Forsythe, founder of Stanford’s computer science department, and Alexandra Forsythe, whose teaching specialty at Stanford was the use of computers in education. Though she got her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore, she studied at the Stanford-in-Britain program during the 1967-68 year. After teaching anthropology and computer science at the University of Pittsburgh, she returned to Stanford in 1995 with a fellowship from the System Development Foundation; she was also a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Her paper on the hidden cultural assumptions in the way computer systems are designed was published in December 1996. She joined the UCSF faculty this year as an associate professor in the medical anthropology program. Survivors include her husband, Bernard Shen.”

(“Obituaries”, November/December 1997, Stanford Magazine)

Somehow Diana Forsythe’s age when she died, 49, coincided with the month and day of her father’s death decades earlier, April 9. Her date of perishment, August 14, was exactly 30 days following the mini-symposium honoring her late father, held on July 15 and led by Cleve Moler of The MathWorks, another of George Forsythe’s former Ph.D. students.

(“A Tribute to the Memory of George Forsythe”, July 15, 1997, SIAM’s 45th Anniversary Meeting, Stanford University)

Closely following her father’s footsteps, Diana graduated from George Forsythe’s alma mater, Swarthmore College, then attended Stanford before getting a teaching job at the University of Pittsburgh.

I note that Marina von Neumann, whose application for Ph.D. study at Princeton – like the equivalent of Stanford for Diana Forsythe – had been rejected as in Part 5 (i), had also ended up teaching at the University of Pittsburgh.

(““The Martian’s Daughter” by Marina von Neumann Whitman”, October 2, 2012, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan)

From that point on, the critical career difference between the two daughters of famous fathers in the computing field was the lift Marina then received from President Richard Nixon in 1972 – coincidentally the year of George Forsythe’s death – to become the first female member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, as in Part 5 (i), which no doubt gave her credentials for her later appointment as a vice president of General Motors.

As taken into consideration in Part 5 (i), back in the 1950s Marina’s father, an important scientific adviser to the U.S. military, had been well acquainted with members of then President Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet, with Nixon then the vice president.

For Diana there was no higher lift – none higher than where her father had founded and led the most influential computer science department in the U.S. – and she eventually returned to Stanford-related jobs, analyzing “hidden cultural assumptions” in the computer field, finally landing a UC San Francisco professorship just in the year she died in Alaska.

George Forsythe’s daughter Diana Forsythe had a much worse luck in life than John von Neumann’s daughter Marina Whitman – perhaps the degree of parental fame mattered for the next generation.

But it has been a consolation that following her death, Diana was immediately remembered in her anthropology discipline by the American Anthropological Association with the Diana Forsythe Prize honoring her spirit of “feminist anthropological research”:

“The Diana Forsythe Prize was created in 1998 to celebrate the best book or series of published articles in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, and/or technology, including biomedicine. …”

(“Awards: Diana Forsythe Prize”, GAD, American Anthropological Association)

Just like the “father of computers” John von Neumann not having been the first to develop the electronic computer, joining the World War II ENIAC project after it had started, George Forsythe, the most influential person in the emergence of the computer science discipline, wasn’t the first to advocate for it – that credit goes to Louis Fein, a name cited in Donald Knuth’s tribute to Forsythe.

Fein, a computing education consultant based in the Stanford area of Palo Alto, had begun campaigning for computer science in the mid-late 1950s, producing a report for Stanford University in 1957, and in 1960 taking the role of chairman of the Education Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery – as in Part 3, ACM has been the main international organization for computer science:

“… the earliest significant papers on CS education appear to be by Louis Fein who was a private consultant in California and a passionate supporter of CS education in universities. He wrote an unpublished report on computing education for Stanford University in 1957 and published three papers (Fein 1959a, 1959b, 1961) and was appointed chairman of the ACM Education Committee in 1960. …

In the two similar 1959 papers that were based on his work for Stanford University, Fein explains that he had been studying the operation of university programs in computing, data processing and related fields since 1956 by holding formal and informal discussions with university administrators, computer center directors, faculty members, students and industry representatives. … The most important impact on university programs at that time was IBM selling heavily discounted IBM 650s to about 50 universities on the condition that they would offer some computing courses. The universities were offering a variety of computer courses but, in Fein’s view, most universities were putting too much emphasis on the computing equipment and courses were being designed as supplements to the equipment when equipment ought to be a supplement to the courses. …

Fein had a clear vision for computer science education in universities and he appears to have been one of the first to call the field “Computer Science” when he suggested that universities establish a Graduate School of Computer Sciences …”

(“Computer Science Curriculum Developments in the 1960s”, by G. K. Gupta, April-June 2007, Volume 29, Issue 2, IEEE Annuals of the History of Computing)

Like George Forsythe, Louis Fein had moved from Southern California, though not from the INA at UCLA but from the military-oriented aerospace industry.

Fein had worked at the Raytheon Company as a chief engineer building the RADAC computer in Massachusetts, moved to Southern California to install it for the Navy, and then formed his own company which he referred to as the “Three C’s”, the Computer Control Company:

“FEIN: In 1954 and 1955, I was in southern California installing and operating at the Naval Air Missile Test Center at Point Magu the RADAC, the Raytheon digital automatic computer which I had built as chief engineer at Raytheon Manufacturing Company between 1948 and 1951. I had, after leaving Raytheon, formed the Computer Control Company which was an organization made up of people from Raytheon that worked for me. On October 30, 1952 I formed the Three C’s, Computer Control Company, because after the acceptance tests were passed for the RADAC, the RADAC was then whipped from Waltham, Massachusetts to Point Magu, that’s right outside of Oxnard. The Navy department asked me if I would go out to Point Magu together with some engineers and install and operate the computer center there. The RADAC was built and actually was intended for the data reduction at Point Magu. They insisted however that I must go personally. …”

(“An Interview with LOUIS FEIN”, interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

In the above-cited May 9, 1979 interview by Pamela McCorduck, Fein recalled that on August 10, 1955, he left his company to become an independent consultant based in Palo Alto, especially for the Stanford Research Institute; in that capacity and at the request of Al Bowker, then Stanford Graduate Dean, he wrote a report for Stanford on starting computer science education:

FEIN: … In August 1955, for a variety of reasons, mostly administrative, I left Three C’s and decided that I would write, consult, and teach perhaps. As a matter of fact that was August 10, 1955. Immediately after leaving Three C’s. by August 11, I had, as I recall, seven or eight contacts already made, and by August 18, I was consulting for five or six computer outfits. … One of the first assignments I’d gotten was with SRI, the Stanford Research Institute then, who had a contract with the Bank of America to build what later became ERMA and they are right here in Menlo Park. I had also gotten an assignment from Sylvania Electronic Defense Laboratory to work on some computer hardware, and I also worked for Electro-Data, RCA, but I rather liked it up here and so we moved up to Palo Alto in January 1956. I was almost walking distance to SRI and to Sylvania and when I had to go down to Pasadena for Electro-Data or to Camden for RCA or to New York for IBM, I just went, but Palo Alto became my home base and I’ve lived here since. I’ve been a free lance independent computer consultant since August 10, 1955, which I believe also might be the longest in the world. … One of my friends introduced me to Al Bowker who is now the Chancellor at Berkeley, but then was the Provost at Stanford. I may not be remembering accurately; he was either Provost or Graduate Dean, and perhaps later became Provost. Al was interested in the proposals that IBM was making people of the following type: “We will give you a 650 for free if you will give a course in scientific computing and one in business computing.” And Al also had heard a little about this computing business and I suggested to him that I thought that computing fits in a university. I didn’t quite know how. But it was clear to me and apparently to him that computers would develop in such a way that most of the disciplines in the university would have need for them at least as auxiliary devices. The question of whether or not computer science, not yet the computer itself, was a discipline worthy of study by the university was not yet settled but in my enthusiasm I thought it might be and so Al Bowker commissioned me to make a study on what might be called “The Role of the University in Computers and Data Processing.” …”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

SRI was the same institute the Silicon Valley pioneer Douglas Engelbart went to, as in Part 5 (i), after leaving UC Berkeley in 1956 and finding out that both Stanford University and the Hewlett-Packard Company had no vision at the time for computer development. Fein had arrived a little earlier, in January 1956 as quoted above, immediately participating in SRI’s ERMA computer project for Bank of America.

ERMA was “the world’s first computer used in banking”, unveiled in September 1955 in a transcontinental videoconference hosted by the actor Ronald Reagan, a future U.S. president.

(“Our Story: Bank of America revolutionizes banking industry”, Bank of America)

While campaigning for computer science, Louis Fein found, in his interactions in the late 1950s with computing pioneers in the academia, that many – including George Forsythe, and UC Berkeley’s Harry Huskey and Derrick Lehmer who had been involved with the first electronic computer ENIAC as in Part 5 (i) – were not so positive.

In his 1979 interview Fein recalled Forsythe’s ‘hedging the bet’ attitude regarding establishing a computer science department at Stanford, and the negative attitudes of John Herriott, later Forsythe’s co-founder of the computer science division in the mathematics department, and of math department chairman David Gilbarg:

“FEIN: …

… Herriot, you know Herriot, I used to talk locally in Palo Alto, a lot at Stanford on this idea, and he was – hostile was an understatement – to the idea. I mean he would get up and shout, “What you want it pie in the sky and you can’t have pie in the sky!” And that was the reception I got. George Forsythe… I met him at a Los Angeles Conference before I came to Stanford – and he asked me about Stanford because he was considering either Berkeley or Stanford and I told him I thought Stanford was the place to go. He was interested in numerical analysis, and he had also worked on SWAC over there, and I told him I was working for Stanford and trying to persuade them about a computer science department. a I was already in the middle of the study and I had the outline of what I was going to recommend and he finally came to Stanford. After he came to Stanford his position was – well equivocal; he could go for it or not go for it. There was a very, very strong opposition in the mathematics department and George was in the mathematics department and Dave Gilbarg who was the chairman of the department, who was a very close friend of mine, because his boy and my boy were on the same little league team, and you know we used to go to the movie together with the families. But Dave thought computing was like plumbing. We don’t have plumbers studying within the university and what does computing have to do with intellect? I am exaggerating of course. He was murder on it and he may still be to this day. And George wasn’t sure he wanted a separate department either. Herriot though the pie in the sky, crazy. So the opposition came from insiders not outsiders…”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

About the Berkeley personalities, Fein recalled the reaction of Harry Huskey – as in Part 5 (i) the leader of the SWAC computer development at the INA at UCLA, and then a Berkeley math and electrical engineering professor – against having a computer science department:

“FEIN: … Well, this report came out and as I recall, one of the anecdotes, I gave a copy to West Churchman who apparently was very interested in it – West is a philosopher and all of that, and he thought it was a great thing. He organized a small seminary to be held at Berkeley (and I don’t recall exactly when that was and I regret so many times not having kept a date book on these things) and as I recall around the table, Harry Huskey, my good Derek Lehmer, Julie (Julian) Feldman, pretty sure Ed Feigenbaum…at least those and I may think of some others before we finish the interview. West introduced me, saying I had a notion that universities should be involved in computers and that there should be a separate computer science department. And I made my pitch. And Harry Huskey said he saw no need whatever for having a separate department. He was doing computing in engineering.”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

As Fein described, dismissiveness toward computer science came from the perspective of engineering as well.

And according to Fein, Derrick Lehmer – as in Part 5 (i) an early pioneer in mathematical computing and a former INA director who brought Huskey to Berkeley after INA’s closure in 1954 – called Fein and his idea “crazy”:

“FEIN: … And Derek Lehmer – he didn’t see any need for a department. He was, even at that time, trying to use the computer that Morton built (Morton was the computer man at Berkeley in those days and they were building a homemade computer). I think Lehmer was trying to use it for prime number calculations. And Derek Lehmer patted me on the head and…crazy idea…as a matter of fact, one of my sons later went to Berkeley, well two of them went to Berkeley, one of them, Danny who was with Mario Savio during those days and once he ran into Derek Lehmer and he said that Professor Lehmer said, “Oh, your father is Lou Fein, that crazy guy that wants…I thought he was joking, but…(laughter).”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

As detailed in Part 5 (i), Huskey and Lehmer were the leading computational mathematicians at UC Berkeley, both had worked with von Neumann in relation to ENIAC, and Huskey held negative opinions of von Neumann in the ENIAC project while Lehmer was of opposite mathematical interests to von Neumann’s.

There seemed to be a common thread in both the early electronic computer development where von Neumann was the leader of an ambitious computer-building movement, and the later emergence of the computer science discipline, that Huskey and Lehmer were solid technical experts but skeptics about ambitious development goals.

After submitting his report to Stanford Graduate Dean Al Bowker, recommending the establishment of a graduate school of computer science, Fein did not receive a formal response for 30 months while the university appointed Forsythe as the Computing Center director, and so had to write a letter to enquire:

“FEIN: …

So I envisioned a set of courses in a department itself, actually in a graduate school to start off with, because we really didn’t know much about computers for undergraduate study, so we had to start out with a graduate program, I thought. And I laid out a set of courses, not only a set of courses for the school itself, but for other departments, computers for – medicine, computer for so–, and a research program, and some dollars required and where it might come from, and I wanted to start it with some seed money that wasn’t merely a computer center as many people were doing. …

…

FEIN: And this report lays it out, and in my other papers which I suppose you should see because George took a lot of his stuff from these papers. I used to talk to George a lot about this. Anyway, the relationship between the computer center and the computer department was identified at least. … and Al…there was a difference in philosophy between Al and me. I laid out a structure, an organization and I thought that even if we didn’t have a bunch of computer geniuses around in which you can set up a school…you have a bunch of slots and then you get the best person you can to fill the slot…and Al didn’t believe this; he said “It doesn’t make any difference what the structure is, because what we need is to get a von Neumann out here and then things will go well.” The great man theory.

It’s clear that with that view he didn’t think I was that great man and he didn’t want in principle to set up an organization and then fill it with people who were available, great or not. Meanwhile, Burroughs, I believe, was dangling some equipment in front of his eyes for free because all of these manufacturers are very interested in getting universities to pick up their equipment for sales promotional purposes and Al, I think, got a very good deal from Burroughs. Burroughs gave him a machine and he, I think, started what was essentially a computer center and it isn’t clear to me when he decided that George should be the one to do that and that maybe alter, I don’t know exactly what Al was thinking because he stopped talking to me about it – that’s why I had to write the letter about it’s 30 months since…I guess Al appointed George to start with the computer center and maybe to give some courses in numerical analysis. …”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

So the pioneering computer science advocate Louis Fein, in his May 9, 1979 interview conducted by Pamela McCorduck, quoted above, made two rather serious allegations: one, when George Forsythe began to advocate for computer science in the early 1960s “a lot of his stuff” came from Fein’s earlier papers; and two, Stanford Graduate Dean Al Bowker held a biased view that a new discipline needed to be started by a “great man” like John von Neumann, which Fein wasn’t.

Apparently, Forsythe was more of such a “great man” – and then also suffered von Neumann’s fate.

In making his allegations, Fein also gave his explanation why his advocacy was ignored by the Stanford administration, namely that his ambition of becoming a computer science department founding chairman was viewed as a threat by academic insiders – possibly insinuating that Forsythe was such an insider:

“FEIN: Well, the usual political explanation – Lou Fein brings in an idea, “An outsider is bringing in an idea and it is clear that he is bringing it in because he wants to be the chairman of the department and I prefer that I be the chairman of the department and so I will resist it.” The resistance to innovation anyway, and secondly the threat.””

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

Fein’s interviewer Pamela McCorduck tried to place Fein’s historical dispute with Stanford in a neutral light:

“McCORDUCK: …

The first time I came across the mention of your name as I was going through the archives of George Forsythe’s papers in the Stanford archives, was in a letter that you wrote to Frederick Terman and in this letter you said that “it has been almost thirty months since we last discussed the formation of a graduate school of computer science at Stanford as recommended in my report commissioned by Dr. A. H. Bowker.” …

…

McCORDUCK: Now I inferred from the text of the letter you wrote that Terman at some point must have responded to you and said, “Look, dozens of faculty members come to me with hot propositions. Yours is no hotter than anybody else’s. It’s interesting but it’s not revolutionary so please leave me alone already.” And you were arguing in your letter that it wasn’t just another hot proposition but that it was in fact revolutionary which he didn’t seem to see or at least denied.”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

Frederick Terman mentioned above, to whom Fein sent a letter of grievance after waiting for nearly 30 months for a response to his report, as in Part 5 (i) had been the mentor of William Hewlett and David Packard in their founding of the Hewlett-Packard Company, an event since recognized as the birth of Silicon Valley.

The Provost of Stanford, his hometown, Terman proudly pitched for the region over the East Coast and Southern California:

““The price that is paid for all these blessings is annoying traffic congestion around 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. in the 10- to 20-minute drive between home and work. But this is really a pretty small price to pay to avoid having to live in the East, or even in Southern California where the traffic is worse and the smog is denser.”

Fred Terman had just retired as provost of Stanford University when he offered that 1965 assessment of what was to become Silicon Valley…

…

Born in English, Ind., in 1900, Frederick Emmons Terman seemed destined from the start for intellectual glory. His father, Lewis, who suffered from chronic battles with tuberculosis, moved his family to Stanford’s sunny environs when Fred was a youngster. There, Lewis, a noted scholar and educator, invented the Stanford-Binet IQ test. He also prepared a course of home tutelage that enabled young Fred to complete grade school in just four years.”

(“THE ENGINEER WHO JUMP-STARTED SILICON VALLEY”, by Joan O’C. Hamilton, August 7, 1997, Business Week)

An MIT engineering Ph.D. graduate in the 1920s under Vannevar Bush, who later during World War II was the U.S. government’s leading scientific adviser as discussed in Part 5 (i), Terman became an excellent teacher at Stanford, at Bush’s request managed a military research lab at Harvard during World War II and later received the Medal of Merit; subsequently as Stanford Dean of Engineering and then Provost, Terman was at home with Cold War-oriented research – as a young boy he had already tinkered with ham radio with his friend Herbert Hoover, Jr.:

“By the time he was 14, the younger Terman had developed an interest in ham radio (which he pursued with his friend, Herbert Hoover Jr.), and with it, a lifelong love of electronics. He earned two Stanford degrees, in chemistry and engineering, then a PhD from MIT, where his mentor was Vannevar Bush, who later became director of the government’s Office of Scientific Research & Development. In the 1920s, Terman returned to Stanford, where he developed a reputation as an excellent teacher… Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard would later write in his autobiography, “The HP Way,” that “Professor Terman had the unique ability to make a complex problem seem the essence of simplicity.”

…

… Other contemporaries say Stanford’s early lead on Silicon Valley vis-a-vis UC-Berkeley, was largely because Stanford had the aggressive and well-connected Terman, while Berkeley had a dean of engineering who was building a much broader base with young faculty.

JAMMIN’ THE RADAR. During the early years of World War II, Vannevar Bush recruited Terman to head the Harvard Radio Research Laboratory, back at Cambridge, Mass. Terman would later be awarded the highest civilian medal – the Medal of Merit – for his work there. Under his direction, the lab developed strategies and methods to confound enemy radar…

During this period Terman both added to his already far-flung network of powerful people in industry and government and lobbied for the government to devote much more funding for science and engineering in higher education as a key to military success. When he returned to Stanford in 1946 as dean of engineering, he embarked upon what he called his “steeples of excellence” strategy to gain world reknown for Stanford. …

This approach was instrumental in nursing back to financial health a Stanford that World War II had threatened. Not only did Stanford lose a lot of tuition-paying students to the war, it got virtually no research money from the federal government, which did, in fact, pour money into Harvard, Yale, and other Eastern schools. As dean, Terman was happy and anxious to take on government contracts that would later fuel the cold war arms race. …”

(Joan O’C. Hamilton, August 7, 1997, Business Week)

The U.S. Presidential Medal for Merit was awarded to “such civilians of the nations prosecuting the war under the joint declaration of the United Nations and of other friendly foreign nations as have distinguished themselves by exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services since the proclamation of an emergency by the President on September 8, 1939.”

(“Federal Register: Executive Order 9637–Medal for Merit”, U.S. National Archives)

But Terman’s achievements and pedigree could not have intimidated Fein, who had not only gone through the Southern California military aerospace industry but had worked as a military technology engineer during World War II, including in a Harvard lab – just a different lab from the one Terman led:

“Louis Fein graduated from Long Island University in 1938, with a bachelor’s degree in physics. Upon graduating, Fein entered the University of Colorado at Boulder to work on his master’s degree in physics. He graduated from Colorado in 1941 and went to work as as an instructor in mathematics at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. By 1943, Fein had left Earlham and went to work for the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory as an engineer on sonar devices, underwater sound gear, acoustic gear, and ultrasonic gear. While working at the Lab, Fein took courses at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in electronics and mathematics. When the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory closed, Fein went to work for Submarine Signal Company, The Submarine Signal Company permitted Fein to enroll at Brown University to work on his doctorate in 1945. … In 1948, Fein applied to the Raytheon Manufacturing Company, who had a contract to make two computers under the HURRICANE project for Point Magu in California. …”

(“Interviewee: Louis Fein Interviewer: Henry S. Tropp”, May 4, 1973, Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

I note an interesting contrast between the two at Harvard during the war, that Terman directed research on radar in the air while Fein did engineering work on sonar underwater.

I also note that Fein received his Ph.D. from Brown, the same university Forsythe had received his.

With his own solid educational and engineering work backgrounds, some of which previously near Terman at Harvard, it was only logical for Fein to appeal to Stanford Provost Terman after 30 months not getting a reply from Graduate Dean Bowker about his consultation report on computer science.

Terman’s feedback, a suggestion of getting “a little contract” from the Office of Navy Research like how Bowker had started Stanford’s statistics department, disappointed Fein:

“FEIN: …

…I had a talk with Terman, because after I presented this report, I talked a lot with Al (Bowker) and then Terman. Al had started the statistics department at Stanford and statistics had the same kind of history of resistance by academics and mathematics departments for introducing a pedestrian study like statistics, which is like plumbing, into the university. The way in which apparently Al got it going was to get a contract from ONS for one person, get a little project going and then hustle another contract from maybe the Air Force and get something going. And after 8 or 9 or 10 years he had gotten something. And I couldn’t see with the vision I had, doing computer science by getting a little dinky computer from IBM…

…

FEIN: … Also Terman, you know Al’s notion was the great man theory, and Terman was telling me, “Well, Lou,” he says, “We can’t just set you up like you want, but why don’t you do like what Al did with statistics: get yourself a little contract from ONR and hire yourself one person and so on and after a while do like he did.” And I couldn’t see that at all, and with hindsight I am still right.”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

In fact, “a little contract from ONR”, i.e., the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research reviewed in Part 5 (i), was not only how Bowker had started the Stanford statistics department but how Bowker himself had been hired by Stanford; Terman had gone to Mina Rees, head of ONR’s mathematics division – previously mentioned in Part 5 (i) – to try to win an ONR statistical sampling contract, and Rees suggested for that purpose hiring Bowker, a Columbia University graduate student who had worked with her in probability studies of strategic bombing during World War II:

“… On one of Terman’s visits to the East Coast, he had talked with Mina Rees, the head of the ONR’s mathematics division, and learned that the ONR was planning to let a contract for statistical sampling work. To Terman this was a clear indication that mathematical statistics was an “important” field, and he was eager for Stanford to obtain the contract … Stanford, however, did not have any mathematical statisticians on its faculty and no money to hire any. But, as Terman was quick to realize, if Stanford could obtain the ONR contract, it could use the contract funds to cover a portion of the salaries of any statisticians the university might hire; the university’s portion of the salaries would be paid with overhead funds accumulated from government contracts. … The university might even make money, Terman speculated. …

Terman’s plan to hire “top notch” statisticians using contract funds from the ONR clearly required the cooperation of the ONR. Terman went directly to Rees with his plan and asked her for the names of the best available statisticians in the country. She suggested Albert Bowker, a graduate student at Columbia University who, during the war, had done probability studies of strategic bombing as a member, along with Rees, of the OSRD’s applied mathematics division at Columbia. Bowker was hired by Stanford; shortly afterwards, the university received from the ONR the statistical sampling contract.”

(Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford, 1997, University of California Press)

So Graduate Dean Bowker had originally been recruited to Stanford by Terman at the recommendation of the ONR to start Stanford’s statistics research, and so was doubtlessly trusted by Provost Terman.

In an interview by McCorduck on May 21, 1979, only 12 days after the Fein interview, Bowker asserted that Terman had “tended to follow” his advice on computing matters:

“McCORDUCK: Do you happen to remember why Louis Fein came to mind when you decided to commission this report?

BOWKER: Well, he had some interest in this field and was around Stanford. I’ve forgotten exactly now why I talked to him. I talked to a number of other people and many of them were quite negative.

McCORDUCK: But still you persisted. What was Terman’s role in this?

BOWKER: Well, he tended to follow my advice in these areas and I’m sure he was…He and I had worked from the very beginning to develop new machine capabilities at Stanford rather than a joint activity at my laboratory and at his when he was Dean of Engineering. We had worked together for a long time on computing matters.”

(“An Interview with ALBERT BOWKER”, interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 21, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

Hence, I can infer that when Terman told Fein to start with “a little contract from ONR” like Bowker had done starting the statistics department, it was also Bowker’s view that the computer science department should also start this way.

My view of it, on the basis of my review of history in Part 5 (i), is that funding through a contract with a military or military-oriented research agency was a foundational cornerstone of U.S. government support for scientific research, first put in place under the leadership of Vannevar Bush, Frederick Terman’s mentor – Louis Fein must have known it well as he had been a chief computer engineer at the military aerospace company Raytheon, a company co-founded by Bush.

(“Raytheon Company: History”, Raytheon Company)

In fact, where Bowker as a student had worked with Rees during World War II, “the OSRD’s applied mathematics division at Columbia” as in the second previous quote, was the U.S. government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development under Bush, which as in Part 5 (i) managed science funding contracts during the war.

Louis Fein might not like the “little contract” much, but George Forsythe proceeded to found and build up a Stanford computer science department beyond such limits, a department with unmatched national influence and an unparalleled number of National Science Foundation Fellows – thus Graduate Dean Al Bowker was right about the “great man”.

I note that Bowker’s background did not seem to include real military technology research like what Terman and Fein did at Harvard radar and sonar labs during wartime, but only the probability studies with Rees at Columbia; at Stanford the “little contracts” he got from defense research agencies to start and build up the statistics department – as Fein described – were thus presumably partly a favor from Rees at ONR.

Rather, Al Bowker was a lifelong academic from a U.S. Capital childhood with his father a member of the Bureau of Standards, as detailed in Part 5 (i) the government agency whose management of the INA at UCLA was cut short during the McCarthy era, before George Forsythe’s move to Stanford; following the dispute with Fein, Bowker left Stanford in 1963 to become Chancellor of the City University of New York, and beginning in 1971 Chancellor of UC Berkeley, before joining U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s administration in 1980 – prior to my 1982 arrival at Berkeley under the helm of his successor Ira Michael Heyman:

“Albert Hosmer Bowker, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, an expert in statistics and an innovative administrator during his decades-long career in higher education across the country, died Sunday in a retirement home in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 88 and had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.

…

Bowker was chancellor of UC Berkeley, which he called a “wild and wonderful place,” from 1971 to 1980…

…

Ira Michael Heyman, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus who served as vice chancellor under Bowker and as chancellor from 1980 to 1990, said that during Bowker’s term as chancellor dwindling state funding made it difficult to maintain existing programs and almost impossible to launch anything new. He applauded Bowker’s role in setting up the UC Berkeley Foundation.

…

Born in Winchendon, Mass., in 1919, Bowker grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father worked for the federal Bureau of Standards.

He earned his B.S. in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1941 and a Ph.D. in statistics at Columbia University in 1949. …

He began his professional career in 1941 as a research assistant in MIT’s Department of Mathematics, and took a post as an associate mathematical statistician at Columbia University from 1943 to 1945.

Bowker became an assistant professor of math and statistics at Stanford University in 1947, and was chair of its statistics department from 1948 to 1959. He is credited with setting up a mathematical statistics research lab and a computer center at Stanford, where he served as the graduate division dean from 1959 to 1963.

Bowker was chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY) from 1963 to 1971, where he supported a plan to provide free tuition for full-time CUNY undergraduates. …

…

Bowker’s role in higher education continued after he left UC Berkeley in 1980. During the Carter administration, he accepted a position as assistant secretary for postsecondary education for the newly-formed U.S. Department of Education. He served there from 1980 to 1981, then took a post as dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland from 1981 to 1984.

…

He was executive vice president of the University of Maryland from 1984 to 1986. He returned to CUNY as vice president for planning at its research foundation from 1986-1993.“

(“Albert Bowker, innovative UC Berkeley chancellor during 1970s, dies at age 88”, by Kathleen Maclay, January 22, 2008, UC Berkeley News)

Reading the UC Berkeley obituary above, I notice that Fein’s allegation of Bowker getting a “little contract” here and there for “8 or 9 or 10 years” was inaccurate: Bowker had in fact founded the statistics department in 1948 immediately after his 1947 arrival at Stanford – he had not even earned his Ph.D. when he became founding chairman of Stanford’s statistics department, but apparently Mina Rees’s recommendation meant everything to a Stanford eager to get the ONR statistical sampling contract.

But I can understand that, given the “little contract” mode of that era, it likely took many more years for Bowker to get sufficient funding to build up a strong department.

Even though Fein did not make it explicit, I can detect that in his lament of Bowker’s “little contract” he was also somewhat belittling of Bowker’s academic credential at the time of founding the Stanford statistics department, compared to Fein’s own long lists of accomplishments when starting to advocate for computer science.

I notice that Bowker’s top-level academic leadership positions have been at left-leaning public universities, CUNY and UC Berkeley, and after Stanford all his positions have been at public institutions.

After arriving at Berkeley, Bowker became a lifelong member of a close-knit academic community there:

““Al Bowker was an outstanding chancellor who paved the way for UC Berkeley into the modern era,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau. “For 28 years after stepping down as chancellor, Al Bowker remained an integral part of the Cal community, offering advice for the chancellors who came after him. I was always delighted to see him at the Faculty Club, entertaining colleagues and participating in campus life. He will be greatly missed.”

…

Bowker maintained a home in Berkeley at University Terrace, a condominium community for university faculty and staff, having moved to a residence in Portola Valley several years ago to be close to his grandchildren.”

(Kathleen Maclay, January 22, 2008, UC Berkeley News)

So it is possible that Bowker’s purer academic perspective entitled him a high sense of intellectual self-esteem that helped keep at bay the enthusiasm of Louis Fein, a person of strong but mostly military-oriented engineering credentials, to wade into the academia for some founding status in a new discipline.

Consistent with this as the explanation why Al Bowker did not act on Louis Fein’s consultation report on computer science but helped George Forsythe take the initiative, is a crucial fact reviewed in Part 5 (i): Mina Rees, Bowker’s wartime mentor at Columbia and then head of ONR’s mathematics division, in the 1950s expressed strong opposition to the U.S. Army’s direct role in academic mathematical research, i.e., opposing the establishment of the Army Mathematics Research Center at Wisconsin-Madison.

Further convergence of Bowker and Rees later actually happened: in 1963 when Bowker became Chancellor of CUNY, Rees was already CUNY Dean of Graduate Studies. Rees spent her entire academic career, before and after serving in government and military research agencies, in the CUNY public education system: at New York City’s Hunter College, CUNY and CUNY Graduate Center.

(“FORMER PRESIDENTS: Mina S. Rees”, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; and, “Mina Rees: August 2, 1902 – October 25, 1997”, Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College)

But despite living to a good 88 years, Al Bowker still died of the same pancreatic cancer his former Stanford underling George Forsythe had died of at 55 – and in a different coincidence, Forsythe’s daughter Diana and Mina Rees died in the same year 1997, Diana in August at 49 before Mina in October at 95!

Mina lived to nearly twice the age of Diana, though not quite. On the other hand, the day in August when I had arrived at the San Francisco International Airport and Berkeley from China 15 years earlier, the 28th, happened to be twice of the August day, the 14th, when Diana Forsythe died in Alaska.

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”, March 29, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

And despite George Forsythe’s talents and ambitious drive, Stanford wasn’t the first university to start a computer science department.

The honor of the first belongs to Purdue University, which established its computer science department in 1962.

In his May 1979 interview Fein also recalled his interactions with Purdue, claiming it as an example that his idea of a new department was viewed as a threat by an existing department:

“McCORDUCK: Do you think people thought of this as a threat? In what way?

FEIN: Yes, it’s threatening in the sense that they themselves typically weren’t in the field and monies that might normally come to them might be diverted to this new department. I had this experience at Purdue. I was invited to Purdue by Tom Jones who is now a Vice President of MIT. He got hold of one of my papers and he thought it was the greatest thing since the wheel. He invited me to Purdue where he was Chairman of the Department. And his people almost murdered me – they didn’t want anything to do with this. Oh, after I left, two years later, they had one…And that’s my explanation. I think anyone who brings in a new idea anywhere that requires money from a common budget poses a financial threat and obviously a professional one.”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 9, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

In his subsequent interview by McCorduck, Bowker did confirm that Stanford mathematicians were resistant to the discipline of computer science and even to that of applied mathematics:

“McCORDUCK: … Apparently one of the things you said to George Forsythe (I got all my information, by the way, from the Stanford archives. George kept superb notes to himself and things like that; notes exist and I must say if you ever go read these, you’d be flattered out of your mind by some of these things. They are very, very complimentary to you.) One of the things you said in your farewell conversation with him, apparently you telephoned to say goodby to him when you were leaving. …

…

McCORDUCK: … When you called him to say goodby, you said to him, you recommended to him, that the Computer Science Division not stay in Math, in fact do its best to get out of Math, because you detected some resistance on the part of mathematicians, resistance to hiring non-mathematical but nevertheless legitimate computer science types.

BOWKER: Yes, well, I think it’s true around the country where very few departments of mathematics have taken the lead in this field. There is some activity in ours and other areas but generally mathematics departments tend to emphasize the pure mathematics. The Stanford department had more emphasis on classical analysis than on applicable mathematics if you like, than most in this country, but still was not terribly interested in becoming primarily an applied mathematics department and still isn’t.”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 21, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

But Bowker politely reminded McCorduck that the Stanford administration, Terman in this case – and presumably Bowker himself since the two had been together on computing matters as mentioned earlier – had controlled the pace of change:

“McCORDUCK: … What I’m curious to know is how you managed to convince a lot of people who were resistant to this that it wasn’t just another “hot project.”

BOWKER: Well, I think Stanford was trying to create activities growing out of research largely, but activities that in some sense fell in between basic science and engineering. …

I don’t remember exactly when Dr. Terman changed his mind. In fact, my recollection is that the department may not have come into being until after I left or at the time I left.”

(interview by Pamela McCorduck, May 21, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

In my view, Louis Fein’s grievance about Stanford, and about existing academic departments in general, consisted of two different matters: one, a university’s attitude toward establishing a computer science department; and two, how the university treated Fein’s active lobbying.

Reviewing the Purdue facts carefully, I come to a conclusion that, rather than Fein’s outsider role having been treated as a threat, his lack of university faculty experience hindered his ambition – a conclusion consistent with my earlier remark on why Stanford Graduate Dean Bowker resisted Fein’s effort to get some computer science founding status, namely that Fein’s primary background had been in the military technology industry and not the academia.

In 1961, Fein was briefly considered a possible candidate for the directorship of Purdue’s Computer Sciences Center:

“The Statistical and Computing Laboratory was moved into the Schools of Engineering along with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Hawkins separated the Computing Laboratory from the Statistical Laboratory and it was renamed the Computer Sciences Center in 1961. … Efforts were made to find a senior person in the computer field to be director of the Computer Sciences Center, and correspondence between Pyle and T.F. Jones mentions Louis Fein and Bernard Galler as possibilities, but the search was not pressed very vigorously until Felix Haas took charge early in 1962 …”

(“The Origins of Computing and Computer Science at Purdue University”, by Saul Rosen and John R. Rice, August 1990, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University)

But Fein’s prospect was short-lived. Unlike Stanford taking a step-by-step approach, Purdue quickly decided to establish a computer science department in 1962 and let the founding department chairman also assume the center directorship:

“During the spring and summer of 1961 there was an active search for a permanent head of the Division of Mathematical Sciences. There were negotiations with Dr. F. Joachim Weyl who was director of the Naval Analysis Group in the Office of Naval Research. Weyl withdrew his name from consideration and the position was offered to Felix Haas who was head of the Mathematics Department at Wayne State University. Haas accepted the position during the summer, with the understanding that he would start at Purdue in January, 1962.

…

… By the beginning of 1962 many universities, including most Big Ten universities, had requested, and some had already received, grants from the National Science Foundation under a program initiated in 1956 in support of institutional computer facilities at universities. … The most important effort of the Computer Sciences Center under Haas and Pyle in the spring of 1962 was to produce an NSF proposal that requested $920,000 to help finance the acquisition of the IBM 7044 and to support related programs in computer service, research and instruction.

…

… Haas recalls a meeting with Hawkins and Hovde, probably before he officially started at Purdue. in which they agreed that the Division of Mathematical Sciences would be organized internally into three academic departments, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, plus a Computer Sciences Center that would provide computing services for the whole university. It was considered only natural then that the head of the Department of Computer Sciences would also be the director of the Computer Sciences Center.”

(Saul Rosen and John R. Rice, August 1990, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University)

As in the above, the National Science Foundation had initiated a program in 1956 to support universities to establish computer facilities, and it helped make university computer science viable.

The year 1956 saw a considerable number of interesting events in the computing field, as in Part 5 (i): John von Neumann was in hospital treatment for cancer and made the decision to move from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to the University of California, a move that did not happen as he soon died in early 1957; the Army math research center at Wisconsin-Madison was founded; the long reign of Thomas J. Watson, Sr. at IBM ended and the rule was passed to his son, Watson, Jr.; and IBM established its San Jose research laboratory in the future Silicon Valley in California.

In 1956 John von Neumann also played a key leading role in the NSF initiative to fund academic computing facilities:

“… during the early 1950s, NSF support for computer science was modest and was channelled through its mathematics research program. This picture changed as a result of the 1956 endorsement by the Advisory Panel on University Computing Facilities (chaired by John von Neumann) of a specialized NSF program for the support of computer science, the 1957 launch of Sputnik, and the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. NSF support for computer science research grew rapidly after 1958, and was especially important in meeting the critical need of academic researchers for computer equipment. Between 1957 and 1972, the National Science Foundation expended $85 million to support the purchase by more than 200 universities of computer hardware.”

(“The Federal Government Role in the Development of the American Software Industry: An Assessment”, by Richard N. Langlois and David C. Mowery, in David C. Mowery, ed., The International Computer Software Industry: A Comparative Study of Industrial Evolution and Structure, 1996, Oxford University Press)

In the academic computing field that I was in during the 1980s and 1990s, Purdue University was known as a practically inclined Midwest school, different from the intellectually inclined West-Coast UC Berkeley and Stanford.

The last quote from the article by Saul Rosen and John R. Rice shows that practical speediness: in 1961 a new head of Purdue’s division of mathematical sciences, Felix Haas, was hired to start in 1962; prior to arrival, Haas already reached an agreement with Purdue to start a new computer science department alongside the existing mathematics and statistics departments in the division; upon arrival, Haas immediately applied for NSF funding to purchase a new IBM computer and to support “computer service, research and instruction” while the preparation for a new computer science department was underway.

Like Louis Fein, Purdue computer science department’s founding chairman Sam Conte had a background working in military-oriented technology companies; but unlike Fein, Conte had been a university professor:

“Having decided that there was going to be a Computer Sciences Department. Haas moved rapidly to recruit a department head. Bill Miller, who was then head of the Division of Applied Mathematics at Argonne, was approached. but when he removed himself from consideration the position was offered to Sam Conte. Conte had been an Associate Professor in the Mathematics Department at Wayne State University up to 1956, before Felix Haas came to Wayne State. Since 1956 Conte had worked for five years at Space Technology Laboratories and then at Aerospace Corporation in California. where he was Manager of the Department of Programming and Analysis in the Computing Laboratory. At a meeting of the University Executive Council on March 12, 1962 Felix Haas announced that “Samuel Come, a distinguished scientist currently with Aerospace Corporation, will join the Purdue staff on July 1 to become Director of the Computer Sciences Center.” …

On October 24, 1962 President Hovde asked for and received approval from the Board of Trustees to change “. . . the internal administrative organization of the Division of Mathematical Sciences . . . effective October 1, 1962.” The Department of Computer Sciences and the Computer Sciences Center were listed as components of the division, along with Departments of Mathematics and Statistics, and a Statistical Laboratory. Professor S. D. Conte was listed as chairman of the Department of Computer Sciences and as Director of the Computer Sciences Center. …

…

After Sam Conte, the first faculty member hired for the new Computer Sciences Department was Saul Rosen. Conte had known Rosen at Wayne State University before they both left that university in 1956. Rosen then worked in the software area for Burroughs and Philco corporation and then as an independent consultant. He inquired of Conte about possible consulting work on the west coast and Conte suggested that he join the new Computer Sciences Department which he was forming at Purdue. …”

(Saul Rosen and John R. Rice, August 1990, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University)

As cited above, Conte had been an associate professor at Wayne State University before joining the aerospace industry.

Saul Rosen, the first Purdue computer science department faculty member cited above alongside Conte, had also been a Wayne State associate professor before joining the industry; Rosen had also earned his math Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where ENIAC had been born.

(“Saul Rosen: 1922–1991”, RCAC, Purdue University)

Interestingly, the year when both Conte and Rosen left Wayne State for the industry was 1956 – just like a number of significant events in the computing field listed earlier.

In contrast, in his early career Louis Fein had only been a college math instructor with a master’s degree, as quoted earlier. Later he taught some computer courses here and there, including at Wayne State and Stanford:

“… Fein taught from 1952 to 1953 at Wayne State University a course on digital computer systems and then later in 1956, at Stanford University. …”

(May 4, 1973, Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

So, in my opinion Fein’s not getting what he wanted at Stanford or Purdue was due to his lack of established academic credentials: universities, either the elite Stanford or the practical Purdue, would choose established faculty members to lead their new departments, not someone with only temporary teaching experience, even if in Fein’s case he had strong records working in the industry and campaigning for such new departments – the rare case of Al Bowker’s hiring at Stanford and founding a new department before receiving the Ph.D. was not an instance of exception, in my view, but one of expediency of the inside track in the academia.

But as the last quote from the Purdue history article by Saul Rosen and John R. Rice indicates, within Purdue in the hiring of Conte and Rosen their industry pedigrees were emphasized, with Conte referred to as “a distinguished scientist currently with Aerospace Corporation”. The two’s most recent jobs had been at military-oriented technology companies: Space Technology Laboratories and Aerospace Corporation for Conte, and Philco Corporation for Rosen.

Space Technology Laboratories was the leading contractor for intercontinental ballistic missiles development, something John von Neumann had played a key role for as the U.S. Air Force’s principal scientific adviser as in Part 5 (i); Aerospace Corporation conducted research and development for the Air Force’s space and missile program; and Philco Corporation produced transistors and built computers for the U.S. Navy and the National Security Agency, and also for the commercial market.

(“Former TRW Space Park, now Northrop Grumman, designated as historic site for electronics and aerospace work”, by John Keller, December 18, 2011, Military & Aerospace Electronics; “ABOUT US: PROVIDING TECHNICAL AND SCIENTIFIC EXPERTISE FOR MORE THAN 55 YEARS”, Aerospace Corporation; and, “First-Hand: The Navy Codebreakers and Their Digital Computers – Chapter 2 of the Story of the Naval Tactical Data System”, by David L. Boslaugh, Engineering and Technology History Wiki)

Nonetheless, in that Purdue history I do notice another sign of a close-knit academia, i.e., besides my earlier comment on Al Bowker’s style as a lifelong academic: both of Purdue computer science department’s founding members had been faculty members at Wayne State University from which Purdue had just hired Felix Haas to lead the Division of Mathematical Sciences, overseeing the math and stats departments and establishing the new computer science department – apparently Haas then brought in former Wayne State associates to fill the founding roles, in another example of expediency of the inside track in the academia.

In October 1962, the Purdue board of trustees proudly noted the university founded the first academic computer science department in the U.S.:

“… The October 24 entry on the minutes of the board of trustees makes it very clear that a Department of Computer Sciences was officially established in the fall of 1962, and provides a firm basis for the claim that the first Computer Science Department at an American university was established at Purdue.”

(Saul Rosen and John R. Rice, August 1990, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University)

The mathematician and computer scientist Carl de Boor, a leader of the very successful spline functions research at the Army Math Research Center at Wisconsin-Madison and the Ph.D. study choice recommended for me by my undergraduate adviser in 1981-1982 as discussed in Part 4 and Part 5 (i), receiving his University of Michigan Ph.D. in 1966 first became a Purdue computer science faculty member:

“The first task of Samuel Conte as new department head was to hire some faculty and define a graduate program. … In the very first year, there were seven teaching faculty, including Conte, a numerical analyst. … Four were already at Purdue. Two new faculty were hired, Robert Korphage in theory and Saul Rosen in programming systems. …

In 1963 there were three new faculty members: Richard Buchi in theory, Walter Gautschi in numerical analysis, and John Steele in programming systems. … The following year John Rice was hired in numerical analysis, and this completed the initial phase of hiring.

No new faculty was hired in 1965, and only one, Carl de Boor in numerical analysis, was hired in 1966. De Boor was the first of a number of young Ph.D.s hired who became influential members of the department. …”

(“History of the Computer Sciences Department at Purdue University”, by John R. Rice and Saul Rosen, in John R. Rice and Richard A. DeMillo, eds., Studies in Computer Science: In Honor of Samuel D. Conte, Springer Science+Business Media, 1994)

De Boor later moved to the Army Math Research Center in 1972 – the year George Forsythe died and Marina von Neumann Whitman was appointed to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, as mentioned earlier.

(“CURRICULUM VITÆ: CARL(-WILHELM REINHOLD) de BOOR”, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

So the elite Stanford was behind the practical Purdue.

And despite George Forsythe’s historical reputation as the most influential advocate for establishing computer science as a discipline, Stanford wasn’t even the second university to found a CS department.

The runner-up claim belongs to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which established its computer science department in 1964 – the year before Stanford in 1965.

UNC had made a very forward-looking move early, in February 1959, hiring John W. Carr, III as its Computation Center director.

Like Louis Fein, Carr had a pioneering background in computer development, but it was in academic settings at MIT and the University of Michigan after World War II service as a Navy electronics officer:

“A pioneer in the computer world, Mr. Carr received a doctorate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began work there in 1949 with the university’s groundbreaking electronic computer, “Project Whirlwind.”

Then, after a year as a Fulbright scholar at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950, he joined the staff at the University of Michigan, where he taught the first courses on computer applications and from 1952 to 1955 headed the construction and design of a digital computer.

…

While serving in the Navy during World War II, he studied radar design and became a lieutenant and the electronics officer aboard the Boxer, an Essex-class aircraft carrier.”

(“John Carr, Emeritus Professor At Penn”, by Bill Price, April 12, 1997, philly.com)

At Michigan, Carr not only became an associate professor of mathematics – like Sam Conte and Saul Rosen at Wayne State – but also a leader of the broader computing community as the president of the Association for Computing Machinery, before moving to UNC Chapel Hill; at UNC, the computation center he directed obtained a new computer, with support from the maker Sperry-Rand Corporation, the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and the National Science Foundation:

“In May, 1959, the Consolidated University of North Carolina will install a new Univac Scientific ERA-1105 Digital Computer in the new Physics and Mathematics Building now being built at Chapel Hill. Purchase of this machine was made possible through the support and cooperation of the Sperry-Rand Corporation, the Bureau of the Census, and the National Science Foundation.

… Beginning in February of this year Dr. John W. Carr, III, Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan and former President of the Association for Computing Machinery assumed the post of Director of the Computation Center and Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University in Chapel Hill.”

(“INAUGURATION OF THE RESEARCH COMPUTATION CENTER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA”, 1959, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

John Carr’s academic credentials, in both teaching and computer development, were significant when he became the 6th president of the ACM with a 2-year term starting in 1956. It added one more milestone to the year 1956 when other significant events happened in the computing field as mentioned earlier, including an NSF initiative led by von Neumann’s efforts to start a special program to support university computing facilities: in Carr’s case, he became the first current university academic to serve as the ACM president.

ACM’s founding president was John H. Curtiss, the head of the Applied Mathematics Division at the National Bureau of Standards, as in Part 5 (i) with a leadership role at the INA at UCLA; ACM’s 2nd president was John W. Mauchly, as in Part 5 (i) one of the lead inventors of ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, who by the time of his ACM presidency had co-founded his own computer company with ENIAC co-inventor John P. Eckert; ACM’s 3rd president was Franz Alt, who as in a quote in Part 5 (i) had been on the same Computations Committee with Derrick Lehmer overseeing ENIAC at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and who then became deputy chief of the Computation Laboratory of the NBS; ACM’s 4th president was Samuel B. Williams, a retired Bell Laboratories computer pioneer, and an NBS consultant at the time of his ACM presidency; and ACM’s 5th president was Alston S. Householder, then director of the Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

(“Margaret R. Fox Papers, 1935-1976. Finding Aid”, by Pat Hennessy, Kevin D. Corbitt and and John L. Jackson, August 1993, Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Technology, University of Minnesota; “Alston Scott Householer”, by G.W. Stewart, October 1993, Volume 26, SIAM News; J. A. N. Lee, eds., International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers, 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; “Dr. Franz Alt”, by Atsushi Akera, January/February 2006, ACM Oral History interviews; “John W. Mauchly”, Encyclopædia Britannica; and, “ACM Past Presidents”, Association for Computing Machinery)

From my standpoint, John Carr’s becoming the first current university academic to serve as the ACM president signalled that by 1956 the wider computing community had come to view the academia as ready to play a significant role in the computing field.

Additionally of interest to me is the fact that this ACM president happened to be also a professor at a university math department when Stephen Smale, later my Berkeley Ph.D. adviser, earned his Ph.D. – in 1957 – while being a leading activist in left-wing and anti-war politics as detailed in Part 2.

(“Biography: Steve Smale”, Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley)

However, subsequently in 1964 when the UNC Chapel Hill computer science department was founded, John Carr not only was not the founding chairman but was not even around at UNC. He had left in 1962 for the University of Pennsylvania:

“Mr. Carr joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962 as professor of electrical engineering and later taught computer science. From 1965 to 1971, he served as graduate group chairman in computer science and taught there until retiring in 1993.”

(Bill Price, April 12, 1997, philly.com)

That was electronic engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, i.e., the Moore School where the first electronic computer ENIAC had been born, where in 1965 Carr became the graduate group chairman in computer science – distinguished indeed even if it wasn’t a computer science department.

And to Carr’s credit, in that same year 1965 Moore school Ph.D. student Richard L.Wexelblat became the world’s “first person to receive a Doctorate in Computer Science from a recognized graduate program in Computer Science”.

(“History of CIS at Penn”, Department of Computer and Information Science, Penn Engineering)

Oh well, North Carolina’s loss was Pennsylvania’s gain.

Still, I wonder why Carr left, rather unexpectedly in the evolution of the history. Was it because UNC did not make it in time to be the first university to found a computer science department? That could be a reason because Penn he then moved to was the birthplace of the electronic computer – a consolation prize for him, that is.

Over the years at Penn, Carr reached out internationally and brought computer science knowledge to important places in the world, including China’s Jiao Tong University, and Egypt’s Air Force Academy as its computer science department head:

“Mr. Carr developed contacts with computer scientists around the world, lecturing in the former Soviet Union and in China, where he was appointed adjunct professor of computer science at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai.

In the early 1970s, he was a visiting professor at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and at the University of Sydney, Australia.

In 1987, he headed the department of computer science at the Egyptian Air Force Academy near Cairo and oversaw the construction of a computer laboratory and curriculum development for cadets.”

(Bill Price, April 12, 1997, philly.com)

But unfortunately, John Weber Carr also became a victim of pancreatic cancer, in 1997:

“John Weber Carr 3d, 73, emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering, died of pancreatic cancer Tuesday at his home in Bryn Mawr.”

(Bill Price, April 12, 1997, philly.com)

Compared to the most influential computer science advocate, pancreatic cancer victim George Forsythe at 55, Carr lived a long life to 73; on the other hand, compared to the Stanford administrator who had facilitated Forsythe in taking the initial modest step of founding the computer science division within the math department, pancreatic cancer victim Al Bowker at 88, who like Carr had moved on to another institution before a historic computer science department was founded, Carr’s life was short.

I note that Carr died in the same year as Diana Forsythe and Mina Rees, i.e., George Forsythe’s daughter and Al Bowker’s mentor, respectively.

And Chapel Hill’s loss could also be a blessing in disguise.

In 1964 establishing the second computer science department among U.S. universities, UNC Chapel Hill recruited Alfred Brooks to be the founding chairman; a distinguished computer scientist who decades later in 1999 received the ACM’s A. M. Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science as mentioned in Part 3, Brooks has enjoyed a long life – now in retirement after 51 years at Chapel Hill – and a long memory of life even before John Carr’s days:

“Fred Brooks retired in 2015 after 51 years at UNC — but he started teaching long before he got here.

“I started regular teaching when I was in high school,” he said. “My senior year, one of the teachers came down with cancer mid-year and I got sworn in to teach geometry and trig because there wasn’t anyone else around to do it.”

Brooks started UNC’s computer science department and has worked with its faculty, staff and students since the 1960s. “Fred founded the department in the mid 1960s, and it is probably very difficult to believe this, but at the time, the notion of forming a free-standing computer science department at a liberal arts university was unheard of,” Kevin Jeffay, chairperson of the Department of Computer Science, said.

“So for that reason we are actually the second oldest computer science department in the country. So it was actually a bit of an experiment, and obviously one that worked very well.” Aside from founding the computer science department at UNC, Brooks also receieved the 1999 A. M. Turing Award, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of computer science. “It’s the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science, so he’s internationally recognized as one of the brilliant computer scientists of our time,” Jeffay said.

Despite his achievements, Jeffay said he is very humble.

“He’s very modest and generous, always giving the credit to his students and to his collaborators,” he said. “He’s a wonderful colleague.”

Gary Bishop, a professor in the department, said Brooks is more than just his accomplishments. “He’s a giant, but he’s also a nice guy,” Bishop said.”

(“Founding UNC’s computer science department was an experiment — but it paid off for Fred Brooks”, by Maggie Budd, March 7, 2016, Daily Tar Heel)

Chapel Hill lost a former ACM president but gained a future winner of the ACM’s Turing Award. Isn’t a scientist of the highest professional honor as worthy as a top leader of the professional association?

Take a look at Brooks’s prior achievements before Chapel Hill, listed in his Turing Award biography, and one is really surprised:

“Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. was born April 19, 1931, in Durham, North Carolina. … he earned his AB in physics at Duke University in 1953. Brooks then joined the pioneering degree program in computer science at Harvard University, where he earned his SM in 1955 and his PhD in 1956. At Harvard he was a student of Howard Aiken, who during World War II developed the Harvard Mark I, one of the largest electromechanical calculators ever built, and the first automatic digital calculator built in the United States.

After graduation Brooks was recruited by IBM, where for the first several years of his career he served in various positions in Poughkeepsie and Yorktown Heights, New York. During that time he helped design the IBM 7090 “Stretch” supercomputer… Stretch was IBM’s first transistorized computer, containing some 150,000 transistors. Although it was a commercial failure, it pioneered a number of advanced concepts quite important to contemporary computing… Brooks went on to participate in the design of the architecture of the IBM Harvest, a variant of the Stretch with special features for the National Security Agency. He later helped the government assess the computing capability of the Soviet Union.

Brooks was next assigned to help design the IBM 8000, a new transistorized mainframe computer intended to replace the IBM 700/7000 series. But by the early 1960s, the global market for computers was incredibly crowded, with numerous companies offering incompatible, proprietary systems. As customers replaced their older systems with faster ones, they realized that their investment in software was a growing problem, because they had to rewrite it for every new system. Bob Evans promoted IBM’s vision to develop a single product line of general purpose computers with a common instruction set that permitted customers to preserve their investment in software as the moved from slower machines to faster ones. Evans assigned Brooks to lead the team to design this product line, called the System/360, which was announced in 1964. Brooks coined the term “computer architecture” to mean the structure and behavior of computer processors and associated devices, as separate from the details of any particular hardware implementation.

The importance of the System /360 cannot be understated: it was a widely successful project that transformed the face of business computing and reshaped the landscape of the computer companies throughout the world. …

While the hardware architecture for the System/360 was well underway, it was clear that there was considerable risk in delivering the operating system for the new series of machines. Brooks was assigned to lead the software team in building what was perhaps the largest operating system project of its time. …

After the successful delivery of the System/360 and its operating system, Brooks was invited to the University of North Carolina, where he founded the University’s computer science department in 1964. …”

(“FREDERICK (“FRED”) BROOKS”, A. M. Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery)

As described above, Alfred Brooks was the team leader of IBM’s revolutionarily successful System/360 computer that changed the face of business computing, and in the same year 1964 this IBM product was announced he was invited to be the founding chairman of Chapel Hill’s computer science department – at the age of only 33.

Brooks’s moving on from IBM to a good role in academic computer science was consistent with the fact that in the late 1950s and early 1960s IBM had become the main backer and influencer of academic computing activities:

“… Indeed, a survey of US academic computing in late 1959 argued that “it is fair to say that, in many cases, to the extent that a university computing activity has a purpose at all, it has been made for them by IBM.””

(Matti Tedre, The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline, 2015, CRC Press)

I notice that Brooks received his Harvard Ph.D. in 1956, the year so many significant events occurred in the computing field.

However, I note that by his Turing Award biography Brooks had not been a university faculty member prior to the Chapel Hill founding chairman job, having worked exclusively at IBM – even if in the 2015 story of his retirement quoted earlier, Brooks emphasized that he had begun teaching as a high school senior substituting for a cancer-stricken math teacher.

In light of the above fact, I have to modify my earlier-stated conclusion regarding Louis Fein’s grievance of not having been given a founding position in computer science: Brooks’s case illustrated that someone without established academic credentials, i.e., not having been a university professor, could still be the founding chairman of the second, if not the first, computer science department in the U.S., provided the person had an exceptionally strong computer industry record – in this case with an IBM brand name.

In other words, Fein could wish he had been a chief engineer for a brand-name IBM computer, rather than a Raytheon computer few knew about.

Experience in a military-oriented technology company like Raytheon, or those Purdue’s Conte and Rosen had worked in, was a significant credential; but Brooks’s experience at IBM developing a computer for the National Security Agency seemed adequate substitute for such military-orientation prerequisite, if there was any – he was also a graduate of Duke University, where the U.S. Army Office of Ordinance Research was located as in Part 5 (i).

Still, Brooks’s IBM achievements may not have been the only reason that Chapel Hill invited him to found the second academic computer science department in the U.S.: as quoted from his Turing Award biography, Brooks had received his Harvard Ph.D. under Howard Aiken, who had during World War II led the development of the Harvard Mark I, “one of the largest electromechanical calculators ever built, and the first automatic digital calculator built in the United States”.

In the historical timeline, the Harvard Mark I had been built before ENIAC, and von Neumann had paid a visit to Aiken and Mark I before taking part in the ENIAC project, as previously quoted in Part 5 (i):

“In 1943, during World War II, von Neumann was invited to join the Manhattan project – the project to develop the atomic bomb – because of his work on fluid dynamics. He soon realized that the problems he was working on involved a lot of computational work which might take years to complete. He submitted a request for help, and in 1944 he was presented a list of people he could visit. He visited Howard Aiken and saw his Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator. …”

(“Doing Mathematics on the ENIAC. Von Neumann’s and Lehmer’s different visions”, by Liesbeth De Mol, in E. Wilhelmus, I. Witzke (eds.), Mathematical practice and development throughout History, 2008, Logos Verlag)

Thus Aiken had been a prominent computer pioneer ahead of von Neumann, the “father of computers”.

But Mark I was not an “electronic” computer, only “electromechanical”, and was not Harvard-built but IBM-built under Harvard professor Howard Aiken’s guidance:

“During Aiken’s initial years as a Harvard graduate student, he followed the usual program of studies. He then shifted his allegiance to the field of electronics, the physics of vacuum tubes, and the properties of circuits, working directly under Professor E. Leon Chaffee… He began teaching in his second year as a graduate student and, after receiving his PhD in 1938, was appointed a faculty instructor… Aiken never published any of the results of his thesis research; all of his published writings dealt with one or another aspect of computing and computers.

…

Aiken’s 1937 proposal for a calculating machine began with a series of paragraphs devoted to an account of the pioneers in machine calculation: Pascal, Moreland, Leibniz, and, above all, Babbage. …

…

… On May 10, 1939, about a year and a half after Aiken’s first approach to IBM, James Bryce wrote Aiken that all the papers had been signed and that he was now “engaged in getting an appropriation put through.” He would then “issue the shop orders” and “begin the actual work of designing and constructing the calculating machine.” …

In January 1943, the Harvard machine was completed in the North Street Laboratory at Endicott, N.Y., and ran a test problem. But only in December 1943 was the machine demonstrated to members of the Harvard faculty. …

…

On April 17, 1944, Harvard’s president, James Bryant Conant, reported to IBM’s president, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., that “the calculating machine” had been “put into operative condition.” …

…

The IBM ASCC (the Harvard Mark I) was the first of a series of four computers associated with Howard Aiken. Mark I and Mark II were electromagnetic, using relays, but Mark III and Mark IV had a variety of electronic components, including vacuum tubes and solid-state transistors. …”

(“Howard Hathaway Aiken”, by J. A. N. Lee, 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.)

Besides leading the development of “the first automatic digital calculator” built in the U.S. and the subsequent Mark II, III & IV machines, Aiken’s pioneering contributions to the computer field included founding the world’s first academic program in the future discipline of computer science – years before computer science departments, influenced by it, came into existence:

“Howard Aiken’s place in the history of computers, however, is not to be measured by these four machines, interesting and important as they may have been. He recognized from the start that the computers being planned and constructed would require mathematicians to program them, and he was aware of the shortage of such mathematically trained men and women. To fill this need, Aiken convinced Harvard to establish a course of studies leading to the master’s degree, and eventually also the doctorate, in what was to become computer science. Just as Aiken–by the force of his success, abetted by his ability to find outside funding for his programs–achieved tenure and rose to become the first full professor in the new domain of computer science, so he inaugurated at Harvard what appears to have been the first such academic program anywhere in the world. The roster of his students contains the names of many who became well known in this subject, including Gerrit Blaauw, Frederick Brooks, Jr., Kenneth Iverson, and Anthony Oettinger. As other later programs came into being, they drew directly or indirectly on Aiken’s experience at Harvard. …”

(J. A. N. Lee, 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.)

Therefore, Alfred Brooks’s IBM achievements and founding of the UNC Chapel Hill computer science department were also matters of the pride and distinction of his scientific lineage following his teacher, who had been the inventor of the first automatic digital calculator in the U.S. and the founder of the first academic computer science program in the world.

A question then naturally arises, in comparison to von Neumann: given Aiken’s prominent pioneering achievements why hasn’t he been regarded, like von Neumann has, as the “father of computers”, or at least a “father of computers”?

One clear reason is that Aiken’s first “calculating machine” wasn’t electronic. As quoted earlier, his Ph.D. research had been in electronics, especially vacuum tubes that would be the basic electronics building blocks, but he never published in that field, instead spending his time on the calculating machines project which, for Mark I and Mark II, did not use vacuum tubes like ENIAC did.

Aiken was very conservative, preferring to use only reliable components, and in those days mechanical relays were much more reliable than electronics, albeit much slower:

“… Of the four, Mark I was the most memorable because it produced such reliable results, and could run continuously for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Thus, although it was very slow compared with any of the electronic machines, it produced a huge output–since unlike its electronic rivals, which had long “down times”–it ran continuously. …

…

… The Mark I was used at Harvard by a US Navy crew that included Grace Murray Hopper and Richard Bloch. Aiken was extremely conservative in his use of well-tested, well-understood elements, using electromechanical decimal rotary counters and relays…”

(J. A. N. Lee, 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.)

As a result of that conservatism, Aiken’s technology for Mark I & II was soon rendered obsolete by the emergence of the electronic ENIAC:

“… Of course, by 1946, when Mark II was becoming operational, ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, built for the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, Maryland, by the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering) had been completed and had demonstrated the enormous advantage of electronic elements over relays in large-scale computing machines. The path to the future thus was shifted from Aiken’s machines to ENIAC. Although Mark I and Mark II continued to do useful work for many years (which may be taken as an index of the increasing national need for computing services), their technology was obsolete.”

(I. Bernard Cohen and Gregory W. Welch with Robert V. D. Campbell, eds., Makin’ Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer, 1999, MIT Press)

There might also be doubt as to whether Aiken’s Harvard Ph.D. expertise in vacuum tubes was actually applicable to building an electronic computer:

“Although Aiken’s field of science for his doctorate was electron physics, and although the subject of his dissertation was space charge within vacuum tubes (or electron tubes), his expertise was in the physics of vacuum tubes and not in electronics, not in the design and application of circuits using vacuum tubes. …”

(I. Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer, 2000, The MIT Press)

A second reason why Aiken has not but von Neumann has been regarded as the “father of computers” is von Neumann’s strong advocacy for the “stored program”, which led to the notion of the “von Neumann architecture” discussed in Part 5 (i).

Aiken, in his conservatism, did not trust “stored program” and so his Mark machines, I, II, III & IV, never became modern general-purpose computers:

“… Aiken is sometimes held to be reactionary because he was always wary of the concept of the “stored program” and did not incorporate it into any of his later machines. This stance did put him out of step with the main lines of computer architecture in what we may call the post-Aiken era, but it must be kept in mind that there are vast fields of computer application today in which separate identity of program must be maintained, for example, in telephone technology and what is known as ROM (“read-only memory”). In fact, computers without the stored-program feature are often designated today (for instance, by Texas Instruments Corporation) as embodying “Harvard architecture,” by which is meant “Aiken architecture.””

(J. A. N. Lee, 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.)

Aiken’s conservatism also meant that his work did not carry the broader relevance and potential like the work of von Neumann, who subsequently became a prominent leader of U.S. science as detailed in Part 5 (i).

On the other hand, compared to John von Neumann, Howard Aiken enjoyed many more years of life.

Depending on the biographical source, Aiken was born on March 8 or 9, 1900, in New Jersey.

(“Howard H. Aiken: 1964 Harry H. Goode Memorial Award Recipient”, IEEE Computer Society; and, “Howard Hathaway Aiken”, Encyclopædia Britannica)

So when von Neumann died of cancer in February 1957 at the age of 53, Aiken was already nearly 57. He was alive, but had become even more conservative, and out-of-date in his scientific knowledge – a fact even Alfred Brooks, a Harvard Ph.D. graduate under Aiken and one of Aiken’s “most devoted disciples”, later acknowledged:

“In certain respects, Aiken had rapidly become a conservative figure in the world of computing. In the 1950s he was already “old” by the standards of this rapidly advancing science, art, and technology. Computer science and invention had become a young man’s game. … In the words of Maurice Wilkes, the new computer innovators were young men with “green fingers for electronic circuits,” many of whom had come from experience with radar and “were used to wide bandwidths and short pulses.”

…

… Even Fred Brooks, one of Aiken’s most devoted disciples, admitted in retrospect that the Harvard Comp Lab had a “Charles River view of the world”—that the students were not fully aware of the developments taking place in other institutions (including MIT, just down the river).”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

But Howard Aiken had his own bigger ambitions, namely to become a businessman and to start his own computer company.

Like others in the computing field, such as Louis Fein, Aiken was a consultant to military research projects, in his case at Lockheed Missile and Space Division in California; in 1961 Aiken retired early from Harvard with the intention of starting his own company, to develop microcomputers with the help of a “close associate”, Cuthbert Hurd, and a Lockheed assistant director of engineering:

“In 1961, Aiken decided to take advantage of Harvard’s provision for early retirement and to begin a new career. He could have continued in his professorship for another five years, and possibly even for a few years after that. Instead, he chose to take advantage of a university rule that permitted tenured members of the faculty to retire at the age of 60. … Mary Aiken recalls that he had a disagreement with some member of the university administration and decided that the time had come to start a new life. …

Tony Oettinger has written that Aiken had always said that he was at least as smart as most businessmen and wanted to prove that he was right. Fred Brooks concurs in this opinion. In a telephone conversation with Cuthbert Hurd, who was a close associate of Aiken’s, especially after his retirement from Harvard, I was given confirmation of this reason for Aiken’s having retired early from Harvard. Hurd said that he had never discussed this matter with Aiken, but that on two or three occasions when Aiken was in California, where he was a regular consultant for the Lockheed Missile and Space Division, the two of them had “talked at great length about organizing a company.” “If we had done it and if it had been successful,” Hurd mused, “it would have been the first microcomputer computer company in the world.” Hurd told me that “an Assistant Director of Engineering at Lockheed . . . was doing the design work,” and that “Howard, along with that man and me” would form the new company. …”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

“It would have been the first microcomputer computer company in the world”, as Aiken’s close associate Cuthbert Hurd later recalled, had they gone ahead and form the company together.

Rather intriguingly, Lockheed Missile and Space Division, based in the future Silicon Valley region of Northern California, had been founded in the same year 1956 as the occurrence of many significant events in the computing field mentioned earlier, such as the founding of the IBM San Jose research laboratory; Lockheed settled in the neighboring city of Sunnyvale:

“The Bayshore Freeway was still a two-lane road, and 275 acres of bean fields adjacent to Moffett Field were purchased in 1956 to become the home of Lockheed Missile & Space Division (now Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company). The company chose the site because of the stellar talent pool provided by nearby colleges and universities, the good weather, quality of living and proximity to an airport.

But while times seemed quiet, America was shrouded in uncertainty, and Lockheed was expanding its mission to confront the challenges of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had developed an offensive nuclear capability, and the United States was in desperate need of better intelligence to characterize the potential threat and respond accordingly.

Addressing both concerns, the first reconnaissance satellite, called Corona, and the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) were designed and built in just a few short years by the company’s engineers and scientists — armed only with slide rules, mechanical calculators, the basic laws of physics and an abundance of imagination.

By 1960, the Sunnyvale population had reached 53,000 — a five-fold increase over what it was just 10 years earlier. Employees at Lockheed, by that time, topped 20,000. In parallel to the population boom, Sunnyvale would become a preferred location for many semiconductor and high-technology companies.”

(“Lockheed grew up with Sunnyvale”, Myles D. Crandall, February 25, 2007, Silicon Valley Business Journal)

It’s hard to believe but true, that the Lockheed military aerospace engineers came in 1956 “armed only with slide rules, mechanical calculators” – so primitive compared to the Southern California military aerospace companies like Raytheon, which had had their own computer development activities even in the early 1950s as reviewed in Part 5 (i) and as shown in Fein’s past work.

But at least they came; and soon some of them were eager – I would assume there were others besides an assistant director of engineering at a management level – to form a new company with Howard Aiken, the ‘godfather’ of mechanical calculators if I may say so, to develop microcomputers.

These Lockheed engineers may have also wished for computing help from Hewlett-Packard, the nascent Silicon Valley’s founding company – but HP wasn’t into it as later recalled by Silicon Valley pioneer Douglas Engelbart about that era, as discussed in Part 5 (i).

Nonetheless it was one more factor turning things in favor of Northern California in 1956, when in his hospital bed John von Neumann planned a move to the University of California, likely choosing Southern California’s UCLA over Northern California’s UC Berkeley as reviewed in Part 5 (i).

Lockheed’s 1956 arrival, initially at Stanford’s industrial park, also boosted that university’s Cold War-oriented scientific research guided by Provost Frederick Terman, with Lockheed bringing in two leading missiles and dynamics experts, Nicholas Hoff and Daniel Bershader, to Stanford’s faculty:

“… Lockheed’s Space and Missile Division, which decided to locate in Stanford’s industrial park in 1956, suggested that Terman let the company offer an appointment at Stanford to one of the nation’s leading aeronautical engineers, Nicholas Hoff, whom the company believed it would be unable to hire without this incentive. Hoff, head of aeronautical engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, had received his degree from Stanford in the early 1940s and after the war had begun research on supersonic aircraft and missiles with the support of substantial military contracts. To Terman, Lockheed’s proposal was yet another way to link firmly the engineering school and industry and, at no cost to Stanford, to improve the aeronautical engineering program, which had been languishing for lack of funds since World War II. … Lockheed also arranged for the head of its gas dynamics division, Daniel Bershader, to teach part-time at Stanford; he soon received a permanent appointment. As a result of Lockheed’s selection of Hoff and Bershader, Stanford’s aeronautical engineering program shifted decisively from research on commercial airplane structures to research related to guided missiles and space vehicles. … ”

(Rebecca S. Lowen, 1997, University of California Press)

In 1956, even more important to Silicon Valley, and to the landscape of high technology, was the arrival of the semiconductor industry that would give meaning to the name “Silicon Valley”:

“In September 1955 William Shockley and Arnold Beckman agreed to found the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a Division of Beckman Instruments “to engage promptly and vigorously in activities related to semiconductors.” Shockley rented a building … in Mountain View, California, began recruiting “the most creative team in the world for developing and producing transistors.” He attracted extremely capable engineers and scientists, including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who learned about and developed technologies and processes related to silicon and diffusion while working there. In December 1956 Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the transistor, but his staff was becoming disenchanted with his difficult management style. They also felt the company should pursue more immediate opportunities for producing silicon transistors rather than the distant promise of a challenging four-layer p-n-p-n diode he had conceived at Bell Labs for telephone switching applications.

After unsuccessfully asking Beckman to hire a new manager, eight Shockley employees – including Moore and Noyce plus Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last and Sheldon Roberts – resigned in September 1957 and founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in Palo Alto. Many other employees, from technicians to PhDs, soon followed. Over the next decade, Fairchild grew into of the most important and innovative companies in the semiconductor industry, laying the technological and cultural foundations of Silicon Valley while spinning off dozens of new high-tech start-ups, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel. Shockley continued pursuing his four-layer diode but his company never realized a profit. Beckman sold the operation to Clevite Corporation in 1960. Shockley became a professor of electrical engineering and applied science at Stanford University.”

(“1956: Silicon Comes to Silicon Valley”, The Silicon Engine, Computer History Museum)

Described in the above, a 1957 rebellion by 8 disciples of William Shockley, a 1956 Nobel Physics Prize winner for his role in the invention of the transistor, at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory against his “difficult management style” and orthodox scientific focus was a watershed event that led to the founding of the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation by this younger generation of scientists and engineers, a company that would lay “the technological and cultural foundations of Silicon Valley”.

In that bustling environment, amidst a new semiconductor industry and the Lockheed engineers eager to take part, Howard Aiken, once a prominent computer pioneer and leading competitor to John von Neumann but not winning the recognition to be a “father of computers”, had a second chance in 1961 upon retiring from Harvard, to become the ‘father of microcomputers’ – if I may use the phrase.

Doing so in the fledgling Silicon Valley might even let Aiken share some glories of its founding with distinguished others, most notably Stanford Provost Frederick Terman – born like Aiken at the turn of the century and mentor to the Hewlett-Packard founders – and the Fairchild Semiconductor founding group – rebels against their conservative mentor William Shockley.

But this second chance did not materialize for Aiken, as Hurd later recalled that they did not follow through with the plan:

“… Aiken, Hurd continued, “wanted me to help raise the money.” They “never followed through” with this plan. “I thought that maybe he wanted to be rich,” Hurd concluded, “and was thinking about starting the company for that reason.””

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

Now I am curious. Why did Aiken and Hurd not follow through with their plan, given that, as quoted earlier, “an Assistant Director of Engineering at Lockheed . . . was doing the design work” already?

Hurd’s somewhat coy explanation was that Aiken “wanted me to help raise the money”, and he thought Aiken “wanted to be rich” and “was thinking about starting the company for that reason”.

Reading Hurd’s descriptions, I can see two possible scenarios why they did not follow through, both to do with money: one, the two men could not agree on ownership sharing, i.e., Hurd was unwilling to settle for the role of ‘helper’, feeling that Aiken wanted too much; and two, Hurd was idealistic and viewed Aiken as too money-oriented to be in computer development with.

Thus, finding out who Cuthbert Hurd was would help understand his mindset in relation to Aiken.

Hurd had also been a computer pioneer, a key driving force behind IBM’s first commercial general-purpose computer, IBM Model 701, the so-called “Defense Calculator” discussed in Part 5 (i), that was launched during the Korean War era:

“Dr. Hurd was a mathematician at the Atomic Energy Commission laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., when he joined I.B.M. in 1949 as its director of applied science. A year later, after the outbreak of the Korean War, he was one of two people assigned to determine how I.B.M. could contribute to the war effort.

Making a bold proposal, Dr. Hurd and his partner, James Birkenstock, recommended that the company design and build a general-purpose computer, bearing the heavy expense itself so that I.B.M. would own the patents. The new machine, the I.B.M. 701, cost $3 million to develop and was introduced with great fanfare in 1952, putting I.B.M. on the path to becoming the dominant force in the computer industry.

Dr. Hurd went on to help develop several other I.B.M. computers and served as a consultant to the company for years after leaving in 1962 to become chairman of the board of the Computer Usage Company, the first independent computer software company. …”

(“Cuthbert Hurd, 85, Computer Pioneer at I.B.M.”, by Laurence Zuckerman, June 2, 1996, The New York Times)

Given Hurd’s backgrounds as above, the first scenario why Aiken and Hurd did not materialize their plan to start a computer company is quite possible: having been a key IBM computer-development executive, Hurd was not content with just helping “raise the money” for the more famous Aiken while settling for much less himself; interestingly, Hurd left IBM in 1962, the year after Aiken had left Harvard in 1961, and so the timing was right for the two to consider start a computer company together; the fact that Hurd, originally a mathematician, left IBM to become the board chairman of “the first independent computer software company”, the Computer Usage Company, confirmed that he deserved a top leadership position in a smaller company.

It also made logical sense in this context that, without collaboration with Aiken, Hurd would focus on computer software and usage, not on developing computers.

Not getting to found the world’s first microcomputer company, Aiken, who decades earlier before attending graduate school had been a chief electrical engineer at the Madison Gas and Electric Company in Wisconsin, in 1961 indeed became a businessman in New York, while also spending part of his academic retirement time in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as the University of Miami’s “Distinguished Professor of Information Technology”:

“… While in high school he also worked twelve hours a night at the Indianapolis Light and Heat Company. In 1919 he entered the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, supporting himself throughout his four years there by working as an operating engineer at the Madison Gas and Electric Company. Aiken received a degree in electrical engineering in 1923; he continued to work for Madison Gas, now as chief engineer, responsible for the design and reconstruction of the company’s electric generating station. He remained with Madison Gas until 1928.

…

After spending ten years as an electrical engineer, Aiken felt he had chosen the wrong field. He decided to study mathematics and physics, and enrolled for a year at the University of Chicago for that purpose. He continued his studies at Harvard, where he obtained a master’s degree in physics in 1937 and a doctorate in physics in 1939. …

…

In 1961 Aiken retired from Harvard and moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He became Distinguished Professor of Information Technology at the University of Miami, helping the school set up a computer science program and a computing center. He also founded Howard Aiken Industries Incorporated, a New York consulting concern. He had always told friends that a good professor with half a mind should be able to run circles around people in industry. Now he would prove it. He said he would spend the remainder of his life trying to make money, and he did just that.”

(Robert Slater, Portraits in Silicon, 1987, The MIT Press)

As indicated in the above, Aiken’s friends, not just Hurd, knew that Aiken always wanted to make money as a businessman in the industry; in my opinion, even the name he chose for his company, Howard Aiken Industries Incorporated, showed his ambition very clearly that it would be his own industries.

Aiken’s company specialized in taking over ailing companies, fixing and then selling them:

“… Essentially, Aiken Industries specialized in taking over companies that were ailing and bringing them back to good health, at which point they were sold. He could not help but be active at the university level, and he accepted a part-time teaching post at the nearby University of Miami, becoming a colleague of John Curtiss.”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

I have to wonder how much Aiken, busy making money in his industries, actually really worked on “setting up a computer science program and a computing center” at the University of Miami as in the second previous quote, since as in the above quote John Curtiss was already a professor there. As reviewed earlier and in Part 5 (i), Curtiss, a former head of the applied mathematics division at the National Bureau of Standards overseeing the INA at UCLA, and the founding president of the ACM, had been fired from the Bureau in 1953 – a victim of McCarthyism-type politics.

Richard McGrath, a lawyer in a senior role at Aiken Industries, later confirmed that he and others were “helping him to build his company” – Howard Aiken Industries Inc., later called Norlin Technologies Inc. – “assisted” Aiken and “managed … for Howard” – the kind of role Cuthbert Hurd had likely been unwilling to accept:

“I was able to learn more about Aiken’s activities during the years after his retirement from Harvard from Richard McGrath, an attorney who was closely associated with Aiken from 1962 to 1973. During these years, McGrath—accompanied by Martin Flaherty and James Marsh—was “almost constantly on the road” with Aiken, “helping him to build his company (which was originally known as Howard Aiken Industries Inc. but was later called Norlin Technologies Inc.).” The three of them “assisted” Aiken in the “process of acquiring companies that became divisions of Aiken Industries.” According to McGrath, Flaherty and Marsh “then managed several of the companies for Howard” while he served in a legal capacity.”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

According to McGrath, Aiken’s management style was “like a visiting fireman”:

“McGrath remembers Aiken as “a born teacher and mentor” who “left an indelible imprint on all our lives.” … What McGrath found particularly noteworthy was Aiken’s “management style,” the way in which “he put together a highly successful high technology company with multiple divisions, without ever having an office or secretary of his own.” Aiken, McGrath concluded, “literally worked out of his hat,” perfecting “the art of visitation, traveling from division to division like a visiting fireman.””

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

I can imagine Charles River water literally pouring out of the magic hat of this “visiting fireman”.

If Howard Aiken thought of himself and his name as the real worth, it shouldn’t have been unexpected. The relationship between Aiken, Harvard and IBM in the development of Harvard Mark I had illustrated the prominent sense of special importance Aiken and Harvard regarded themselves with.

The Harvard-IBM agreement for building the Mark machines clearly defined the special privilege position Harvard had over IBM:

“By March 31, 1939, the final agreement had been drawn up and signed. IBM agreed (1) “to construct for Harvard an automatic computing plant comprising machines for automatically carrying out a series of mathematical computations adaptable for the solution of problems in scientific fields.” Harvard agreed (2) to furnish “without charge” the structural foundation, and (3) to appoint “certain members of the faculty or staff or student body” to cooperate with “the engineering and research divisions of IBM in completing the design and testing.” It was agreed (4) that all Harvard personnel assigned to this project would sign a standard “nondisclosure” agreement to protect IBM’s proprietary technical and inventive rights. IBM (5) would receive no compensation, nor were any charges to be made to Harvard. The finished “plant” would become “the property of Harvard.” …”

(J. A. N. Lee, 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.)

In the 5-point agreement above between IBM and Harvard, other than Point (2) that was logically Harvard’s role to provide the space to house the machines, and Point (4) that prevented Harvard personnel from disclosing IBM proprietary information, the stipulations were in Harvard’s favor: it obliged IBM to pay for building the Mark machines, do the construction with the involvements of some Harvard personnel, and give the product’s full ownership to Harvard.

Moreover, after Mark I’s completion when IBM president Thomas Watson, Sr. was going to attend the Harvard ceremonies for its dedication, Harvard was so brimming of self-esteem that its press release did not want to acknowledge that the machine had been built by IBM, instead emphasizing that “the inventor, Commander Howard H. Aiken, U.S.N.R,” was in charge of the project; Harvard’s attitude really irritated Watson:

“The Harvard News Office, in close consultation with Aiken, prepared a news release. It was evidently not considered necessary to clear the release with IBM… The release was headed “World’s greatest mathematical calculator” and bore the statement: “The NAVY, which has sole use of the machine, has approved this story and set this release date [Monday papers, August 7, 1944].” The first five paragraphs … stated that the machine would be presented to Harvard by IBM, that it would solve many types of mathematical problems, that the presentation would be made “by Mr. Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines Corporation,” that the machine was “new in principle,” and was an “algebraic super-brain.” Then followed the bold unqualified statement that “In charge of the activity…is the inventor, Commander Howard H. Aiken, U.S.N.R,” who “worked out the theory which made the machine possible.” It may be observed that not only was Aiken designated “the inventor,” but no reason had been given thus far for IBM being the donor-it had not even been mentioned that IBM had actually constructed the machine. In fact, in the whole eight pages, the only reference to IBM’s contribution was a single paragraph later on in the release.

Two years of research were required to develop the basic theory. Six years of design, construction, and testing were necessary to transform Commander Aiken’s original conception into a completed machine. This work was carried on at the Engineering Laboratory of the International Business Machines Corporation at Endicott, N.Y., under the joint direction of Commander Aiken and Clair D. Lake. They were assisted in the detailed design of the machine by Frank E. Hamilton and Benjamin M. Durfee.

It is said that when Watson arrived in Boston accompanied by his wife and first saw the news story, he became so irate that he even planned to return to New York without attending either the ceremonial luncheon or the formal dedication ceremonies.When Watson arrived at his hotel, he telephoned–so the story goes–to his Harvard hosts, threatening to boycott the ceremonies on the following day. Conant and Aiken thereupon rushed from Cambridge to Boston to placate Watson, who launched into a furious tirade against Aiken and (presumably) Harvard. Evidently Conant and Aiken succeeded in calming Watson, who did attend the dedication on the following day and gave a star performance.”

(J. A. N. Lee, 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.)

Learning how Harvard and Aiken had treated IBM president Thomas Watson in the days of Mark I helps one understand that when a mid-level IBM executive like Cuthbert Hurd was interested in getting into business with Aiken in 1961-1962, it likely had to be Hurd helping Aiken build Aiken’s company – something lawyer Richard McGrath then did.

In 1967 Aiken retired again, this time from his own company – as quoted earlier it was Howard Aiken Industries Inc. later renamed Norlin Technologies Inc. – and became its vice chairman of the board; again, Aiken did not fully retire but returned to working as a computer consultant for big technology companies, now Monsanto in addition to Lockheed:

“During the 1973 interview, Hank Tropp questioned Aiken about aspects of his life and career after leaving Harvard. Aiken referred, first of all, to his “forming Aiken Industries, beginning in 1961” and his becoming “vice-chairman of the board” in 1967. “So now,” Aiken said, “I go to board meetings, but I’m not going at it the way I used to. . . . When they kicked me out of Harvard, I had to find a new job and that was Aiken Industries. And when they kicked me out, I had to find a new job and went into the consulting business. So now I spend a good deal of time at Monsanto.” … Aiken said that he had been a consultant at Lockheed “for many years,” but that he had “quit that this year.”

Once the subject had been brought up, Aiken felt the need to discuss the subject at length. “You can’t quit,” he said. “At the time you quit, you’ve had it.” “If I were to quit work and sit here in this study,” he continued, “I think I’d be dead very soon. I don’t think I’d last.”

… During his last years, Aiken continued his long-time service for the aerospace industry in California, making periodic visits to Lockheed Missiles Company. Cuthbert Hurd gave me a list of some people with whom Aiken was associated in California when he used to come out to the West Coast on his regular visits. One of them was George Garrett, who, Hurd informed me, “was for a while the Director of Computer Activities at Lockheed Missiles. Howard and George saw a great deal of each other for a certain period.” …”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

Just like I have remarked earlier, Howard Aiken was a “godfather” of what Lockheed Missiles was doing in the computing field – and he did his work by regularly visiting like a fireman.

By now Aiken was rich, and he continued to care about developing microcomputers, or what would become “personal computers”; in 1970, Aiken again discussed with Cuthbert Hurd a plan to start a new computer company, PANDATA, this time as the investor he would offer Hurd the board chairman position:

“Hurd, on another occasion, gave some further details on a new company that Aiken had proposed to form. He recalled that he, Aiken and William Main had met several times in 1970 “to discuss the formation of a corporation to be called PANDATA.” The three had “discussed the idea of what was to become a microprocessor and personal computer.” Aiken, according to Hurd, “had an early vision of the usefulness of such devices,” “believed that they could be mass produced at a low cost,” and “wished to form an integrated company to manufacture and sell them.” Aiken wanted Hurd “to help form the company, be chairman of the board, and raise the money.” Aiken himself “wished to make a considerable investment in the new company.” …”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

So it looked like that in 1970 Howard Aiken had a third chance, with his idea of “a microprocessor and personal computer”, to become the ‘father of personal computers’ this time.

The name of the third partner this time – the last time it would have been a Lockheed assistant director of engineering – was reported in Bernard Cohen’s biography of Aiken: William Main.

Main had been Aiken’s co-organizer of a 1962 symposium on switching theory in space technology, sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale.

(Howard Aiken and William F. Main, eds., Switching theory in space technology: [Symposium on the Application of Switching Theory in Space Technology, held at Sunnyvale, California, February 27-28 and March 1, 1962], 1963, Stanford University Press)

But again, a new computer company with Aiken and Hurd together did not materialize:

“… Hurd reported, however, that he “was busy at the time with other activities” and that Aiken “died before the venture could be launched.””

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

At least Hurd was interested this time in 1970, as quoted – apparently because he was offered the board chairmanship – but understandably he was already the board chairman of the Computer Usage Company and so would like to do it with Aiken sometime later.

With or without Hurd, Aiken continued to pursue his vision of miniaturization of computers – now with the Monsanto Chemical Company:

“One of Aiken’s final computer-related assignments in these post-retirement years was for the Monsanto Chemical Company, which was trying to develop magnetic bubbles as the basis of a new memory technology. At the time of the 1973 interview, Aiken was enthusiastic about magnetic-bubble technology. This led him to talk about miniaturization in general. He had on the table a hand-held Bowman electronic calculator, and he showed an obvious sense of delight as he discussed how powerful a tool this small device was. He said that he foresaw a time when a machine the size of this calculator would be more powerful than mainframe computers. …”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

Aiken also found someone else to help him, Dick Bloch, who started a new company Genesis to invest in new technology ideas – the concept was reminiscent of Aiken Industries, but through starting new companies instead of buying old companies, and then selling the stake:

“… Aiken had never been concerned to patent his innovations while a member of the Harvard faculty, and the innovations he produced for Monsanto were patented in the company’s name rather than his. But he was concerned with a patent for one of his own inventions, the creation of his last retirement years. The invention in question was related to the general problems of encryption and decoding and the security of computer data.

Aiken went into some detail about this most recent invention and the company that was in the process of being organized to exploit his innovations in relation to the security of computer information. “That’s the Information Security Corporation,” Aiken said. It was “being formed by Dick Bloch to exploit a cryptographic invention of mine.” The parent company was called Genesis. In an earlier interview with Bloch, Tropp discovered that the primary mission of Genesis was to seek new ideas that could be exploited commercially and then to find financing. Once the venture was started, Genesis would provide the early management; as soon as the company was able to stand on its own feet, however, Bloch and Genesis would, in a sense, “get out and look for something else.” …”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

The man Aiken referred to, Dick Bloch, or Richard Bloch as in an earlier quote about a Navy crew using Harvard Mark I, had been the chief operating officer of Aiken’s Mark I project, and then an executive in the aerospace and computer industries:

“Richard M. Bloch, a pioneer in the development and design of digital computers, died of cancer on May 22 in Framingham, Mass. He was 78 and lived in Marlborough, Mass.

As chief operations officer at Harvard University’s Computation Laboratory in the 1940’s, Mr. Bloch helped design and program the first automatic digital computer, the Mark 1.

…

Over the succeeding years, Mr. Bloch held a number of administrative positions in the rapidly growing computer industry, including general manager of the computer division of Raytheon, vice president for technical operations at Honeywell, vice president for corporate development at the Auerbach Corporation and vice president of the advanced systems division of General Electric.

He was also chairman and chief executive of the Artificial Intelligence Corporation and the Meiko Scientific Corporation.”

(“Richard Bloch, 78, Pioneer in Digital Computers”, by William H. Honan, May 29, 2000, The New York Times)

What a pity! The inventor of the world’s first “automatic digital computer” – officially a “calculating machine” as cited earlier – after becoming a businessman for over a decade and getting rich, in the end still had to rely on a former deputy from his first Harvard project 3 decades ago to get his new technology ideas into business.

And that company, Genesis, and its subsidiary Information Security Corporation set up to exploit a cryptographic invention of Aiken’s as in the second previous quote, likely did not succeed since Bloch’s The New York Times obituary made no mention of either.

Noteworthy in Bloch’s May 29, 2000 obituary is the fact that he was once the general manager of Raytheon’s computer division – presumably the place Louis Fein had once worked developing a computer for the Navy in Southern California.

I note that Richard Bloch was also a victim of cancer, although at the age of 78 he faired better than John Carr at 73.

Aiken’s 1973 interview by Henry Tropp quoted in Bernard Cohen’s biography of Aiken, in which Aiken talked about his consulting for Monsanto, his quitting Lockheed consulting that year, and a new company with Dick Bloch, was conducted on February 26-27.

(“Interviewee: Howard Aiken (1900-1973) Interviewers: Henry Tropp and I.B. Cohen”, February 26-27, 1973, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

About 10 days later it was Aiken’s birthday – March 8 or 9 as mentioned earlier – and a few days after that, on March 14 Howard Aiken died in his sleep in a hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, during a consulting visit to Monsanto:

“Howard Aiken died in his sleep in a hotel in St. Louis on 14 March 1973. He was in St. Louis for one of his regular consultations with Monsanto. He was 73 years old.”

(I. Bernard Cohen, 2000, The MIT Press)

Aiken was 73, the same age John Carr died at decades later, although Aiken wasn’t a victim of cancer that Carr would be.

In comparison, John Curtiss, Aiken’s retirement colleague at the University of Miami, former founding president of ACM and a victim of McCarthyism-type politics at the National Bureau of Standards, later died in 1977 at only 67; Curtiss was also a Harvard Ph.D. alumnus.

(J. A. N. Lee, eds., 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

From my angle of analysis, Aiken lived a relatively long life compared to his contemporary leading computer pioneer John von Neumann who is regarded as the “father of computers” that Aiken isn’t – 20 years longer – whereas Carr lived a relatively short life compared to his contemporary computer science pioneer Alfred Brooks, who is living and in 2015 retired from UNC Chapel Hill at 84.

But Aiken missed at least two further chances, following his early retirement from Harvard to enter the industry, to become the ‘father’ of something in the computer world – microcomputers, then personal computers – as a result of his would-be collaborator Cuthbert Hurd not going forward with it each time, by Hurd’s own candid admission.

As quoted earlier, Cuthbert Hurd later said that that Aiken “died before the venture could be launched”, referring to the company PANDATA he, Aiken and William Main talked about in 1970 – the second and last such chance for Aiken – for developing “a microprocessor and personal computer”.

The year after Aiken’s death, in 1974 Hurd left his board chairmanship at Computer Usage Company and started his own company, Cuthbert C. Hurd Associates:

“… From 1949 to 1962 he worked at IBM, where he founded the Applied Science Department and pushed reluctant management into the world of computing. Hurd later became director of the IBM Electronic Data Processing Machines Division.

After 1962 he served as chairman of the Computer Usage Company, the first independent computer software company, until 1974 when he formed Cuthbert C. Hurd Associates.”

(“Cuthbert Hurd: Biography”, Engineering and Technology History Wiki)

Now I begin to doubt Hurd’s sincerity.

If Hurd could leave IBM in 1962 following Aiken’s 1961 Harvard retirement and starting Aiken Industries, it suggested that he could get into a new business with Aiken, but that they did not reach an agreement that time.

But if Hurd then could leave the independent computer software company board chairmanship in 1974 after Aiken’s 1973 death, and had in effect agreed to “the venture” with Aiken in 1970 but just hadn’t “launched” it, why couldn’t he have left to launch it earlier? Aiken was already 70 years of age in 1970 when he asked Hurd to “help form the company, be chairman of the board, and raise the money” – at that age Aiken’s prospect of starting a new company very much dwindled in the twilight.

The pattern of the timing of Hurd’s departure from an over-decade-long corporate position, both in 1962 and 1974, that it was the year after something had happened with Aiken, showed that Hurd was repeatedly capable of changing a long-time career job, but just not doing it a little earlier to start a business with Aiken.

That leads to the second possible scenario raised earlier regarding why Hurd did not follow through with the plans to start a company with Aiken: Hurd might be idealistic, and dismissive or even contemptuous of Aiken’s preoccupation with getting rich. Note that the first scenario, Hurd and Aiken not agreeing on ownership sharing, as discussed became less likely in 1970 when Hurd was offered the board chair position and in effect agreed to launching a venture later.

It turned out that Cuthbert Hurd not only was a close associate of Howard Aiken’s but had been a close associate of John von Neumann’s also; and so a comparison of his attitudes toward Aiken versus toward von Neumann can help determine if the second scenario above was likely the case.

In a 1981 interview by Nancy Stern on the history of computer development in his personal experience, Hurd talked in great depth about von Neumann, referring to the name over 60 times, but mentioned Aiken only twice and only in the context of a von Neumann-Aiken rivalry as follows (name underline emphases added):

“STERN: Can you tell me about when you first met Von Neumann?

HURD: I’m fuzzy, I don’t know whether it was 1947, or 1948. I met him at some meeting of the American Mathematical Society. I don’t know whether it was in Washington or New York. Some place east with the American Mathematical Society. And of course he was known as a great mathematician. It was also known he was interested in computers. …

…

STERN: Now when did you meet him again after that initial [time]?

HURD: I met him at normal times, up between whenever that was until the time I joined IBM. I met him at normal times in the sense of, there were a few conferences which we would now call computer conferences. And I’d see him around, at one of those places that he was on the program.

STERN: Can you recall where some of those conferences were? We’re talking about the Harvard computing conferences?

HURD: Yes. I would be fairly sure but not certain that he would not be at one.

STERN: Why not?

HURD: I don’t think that he and Aiken were close.

STERN: Well they both sat on the National Research Council Meeting.

HURD: I don’t think they were close.

STERN: Was it a kind of competition because they were both doing computing projects, do you think?

HURD: I think so, although neither one ever said that to me. Neither one ever said, I knew Howard Aiken very well. Neither of them ever said anything to me, derogatory or anything whatsoever about the other, but I just observed that those two gentlemen were not necessarily very close. …”

(“An Interview with CUTHBERT C. HURD”, by Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

In the above, Hurd clearly tried to emphasize that Aiken and von Neumann did not quite like each other. Given that, Hurd’s barely mentioning Aiken in this 1981 interview while detailing his relationship with, knowledge about and admiration of von Neumann clearly indicated his preference for von Neumann over Aiken.

Hurd talked about von Neumann’s quick mastery of the body of knowledge of psychiatry while terminally ill with cancer:

“STERN: Well, I was thinking even in terms of things that had nothing to do with what people tell me, but the conversion to Catholicism at the last minute would not be something one would expect from someone like Von Neumann.

HURD: That’s right and that was the one thing I was going to mention to you. And I never understood that. I didn’t. I didn’t have anything against it. He and I never talked about religion at all. We didn’t talk about philosophy, and I spent two and a half days a month for this period or whatever it was. Plus other times. And I had the impression somewhere along the line he became interested in psychiatry. And their was a colonel I think in the air force who was his psychiatrist, and somebody told me that when John got interested in psychiatry, that he quickly learned more about formal psychiatry, than the people who the psychiatrist knew. And I didn’t understand the significance of that. But I was told this, maybe by Klari. But other than that, I was surprised, because at the time of the funeral, let’s see, I went down and I hired a car, and I went to where Klari was and his family. Took them to church, wherever they went afterwards. It was a Catholic church. And I was a little surprised, because he never talked about religion.

…

STERN: … But was Klari surprised about the conversion?

HURD: I don’t remember her saying so. I don’t think she was Catholic either.”

(Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

In the above, Hurd did not explain why von Neumann had a psychiatrist, who was provided by the Air Force – as in Part 5 (i) von Neumann was a leading scientific adviser for the U.S. Air Force – presumably it was to help him cope with his life-ending illness.

As quoted, at the time of von Neumann’s death Hurd was very close to von Neumann’s family, and was the person chauffeuring and accompanying them to von Neumann’s church funeral and wherever they attended afterwards.

Both Hurd and the interviewer Nancy Stern expressed perplexity about von Neumann’s conversion to Catholicism prior to his death – von Neumann’s quick mastery of psychiatry happened around that time, when he also had an Air Force colonel psychiatrist.

On related scientific subjects, Hurd pointed out that von Neumann had full knowledge of neurophysiology, and had pioneering ideas for the mathematical analysis of the brain:

“STERN: Now in terms of this interest in psychiatry that you mentioned, he also had this interest in the McCulloch-Pitts research that related to the computer, or the brain as a kind of a computer. Did he speak about that at all, to you?

HURD: Well, yes. I think it would be clearer that he knew at that time as much about neurophysiology as was known.

STERN: That’s quite a statement considering he was a mathematician.

HURD: He believed, I am sure, that it was possible to find out how the brain works. There were ways to do that. And I think he had in his mind the way of going about discovering it. And he thought it was associated with what we now call software. The kind of coding, programs in the brain, and I could never find out how he intended to go about that. I’m convinced that he thought he could do that. Well we talked about that. And we also talked about his paper on how he proved that unreliable components can be used to produce a reliable machine. We used to talk about that. And how we arrived at that numerical analysis. …”

(Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

In the above two quotes, Hurd told of an von Neumann who could quickly master the full body of knowledge of various scientific disciplines, and who would try to pioneer studies of them from mathematical perspectives.

In what Hurd described, I can already see an instance of contrast between Aiken and von Neumann: the conservative Aiken would only use reliable components for his Mark I, and thus mechanical relays rather than electronic vacuum tubes, but the ambitious and brilliant von Neumann proved mathematically that “unreliable components can be used to produce a reliable machine”.

Hurd described von Neumann’s personality as friendly and approachable in spite of his greatness:

“HURD: … You asked once of a great man talking to the subordinates, in our association he never talked down to me. But in almost every case he always was far ahead of me in his thoughts about a subject. He never talked down to me, but I know he had lots of thoughts including the one that you just talked about, but he never discussed them.”

(Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

This particular view of von Neumann that Hurd gave is one John Nash, whose Ph.D. research idea was quickly dismissed by von Neumann, would likely disagree; as in Part 2, Nash’s impressions included that von Neumann, according to Sylvia Nasar in her book “A Beautiful Mind”, “had the preoccupied air of a busy executive”.

To the scientists close to von Neumann, such as Hurd, it was like a mystery that a mathematical genius – the only genius Hungary had produced in that era according to Nobel Physics Prize winner Eugene Wigner quoted in Part 5 (i) – who was born Jewish, near the end of his life converted to Catholicism; as Hurd said, quoted earlier, “I never understood that”, and “I was a little surprised”.

The economist Oskar Morgenstern, von Neumann’s collaborator and co-founder of the game theory in mathematical economics, was quite critical of von Neumann’s religious conversion:

Of this deathbed conversion, Morgenstern told Heims, “He was of course completely agnostic all his life, and then he suddenly turned Catholic—it doesn’t agree with anything whatsoever in his attitude, outlook and thinking when he was healthy.” …”

(William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1993, Anchor Books)

Perhaps in his hospital bed von Neumann was no longer “agnostic” like Morgenstern had viewed him as, and no longer believed that the physical world at the quantum level was not governed by causality – a worldview he had advocated in relation to his mathematics of quantum mechanics, discussed in Part 4.

The conversion occurred when von Neumann knew he was terminally ill; he suddenly decided to do so, and Father Anselm Strittmatter, a Benedictine monk, baptized him and acted as his priest in his last year of life:

“As the end neared, von Neumann converted to Catholicism, this time sincerely. … A Benedictine monk, Father Anselm Strittmatter, was found to preside over his conversion and baptism. Von Neumann saw him regularly the last year of his life.

… The conversion did not give von Neumann much peace. Until the end he remained terrified of death, Strittmatter recalled.”

(William Poundstone, 1993, Anchor Books)

I wonder if Father Anselm Strittmatter’s counselling influenced the decision by John von Neumann in 1956 while in hospital, who continued his work as a U.S. Atomic Energy Commissioner and key scientific adviser to the U.S. Air Force, to move to the University of California and focus on computer research – most likely at UCLA as in Part 5 (i) – and if so, whether it was due to increased fear of nuclear radiation – a factor disfavoring UC Berkeley as his choice as reviewed in Part 5 (i) – or some higher spiritual thought.

Originally in 1929 in Hungary, when von Neumann married his first wife Mariette, i.e., Marina von Neumann’s mother, with the marriage was his acceptance of the Catholic faith of hers, which von Neumann did not take seriously at the time:

“In 1929, … he was invited to lecture on quantum theory for a semester at Princeton. Upon being offered the job, he resolved to marry his girlfriend, Mariette Koevesi. He wrote back to Oswald Veblen of Princeton that he had to attend to some personal matters before he could accept. Von Neumann returned to Budapest and popped the question.

His fiancée, daughter of a Budapest doctor, agreed to marry him in December. Mariette was Catholic. Von Neumann accepted his wife’s faith for the marriage. Most evidence indicates that he did not take this “conversion” very seriously. …”

(William Poundstone, 1993, Anchor Books)

So von Neumann had not taken Catholicism seriously until near death. But back in 1929 his own family and Mariette’s family were all new or recent Jewish converts to Catholicism:

“Von Neumann married Mariette Kövesi in 1929 and their daughter Marina was born in 1935. The marriage broke up in 1936 and they divorced in 1937. In 1938, von Neumann went back to Budapest and married Klára (more tenderly, Klári) Dán. Both his wives came from converted Jewish families. Von Neumann and his family did not convert until after his father had died in 1929; then, they converted to Catholicism.”

(Balazs Hargittai and István Hargittai, Wisdom of the Martians of Science: In Their Own Words with Commentaries, 2016, World Scientific)

It isn’t clear from the above story if von Neumann’s nominal conversion to Catholicism in 1929 was a result of his marriage or his parental family’s insistence. But the last time before his death, von Neumann initiated to do so in a sincere manner. A Life magazine story on the life of John von Neumann following his death, described it in the same context as the prominent honors bestowed on him around that time:

“In April 1956 Von Neumann moved into Walter Reed Hospital for good. Honors were now coming from all directions. He was awarded Yeshiva University’s first Einstein prize. In a special White House ceremony President Eisenhower presented him with the Medal of Freedom. In April the AEC gave him the Enrico Fermi award for his contribution to the theory and design of computing machines, accompanied by a $50,000 tax-free grant.

Although born of Jewish parents, Von Neumann had never practised Judaism. After his arrival in the U.S. he had been baptized a Roman Catholic. But his divorce from Mariette had put him beyond the sacraments of the Catholic Church for almost 19 years. Now he felt an urge to return. One morning he said to Klara, “I want to see a priest.” He added, “But he will have to be a special kind of priest, one that will be intellectually compatible.” Arrangements were made for special instruction to be given by a Catholic scholar from Washington. After a few weeks Von Neumann began once again to receive the sacraments.”

(“Passing of a Great Mind: John von Neumann, a Brilliant, Jovial Mathematician, Was a Prodigious Servant of Science and His Country”, by Clay Blair, Jr., February 25, 1957, Volume 42, Number 8, Life)

According to the above high-profile Life story, von Neumann had not been a religious Jew to begin with, was baptized Catholic as a result of his first marriage and attended church with his first wife until their divorce.

In this sense, the late-life request for conversion should be described as a ‘reconciliation’; and as his demanded condition of a compatible priest showed, to the end von Neumann continued to perceive differences between the Catholic Church and his intellectual interests.

In a subsequent tragedy that serves as an eerie hidden context for the comparison earlier between the “great man” John von Neumann, the “father of computers”, and the “great man” George Forsythe, the most influential person in the emergence of computer science, von Neumann’s second wife Klara (Klari) later died of drowning in 1963, decades before the 1997 drowning of Forsythe’s daughter Diana whose life I have earlier contrasted to von Neumann’s daughter Marina’s. Here the incident was described by von Neumann’s friend, the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam:

“Klari was a moody person, extremely intelligent, very nervous, and I often had the feeling that she felt that people paid attention to her mostly because she was the wife of the famous von Neumann. This was not really the case, for she was a very interesting person in her own right. Nevertheless, she had these apprehensions, which made her even more nervous. She had been married twice before (and married a fourth time after von Neumann’s death). She died in 1963 in tragic and mysterious circumstances. After leaving a party given in honor of Nobel Prize-winner Maria Mayer, she was found drowned on the beach at La Jolla, California.”

(S. M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician, 1991, University of California Press)

In his 1981 interview Cuthbert Hurd was also asked about his own contributions to the computing field, and he answered by paraphrasing the most important of his own contributions in the spirit of von Neumann’s, that von Neumann interacted with and convinced senior decision makers – Hurd cited the examples of the nuclear physicist Edward Teller heading the Lawrence Livermore national lab, and IBM president Thomas Watson – of the benefit of computers, while he interacted and communicated with engineers:

“STERN: To summarize what, what would you say Von Neumann’s most significant contributions to the computing field were?

HURD: I think they were, they were two quite different things. I think irrespective of who really had the ideas first, that the publication, the promulgation of those papers which he and Burks and Goldstine wrote. I think those were very important documents. The other thing was, Von Neumann because of his reputation as a mathematician would gain the confidence of people and because he was so highly articulate gave people confidence in the fact that a computer if built would work, it would be a success. And I want to support that thing by two, two instances. When I first met Teller, and I don’t know when that was, in 1954, and Livermore got one of the first Univacs and Livermore got one of the first 701s. When I first met him, Teller said to me that the fact that Von Neumann, for whom he had the greatest respect, and who had some experience with computers felt, that use of the computer would be highly useful at Livermore, that that fact was a deciding influence on Teller’s part, on deciding to make the investment. … It was a big investment to make a computer, in the stand point that you have to have people, so the confidence that he gave Teller was a very important thing for Teller, and of course as soon as Teller made the decision other people would make the decision on the same basis, just because Teller did. I can illustrate it another way. I talked to, I just happened to be talking to Tom Watson, over the phone to Watson, and he said “Cuthbert I always remember the time you brought Von Neumann up to see us, and Von Neumann gave us confidence in what we were doing”. …

STERN: Kind of legitimating the computing field in general?

HURD: Yes.

STERN: How about your own contributions if you were to sum them up? Your most significant to the computing field.

HURD: I want to be careful not to compare myself to Von Neumann in anyway, but in the same way that Von Neumann gave some key people confidence in the field, I think the fact, that I could talk with engineers and understand what they were doing in any detail I wanted to. I was also able to communicate with people about what I knew about computing. I think that’s it in contributions. …”

(Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

Reading this January 20, 1981 interview, in which he emphasized the von Neumann-Aiken rivalry as computer pioneers and gave glowing praises of von Neumann, but otherwise scantily mentioned Aiken, I can’t help but wonder how much Cuthbert Hurd, affected by such a mindset, really thought of the worth of Aiken’s role in any collaboration to start a new computer company.

But perhaps the most telling of Hurd’s views of von Neumann versus Aiken is Hurd’s description, in the 1981 interview, of von Neumann’s attitude toward money, that can be contrasted to Hurd’s dismissiveness toward Aiken’s focus on getting rich.

Hurd had played key roles in recruiting von Neumann for certain scientific consultancies in the atomic energy field and in the computer industry.

The first time in the late 1940s, Hurd recruited von Neumann to be a consultant at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory:

“HURD: … One of my first conversations with him, would he become a consultant with Oak Ridge and we were working on a design of a gaseous fusion plant. There was a lot of numerical analysis what we would now call computing, and I thought and a colleague of mine, Dr. George Garrett, who was my boss, he’s a mathematician, thought that John Von Neumann would be useful, and when we told Alston Householder about this, Alston thought it would be a good idea to get John to become a consultant. John was already a government consultant, so I talked to him about this. He examined his schedule and after some period of months I guess, decided he would have time and the interest to become a consultant also at Oak Ridge so he became a consultant. But the first time he visited was after I had left.

…

STERN: Now, when he was a consultant for Oak Ridge was it a financial arrangement that he had with Oak Ridge or did he do this as part of his consulting with the government?

HURD: That’s it.

STERN: It was part of his consulting with the government?

HURD: That’s it.

STERN: And the expectation would be that he’d come down once a month, twice a month, what was the frequency?

HURD: I think he just came once for a preliminary visit and then it would be decided how often he came. I think he went once or twice. …

STERN: Well Oak Ridge did eventually build a IAS type computer.

HURD: Yes.”

(Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

The Oak Ridge national lab had begun as the Clinton laboratories of the Clinton Engineer Works, the leading production site for nuclear bomb materials during the Manhattan Project.

(Bruce Cameron Reed, The History and Science of the Manhattan Project, 2014, Springer; and, “OAK RIDGE AND HANFORD COME THROUGH (Oak Ridge [Clinton] and Hanford, 1944-1945)”, The Manhattan Project, U.S. Department of Energy)

Nuclear materials production had not been a part of von Neumann’s Manhattan Project roles, which were in bomb design at the Los Alamos national lab, and in analyzing and selecting the bombing targets – including proposing the Japanese ancient capital of Kyoto as one.

(Kati Marton, The Great Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, 2006, Simon and Schuster; “The enduring legacy of John von Neumann”, by John Waelti, October 14, 2011, The Monroe Times; and, “IMPLOSION BECOMES A NECESSITY (Los Alamos: Laboratory, 1944)”, The Manhattan Project, U.S. Department of Energy)

After World War II, von Neumann had his focus on designing and advocating for the hydrogen bomb and for intercontinental ballistic missiles, as discussed in Part 5 (i).

But as Hurd explained, there was “a lot of numerical analysis”, i.e., computing, that von Neumann’s talents would be useful, von Neumann accepted Oak Ridge’s invitation, and Oak Ridge later built a von Neumann IAS-type computer – as a part of a von Neumann-led computer-building movement among the academia and the scientific institutions, reviewed in Part 5 (i).

As in the above quote, after recruiting von Neumann for consulting Hurd then left Oak Ridge before von Neumann began to attend the lab. As quoted earlier, Hurd moved to IBM in 1949 to found and direct its applied science department, and became a key driving force behind IBM’s first commercial computer, the IBM 701 “Defense Calculators” of the Korean War era.

The second time in the early 1950s, recruiting von Neumann to be a consultant for IBM, Hurd had an observation about von Neumann’s attitude toward money, that von Neumann was “interested in money” but it was not a primary reason for his doing consultant work, as Hurd later told:

“STERN: Bullom in the obituary you showed me, frequently talked about Von Neumann being interested in power, if you recall. Did you have any sense of that being the case?

HURD: No.

STERN: What do you think his reasons for consulting for IBM were?

STERN: Or just speculate?

HURD: I think he liked the opportunity to be with a group of bright people. He clearly enjoyed his consulting projects. He liked it. And there were some problems to be solved in IBM which were challenges which he could solve. For example we discussed the possibility of writing a simulator of the Endicott plant. And we decided it was silly. I think he was interested in money. I don’t think that was a primary reason but when we came to discuss the terms why he was clearly interested in what the honorarium would be. I think I remember at first he thought it was terribly high. I don’t know what Von Neumann thought later. I think he was also interested in having his ideas put into a practical application. I don’t think our association was a deterministic thing, because he and I could have seen each other [at times other] than when he consulted.”

(Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

Both von Neumann and Aiken were interested in money. However, when von Neumann was told of the IBM honorarium figure for his consulting, he thought “it was terribly high”, whereas Aiken’s goal, reviewed earlier, was “to be rich”.

And when Hurd said he did not think his association with von Neumann was “a deterministic thing”, he probably suggested that the outcome of their interactions made them associate more.

In that same logic, was it, or was it not, “a deterministic thing” that Hurd’s interactions with Howard Aiken, which led to Hurd’s becoming cited as a “close associate” of Aiken’s, did not lead to their starting a business together even though he could do so and Aiken repeatedly expressed an interest?

I think the various anecdotes Hurd told that I have reviewed are surprisingly revealing of Hurd’s own inclination towards von Neumann, and partially explain why he twice succeeded in recruiting von Neumann to major scientific and technological consultancies, and yet twice failed to proceed with forming a company with Aiken to develop microcomputers and personal computers.

But there was something more specific linking Hurd’s recruiting of von Neumann for consultancies to his later discussions with Aiken about co-starting a company: in Bernard Cohen’s biography of Aiken, “Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer”, quoted earlier, Hurd was quoted as saying that Aiken was very close to George Garrett, Lockheed Missiles Company’s Director of Computer Activities; and in his interview with Nancy Stern quoted earlier, Hurd said that he and his Oak Ridge national lab colleague and boss George Garrett, a mathematician, decided to recruit von Neumann as a consultant.

The George Garrett at Oak Ridge and the one at Lockheed Missiles were in fact the same person, like Cuthbert Hurd a mathematician in the atomic energy field and then in the computing field, though in Garrett’s case at Lockheed Missiles he continued to be in a military arena:

“George A. Garrett, 84, a 21-year resident of Menlo Park, died May 21 after an illness of several months. Born in Sardis, Miss., he graduated from the University of Mississippi and received a doctorate in mathematics from Rice University in Houston. He began his career as the party chief of a seismographic crew, until World War II, when he worked as a civilian for the Navy at MIT, developing and testing airplane sonar. After the war, he worked in the burgeoning nuclear field at Oak Ridge, Tenn., where he developed peaceful uses for atomic energy and helped to design the nuclear power plant installed at Paducah, Ky. After years at Oak Ridge, he became director of information processing for Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale. In 1977 he transferred to the position of senior scientist for Bechtel Corp. in San Francisco. …”

(“Deaths”, May 31, 1995, Palo Alto Online)

Now I can see that the two engaged in very specific activities in a human-resources sense: Hurd and Garrett together associated with von Neumann while in the atomic energy field, and then with Aiken in the computing field; first with von Neumann, Garrett no doubt worked with him at Oak Ridge on both nuclear energy and the computer built there following von Neumann’s design, while Hurd moved to IBM, where he recruited von Neumann for a second time; later with Aiken, Garrett most likely had a role in recruiting him to Lockheed Missiles in the fledgling Silicon Valley, while Hurd went there to discuss with Aiken, and their discussions and negotiations would determine whether Hurd, by now an established computer industry executive, would take the second step in Aiken’s case, i.e., to start a new computer company together.

Apparently Hurd did not take that second step with Aiken that he had taken with von Neumann.

Possibly due to disillusionment, Howard Aiken, as told in his February 1973 interview quoted earlier from Bernard Cohen’s biography of him, ended his consultancy with Lockheed that year and concentrated on consulting for Monsanto for the same goal of making computers small – unfortunately, and somewhat prophetically for something he had said in that interview, Aiken died in his pursue of the goal.

Cuthbert Hurd was of course not the only industry executive in the computer field Aiken was close to, Aiken’s former Mark I underling Richard Bloch being another, who at some point became general manager of Raytheon’s computer division as quoted earlier. But as the example of Louis Fein illustrates, in the computing field Raytheon was no match for IBM.

Given that Hurd had been IBM’s director of the Applied Science Department and then director of the Electronic Data Processing Machines Division, he had the full breath of management experiences in computer development and computer applications.

At IBM, Hurd had a lot of interactions with Thomas Watson father and son:

“HURD: … I was hired with some notion about helping IBM get in the computer field. It was vague. When I came in I talked to Mr. Watson Sr. who was the chairman, Mr. Phillips who was the president and Tom Watson Jr. who was executive vice president, the director of sales, the director of product planning and John McPherson who I guess was vice president of engineering. I talked to everybody, we all talked about this subject.”

(Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

Loud arguments between Watson, Sr. and Watson, Jr. – the father against and the son for IBM computer development as first noted in Part 5 (i) – were often overheard by Hurd and other executives:

“STERN: … Now you’ve mentioned and I’ve read elsewhere, that in the late ’40s, Watson Jr. was really interested in getting into the computing field and Watson Sr. was not. Did you experience any kind of difference of opinion over this issue?

HURD: First let me say as I said earlier that I think, in 1949, Tom did not think specifically that IBM should get into the computer field, because the computer field was not defined. He used to talk about electronics. He talked about two things. He’d talk about electronics, and he’d talk about magnetic tape, and he understood instinctively that something had to be done with it, but we were all aware now–what do I mean by all? Half dozen people were aware– that there was a difference of opinion. Which would sometimes have a very strong expression between Mr. Watson Sr. and Mr. Watson Jr. The away we knew about this was, Mr. Watson Sr.’s on the seventeenth floor, Mr. Watson Jr.’s office was on the sixteenth floor. My office was on the fifteenth floor. We’d sometimes have meetings on the sixteenth floor, and Tom would disappear, and sometimes if somebody happened to go up or down, they never took the elevator. There was a stairway. You’d go outside Tom’s office, and in fifteen or twenty feet there was a door and it was a stairway, and it was not unusual to hear very loud voices.

STERN: [Laugh.]

HURD: And nobody ever said that you know explicitly that this is what this is going on. But everybody had the impression that these two gentlemen, who had very strong minds were disagreeing about something. …”

(Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

As quoted earlier, after he left IBM for the chairmanship of the Computer Usage Company, Hurd continued to be a consultant for IBM. It was only logical because that independent company, founded in 1955, produced software for use on IBM computers.

(Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 2003, The MIT Press)

Hurd’s important responsibilities within IBM, and continuing close ties as a consultant to IBM afterwards, could in fact be a main reason why Aiken repeatedly discussed with him ideas of starting a new company to develop smaller computers. After all, from the very beginning it had been IBM that made Aiken’s Mark I project a reality.

As reviewed in details in Part 5 (i), major U.S. government funding support for science and technology was first jumpstarted by the considerations of military usage of the Second World War; the first general-purpose electronic computer ENIAC, with John von Neumann involved in a key development role, was made during that time for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground; subsequently, IBM’s first commercial computer, the Model 701 Defense Calculator, with Cuthbert Hurd in a key development role, was made in response to the Korean War.

It was no exception for Aiken’s own invention, the Mark machines, which he had independently proposed to IBM in 1937 several years before World War II. Ultimately, they were all made for use for the U.S. military’s needs:

“The four large-scale calculators which Aiken developed were:

Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (the Harvard Mark I, known within IBM as the ASCC): conceived by Aiken in 1937, designed by IBM engineers and by Aiken, built by IBM as a gift to Harvard. The Mark I was used at Harvard by a US Navy crew that included Grace Murray Hopper and Richard Bloch. …

Mark II: Designed and built at Harvard for the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren, Va., for the development of ballistics tables. …

Mark III: Like Mark II, this machine was designed and built at Harvard for Dahlgren. …

Mark IV: Designed, built, and operated at Harvard for the US Air Force…”

(J. A. N. Lee, 1995, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.)

As for Aiken himself, the Harvard press release for Mark I’s dedication, discussed earlier, referred to Aiken as “Commander Howard H. Aiken” of the U.S. Navy Reserve; clearly the Navy, which made good use of the first two, non-electronic Mark machines, was a pride of Aiken and Harvard.

So for Howard Aiken, his consultancy at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, where he worked with George Garrett and had discussions with Cuthbert Hurd about starting a new company, was probably in his understanding a necessary military-affiliation ingredient for launching the new venture of his desire; with proposed technical help of some Lockheed engineering personnel as mentioned earlier, it could make him the “father” of a new generation of computers – an accolade that had eluded him in his Harvard Mark projects.

The U.S. Navy certainly prized its Harvard Mark machines association. Grace Murray Hopper, as cited above Richard Bloch’s colleague in the Navy team using Mark I, and another of Aiken’s Harvard underlings, eventually rose in the Nay to become a rear admiral, on the merits of her computer work leadership:

“Grace Brewster Murray was born on December 9, 1906 in New York City. In 1928 she graduated from Vassar College with a BA in mathematics and physics and joined the Vassar faculty. While an instructor at Vassar, she continued her studies in mathematics at Yale University, where she earned an MA in 1930 and a PhD in 1934. …

In 1930 Grace Murray married Vincent Foster Hopper. (He died in 1945 during World War II, and they had no children.) She remained at Vassar as an associate professor until 1943, when she joined the United States Naval Reserve to assist her country in its wartime challenges. … she was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she worked at Harvard’s Cruft Laboratories on the Mark series of computers. In 1946 Admiral Hopper resigned her leave of absence from Vassar to become a research fellow in engineering and applied physics at Harvard’s Computation Laboratory. In 1949 she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a Senior Mathematician. This group was purchased by Remington Rand in 1950, which in turn merged into the Sperry Corporation in 1955. …

Throughout her years in academia and industry, Admiral Hopper was a consultant and lecturer for the United States Naval Reserve. After a seven-month retirement, she returned to active duty in the Navy in 1967 as a leader in the Naval Data Automation Command. Upon her retirement from the Navy in 1986 with the rank of Rear Admiral, she immediately became a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, and remained there several years, working well into her eighties. She died in her sleep in Arlington, Virginia on January 1, 1992.”

(“Grace Murray Hopper”, 1994, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, as posted by Yale University Department of Computer Science)

Like her former Harvard mentor Howard Aiken, Grace Murray Hopper also died during sleep. But at 86 on New Year 1992, she enjoyed 13 more years of life than Aiken.

In Part 3 I have mentioned a women’s computing conference in October 2014 that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was invited to attend and there Maria Klawe disagreed with something he said; the annual conference, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, is named in honor of Grace Murray Hopper.

(“About”, Anita Borg Institute Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing)

Subtly different, Cuthbert Hurd, whom Aiken counted on for co-launching a computer industry venture, had a U.S. Coast Guard Academy working background from World War II:

“HURD: I started mathematics with a Ph.D. [from] the University of Illinois, 1936. Dissertation concerned asymptotic solutions of differential equations. Taught at Michigan State College, now Michigan State University, until the war. And organized and staffed department for reserve officers of The Coast Guard Academy, and was educational officer for the academy, helped the admiral revise the curriculum, and was briefly dean of Allegheny College, joined the Oak Ridge Project in nuclear energy. In 1947 was a Technical Research Head. Did work which involved dealing with lots of data. Felt we needed something more, became acquainted with IBM. Called on Mr. Watson Sr. told him I wanted to work for IBM. Joined IBM, organized the Applied Science department. Got IBM’s first computer announced in about a year and a half.”

(Nancy Stern, January 20, 1981, Charles Babbage Institute, The Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota)

As described, at the Coast Guard Academy Hurd was an organizer of reserve officers, and an educational officer, helping the admiral revise the curriculum.

Hmm, once helping always helping the admiral revise ‘The Coast Guard Academy curriculum’, so to speak, now I begin to wonder: might it not be Hurd’s closer empathy for von Neumann than for Aiken, but a more subtle form of institutional bias that prevented Hurd from helping Aiken’s ambition of developing and commercializing a new generation of computers?

More specifically, prior to his Oak Ridge career Hurd’s interests had all been in education: college teaching and research, personnel education and administration during World War II at the Coast Guard Academy, and academic administration as a college dean; then at Oak Ridge national lab, Hurd began managing technical research.

Hurd’s starting role at IBM, founding director of the applied science department, was thus likely offered to him because of his prior long career in administering education and scientific research.

After IBM, the independent computer software company Hurd became the board chair of, the Computer Usage Company, emphasized “usage” of computers, in fact IBM computers as mentioned earlier.

Even later, Hurd became board chairman of a company specializing in “educational software”:

“… He was later appointed chairman of the Picodyne Corporation, which specialized in educational software, and in 1984 he co-founded Quintus Computer Systems, which was devoted to the commercialization of artificial intelligence. At the time of his death, he was the chief scientist of Northpoint Software Ventures Inc., a developer of risk management software.”

(Laurence Zuckerman, June 2, 1996, The New York Times)

Hence, my metaphor of Cuthbert Hurd always helping the admiral revise the curriculum, includes about some detected disdain, tinted by Hurd’s educational institutional perspective albeit perhaps not as decidedly biased as Al Bowker’s lifelong academic perspective, toward the business passion and acumen of Howard Aiken, a retired Harvard professor – as a result Hurd talked about but never took a real step toward forming a computer company with Aiken.

John von Neumann, stricken with cancer in his early 50s, wanted to move to California to engage in “research on the computer and its possible future uses, with considerable commercial sponsorship”; but did not have life left to do so as detailed in my review in Part 5 (i).

Howard Aiken, von Neumann’s academic computer-pioneer rival, lived two decades longer, retired from the academia, started a businessman career, and became a computer consultant in California’s growing Silicon Valley for over a decade, at Lockheed Missiles and Space company; but despite his repeatedly expressed wishes, with technological ideas proposed, to start a company to develop smaller computers, the promise he was given in return was never fulfilled.

Finally Aiken gave up on Lockheed and Silicon Valley, pinning his hope on Monsanto’s computer technology ambition; but sadly, he immediately met his end.

What consoled Howard Aiken, undoubtedly, was that within a short 3 years of his early retirement from Harvard, Alfred Brooks, one of his “most devoted disciples” as referred to earlier, made significant achievements as the development team leader of a revolutionarily important and successful IBM commercial computer, and became the founding chairman of the second academic computer science department in the U.S.

Decades after Aiken’s death, in 1999 Brooks received computer science’s highest honor, the A. M. Turing Award, an honor in my opinion Howard Aiken very much deserved and should have been given – had not been for his career conversion to a businessman.

Since founding the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s computer science department, Brooks’s research has specialised in computer graphics:

“After the successful delivery of the System/360 and its operating system, Brooks was invited to the University of North Carolina, where he founded the University’s computer science department in 1964. He chaired the department from 1964 to 1984, and served as the Kenan Professor of Computer Science. His principal research area, real-time three-dimensional graphics, provides virtual environments that let biochemists reason about the structure of complex molecules, and let architects walk through buildings under design. Brooks has also pioneered the use of a haptic force feedback display to supplement visual graphics.”

(“FREDERICK (“FRED”) BROOKS”, A. M. Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery)

As discussed in Part 3, Chapel Hill’s computer science department was where Jack Snoeyink moved to in 2000, from the University of British Columbia, who had a Stanford computer science Ph.D. with specialisation in computer graphics and whose 1990 hiring by the UBC computer science department had ended my hope for a UBC tenure-track faculty position.

I note that Snoeyink became Brooks’s colleague the year after Brooks’s winning of the Turing Award.

As also reviewed in Part 3, graduating from Stanford Snoeyink was recruited by UBC computer graphics professor Alain Fournier, who had taught courses at Stanford and been acquainted with Snoeyink’s Ph.D. adviser Leonidas Guibas; later to Chapel Hill Snoeyink became a colleague of Henry Fuchs, a senior professor in computer graphics who had been on the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas in the mid-late 1970s when Fournier was a Ph.D. student there, interested in specializing under Fuchs before Fuchs’s departure for Chapel Hill.

Clearly, UNC Chapel Hill’s computer science leader Alfred Brooks recognized talents like Henry Fuchs and Jack Snoeyink.

But mindful of Brooks being a former devoted disciple of Howard Aiken, and mindful of a computer-pioneer rivalry between Aiken and John von Neumann, I note that back in the Manhattan Project era von Neumann had had an important collaborator also by the name of Fuchs, Klaus Fuchs, in pioneering design of the hydrogen bomb, who turned out to be a spy handing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union:

“Fuchs, the Quaker son of a Lutheran pastor, was born in Russelsheim, Germany in 1911. He attended both Leipzig and Kiel Universities but, as a Communist, was persecuted by the Nazis. He fled through Switzerland and France to Britain, where he attended in succession Bristol and then Edinburgh Universities. In 1940 he was taken into custody as a German ‘enemy alien’ and shipped off to an internment camp in Quebec, Canada.

In 1941, with the help of his old professor at Edinburgh, Max Born (himself a Jewish refugee from Germany) he was back in Britain — and in 1942 he obtained a job with the ‘Tube Alloys’ project (code name for the British atomic research programme).

He was naturalised British in 1942 and, ironically, he signed the Official Secrets Act at about the same time as he started meeting ‘the girl from Banbury’, really Ruth Werner, a German communist working for the Soviets. …

In late 1943, he was transferred to New York to work on the US atomic bomb programmme at Columbia University; then, in the summer of the following year, he started work at the Theoretical Physics Division on the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico … Together with John von Neumann he filed a patent, far ahead of its time, for initiating fusion and implosion in an H-bomb.

In 1947, he became the first head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment, which had been set up at the instigation of Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell (1886-1957), Churchill’s scientific adviser …

While at Harwell, Fuchs met Soviet agent Alexander Feklisov (1914-2007) at least twice… On the first occasion, he gave top-secret information about the American super H-bomb and how scientists Fermi and Teller had proved its workability. On the second, he gave away secrets which… “played an exceptional role in the subsequent course of the Soviet thermonuclear programme”.

(“Harwell head gave away H-bomb secrets”, by Chris Koenig, March 9, 2011, Oxford Times)

So I wonder if Professor Alfred Brooks was intrigued not only by Professor Henry Fuchs’s talents but also by the Fuchs name when he hired the latter, who is today the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill.

(“Henry Fuchs: Federico Gil Distinguished Professor”, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

In any case, per his Turing Award biography, in his IBM days Brooks had participated in developing a computer for the NSA, and helping the U.S. government assess the computing capability of the Soviet Union, and so he had his nerves.

Alain Fournier did not get to become Henry Fuchs’s Ph.D. student in Dallas, but decades later Jack Snoeyink he mentored became Fuchs’s faculty colleague at Chapel Hill, and so an intention was realized by one of a younger generation.

Despite Jack’s role in UBC academic politics to my detriment, mentioned in a quote in Part 1, it is still fitting that a Ph.D. from the most influential academic computer science department in the U.S. founded by the late George Forsythe, “almost … the Martin Luther of the Computer Reformation”, became a professor in the U.S.’s second academic computer science department founded ahead of Stanford’s, and in the same computer graphics field as that department’s founder Alfred Brooks.

Snoeyink went to Chapel Hill in the same year 2000 when Fournier died of cancer, as in Part 3. Fournier was 56 – only a year older than George Forsythe at his death decades earlier.

(“Alain Fournier, a life in pictures”, Pierre Poulin, Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal)

Then in the same year 2015 when Brooks retired after 51 years at UNC, Snoeyink became a program director in the U.S. National Science Foundation as noted in Part 3 – I can only hope that this is an indication of progress.

(Part 5 continues in (iii))

A review of postings about scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, with observations regarding elite centrism – Part 5: inventions, innovations, and ushering of ‘the new normal’ (i)

(Continued from Part 4)

The electronic computer ranks among the foremost in the history of scientific and technological innovations. The mathematician John von Neumann, who played important roles in World War II U.S. military science projects, is often regarded as the “father of computers” for his key participation in the development of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, the University of Pennsylvania, and his subsequent leading role in spreading the development of computers:

“The Moore School signed a research contract with the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) of the U.S. Army, and in an August 1942 memorandum Mauchly proposed that the school build a high-speed calculator out of vacuum tube technology for the war effort. In 1943, the army granted funds to build the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) to create artillery ballistic tables. Eckert served as chief engineer of a team of fifty engineers and technical staff on the ENIAC project.

Completed in 1945, the ENIAC consisted of 49-foot-high cabinets, almost 18,000 vacuum tubes, and many miles of wiring, and weighed 30 tons. …

… While building the ENIAC, Mauchly and Eckert developed the idea of the stored program for their next computer project, where data and program code resided together in memory. The concept allowed computers to be programmed dynamically so that the actual electronics or plugboards did not have to be changed with every program.

… During World War II, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb and also lent his wide expertise as a consultant on other defense projects.

After becoming involved in the ENIAC project, von Neumann expanded on the concept of stored programs and laid the theoretical foundations of all modern computers in a 1945 report and through later work. His ideas came to be known as the “von Neumann Architecture,”, and von Neumann is often called the “father of computers.” … After the war, von Neumann went back to Princeton and persuaded the Institute for Advanced Study to build their own pioneering digital computer, the IAS (derived from the initials of the institute), which he designed.

…

Eckert and Mauchly deserve equal credit with von Neumann for their innovations, though von Neumann’s elaboration of their initial ideas and his considerable prestige lent credibility to the budding movement to build electronic computers. …”

(Eric G. Swedin and David L. Ferro, Computers: The Life Story of a Technology, 2005, The Johns Hopkins University Press)

In a February 2013 blog post, I wondered about the prospect in the mid-1950s that von Neumann, then stricken with cancer, was to move from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, to the University of California; “I bet it was my alma mater UC Berkeley”, I marvelled at how much his coming would have been a boost to Berkeley’s science and the nascent Silicon Valley’s technology:

“In any case, it was a pity for the University of California that John von Neumann died at his prime age, as before his death he had decided to resign from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and move to one of the UC campuses, as also revealed in the book quoted about him:

“When Johnny was in hospital in 1956, with what proved to be his terminal cancer, he wrote to Oppenheimer and explained, although not yet for publication, that he was not in fact going to come back to the IAS. He had privately accepted an offer to be professor at large at the University of California: he would live near one of its campuses (it had not been quite decided which) and proceed with research on the computer and its possible future uses, with considerable commercial sponsorship. We cannot know how much he would then have enriched our lives, with cellular automata, with totally new lines for the computer, with new sorts of mathematics.”

I bet it was my alma mater UC Berkeley John von Neumann was about to move to, given its close collaborations with several National Labs that had nuclear science and weapons researches, and its proximity to what would become Silicon Valley around Stanford University across the Bay as discussed in Part 1.

The scientific and technological history of the Bay Area would have looked very different, so much more – had “Johnny” come to his senses earlier, I sigh.”

(“Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)”, February 28, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

What I quoted from in the above was Norman MacRae’s book, John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More, originally published in 1992.

Von Neumann soon died, and his intended move has left room for imagination since the University of California had several major campuses and “it had not been quite decided which” according to MacRae.

My educated guess of UC Berkeley was based on the close relations Berkeley had with the nearby national laboratories – the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab discussed in Part 4 – in nuclear science and weapons research, of top interest to von Neumann.

For instance, in his involvement in the development of the hydrogen bomb, von Neumann had spent time at the Livermore lab with the physicist Edward Teller, Cold War strategist Herman Khan, and others:

“Herman Kahn … went to U.C.L.A. and majored in physics. During the war, he served in the Pacific theatre in a non-combat position, then finished his B.S. and entered a Ph.D. program at Cal Tech. He failed to graduate… went to work at rand. He became involved in the development of the hydrogen bomb, and commuted to the Livermore Laboratory, near Berkeley, where he worked with Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Hans Bethe.”

(“Fat Man: Herman Kahn and the nuclear age”, by Louis Menand, June 27, 2005, The New Yorker)

On the other hand, UCLA has claimed that von Neumann had planned to move there, before his premature death in February 1957, because of his close association with a computer project at RAND Corporation in Santa Monica in the Los Angeles region:

“1950_____________________________________

At RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, a project to build a von Neumann type machine was closely tracking the ongoing development t the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (von Neumann often came West to consult at RAND and, in fit, his plan to relocate to UCLA was aborted by his death in February 1957).”

(“THE HISTORY OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING & COMPUTER SCIENCE AT UCLA”, by Gerald Estrin, Computer Science Department, UCLA Engineering)

As cited, the RAND computer project closely followed von Neumann’s computer design at the IAS in Princeton.

RAND was the Cold War think-tank from which John Nash, whose Princeton Ph.D. thesis idea in game theory had once been dismissed by von Neumann, was expelled in 1954 due to a police arrest for homosexual activity in a public restroom, here with more details than a previous quote in Part 2:

“That August… He spent hours at a time walking on the sand or long the promenade in Palisade Park, watching the bodybuilders on Muscle Beach…

One morning at the very end of the month, the head of RAND’s security detail got a call from the Santa Monica police station, which, as it happened, wasn’t far from RAND’s new headquarters on the far side of Main. It seemed that two cops in vice, one decoy and one arresting officer named John Otto Mattson, had picked up a young guy in a men’s bathroom in Palisades Park in the very early morning. … The man, who looked to be in his mid-twenties, claimed that he was a mathematician employed by RAND. Was he?

…

… Nash had a top-secret security clearance. He’d been picked up in a “police trap.” …

…

Nash was not the first RAND employee to be caught in one of the Santa Monica police traps. Muscle Beach, between the Santa Monica pier and the little beach community of Venice, was a magnet for bodybuilders and the biggest homosexual pickup scene in the Malibu Bay area. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Unlike John Nash, a libidinous young gay man incessantly roaming public beaches and parks and thus a misfit for RAND’s security sensitivity, John von Neumann was a leading Cold War brain of the think-tank, alongside Herman Khan:

“… RAND is a civilian think tank … described by Fortune in 1951 as “the Air Force’s big-brain-buying venture”, where brilliant academics pondered nuclear war and the new theory of games. …

…

Nothing like the RAND of the early 1950s has existed before or since. It was the original think tank, a strange hybrid of which the unique mission was to apply rational analysis and the latest quantitative methods to the problem of how to use the terrifying new nuclear weaponry to forestall war with Russia – or to win a war if deterrence failed. The people of RAND were there to think the unthinkable, in Herman Kahn’s famous phrase. … And Kahn and von Neumann, RAND’s most celebrated thinkers, were among the alleged models for Dr. Strangelove. … RAND had its roots in World War II, when the American military, for the first time in its history, had recruited legions of scientists, mathematicians, and economists and used them to help win the war. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Beyond RAND or Livermore, von Neumann’s advocacy for the use of nuclear weapons was famous, rare among scientists, and framed in the mindset of “world government” – as in Part 2 a political ideal Nash was also drawn to and attempted to campaign for:

“After the Axis had been destroyed, Von Neumann urged that the U.S. immediately build even more powerful atomic weapons and use them before the Soviets could develop nuclear weapons of their own. It was not an emotional crusade, Von Neumann, like others, had coldly reasoned that the world had grown too small to permit nations to conduct their affairs independently of one another. He held that world government was inevitable—and the sooner the better. But he also believed it could never be established while Soviet Communism dominated half of the globe. A famous Von Neumann observation at that time: “With the Russians it is not a question of whether but when.” A hard-boiled strategist, he was one of the few scientists to advocate preventive war, and in 1950 he was remarking, “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not 1 o’clock?”

(“Passing of a Great Mind: John von Neumann, a Brilliant, Jovial Mathematician, Was a Prodigious Servant of Science and His Country”, by Clay Blair, Jr., February 25, 1957, Volume 42, Number 8, Life)

So for von Neumann, world government needed to be achieved through war, even nuclear war, rather than through the kind of peace movement Nash wished for but failed to start.

Von Neumann’s contributions as a military technology consultant and a Cold War adviser were immense:

“His fellow scientists… knew that during World War II at Los Alamos Von Neumann’s development of the idea of implosion speeded up the making of the atomic bomb by at least a full year. His later work with electronic computers quickened U.S. development of the H.bomb by months. The chief designer of the H-bomb, Physicist Edward Teller, once said with wry humor that Von Neumann was “one of those rare mathematicians who could descend to the level of the physicists.” …

… The principal adviser to the U.S. Air Force on nuclear weapons, Von Neumann was the most influential scientific force behind the U.S. decision to embark on accelerated production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. …”

(Clay Blair, Jr., February 25, 1957, Volume 42, Number 8, Life)

Without von Neumann’s ambitious push, the United States would have fallen behind the Soviet Union in the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), namely long-range strategic nuclear missiles:

“In the early 1950s, the champion of strategic bombers in the United States was the famous, truculent, imperious Gen. Curtis LeMay, the chief of the Strategic Air Command, who, during the last months of World War II, had tried to break Japan’s will and avert the necessity of an American invasion by dropping 150,000 tons of firebombs on Japanese cities. …

…

In the Pentagon of the 1950s, LeMay was “king of the mountain,” as one colleague put it, known for pulverizing those few men who tried to stand in his way. …

Lacking LeMay’s blinders, Bennie Schriever realized that the Soviets planned to rest their future defense not on bombers but on intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States with only 15 minutes of advance warning. The Kremlin was also fast improving batteries of surface-to-air missiles that could knock LeMay’s beloved bombers out of the sky. …

Schriever’s new way of thinking began in 1953, when he was still a colonel. During a briefing on intermediate-range bombers at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, he had a fateful conversation with the legendary refugee scientists Edward Teller and John von Neumann. They predicted that by 1960, the United States would be creating hydrogen bombs so lightweight that missiles could carry them. The following year, Schriever, by then a general, was asked to supervise, on highest priority, the creation of some kind of ICBM force. …”

(“Missile Defense”, by Michael Beschloss, October 1, 2009, The New York Times)

But as discussed earlier, in hospital for cancer treatment in 1956 von Neumann expressed the wish to move to California to conduct computer research.

The computer developed at RAND in association with von Neumann was name JOHNNIAC in honor of him, and was one of the most utilized computers of that early generation:

“JOHNNIAC (circa 1952-1966)

The JOHNNIAC (John von Neumann Integrator and Automatic Computer) was a product of the RAND Corporation. It was yet another machine based on the Princeton Institute IAS architecture. The JOHNNIAC was named in von Neumann’s honor, although it seems that von Neumann disapproved. JOHNNIAC is arguably the longest-lived of the early computers. It was in use almost continuously from the end of the Korean War, until finally shut down on 11 February 1966 after logging over 50,000 operational hours. After two “rescues” from the scrap heap, the machine currently resides at the Computer History Museum.”

(Marshall William McMurran, ACHIEVING ACCURACY: A Legacy of Computers and Missiles, 2008, Xlibris Corporation)

UCLA’s claim that it and RAND were von Neumann’s choice in 1956 is thus consistent with MacRae’s account of von Neumann’s wish, that he wanted to concentrate on “research on the computer and its possible future uses, with considerable commercial sponsorship” – von Neumann’s prior association with RAND and JOHNNIAC made it more likely for UCLA rather than UC Berkeley to be his choice.

In that vein I would guess anew, that with von Neumann’s guidance RAND could have started a ‘Computer Beach’ at Santa Monica. It could resemble the Silicon Valley’s start in a Palo Alto garage by the Hewlett-Packard Company’s founders under the mentorship of Frederick Terman, their Stanford University professor:

“The Rise of Silicon Valley

In 1939, with the encouragement of their professor and mentor, Frederick Terman, Stanford alumni David Packard and William Hewlett established a little electronics company in a Palo Alto garage. That garage would later be dubbed “the Birthplace of Silicon Valley.””

(“History of Stanford”, Stanford University)

There would have been plenty of time to build a computer industry for von Neumann and RAND, as RAND was much more than a garage and Hewlett-Packard’s first computer would come out only 10 years later in 1966 – the year of JOHNNIAC’s retirement.

(“Hewlett-Packard”, 2008, Silicon Valley Historical Association)

My imagined Computer Beach versus the nascent Silicon Valley would have been one scenario, while UCLA versus UC Berkeley was another factor von Neumann likely considered.

Stricken with cancer, von Neumann likely came to think of his involvement in the atomic bomb development as an occupational hazard, as I discussed in my February 2013 blog post, again quoting from MacRae:

“After his intimate participations in advanced military researches during World War II and afterwards, including in the development of the nuclear bomb, John von Neumann died of cancer in 1957 at only 53, and there has been a question whether his premature death had been work-related:

“It is plausible that in 1955 the then-fifty-one-year-old Johnny’s cancer sprang from his attendance at the 1946 Bikini nuclear tests. The safety precautions at Bikini were based on calculations that were meant to keep any observer’s exposure to radiation well below what had given Japanese at Hiroshima even a 1 percent extra risk of cancer. But Johnny, like some other great scientists, underestimated risks at that time. He was startled when radiation probably caused the cancer and death in 1954 at age fifty-three of his great friend Fermi, whose 1930s experiments with nuclear bombardment in Italy were not accompanied by proper precautions. Soon after a Soviet nuclear test in 1953 Sakharov and Vyacheslav Malyshev walked near the site to assess its results. Sakharov ascribed Malyshev’s death from leukemia in 1954, and possibly his own terminal illness thirty-five years later, to that walk.”

So von Neumann and some other great scientists in the nuclear bomb development may have “underestimated” the health risks, and he and Enrico Fermi who had discovered nuclear reaction, both died at the age of 53.

Hmm, I doubt that a mathematician of von Neumann’s caliber would have incorrectly calculated the cancer risks from radiation.”

(February 28, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

I doubted in that blog post, and still do, that a mathematician and scientist of John von Neumann’s caliber would have underestimated his risk of getting cancer from nuclear radiation. But the facts remain that both von Neumann and Enrico Fermi, whose discovery of nuclear reaction made the atomic bomb possible, died of cancer at the same age of 53.

Moreover, as I noted in that blog post, previously quoted in Part 4, that former UC Berkeley physicist Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the atomic bomb development and director of the IAS to whom von Neumann expressed the wish to move to UC, later also died of cancer – 10 years older at the age of 63:

“The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the director of IAS at Princeton with whom von Neumann discussed his pending move in 1956, had hailed from UC Berkeley to become “father of the atomic bomb”, leading the development of nuclear bombs at Los Alamos National Lab founded by him in northern New Mexico; Oppenheimer later also died of cancer, at the age of 63.”

(February 28, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

So it is possible that in 1956 cancer prompted von Neumann’s final decision that would be to stay away from UC Berkeley and the nearby nuclear labs.

But von Neumann was also a professor of mathematics, at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and, if he had moved to California, at UCLA or UC Berkeley, the two oldest primary UC campuses as in Part 4. The academic factors could also sway his decision.

At UCLA there was a computer, SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer), developed at the Institute for Numerical Analysis sponsored by the National Bureau of Standards and funded by the Office of Naval Research:

“1947____________________________________________

The Institute for Numerical Analysis was set up on the UCLA campus under sponsorship of the National Bureau of Standards and with funding from the Office of Naval Research. The primary function of INA was “to conduct research and training in the types of mathematics pertinent to the efficient exploitation and further development of high-speed automatic digital computing machinery.” INA attracted a stream of internationally recognized applied mathematicians. Harry Huskey completed the SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) development project in 1950, and it became one of the very few places where modern numerical experiments could be conducted. The SWAC provided a testing ground for computer engineers, programmers and applied mathematicians. …”

(Gerald Estrin, Computer Science Department, UCLA Engineering)

As quoted, upon its 1950 completion the SWAC computer at UCLA became “one of the very few places where modern numerical experiments could be conducted”.

The National Bureau of Standards wanted computers for practical needs, and so SWAC and its Eastern sibling SEAC were quickly built, completed even before von Neumann’s IAS computer in Princeton:

“The SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer) and the SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) were built by the National Bureau of Standards in Washington and Los Angeles respectively. Both of these computers were designed to be completed rapidly in order to satisfy the computing needs of the National Bureau of Standards until either the IAS machine or the UNIVAC was completed. … In May of 1950 the SEAC became the first post-ENIAC American computer to be fully operational. … SWAC was completed by July 1950…”

(Louis A. Girifalco, Dynamics of Technological Change, 1991, Van Nostrand Reinhold)

Von Neumann, on the other hand, was the leader of a larger computer-building movement at universities and scientific institutions in the U.S. and internationally, distributing his computer design plans far and wide:

“At Cambridge, computer development was led by Maurice Wilkes, who constituted the staff of the “University Mathematical Laboratory,” which was founded in 1937 to tend the university’s Differential Analyzer. In May of 1946, Wilkes read von Neumann’s “First Draft on the EDVAC,” which he obtained from L. J. Comrie who had just visited the United States. Wilkes was invited to the Moore School 1946 summer lectures and returned home determined to build an electronic computer. … He called his machine the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator). …

EDSAC also led to the first computer to be used for commercial data processing. …

In spite of these great achievements, the future course of digital computers was largely determined in the United States. The machines built immediately after the ENIAC that set this course were the EDVAC (1952), the IAS machine of von Neumann (1951), the SEAC (1950) and SWAC (1950) of the Bureau of Standards, the REA 1101 (1950), the UNIVAC (1951), and Whirlwind (1951). Although the EDVAC was the last of this group to become operational, its design was well known and had a profound influence on all post-ENIAC machines, as has been already noted.

The Institute for Advanced Study machine was funded by the Army through the efforts of von Neumann and Goldstine. Von Neumann’s great prestige and widespread contacts ensured that the IAS machine would be widely used. In fact, von Neumann’s original plan was to distribute design plans to a number of institutions as they were developed so that the other organizations could rapidly build copies. A number of copies, with some alterations and improvements, were actually built at various institutions, including the Rand Corporation, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois. All of these were paid for by the United States government. Von Neumann’s machines were not limited to the United States. Several versions were built abroad, including the SILLIAC in Australia.”

(Louis A. Girifalco, 1991, Van Nostrand Reinhold)

The Institute for Advanced Study’s list of historical computers influenced by von Neumann is longer and includes international ones such as in Stockholm, Moscow, Munich and Sydney:

“Differences over individual contributions and patents divided the group at the Moore School. In keeping with the spirit of academic enquiry, von Neumann was determined that advances be kept in the public domain. ECP progress reports were widely disseminated. As a consequence, the project had widespread influence. Copies of the IAS machine appeared nationally: AVIDAC at Argonne National Laboratory; ILLIAC at the University of Illinois; JOHNNIAC at RAND Corporation; MANIAC at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory; ORACLE at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; ORDVAC at Aberdeen Proving Grounds; and internationally: BESK in Stockholm; BESM in Moscow; DASK in Denmark; PERM in Munich; SILLIAC in Sydney; and WEIZAC in Rehovoth, to mention a few. …”

(“Electronic Computer Project”, Institute for Advanced Study)

In the lists in the above two quotes, the U.S. institutions building computers, many following von Neumann’s design, included National Bureau of Standards’ SWAC at UCLA, RAND’s JOHNNIAC, and MANIAC at the Los Alamos national lab, but none at UC Berkeley or the nearby Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore national labs.

With UCLA having a computer built by the National Bureau of Standards, wasn’t UC Berkeley in an obviously inferior position when von Neumann cast his eyes on moving to the University of California to focus on computer research and development?

Yes and no.

UC Berkeley was building CALDIC, the first computer built in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California and the first by a university on the West Coast, although compared to those in the Los Angeles region it was a modest one, credited mostly for educational training and completed only in 1954:

“In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the nascent West Coast computer industry was concentrated in Los Angeles. A number of Southern California aerospace firms received military funding to develop computers, many of which were meant to support aircraft design and research (Eckdahl, Reed, and Sarkissian, 2003; Norberg, 1976). The CALDIC (California Digital Computer) built at UC Berkeley in 1954 was the first computer developed in the Bay Area and the first computer developed at a West Coast university. Supported by the Office of Naval Research, in 1948 Professors Paul Morton (EE), Leland Cunningham (astronomy), and Richard Lehmer (mathematics) began building the CALDIC, which was meant to be an intermediate-size computer (Hoagland, 2010: 15). Like many university-developed computers during this period, the CALDIC was not commercialized, nor were any patents issued on the results of the work. Instead, the project’s main contribution to the local economy was the graduate students supported by the project, several of whom later became industry leaders.

…

For example, Albert Hoagland, Roy Houg, and Louis Stevens worked on CALDIC’s magnetic data storage system and on graduation joined the newly formed IBM research laboratory that had been established in San Jose in 1956 (Flamm, 1988: 20ff). … IBM’s San Jose Laboratory soon became a global center for digital magnetic storage innovation. … Another CALDIC PhD student, Douglas Engelbart, went to the Stanford Research Institute and developed some of the cornerstones of personal computing such as the mouse, “windowed” user interfaces, and hypertext (Bardini, 2000). Students trained through the CALDIC project thus emerged as leading industrial researchers in the Bay Area computer industry of the 1960s.”

(Martin Kenney and David C. Mowery, eds., Public Universities and Regional Growth: Insights from the University of California, 2014, Stanford Business Books)

But according to Douglas Engelbart, cited above as the a Berkeley Ph.D. student in the CALDIC project, that computer wasn’t really completed at the time of his Ph.D. graduation in 1955, Berkeley wasn’t receptive to a creative pioneer like him on its faculty, and he soon left:

“… After completing his B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1948, he settled contentedly on the San Francisco peninsula as an electrical engineer at NACA Ames Laboratory (forerunner of NASA).

…

He began to envision people sitting in front of cathode-ray-tube displays, “flying around” in an information space where they could formulate and portray their thoughts in ways that could better harness their sensory, perceptual and cognitive capabilities which had heretofore gone untapped. And they would communicate and collectively organize their ideas with incredible speed and flexibility. So he applied to the graduate program in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and off he went to launch his crusade. At that time, there was no computer science department and the closest working computer was probably on the eastern side of the country, with MIT’s Project Whirlwind. Berkeley did have a serious R&D program developing a general-purpose digital computer, the CalDiC, but remained unfishined throughout his time there.

He obtained his Ph.D. in 1955, along with a half dozen patents in “bi-stable gaseous plasma digital devices,” and stayed on at Berkeley as an acting assistant professor. Within a year, however, he was tipped off by a colleague that if he kept talking about his “wild ideas” he’d be an acting assistant professor forever. So he ventured back down into what is now Silicon Valley, in search of more suitable employment.

…

He settled on a research position at Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International, in 1957. …”

(“A Lifetime Pursuit”, by Christina Engelbart, Doug Engelbart Institute)

Before settling on a career at Stanford Research Institute beginning in 1957, Engelbart also approached both Stanford University and Hewlett-Packard – where the future Silicon Valley had begun – and learned that neither had plans for computer development:

“Were you working with computers at Ames in 1951?

No! The closest computer was somewhere on the east coast.

I left Ames to attend the University of California and received a Ph.D., and taught there for a year. …

So I contacted the Dean of the School of Engineering at Stanford, just across the bay from Berkeley, and received a nice letter that said something like, “Dear Dr. Engelbart. Thank you for your interest in Stanford. Unfortunately, our School of Engineering is a small department, and we have chosen to focus only on those areas which we feel offer real potential. Since computers are only useful to service entities, we have no interest in developing a focus in them. Best of luck, etc.”

Wow – I can’t believe they were so myopic! It’s hard to believe that an institution so closely allied with the birth of Silicon Valley could have missed that one…

They weren’t alone! I also spoke with David Packard (of Hewlett-Packard). We had a great conversation, and I was all set to work for them. Then, as I was driving home from the interview, a question forced its way into my mind. About a quarter of the way home, I stopped and called the vice president of engineering at HP I was going to work for, and asked, “I assume HP is planning on going into digital instruments and digital computers, and I’ll get a chance to work in those areas, right?” And he replied that they didn’t think there was much potential there, so the answer was no.”

(“Doug Engelbart: Father of the Mouse”, by Andrew Maisel, editor-in-chief, SuperKids Educational Software Review)

Engelbart’s early experiences of discouragement were a remarkable contrast to his subsequent pioneering work and achievements, which later in 1997 won him the A. M. Turing Award – computer science’s highest honor as mentioned in Part 3:

“… He is not a computer scientist, but an engineer by training and an inventor by choice. His numerous technological innovations (including the computer mouse, hypertext, and the split screen interface) were crucial to the development of personal computing and the Internet. …”

(“DOUGLAS ENGELBART”, A. M. Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery)

Amazing, an engineer with pioneering ideas for computers was ignored by the fledgling Silicon Valley’s leading engineering centers, Hewlett-Packard, Stanford and Berkeley, but went on to success, receiving the computer science community’s top honor.

During that 1950s in Southern California, including Los Angeles, the military-oriented aerospace technology companies were very active in computer research, receiving substantial funding from the U.S. military:

“One other pocket of activity, in historical hindsight, looms in importance as a transporter of computer technology from laboratory to market. Located on the West Coast of the United States and tied closely to the aerospace industry in Southern California, which, in turn, was very dependent on government contracts, this activity focused on scientific and engineering computing. The design of aircraft inherently required extensive mathematical calculations, as did applications such as missile guidance. Early efforts (late 1940s) were primarily housed at Northrop Aircraft and to a lesser extent at Raytheon. Both had projects funded by the U.S. government: Northrop for its Snark missile and Raytheon for a naval control processor, for example. Northrop worked with an instrument supplier (Hewlett-Packard) on early digital projects. Then, in 1950, a group of Northrop engineers formed their own computer company called Computer Research Corporation (CRC). Like ERA, it had a military sponsor the U.S. Air Force for which it built various computers in the first half of the 1950s.”

(James W. Cortada, The Computer in the United States: From Laboratory to Market, 1930 to 1960, 1993, M.E. Sharpe)

As quoted, while Southern California’s aerospace companies were building computers, Northern California’s Hewlett-Packard was only “an instrument supplier” for some of them.

In fact, when the future leading computer maker IBM first entered the electronic computer market in the early 1950s with its IBM 701 machine, there were very few buyers and half of them were companies and organizations using the SWAC computer at INA at UCLA:

“By 1951 the demands for computational assistance were so great that it was difficult for the Computational Unit to fulfill its obligations. Accordingly, a new unit of INA, called the Mathematical Services Unit, was formed under the supervision of Harry Huskey. It was funded by the United States Air Force. One of the purposes of this unit was to encourage Federal Government contractors to learn how to use electronic computers. Accordingly, computational services using SWAC were made available to them. Many of these contractors made use of this service. Effectively, the NBS offer to these contractors was to augment their contracts by providing free computational services of a type which was not as yet available elsewhere. It is interesting to note that when IBM announced that they would build a “Defense Calculator” if they get 12 orders, 6 of the 12 orders came from INA’s computer customers. The “Defense Calculator” became the IBM 701 – their entry into the “Electronic Computer Age.””

(Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, Mathematicians Learning to Use Computers: The Institute for Numerical Analysis UCLA 1947-1954, 1991, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce)

So in 1956 when von Neumann was planning to move to California to focus on computer research, the future Silicon Valley region in Northern California, be it academically or industrially in the computer field, paled in comparison to the Los Angeles region in Southern California.

Moreover, von Neumann’s role as the U.S. Air Force’s leading scientific adviser on ICBM helped bring additional military aerospace presence to the Los Angeles region:

“In July 1955, along with von Neumann and others, Schriever had an audience with President Eisenhower in the West Wing. He explained not only the paramount importance of ICBMs and the “radical” new organization he had established near Los Angeles to develop them, but also why he had not handed the project over to commercial aircraft contractors…

“Most impressive!” Ike declared. … Eisenhower secretly ordered the Pentagon to build ICBMs with “maximum urgency.” That same summer, Schriever learned from intelligence sources how little time they had: the Soviets were already testing ­intermediate-range ballistic missiles.”

(Michael Beschloss, October 1, 2009, The New York Times)

But von Neumann was also a great mathematician and so the specifics of mathematical computing and numerical analysis could also be factors influencing his decision choosing between UCLA and UC Berkeley.

UC Berkeley had mathematics professor Richard Lehmer, cited in an earlier quote as one of the leaders of the CALDIC computer project.

I know it might not sound that big to someone of von Neumann’s ambitions. But recall, as previously quoted in Part 4, that Berkeley math professor Derrick H. Lehmer – the same person – became the director of UCLA’s Institute for Numerical Analysis at the time of the Loyalty Oath controversy in the early 1950s, when he joined 3 other Berkeley math professors among 29 tenured Berkeley professors, and 2 at UCLA, to express objection to McCarthyism:

“Wanting to show proof of loyalty, Robert Gordon Sproul, then President of the University of California, proposed the Loyalty Oath which would have all professors declare they were not and never had been communists.

Some 29 tenured professors from UC Berkeley and two from UCLA (one of whom later became a UC President) refused to sign. …

The Regents of the time mandated that all professors had to sign, or be fired. In the Mathematics Department, three professors refused: John Kelley, Hans Lewy, and Pauline Sperry. Another professor, D.H. Lehmer, attempted to avoid signing by taking a leave of absence to take a federal job at UCLA as Director at the Institute for Numerical Analysis. …”

(“Loyalty Oath Controversy: Interview with Leon Henkin”, Fall 2000, Vol. VII, No. 1, Berkeley Mathematics Newsletter)

Derrick Lehmer’s former directorship at the INA at UCLA was a strong credential in the computing field and thus an encouraging factor; John von Neumann himself had been a distinguished visitor at INA:

“INA attracted many distinguished visitors such as, John von Neumann, Solomon Lefschetz, Edward Teller, Norbert Wiener, and many others, …”

(Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, 1991, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce)

But I have to concede that the contrast of 29 Berkeley professors refusing to sign the loyalty oath to UCLA’s only 2 refusals, unfortunately, went opposite to von Neumann’s Cold War strategizing at RAND and his close collaboration with nuclear weapons scientists like Edward Teller, also a distinguished visitor at INA as cited above.

Lehmer returned to Berkeley in 1953, and in 1954 the National Bureau of Standards ended the Institute for Numerical Analysis due to the objection of the U.S. Department of Defense, leaving the SWAC computer to UCLA:

“THE PERIOD SUMMER 1953 THROUGH SPRING 1954

D. H. Lehmer returned to the University of California at Berkeley in August and C. B. Tompkins took over the Directorship of INA. …

…

The National Bureau of Standards was a co-sponsor with the American Society of a Symposium on Numerical Analysis held at Santa Monica City College, August 26-28. John H. Curtiss was the chairman of the organizing committee. The symposium was entitled “American Mathematical Society Sixth Symposium in Applied Mathematics: Numerical Analysis.” …

… A large number of the participants had been associated with NBS and INA as visiting scientists. NBS and INA were represented by C. B. Tompkins, Olga Taussky-Todd, Emma Lehmer, M. R. Hestenes, T. S. Motzkin, and W. R. Wasow. …

…

David Saxon returned to his position in the Department of Physics at UCLA. He had a distinguished career in research and in administration. In 1975 he became President of the University of California. In 1983 he was appointed Chairman of the Corporation of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

We now begin the final period of existence of INA. …

…

The decision of Secretary of Defense, Charles E. Wilson, to no longer permit a non-DOD Government agency to serve as administrator of projects carried out at a university but supported entirely, or in large part, by DOD funds, caused the National Bureau of Standards to give up its administration of INA by June 30, 1954. The University of California was invited to take over this administration. The university was not in a position to take over all sections of INA. However, UCLA agreed to take over the administration of the research group, the SWAC and its maintenance, and the Library. … The question of faculty status of INA members was to be dealt with after the takeover had been accomplished. The new organization was to be called Numerical Analysis Research (NAR). …”

(Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, 1991, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce)

As quoted, the INA at UCLA had been under the administration of the National Bureau of Standards, then U.S. Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson decided that a government non-defense agency should no longer manage projects of substantial defense funding, and so the INA as administered by the NBS and funded by the ONR had to end.

Nevertheless, I note that the physicist David Saxon mentioned above was one of those only 2 UCLA professors refusing to sign the McCarthy-era loyalty oath, one of whom later a UC president as quoted earlier: Saxon was the future president of the University of California encompassing UCLA, UC Berkeley and many other campuses.

(“David S. Saxon, 85; Physicist Forced Out in McCarthy Era Later Led UC System in a Time of Tight Budgets”, by Elaine Woo, December 9, 2005, Los Angeles Times; and, “IN MEMORIAM: David Stephen Saxon: President Emeritus University of California: 1920 – 2005”, by Richard C. Atkinson, The University of California)

And I am struck by the contrast between the title of the above-quoted 1991 book by Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd on the history of NBS’s INA at UCLA in 1947-1954, “Mathematicians Learning to Use Computers”, and the title of a The New York Times article discussed in Part 4 about the 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians held at UC Berkeley featuring my Ph.D. Adviser Stephen Smale as the leading plenary speaker, “MATHEMATICIANS FINALLY LOG ON”.

Mathematicians were “learning to use computers” in the 1940s and 1950s, and yet it took them until the 1980s to “finally log on”!

A timeline, in the context of the facts reviewed earlier, seemed to be: in the late 1940s and early 1950s mathematicians were “learning to use computers” at the Institute for Numerical Analysis run by the National Bureau of Standards at UCLA, until 1954 when the institute was terminated due to a Pentagon decision; in 1956 John von Neumann, a leading mathematician and the “father of computers”, was deciding on which UC campus to move to for computer research and chose UCLA, which no longer held a dominant lead over UC Berkeley but his Cold War think-tank RAND was nearby which had also followed his computer design; in 1957 von Neumann died of cancer at an early age of 53; then it took another 3 decades for mathematicians to “finally log on” computers.

I know my timeline appears stretching the facts, namely that the death of one mathematician, as great as von Neumann might be, could have such a devastating impact on the history of mathematicians’ acquaintance with computers.

But there were other intriguing and tell-tale facts hinting at a similar timeline.

Within a small number of years following the the world’s leading gathering of mathematicians in 1986 at Berkeley, as mentioned in Part 4, several Berkeley mathematicians in the computational fields who influenced my study there, Richard Karp, Stephen Smale, Andrew Majda, William Kahan, and also the University of Wisconsin’s Carl de Boor, all mentioned in Part 4, received the John von Neumann Lecture honor of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics:

“The John von Neumann lecturers:

…

• 1986 Jacques-Louis Lions
• 1987 Richard M. Karp
• 1988 Germund G. Dahlquist
• 1989 Stephen Smale
• 1990 Andrew J. Majda
• 1992 R. Tyrrell Rockafellar
• 1994 Martin D. Kruskal
• 1996 Carl de Boor
• 1997 William (Velvel) Kahan

…”

(“The John von Neumann Lecture”, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

Not only that starting in 1987 these Berkeley professors received the John von Neumann Lecture honor, but that none of the prior recipients in the SIAM’s list cited above, starting from 1960 and including mathematicians, physicists and other scientists, had been a Berkeley recipient as far as I know.

So, like The New York Times said mathematicians “finally log on” at the 1986 ICM held at UC Berkeley, and then the UC Berkeley mathematicians, i.e., those whose work facilitated it, finally receive an honor named for John von Neumann – now imagine if von Neumann himself had been living and leading in the missing decades!

Recall an anecdote told in Part 4, that in the fall of 1983 when I was contemplating doing Ph.D. study with the mathematician Smale or the numerical analyst Andrew Majda, Majda commented to me that Smale “knows nothing about numerical analysis”; I note here that Majda had in fact been a professor at UCLA before Berkeley, and was moving to Princeton where von Neumann had been famous.

But despite Majda’s opinion, SIAM awarded Smale the John von Neumann Lecture honor one year before it accorded Majda. It illustrated that the contributions to the computational fields by the more pure math-inclined mathmaticians like Stephen Smale were appreciated by the applied mathematics community.

Back in August 1953 when the National Bureau of Standards and the Institute for Numerical Analysis hosted in Santa Monica an event titled, “American Mathematical Society Sixth Symposium in Applied Mathematics: Numerical Analysis” – as earlier quoted from the book by Hestenes and Todd – it was a first for computing: the AMS Symposia in Applied Mathematics had begun in the late 1940s and this 6th symposium was the first to devote to computational issues.

(“Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics”, AMS eBook Collections, American Mathematical Society)

In the summer of 1953 John von Neumann was in fact the outgoing AMS president, serving 1951-1953. At the time, von Neumann’s nuclear science expertise was giving him increasingly prominent national responsibilities: he became a General Advisory Committee member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1952, and a member of the Technical Advisory Panel on Atomic Energy in 1953.

(Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 1972, Princeton University Press)

The INA’s closure in 1954 was a major setback to the mathematical computing field, but John von Neumann was moving to the top in the nuclear arena, appointed a U.S. Atomic Energy Commissioner by President Dwight Eisenhower – and on that job for only 6 months before a diagnosis that he had cancer:

“In October 1954 Eisenhower appointed Von Neumann to the Atomic Energy Commission. Von Neumann accepted, although the Air Force and the senators who confirmed him insisted that he retain his chairmanship of the Air Force ballistic missile panel.

Von Neumann had been on the new job only six months when the pain first struck in the left shoulder. After two examinations, the physicians at Bethesda Naval Hospital suspected cancer. Within a month Von Neumann was wheeled into surgery at the New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston. A leading pathologist, Dr. Shields Warren, examined the biopsy tissue and confirmed that the pain was a secondary cancer. Doctors began to race to discover the primary locations. Several weeks later they found it in the prostate. Von Neumann, the agreed, did not have long to live.”

(Clay Blair, Jr., February 25, 1957, Volume 42, Number 8, Life)

When the INA was closing, most of its scientists and engineers left for jobs elsewhere, including going to the industry and to RAND, while a few went to UC faculty jobs:

“At this time, a Numerical Analysis section was set up at NBS in Washington with John Todd as Chief and with, on a smaller scale, a mission similar to that of INA. …

…

The engineers resigned on November 1, 1953 and accepted positions with the Magnavox Corporation. …

By June 30, 1954, various members of INA had accepted positions in industry and in various departments of universities. For example, B. Handy, A. D. Hestenes, M. Howard, and E. C. Yowell were employed by National Cash Register. S. Marks and A. Rosenthal went to the Rand Corporation. …

During his leave of absence from INA, Lanczos was employed by North American Aviation as a specialist in computing. In 1954 at the invitation of Eamon de Valera, who was at that time Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, Lanczos accepted the post of Senior Professor in the School of Theoretical Physics of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. …

In 1954 Harry Huskey accepted a faculty position at UC-Berkeley, where he continued to make significant contributions in the computer field. In 1967 he moved to UC-Santa Cruz to serve as Professor of Computer and Information Science. There he set up the USCS Computer Center and served as its Director from 1967-1977. Internationally, he was in great demand as a consultant to various computer centers, e.g., centers in India, Pakistan, Burma, Brazil, and Jordan. …

…

Charles B. Tompkins became a member of the Department of Mathematics at UCLA. He was in charge of the NAR Project … He continued to make the computing facility available to all interested faculty and students. …”

(Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, 1991, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce)

The above quote noted that the National Bureau of Standards had not had a numerical analysis group in the U.S. Capital until its INA in Los Angeles was shutting down.

Another key fact cited above was that Harry Huskey, quoted earlier as leader of the SWAC computer development and leader of computer training for U.S. government contractors, moved to UC Berkeley in 1954.

Huskey had been an original member of the first electronic computer ENIAC project and met von Neumann there although as he later recalled, he and his fellow ENIAC engineers did not have a high opinion of von Neumann because the latter did not pay attention to details:

“… I heard that there were projects at the electrical engineering department of the Moore School at the university, and I applied for part time work. Since their work was classified they couldn’t tell me what they were doing, so I had no idea what I would be doing. When finally clearance came I was the showed the ENIAC and I’ve worked in computers ever since.

…

… The von Neumann report was not helpful, in my opinion. So I think the answer– well, we had general meetings in which von Neumann participated. And I think the people who were actually working on the project took the feeling that, “Well, he doesn’t worry about the details. He waves his hand.” That sort of position. …”

(“Oral History of Harry Huskey”, interview by William Aspray, February 7, 2006, Computer History Museum)

So later in 1956 when von Neumann contemplated about UCLA or UC Berkeley to move to, a key computer development leader who had moved from the INA at UCLA to Berkeley was not so positive about him.

In 1954 it was Derrick Lehmer and also Paul Morton, cited earlier as leaders of the CALDIC computer project, who offered Huskey his Berkeley professorship in both mathematics and electrical engineering departments:

“The fact that INA was a project under the Bureau of Standards caused it to be terminated as a Bureau project. The SWAC computer was given to the Engineering Department of UCLA, and the mathematical research part of INA was set up as a project in the Math Department of UCLA. And so that ended that phase of things. I had gone on leave to Wayne University with Jacobson, with the charter to set up a computer center there, and so I spent the year working on that, and when I came back to the Bureau, all this other stuff had happened. So the question was, what is the future? And at that point, Lehmer and Paul Morton at Berkeley offered me a position, so I took that. It was an associate professorship.

…

It was half math and half EE, and so on July 1st of that year, I moved to Berkeley. That’s about the whole story.”

(interview by William Aspray, February 7, 2006, Computer History Museum)

As mentioned earlier, Berkeley’s CALDIC computer project was reportedly completed in 1954 but then Douglas Engelbart later said it was still not when he graduated in 1955. So it is possible that Huskey’s arrival helped finish it.

Like Huskey, Lehmer’s association with the computer and von Neumann had come earlier; in 1945-1946 Lehmer was a member of the Computations Committee planning ENIAC’s use at the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground:

“… A Computations Committee had been established in 1945 to provide a group of experts to plan for the arrival of ENIAC at the BRL and to see that it would be applied productively. The members of the Computations Committee included the mathematicians Haskell Curry, Franz Alt, and Derrick Lehmer and the astronomer Leland Cunningham. All of them had come to Aberdeen during the war to assist with the BRL’s computational work, and they retained a connection with the lab for several years afterward—some as employees, others as frequent visitors. …”

(Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope, ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, 2016, The MIT Press)

The Aberdeen Proving Ground, as previously mentioned in a quote in Part 4, was a military research facility where Berkeley math professor Hans Lewy had worked during World War II, who later was one of Lehmer’s fellow objectors to the McCarthy-era UC loyalty oath.

Lehmer had strong historical credentials for overseeing ENIAC computing; he had been a pioneer in building electro-mechanical computing devices:

“Lehmer made contributions to many parts of number theory, but he was especially interested in relevant numerical calculations. He was unsurpassed in this field. …

While still an undergraduate, Lehmer realized that it would be helpful to have a mechanical device for combining linear congruences, and at various times, he supervised the construction of several such machines. These special-purpose computers, known as sieves, were particularly useful in factoring large numbers. The first model, constructed in 1927, used 19 bicycle chains. …

In 1932, an improved sieve was constructed and displayed at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. Here, instead of bicycle chains, disk gears with various numbers of teeth were used, with holes opposite each tooth. For a given problem, the unwanted holes were plugged, and a photoelectric cell was used to stop the machine when open holes were lined up. …

Lehmer was a pioneer in the development of modern computing machines and in their use in the solution of scientific problems, particularly those arising in number theory. In 1945-46 he was called to the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the Aberdeen Proving Ground to prepare that laboratory for the installation of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer. he observed the completion of that computer in Philadelphia and took part in its testing in Aberdeen. …”

(“Derrick H. Lehmer, Mathematics: Berkeley: 1905-1991 Professor Emeritus”, John L. Kelley, Raphael M. Robinson, Abraham H. Taub, and P. Emery Thomas, 1991, University of California)

I note that the Lehmer sieves built in the 1920s and 1030s as explained above could only do specific mathematical computations – unlike later ENIAC, the first “general-purpose” electronic computer.

As a mathematician, Lehmer’s passion was in computations for number theory, and even on ENIAC as in the following anecdote of a July 4 holiday weekend he and his wife Emma chose to spend on ENIAC:

“Lehmer’s Holiday Computations

Another well-documented calculation from 1946 was carried out by the Berkeley number theorist Derrick Lehmer. Lehmer spent the year 1945-46 at the Ballistic Research Lab as a member of a group helping to plan for ENIAC’s use. He experimented with the machine by running “little problems” when it was otherwise not in use. …

As Derrick Lehmer later recounted, he and his family descended on ENIAC over the July 4 weekend, a weekend during which very little work is done in the United States. (Lehmer’s wife, Emma, was a noted mathematician who did much of the computational work required to get ENIAC’s output from this visit into publishable form.) With help from John Mauchly, they were allowed to “pull everything off the machine” and set up their own problem.

…

Lehmer credited Mauchly with the idea of implementing a sieve on ENIAC. Lehmer’s program, as partially reconstructed by the historians Maarten Bullynck and Liesbeth de Mol, made use of ENIAC’s ability to perform several parts of a computation at once. In the reconstruction, fourteen accumulators were used to simultaneously test a single number against different prime numbers. Lehmer’s paper does not provide enough information to make it certain that his original implementation exploited that technique, but in discussing the computation he later complained that ENIAC “was a highly parallel machine, before von Neumann spoiled it.” …”

(Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope, 2016, The MIT Press)

While doing research in parallel computation beginning in the mid-late 1980s, I became familiar with the term, “the von Neumann bottleneck” – related to something Lehmer said in the above quote – coined by IBM computer scientist John Backus:

“… What is a von Neumann computer? When von Neumann and others conceived it over thirty years ago, it was an elegant, practical, and unifying idea that simplified a number of engineering and programming problems that existed then. Although the conditions that produced its architecture have changed radically, we nevertheless still identify the notion of “computer” with this thirty year old concept.

In its simplest form a von Neumann computer has three parts: a central processing unit (or CPU), a store, and a connecting tube that can transmit a single word between the CPU and the store (and send an address to the store). I propose to call this tube the von Neumann bottleneck. …

…

… Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand. …”

(“Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs”, by John Backus, 19 77 ACM Turing Award Lecture, Association for Computing Machinery)

Whatever the limitations of the von Neumann computer design, back in the 1940s and 1950s on the early computers the kind of mathematical delicacies Lehmer enjoyed was the opposite of the norm, while the norm was serious military research led by von Neumann, especially for atomic bomb development:

“But ENIAC’s more profound contributions to advances in military science and technology came with Cold War work that would have been prohibitively expensive to attempt by hand. ENIAC simulated explosions of atomic and hydrogen bombs, airflow at supersonic speeds, and designs for nuclear reactors. With the considerable assistance of John von Neumann, it established the digital computer as a vital tool within the emerging military-industrial-academic complex carrying out cutting-edge research and development work during the early years of the Cold War. A few years later, IBM launched its first commercial computer, the Model 701, as the “defense calculator” and sold it almost exclusively to defense contractors. The United States Government even managed the delivery queue for IBM, making sure that computers were dispatched first to the firms doing the most important work.”

(Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope, 2016, The MIT Press)

As the above quote indicates, in the 1940s-1950s military priorities were the highest of the “cutting-edge research and development work”, and allocation of computer use was centrally managed by the U.S. government – be it for academic, industrial or commercial usage.

From this perspective, one could refer to it as U.S. government generosity that for 7 years, 1947-1954, mathematicians got to go to the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA to learn to use the SWAC computer run by the National Bureau of Standards – in 2 of the years even under the directorship of Derrick Lehmer, an objector to the UC Loyalty Oath – before Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson pulled the plug in 1954.

The historian of science Liesbeth De Mol has done a comparison showing the contrasting mathematical focuses of Lehmer and von Neumann, i.e., Lehmer’s pure mathematics interests versus von Neumann’s applied mathematics ambitions.

De Mol wrote of Derrick Lehmer the mathematician:

“Derrick H. Lehmer (1905-1991) was born into number theory. His father, Derrick N. Lehmer, was a number-theorist, known for his factor table up to 10,000,000 and his stencil sheets to find factors of large numbers. …

…

Throughout Lehmer’s papers one finds numerous statements about the experimental character of mathematics and more specifically number theory, which he regarded as a kind of observational science. It is exactly in this context that one should understand Lehmer’s interest in computers. He regarded them as instruments to experimentally study mathematics … Already as a young boy, Lehmer began to design and build small special-purpose machines, known as sieves, to assist him in his number-theoretical work.

…

When World War II began, Lehmer “got involved into war work mostly having to do with the analysis of bombing…”. He built a special-purpose machine, a “bombing analyzer [which] was a combination of the digital and the analog device. […] I demonstrated it in Washington one time at the Pentagon. […] This thing was Army Ordnance, I guess. …”. Just after the war Lehmer was called upon by the Ballistic Research Laboratories (Aberdeen Proving Ground) to become a member of the ‘Computations Committee’, which was assembled to prepare for utilizing the ENIAC after its completion …”

(“Doing Mathematics on the ENIAC. Von Neumann’s and Lehmer’s different visions”, by Liesbeth De Mol, in E. Wilhelmus, I. Witzke (eds.), Mathematical practice and development throughout History, 2008, Logos Verlag)

In short, Lehmer was an experimentally and computationally oriented pure mathematician, who also proved his abilities in his wartime work for the military.

De Mol wrote of John von Neumann the mathematician:

“John von Neumann is far more famous than D.H. Lehmer, not in the least because the hardware of computers nowadays is still referred to as ‘the von Neumann architecture’. He was a mathematician by education and made major contributions in many different fields, including: mathematical logic, set theory, economics and game theory, quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics, computer science,…

Von Neumann’s acquaintance with the field of mathematical logic had a major influence on his work on computers. …

It was not his interest in logic, however, that triggered his interest in the subject. … Ulam explains why von Neumann got interested in computers …:

It must have been in 1938 that I first had discussions with von Neumann about problems in mathematical physics, and the first I remember were when he was very curious about the problem of mathematical treatment of turbulence in hydrodynamics. […] He was fascinated by the role of Reynolds number, a dimensionless number, a pure number because it is the ratio of two forces, the inertial one and the viscous […] [von Neumann] […] wanted to find an explanation or at least a way to understand this very puzzling large number. […] I remember that in our discussions von Neumann realized that the known analytical methods, the method of mathematical analysis, even in their most advanced forms, were not powerful enough to give any hope of obtaining solutions in closed form. This was perhaps one of the origins of his desire to try to devise methods of very fast numerical computations, a more humble way of proceeding. Proceeding by “brute force” is considered by some to be more lowbrow. […] I remember also discussions about the possibilities of predicting the weather at first only locally, and soon after that, about how to calculate the circulation of meteorological phenomena around the globe.

Von Neumann got particularly interested in computers for doing numerical calculations in the context of theoretical physics and thus understood, quite early, that fast computing machines could be very useful in the context of applied mathematics.”

(Liesbeth De Mol, in E. Wilhelmus, I. Witzke (eds.), Mathematical practice and development throughout History, 2008, Logos Verlag)

As De Mol described, von Neumann was a pure mathematician, but more importantly an applied mathematician ambitious for real-world applications.

It was von Neumann’s applied-math research in fluid dynamics that led to his participation in the atomic bomb development, for which he began searching for available computing power, actively surveying the existing state-of-the-art calculating machines, as De Mol described:

“In 1943, during World War II, von Neumann was invited to join the Manhattan project – the project to develop the atomic bomb – because of his work on fluid dynamics. He soon realized that the problems he was working on involved a lot of computational work which might take years to complete. He submitted a request for help, and in 1944 he was presented a list of people he could visit. He visited Howard Aiken and saw his Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator. He knew about the electromechanical relay computers of George Stibitz, and about the work by Jan Schilt at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University. These machines however were still relatively slow to solve the problems von Neumann was working on. …”

(Liesbeth De Mol, in E. Wilhelmus, I. Witzke (eds.), Mathematical practice and development throughout History, 2008, Logos Verlag)

So, even taking into account INA’s 1954 closure reducing UCLA’s strength in computing before von Neumann deciding in 1956 to go to UCLA or Berkeley, the two former INA computational mathematicians who returned to or moved to Berkeley, Lehmer and Huskey, were not the compatible types for von Neumann.

In the spirit of my review in Part 4 of some Berkeley mathematicians, I would like to view the contrast between Lehmer and von Neumann – articulated by Liesbeth De Mol – as an older-generation phenomenon prior to the contrast between Stephen Smale and Alexander Chorin in the 1970s and 1980s: Smale’s anti-war politics was more outspoken and higher-profile than Lehmer’s expression of objection to McCarthyism, whereas Chorin, instrumental in forming a faculty group in numerical analysis specializing in fluid dynamics, affiliated with the Lawrence Berkeley national lab and funded by military research agencies, was probably not quite von Neumann’s caliber.

Chorin’s former Ph.D. adviser Peter Lax, of New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, had in fact become a protégé of von Neumann’s while a teenager before university; later during the Manhattan Project, Lax worked in the Los Alamos national lab and got his start in the subject of fluid dynamic shock waves – in the fall of 1983 Andrew  Majda introduced me to the subject as in Part 4 – there through von Neumann’s introduction.

(“NYU’s Peter Lax Wins ‘Nobel Prize of Mathematics’”, by Gary Shapiro, March 23, 2005, The New York Sun)

While the Polish-born Jewish Chorin as an incoming NYU Ph.D. student was initially mistaken by his adviser Peter Lax for a Hungarian compatriot, as in a tale told in Part 4, von Neumann had been the unmistakable Hungarian Jewish genius – the only Hungarian genius according to Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner:

“… Five of Hungary’s six Nobel Prize winners were Jews born between 1875 and 1905, and one was asked why Hungary in his generation had brought forth so many geniuses. Nobel laureate Wigner replied that he did not understand the question. Hungary in that time had produced only one genius, Johnny von Neumann.”

(Norman MacRae, John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More, 1992, Pantheon Books)

As my review so far has shown, in 1956 when von Neumann planned to move to California, if his intent was to focus on computer research as described in Norman MacRae’s book, rather than on nuclear science, then the Los Angeles region of UCLA was stronger in that respect and more conducive for his interests politically, industrially and academically, than UC Berkeley and the nascent Silicon Valley.

But the year 1956, tantalizingly, also was when some things began to happen in favor of the future Silicon Valley.

One of the happenings was that IBM established a research laboratory in San Jose, the future Silicon Valley’s largest city, as quoted earlier, and several Berkeley CALDIC computer project students had their industry-leading career start there, working on digital magnetic storage systems.

I understand that such computer peripherals might not be much for a prominent computer pioneer and ambitious scientific leader like John von Neumann. But IBM had held, and would continue to hold, von Neumann in high regard.

Following von Neumann’s death, Herman Goldstine, his former collaborator at the ENIAC project and his deputy at the Princeton IAS computer project, became the founding director of the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM’s central research organ, Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York state:

“… long before the Eniac was running it was obvious it had several major design defects. The gargantuan machine, weighing 30 tons and containing 18,000 electronic tubes, took several days to program and could store just 20 numbers. A study group for an improved machine, to be called the Edvac (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), was established, consisting of Goldstine, Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert (Eniac’s principal engineer) and Arthur Burks (a mathematical logician). The group was shortly joined by John von Neumann.

In June 1945, von Neumann wrote the seminal Edvac Report, whose wide circulation established the new computing paradigm and ultimately the worldwide computer industry. Von Neumann’s sole authorship of the report, and his towering reputation as America’s leading mathematician, completely overshadowed the contributions of the others in the group, causing deep resentment in Eckert and Mauchly.

At the end of the war the group broke up because of these tensions. Eckert and Mauchly formed the computer company that eventually became today’s Unisys Corporation, while von Neumann, Goldstine and Burks went to the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton University, to build a computer in an academic setting. Goldstine was appointed assistant director of the computer project, and director from 1954. In addition he co-wrote with von Neumann a set of reports, Planning and Coding of Problems for an Electronic Computing Instrument (1947) that established many early ideas in computer programming.

The IAS computer was an important design influence on the early computers of IBM, for whom von Neumann was a consultant. In 1958, following von Neumann’s death and the termination of the IAS computer project, Goldstine became the founding director of the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.”

(“Herman Goldstine: Co-inventor of the modern computer and historian of its development”, by Martin Campbell-Kelly, July 4, 2004, The Independent)

As described, the leading architects of the original electronic computer ENIAC, Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, subsequently took an entrepreneurial route, forming a commercial company to further computer development, whereas von Neumann led Goldstine and several others starting the IAS computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton – a project that not only led to proliferation of computer development in academic and scientific institutions as discussed earlier, but also had important design influence on IBM computers, with von Neumann himself a consultant for IBM.

Von Neumann had not been a founding member of the ENIAC project; it was Goldstine who had started the project on behalf of the U.S. Army, and then invited von Neumann’s participation in 1944:

“While there are challengers for the title of “first computer,” the dedication of ENIAC on Feb. 15, 1946, is widely accepted as the day the Information Age began. And like the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia 170 years before, it declared a revolution.

…

Dr. Goldstine — now 82 and executive officer of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia — recalls arriving at Aberdeen in 1942 as a newly commissioned lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. He had just been pulled out of his squadron when the Army realized that it had better uses for a Ph.D. mathematician from the University of Chicago.

At Aberdeen, Lieutenant Goldstine was given the mission of speeding up the calculation of firing tables needed for accurate artillery and the charts needed for bombing runs. At the time, the necessary math was done by a group of young women using mechanical desk calculators. The system wasn’t working.

…

In the process of consulting with university experts, Lieutenant Goldstine met a 32-year-old physicist named John W. Mauchly, who outlined his idea for an all-electronic digital computer that could perform computations 1,000 times faster than a human.

Lieutenant Goldstine was intrigued, so he took the idea back to his boss, Lt. Col. Paul Gillon. He gave the project both his approval and its name — Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

…

ENIAC was designed and built at the Moore School by a team led by Dr. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, an engineer in his early 20s. The newly promoted Captain Goldstine ran interference with the Army brass and contributed his own considerable expertise, says Paul Deitz, a civilian official at Aberdeen who is an unofficial historian of the ENIAC project.

…

In 1944, soon after the first part of ENIAC was completed, Dr. Goldstein had a chance meeting at the Aberdeen train station with John L. von Neumann, one of the leading mathematicians of his day and an adviser to the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the proving ground.

Dr. Goldstein recalls that when he told Dr. von Neumann about the ENIAC project, “he suddenly became galvanized.” It turned out that Dr. von Neumann had been working on a project in Los Alamos, N.M., that required high-power computing.”

(“Computer age had clumsy start Electronic era: Born 50 years ago, the ancestor of today’s PCs and calculators was slow, unreliable and weighed 30 tons”, by Michael Dresser, February 12, 1996, The Baltimore Sun)

Clearly, had von Neumann gone to the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-late 1950s the newly founded IBM San Jose research laboratory would have been privileged to receive his advice.

The presence of national-level nuclear science, top-level West Coast universities with growing interest in computers, and IBM’s arrival in the Bay Area, could have given von Neumann another chance on pioneer computer research – as an alternative to the more active, military-funded industrial computer activities in the Los Angeles region where von Neumann also had his RAND and JOHNNIAC.

21 years later views about von Neumann’s computer design began to change, and it was an IBM San Jose Research Laboratory scientist, John Backus quoted earlier, who put forth the term, “the von Neumann bottleneck”, in his 1977 Turing Award lecture which made references to von Neumann a whopping over 90 times – love him or hate him!

(John Backus, 19 77 ACM Turing Award Lecture, Association for Computing Machinery)

Within the academia, the termination of the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA in 1954, when the National Bureau of Standards gave up its management role due to the Pentagon’s objection, was a watershed event in the history of the computing field.

Harry Huskey, the SWAC computer project leader and computer training leader at INA who subsequently moved to Berkeley, later blamed the INA’s end on McCarthyism targeting the NBS:

“… some company made an additive to add to batteries that was supposed to extend their life, and the Bureau of Standards was given the job of testing it. So they tested it and decided that it didn’t do any good at all, and reported this. The guy that manufactured it contacted his congressman and said whatever, and that ended up with the Commerce Department appointing a committee, the Kelly Committee, I think it was, to review what the Bureau of Standards was doing, and this is also tied up with McCarthy. McCarthy was witch-hunting, you know, and I think the– well, they’re almost independent, but anyway, the McCarthy business caused the Bureau to fire a number of people, starting at the top. Ed Condon was fired. The next director, Alan Astin I think, was forced to resign or fired, or something. In the math division, John Curtiss was fired.

The whole Bureau operated with a good fraction of its budget coming from projects that were financed by other government agencies, and almost all of that was wiped out. If the Navy had a project going on, they would transfer it back to the Navy, and that sort of thing, so there was a real cutback in operation.

The fact that INA was a project under the Bureau of Standards caused it to be terminated as a Bureau project. …”

(interview by William Aspray, February 7, 2006, Computer History Museum)

I wouldn’t be surprised if the INA’s demise had to do with McCarthyism, given that in the summer of 1954 after its closure, John Nash was arrested for public homosexual activity in nearby Santa Monica and expelled from RAND.

On the other hand, from an opposite viewpoint, the end of NBS’s broad management role in scientific research may have reflected a Pentagon objective to get the ‘bang for their buck’, i.e., to focus funding on research directly relevant to the U.S. military.

Historically in the United States, substantial government support for scientific research had begun only with the coming of World War II:

“… During the Great Depression … a Science Advisory Board was created by executive order to advise the President. However, the board’s attempts to establish a basic research program in universities did not succeed.

The most significant step toward a durable relationship between government and science came in 1940. The war raging in Europe presented an opportunity for scientific work to affect a conflict. The leaders of the scientific community began to lobby for the creation of a government agency that would mobilize U.S. scientists for the country’s inevitable entry into the war. As a result, President Roosevelt created the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) under the chairmanship of Dr. Vannevar Bush. Bush was a former Dean of Engineering at MIT and was later the president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington. …

A major landmark in the progress of governmental support for science in the United States turned out to be the creation of the expanded Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), under Vannevar Bush. This initiated a structure under which U.S. scientists were brought into war efforts through a contract mechanism, while leaving them free to pursue their creative work. …”

(Jagdish Chandra and Stephen M. Robinson, An Uneasy Alliance: The Mathematics Research Center At the University of Wisconsin, 1956-1987, 2005, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

As in the above history, the U.S. government’s scientific research funding came primarily from World War II preparation and in the form of contracts, which did not prohibit the scientists from pursuing other scientific and creative interests: mobilization of the scientific community was led by the U.S. government’s National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) headed by former MIT Dean of Engineering Vannevar Bush, and later the expanded Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) under Bush became a contracting agency for wartime scientific research.

The ENIAC discussed earlier was a prominent example of military research and development by academic scientists: the development of the first general-purpose electronic computer was directly initiated, funded and supervised by the Army, but was carried out at a university; after its completion, the leading developers were free to move on to start their own company, or build computers in the academia.

After World War II, the Navy’s Office of Naval Research became the primary science funding agency before the founding of the National Science Foundation – with the exceptions of medical research funded by the National Institutes of Health, and nuclear science research funded by the Atomic Energy Commission:

“In 1946, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) was created to plan, foster, and encourage scientific research and to provide within the Department of the Navy a single office which by contract or otherwise was able to sponsor, obtain, and coordinate innovative research of general interest to all sectors of the Navy. … By and large, the naval authorities believed that most of the basic research carried out under ONR’s auspices should be published in the normal way. This policy allayed many fears in the academic and scientific community. The office began to take on the role that was envisaged for the yet-to-be-established National Science Foundation (NSF).

The National Institute of Health (NIH), established in 1930 and generously funded by OSRD during the war, became a major focus of government support for medical research in the universities. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was established in 1946, and this agency forged close links with universities by contracting research work to them and by building up the university-associated laboratories that it had inherited from the Manhattan Project. …”

(Jagdish Chandra and Stephen M. Robinson, 2005, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

Despite the original recommendation by Vannevar Bush, the U.S. government’s leading science adviser, the NSF founded in 1950 did not include defense research in its charter; and the Army and Air Force proceeded to establish their own research agencies:

“When the NSF was eventually established in 1950, defense research was excluded from its terms of reference. In the initial recommendation, Dr. Bush had envisioned defense research as one of the organizational component of NSF’s charter. As a consequence, the Department of the Army, and subsequently the Air Force, established their own offices of research. The Department of the Army’s Office of Ordinance Research was established in June 1951 on the campus of Duke University.”

(Jagdish Chandra and Stephen M. Robinson, 2005, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

As quoted above, Vannevar Bush, former MIT Dean of Engineering , had envisioned the National Science Foundation to have defense research as an organizational component.

Bush had outlined his vision in a July 1945 report to President Harry Truman, in which the proposed “National Research Foundation” would include a “Division of National Defense” alongside other divisions such as a “Division of Medical Research” and a “Division of Natural Sciences”.

(“Science The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945”, National Science Foundation)

The actual outcome, i.e., an NSF without a defense research branch, was positive for someone like Stephen Smale, who in the 1960s faced the unpleasant prospect, as in Part 2, that his anti-war activism risked his NSF grant eligibility – fortunately the NSF did not need to defer to the Pentagon.

From this angle, the National Bureau of Standards’ loss of management role for defense-funded research projects was inline with the separation of the NSF and defense research, although some might reason that when it came to the administration of national standards for technology there should be as few exceptions as possible.

But as pointed out by Harry Huskey, quoted earlier, in 1953 the NBS’s loss came as a result of McCarthyism-type politics. There was a public scandal, Congressional hearings and the firing of key NBS leaders; at the recommendation of the Congressional Kelly Committee, the Pentagon transferred all weaponry research away from the NBS:

“… The Battery AD-X2 controversy, on the other hand, was serious indeed. It caused the firing of the Bureau’s director, followed eventually by full reinstatement; prompted the investigation of the Bureau by two high-level committees and brought about dramatic changes in its programs; provoked a furor in the whole scientific community and led a large number of the Bureau staff to threaten resignation; resulted in six days of hearings before a Senate select committee; made the Bureau and its director front-page news for months; brought about the resignation of an assistant secretary of commerce; and (in part) caused the transfer of 2000 persons from the Bureau to newly formed military laboratories.

…

It can be fairly said that no other single report has had as great an effect on the history of the Bureau as the “Kelly Committee Report,” as it is commonly known. …

…

… Hence it recommended the “transfer of weaponry projects to the Department of Defense,” but recommended “continued use of the Bureau by Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission for non-weaponry science and technical aid.” Following these recommendations, on September 27, 1953, four ordnance divisions, totaling 2000 persons—1600 in three divisions at the Harry Diamond Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, and 400 at the Missile Development Division in Corona, California—were transferred to Army Ordnance and Naval Ordnance respectively, although all operations remained at their respective sites. …”

(Elio Passaglia with Karma A. Beal, A Unique Institution: The National Bureau of Standards, 1950-1969, 1999, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce)

As the Kelly Committee stated, quoted above, that research in “non-weaponry science and technical aid” for the Department of Defense could continue within the NBS.

Obviously, most of the mathematical research and computer training at the Institute for Numerical Analysis, funded by the Office of Naval Research as mentioned earlier, was “non-weaponry science” and so should have been able to continue. But as quoted earlier, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson decided to end NBS management of all defense agency-funded projects, including the INA.

The U.S. Army understood the importance of academic scientific research, as seen in the fact that its Office of Ordinance Research was first founded on the campus of Duke University, following the establishment of the NSF independent of the Pentagon, as quoted earlier.

The end of the INA became a point in time following which the Army directly went into initiating and supervising university-based mathematical research.

Led by Lieutenant General James M. Gavin, Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau and Brigadier General Chester Clark, the Army proceeded with forming its own mathematics research center in the academia, with the focus on relevance to the interests of the Army:

“Army general officers such as Lt. Gen. Arthur Trudeau, Lt. Gen. James M. Gavin, and Brig. Gen. Chester Clark, and other officers such as Lt. Col. Ivan R. Hershner, recognized early in the 1950s that the Army is a major user of the fruits of research in mathematics, no matter what the source is. … these enlightened officers and other members of the Army establishment were successful in convincing the Army to establish a center of mathematical expertise at an academic institution.

In preparation for this crucial decision, the Mathematics Advisory Panel of the Army, a precursor group to the Army Mathematics Advisory Group (AMAG) and the Army Mathematics Steering Committee (AMSC), conducted a survey of the uses of mathematics in Army activities and combined that with a census of its mathematically trained personnel and its expenditures for mathematical investigation. …

… The Advisory Panel made two recommendations. First, it advised that the Army establish for itself a mathematics research center at an academic institution. The key aspects of the work statement were to conduct basic research in selected areas of mathematics relevant to the interests of the Army, to provide educational and training courses to the Army on current mathematical methods, and to be available for consulting on mathematical problems encountered by Army scientists and engineers. It was to carry on research in four areas…:

• Numerical analysis. This was broadly understood as the adaptation of mathematics to high-speed computation, to include the use of electronic computing machines, the formulation of mathematical problems for exploration by such computers, and hence the broadening of the field in which such computers could be used. This area was originally intended to include “the engineering physics of high-speed computers,” presumably what is now referred to as computer architecture and computer engineering, though unfortunately very little was in fact done at MRC in those areas.
• Statistics and the theory of probability.
• Applied mathematics, including ordinary and partial differential equations as well as physical mathematics with emphasis on fluid mechanics, elasticity, plasticity, electro-dynamics, electrical networks, wave guidance, and propagation. 
• Operations research, including such subfields as linear and nonlinear programming, game theory, decision theory, information theory, and optimization.

Second, the Advisory Panel recommended that it be recognized and established as a continuing body, with the assignment to inform itself about new mathematical developments and to keep itself informed of the Army’s needs in and uses of mathematics, to supervise activities of this kind, and to facilitate the interchange of relevant information between activities. Initially, this was a committee of about twenty-five, including four from academic institutions. The rest represented various Army activities.”

(Jagdish Chandra and Stephen M. Robinson, 2005, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

In the above history account, the reflection of the military interests in the founding of an Army mathematics research center can be seen in the Army experts’ overwhelming dominance on the advisory panel over the academics.

Army experts led by Lieutenant Colonel Ivan R. Hershner, the University of Vermont’s mathematics department chairman, visited 26 universities that showed some interest, including, “Brown, Columbia, University of Chicago, Duke, California Institute of Technology, Harvard, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, MIT, New York University, the University of North Carolina, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Virginia”; out of 21 university proposals submitted, the University of Wisconsin was chosen:

“Towards the realization of the first recommendation, the chief of research and development of the Army appointed Ivan R. Hershner (then the chair of the Mathematics Department at the University of Vermont) to head an effort to explore with various universities and research groups their possible interest in this center. Letters were sent to over fifty U.S. institutions of higher learning. Based on the level of interest expressed, this small group of experts visited twenty-six universities …

This process resulted in twenty-one formal proposals. A technical advisory committee of Army scientists evaluated these proposals … The Army had offered to provide a state-of-the-art computer, but it expected that the selected university would supply suitable physical space to house the center. …

…

The decision to establish the Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin was announced on November 16, 1955, by Lt. Gen. James M. Gavin, chief of research and development of the U.S. Army. …

…

The first contract for MRC’s operation was signed on April 25, 1956, and the university designated Professor Rudolph E. Langer as MRC’s first director. ….”

(Jagdish Chandra and Stephen M. Robinson, 2005, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

The Army Mathematics Research Center started in 1956, the same year IBM started its San Jose research lab.

It is interesting that following a nationwide search, the Army’s final choice of the academic host for its mathematics research center was the leading university in the home state of then Senator Joseph McCarthy.

That might be coincidental, but it wasn’t isolated. The Army’s Office of Ordinance Research had been founded in 1951, as quoted earlier, at Duke University, which happened to be the alma mater of the high-profile, staunchly anti-Communist Senator Richard Nixon – soon-to-be U.S. Vice President – from Southern California, whose political tie to North Carolina was intimate, even within the Senate, as recalled by future Senator Jesse Helms, then an assistant to Senator Willis Smith of North Carolina:

“Serving as administrative assistant to a United States Senator is a true learning experience. …

In 1951 there were ninety-six U.S. Senators representing the then forty-eight states…

One of those ninety-six Senators back then was a delightful young Republican Senator from California named Richard M. Nixon. I was impressed by his intellect and his genuine interest in working with people who shared conservative principles without concern for their party tag. Senator Nixon had a solid North Carolina connection because he was a graduate of the law school at Duke University. As I mentioned, Senator Smith had been on the university’s board of trustees for some time … There were many visits to Senator Smith’s office by then President of Duke, Arthur Hollis Edens, and Senator Nixon often stopped by to greet Dr. Edens. The Duke connection as fellow alumni helped establish a solid friendship between Senator Nixon and Senator Smith.

The assignment of office space had put Mr. Nixon’s offices between the offices of Senator Smith and North Carolina’s senior Senator, Clyde R. Hoey, on one corner of the third floor of the Russell Senate Office Building. …”

(Jesse Helms, Here’s where I Stand: A Memoir, 2005, Random House)

As illustrated, much thought had been given to the assignment of office locations in a Congressional building – let alone the location of an Army central research center.

The Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison began its life less than 2 years after the termination of the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA, and in the same year 1956 when John von Neumann, former president of the American Mathematical Society and a top adviser to the U.S. military, was hospitalized for cancer treatment and made the decision to move to the University of California.

Von Neumann soon died, in February 1957 at the age of 53.

Shortly afterwards in May 1957, McCarthy suddenly died at only 48.

Prior to that, in the early summer of 1954 – just as the INA was closing – McCarthy’s ongoing Senate committee hearings hunting for Communists in the U.S. government were foiled by the Army, after he tried to target former Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“…Often, the information McCarthy used came from FBI files, which were full of rumor and third-hand accounts.
…

The McCarthy era began on February 9, 1950 when the obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin gave a speech to 275 members of the local Republican women’s club at the McClure Hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia.

“While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were known to the secretary of State and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy of the State Department,” McCarthy said…

…

McCarthy eventually made the mistake of turning his sights on President Dwight D. Eisenhower. A former Army general who had led allied forces to victory during World War II, Eisenhower was as American as apple pie.

As McCarthy began accusing Eisenhower of being soft on Communists, Hoover realized he would have to distance himself from the senator. Just before what became known as the Army-McCarthy hearings started on April 22, 1954, Hoover ordered the bureau to cease helping him. …

During the hearings, McCarthy failed to substantiate his claims that the Communists had penetrated the Army, which had hired a shrewd Boston lawyer, Joseph Welch, to represent it. McCarthy noted that Fred Fischer, a young lawyer in Welch’s firm, had been a member while at Harvard Law School of the National Lawyers Guild, described by the attorney general as the “legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party.” Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg had also been a member of the group.

Upon hearing this accusation, Welch responded, “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or recklessness.” When McCarthy continued to hound Fischer, Welch said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

After two months, the hearings were over, and so was McCarthy’s career. Watching the hearings on television, millions of Americans had seen how he bullied witnesses and what an unsavory character he was. Behind the scenes, Eisenhower pushed fellow Republicans to censure McCarthy.

In August 1954, a Senate committee was formed to investigate the senator. …

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure him. After that, when he rose to speak, senators left the Senate chamber. Reporters no longer attended his press conferences. On May 2, 1957, McCarthy died at the age of forty-eight of acute hepatitis, widely believed to be a result of his alcoholism…”

(“The Real Story on Joe McCarthy”, by Ronald Kessler, April 7, 2008, Newsmax)

Under the Army’s supervision the Mathematics Research Center at Wisconsin-Madison excelled. A clear sign that the MRC viewed itself as inheriting the mantle of the INA at UCLA was the fact that J. Barkley Rosser, an early director of the INA, became the second director of the MRC in 1963:

“In 1949 he was asked to become the Director of Research at a newly created Institute for Numerical Analysis, located at UCLA and sponsored by the National Bureau of Standards. At this early stage in modern electronic computing, Rosser was successful in drawing together a stellar group of mathematicians whose ultimate impact on the future of computing was memorable. He also saw that the computer held great promise for pure mathematics; one example was a project aimed at finding high precision values for the zeros of the Riemann zeta-function. While the final publication was delayed until 1969, this was among the earliest computational evidence supporting a famous conjecture of Riemann connected with properties of the prime numbers.

With the Institute functioning, Rosser returned to Cornell. In 1953-54 he received a joint Guggenheim-Fulbright fellowship which he spent in Europe, writing a book on modern logic. However, because able scientific administrators are rare, he also continued to receive requests to fill such posts, serving on many panels and committees connected with the Space Program and related projects, as well as other scientific organizations and research centers. Among these: Director of the Institute for Defense Analysis, Chairman of the Mathematics Division of the NRC, and Chairman of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences.

In 1963 he moved permanently from Cornell to Wisconsin, to become the Director of the Mathematical Research Center, replacing the first Director, Rudolph Langer, who had chosen to retire. The presence of two longtime Princeton friends, Joe Hirshfelder and Steve Kleene, was an added incentive for Rosser. The MRC operated under a contract from the Department of the Army…”

(“Memorial Resolution of the Faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison: On the Death of Emeritus Professor J. Barkley Rosser”, March 5, 1990, University of Wisconsin Madison)

From INA directorship in 1949 to directorship of the Institute for Defense Analysis, chairmanship of the National Research Council’s mathematics division, and then directorship of the Army mathematics research center, the mathematician J. Barkley Rosser took on several important management positions affiliated with the U.S. government and the defense establishment. As a result, as told in the above quote, some of his own mathematical research did not get to publication for 2 decades until 1969.

Interestingly, that particular research piece of Rosser’s was the use of the computer at INA, the SWAC computer as mentioned earlier, to calculate the zeros of the Riemann zeta-function, i.e., to provide evidence for the Riemann Hypothesis – a famous pure mathematics problem which John Nash’s unsuccessful attempt at solving in 1958 contributed to his mental instability, as in Part 2.

The rite of manhood in Professor Rosser’s occupation, I suspect, be it mathematics applied to the Army’s interests or mathematics as difficult as the Riemann Hypothesis.

The year after Rosser’s publication of his computing work on the Riemann Hypothesis, i.e., in 1970 as in Part 4, the MRC under his directorship was the target of the most powerful U.S. domestic terror bombing up to that point, which killed a physicist, Robert Fassnacht.

The bombing was a part of anti-war protests persisting over the years against the Army-affiliated math center, with some protestors advocating for “A People’s Math Research Center”:

“During the years of protest against the war and against MRC, many persons wrote documents, pro or con, about the center’s activities in support of the Army. Among all of these, the one that stands out as probably the most comprehensive single presentation of the case against the center is a booklet called THE AMRC Papers, produced in 1973 by a group calling itself the Madison Collective of Science for the People. …”

…

The Booklet is organized in four parts, whose titles are

• How AMRC Helps the Army
• How AMRC Works
• AMRC’s Relationship with the University of Wisconsin
• An Alternative: A People’s Math Research Center

The part of most interest here is the first, which includes four chapters on specific areas in which it is alleged that MRC helped the Army. The titles of these chapters are Counterinsurgency, Chemical & Biological Warfare, Missile, and Conventional Weapons. … Indeed, many of the descriptions reported in these four chapters are taken directly from the reports of the center itself, and others from documents produced by military agencies. … this booklet was being sold in Madison at a time when some Army scientists responsible for oversight of the MRC contract were in town. Mindful of the difficulty they frequently encountered in persuading other Army officials that mathematical research was doing anything of real use to the Army, the scientists went out on the street and bought 40 copies of the booklet because it made such powerful arguments that MRC was in fact of great benefit in advancing the Army’s programs!”

(Jagdish Chandra and Stephen M. Robinson, 2005, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

Mina Rees, a mathematician who had held management positions in the U.S. government research agencies, including with the applied mathematics panel of the National Defense Research Committee and as the head of the mathematics division at the Office of Naval Research, and who had played a key role in starting the NBS-sponsored INA at UCLA, expressed her strong opposition to the Army’s plan of directly involvement in an academic math research center:

“I think now rather with amusement of our feeling that the West Coast was somewhat underprivileged in — in this kind of development, but we did go to major universities all over the United States and it was after the visits to various places and an assessment of the degree of interest and the degree of involvement that the various universities were willing to undertake that we decided that the University of California at Los Angeles had the best chance of doing a – the kind of thing that we saw as needed, and I would think that we spent at least a year making that decision.

…

Yes. I think that was an outcome of discussions between John Curtiss and me, and one reason that we chose Southern California was that we thought that that was the place where we could get people to do that. Now the – what is it called – the Institute at Wisconsin – the Army Research – Mathematics Research Institute which had its troubles during the students’ uprisings some years later built on the same concept and tried to exploit the same attractiveness at having Army work done in a university. I was strongly opposed to that at that time, and I had no foresight- I don’t claim any foresight of what was going to happen later – but it just did not seem to me the right way to go about that problem, but it did seem to be the right: way to go about the development of solid mathematics.”

(“Interviewee: Mina Rees (1902-1997) Interviewer: Henry Tropp”, September 14, 1972, Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977, Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

There was “solid mathematics” done at the Army MRC at Wisconsin-Madison despite her strong opposition to the setup, as Rees later admitted in the above.

Moreover, the solid mathematics did not apply only to the military’s interests, but also in civilian industry.

Recall as previously quoted in Part 4, the significant achievements of Wisconsin-Madison mathematics professor Carl der Boor – SIAM’s 1996 John von Neumann Lecturer as cited earlier – in the development of the theory and applications of spline functions, which became “indispensible tools” in computer-aided design, and in auto and airplane manufacturing, among other industrial fields:

“… Splines were introduced in the 40’s (by the late I.J. Schoenberg of Wisconsin) as a means for approximating discrete data by curves. Their practical application was delayed almost twenty years until computers became powerful enough to handle the requisite computations. Since then they have become indispensible tools in computer-aided design and manufacture (cars and airplanes, in particular), in the production of printer’s typesets, in automated cartography… Carl is the worldwide leader and authority in the theory and applications of spline functions. … Carl has made Wisconsin-Madison a major international center in approximation theory and numerical analysis…”

(“Van Vleck Notes: Dedications, Honors and Awards …”, Fall 1997, Department of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin)

I. J. Schoenberg mentioned above, the founder of the mathematical theory of spline functions, had done some of his early work at the INA amidst a host of other researchers, including Derrick Lehmer, J. Barkley Rosser and David Saxon mentioned earlier, pursuing various subjects of their interests:

“THE PERIOD SUMMER 1951 THROUGH SPRING 1952

…

Research in the Mathematical Theory of Program Planning was carried enthusiastically by Motzkin, Agmon, Blumenthal, Gaddum, Schoenberg, and Walsh. During July and August a joint seminar was held with Rand on “Linear inequalities and related topics.” Invited speakers from outside were: A. W. Tucker, R. W. Shepherd, J. M. Danskin, S. Karlin, and R. E. Bellman.

Studies in numerical integration of ordinary and partial differential equations were pursued vigorously by Agmon, Bers, Fichera, and Wasow. … Rosser investigated the problem of computing low moments of normal order statistics. …

…

… Schoenberg pursued his theory of splines, a theory that has many useful applications.

Lehmer developed a practical method for obtaining the so-called Kloosterman Sums and investigated their properties. A series of tests for primality of Mersenne numbers were made on the SWAC, using a code sent in by R. M. Robinson of UC-Berkeley. …

Studies in theoretical physics were carried out by Saxon in cooperation with members of the Physics Department and other departments at UCLA …”

(Magnus R. Hestenes and John Todd, 1991, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce)

But it wasn’t until the mid-1960s at the MRC at Wisconsin-Madison that research in spline functions theory, “a theory that has many useful applications” as quoted above, flourished:

“Work on splines at MRC started in 1965 under the leadership of two permanent members, I. J. Schoenberg and T. N. E. Greville. The work evolved into a separate area in 1966 and continued for years thereafter. In fact, it probably is the case that spline functions are one of the best recognized of the mathematical advances that MRC brought about. …

…

… The contrast between the sustained success of the spline function subarea (benefiting from the continuous attention and organizational work of Schoenberg and later of Carl de Boor) and the sporadic nature of the other numerical analysis work provides a striking example of the importance of influential continuing staff in the development and sustenance of a research area.”

(Jagdish Chandra and Stephen M. Robinson, 2005, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

As quoted, spline functions became one of MRC’s “best recognized” successful research advances, whereas other numerical analysis work was “sporadic” in nature.

The direct funding, by U.S. defense research agencies, of mathematical research applicable to their interests continued to and during the 1980s, as can be seen in my situation when I was applying for graduate study in the U.S. and then studying for my mathematics Ph.D. at Berkeley, here as summarized from previous discussions in Part 4:

• in 1982 graduating from Sun Yat-sen University in China, Prof. Yuesheng Li who had supervised my undergraduate thesis in spline functions theory, suggested that I go to the MRC at Wisconsin-Madison to study with Carl de Boor, whose industry-applied research had been funded by the U.S. Army;
• when I chose UC Berkeley, Prof. Li suggested that I study with Alexander Chorin, whose ground-breaking research in computational fluid dynamics had been funded by the U.S. Navy;
• partly at the advice of Tosio Kato at Berkeley, I chose Stephen Smale, a prominent pure mathematician and former anti-war movement leader, to be my Ph.D. adviser, whose research had been funded by the National Science Foundation;
• Smale’s ambitious work to develop mathematical theories for numerical analysis was consistently dismissed by Berkeley numerical analysts, especially by Chorin, and Smale’s claims of his work being in applied mathematics were not accepted by those aligned with the numerical analysts.

From an industry point of view, the dominance of military influences in the early development of computers could be partly due to the ineptitude, or ineffectiveness, of the civilian sector, as seen in Berkeley Ph.D. and Silicon Valley pioneer Douglas Engelbart’s experience in the mid-1950s with Hewlett-Packard, discussed earlier.

IBM, which in 1956 started a research laboratory in San Jose as discussed earlier, hadn’t done that well, either:

“… IBM’s president from 1914 to 1956, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., had failed to recognize growing scientific and engineering demand for high-speed computing and visualized only a small market for the new electronic machines. Only under the patriotic cover of IBM’s support for the Korean War effort and through the leadership of Thomas J. Watson, Jr., did the firm manufacture its first computer, the Defense Calculator—IBM Model 701. The eighteen machines produced were oriented toward scientific use, with limited input/output equipment, and were all placed at government installations or with defense contractors. …”

(David O. Whitten and Bessie E. Whitten, eds., Manufacturing: A Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide, 1990, Greenwood Press)

Like with the invention of the first electronic computer ENIAC, war mobilization played a key role in the start of IBM computer manufacturing, during the Korean War era – despite the International Business Machines Corporation’s decades-long history in a closely related industrial field.

It is also interesting that the IBM San Jose research lab’s start coincided with the end of the over 4-decades-long reign of Thomas J. Watson, Sr. at IBM, in 1956 as quoted above.

Watson, who had adopted for IBM the alluring slogan, “World peace through world trade”, passed the reign to his son Thomas J. Watson, Jr., a month before his death in June 1956.

(“Thomas J. Watson: CEO 1914 – 1956”, International Business Machines Corporation)

Another industrial company was more eager than IBM.

I have quoted in Part 4 from an 2011 blog post, about Prof. Li in 1982 stressing to me the benefits of Carl de Boor’s General Motors connection:

“When I applied for graduate study in the United States Professor Li seriously recommended the U. S. Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison – Dr. Carl de Boor there and his General Motors connection were Professor Li’s favorite …”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”, March 29, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

I had no knowledge of the specifics of Professor de Boor’s GM connection.

But there is something about Charles Wilson, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense who in 1953 dumped the National Bureau of Standards from the management of defense agency-funded projects.

Wilson had been promoted from the presidency of General Motors:

“Running on an anti-New Deal, pro-business, anti-corruption, anti-Communism platform, and featuring a pledge to end the Korean conflict, the Republican Eisenhower-Nixon ticket rode roughshod over the Stevenson-Sparkman Democrats, winning the White House as well as both houses of Congress. A changed philosophy of Government had been installed in Washington, one best exemplified by the nomination as secretary of defense of Charles (“Engine Charlie”) Wilson, president of General Motors, whose statement, “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa,” was added to the lexicon of the Nation’s political history.”

(Elio Passaglia with Karma A. Beal, 1999, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce)

Yup, what was good for the Army’s interests was probably good for General Motors, and “Charlie Engine” Wilson had more of that drive than Thomas Watson, Sr.

By 1981-1982 as I was applying to U.S. graduate schools and had discussions with Prof. Li, there was a General Motors senior executive with a prominent mathematical computing link in the family.

Marina von Neumann Whitman, General Motors vice president and chief economist beginning in 1979, was the daughter of the late “father of computers” who had spread his computer-building ‘gospel’ around the academia and scientific institutions; she had been the first woman ever to be on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, appointed by President Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s former vice president, in 1972:

“Whitman’s father, John von Neumann, is known for inventing Game Theory, pioneering developments in computer science and contributing to the Manhattan Project, among other achievements.

“This was a force to contend with,” Whitman said. “He was a wonderful father, but he put a lot of pressure on me to always be on the top of everything.”

Still, it’s safe to say she’s escaped her father’s shadow. She was the first woman to be appointed to the president’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1972, by President Richard Nixon. Whitman also served as vice president and chief economist of General Motors from 1979 to 1985 and group vice president for public affairs from 1985 to 1992.”

(“Marina von Neumann Whitman to read from new memoir ‘The Martian’s Daughter’”, by John Bohn, October 2, 2012, The Michigan Daily)

General Motors’ recognition of von Neumann Whitman’s talents was only logical, considering that in the 1950s Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, the former GM president, had benefited greatly from her father’s advice, even at his hospital bedside in his last year of life:

“… At Walter Reed, where he was moved early last spring, an Air Force officer, Lieut. Colonel Vincent Ford, worked full time assisting him. Eight airmen, all cleared for top secret material, were assigned to help on a 24-hour basis. His work for the Air Force and other government departments continued. Cabinet members and military officials continually came for his advice, and on one occasion Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, Air Force Secretary Donald Quarles and most of the top Air Force brass gathered in Von Neumann’s suite to consult his judgment while there was still time. …”

(Clay Blair, Jr., February 25, 1957, Volume 42, Number 8, Life)

Ironically, the earlier experiences of Marina von Neumann, entering the real world, included being turned down for a job prospect at IBM, where her late father had been a consultant, and being invited to apply and then rejected for Ph.D. study at Princeton University, where her father had been famous – for rather unusual personal reasons:

“She remembers one contentious exchange after Whitman told her father that she planned to get married upon graduating college.

“He had a fit,” Whitman said. “He thought that this would be the death knell for any professional ambitions I might have. And in the 1950s, he was statistically right, but he was wrong about me.”

…

Using two distinct anecdotes, Whitman’s second focus in the book is how society has changed during her lifetime. In the first, she describes how she was turned down for a prospective job opportunity at IBM because the recruiter saw she was engaged to be married.

…

The second anecdote discusses Whitman’s application to Princeton University for a Ph.D. in economics; the economics department invited her to apply, yet turned her down for a simple reason.

“I went to see the president (of Princeton). And what the conversation boiled down to was, ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs. Whitman, we can accept a student of your caliber, but we just don’t have enough ladies’ rooms.’ ”

(John Bohn, October 2, 2012, The Michigan Daily)

Marina Whitman is now a professor of business administration and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

(““The Martian’s Daughter” by Marina von Neumann Whitman”, October 2, 2012, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan)

(Part 5 continues in (ii))

Universal basic income – too good to be true, or simply not enough?

Good news travels fast.

Last December, a story appeared in the mainstream international media, e.g., Britain’s Independent newspaper, that Finland was planning to bring in a guaranteed basic income for all her citizens:

“Finland’s government is drawing up plans to give every one of its citizens a basic income of 800 euros (£576) a month and scrap benefits altogether.

A poll commissioned by the agency planning the proposal, the Finnish Social Insurance Institute, showed 69% supported the basic income plan.

Prime Minister Juha Sipila was quote by QZ as backing the idea.

“For me, a basic income means simplifying the social security system,” he said.

The proposal would entitle each Finn to 800 euros tax free each month, which according to Bloomberg, would cost the government 52.2 billion euros a year.

The country’s government will make a final decision on the plan in November 2016.”

(“Finland plans to give every citizen 800 euros a month and scrap benefits”, by Will Grice, December 6, 2015, Independent)

In quoting its source, Bloomberg View columnist Leonid Bershidsky’s article a month earlier, the Independent skipped the fact that there would be a “pilot stage” first:

“… Full implementation would be preceded by a pilot stage, during which the basic income payout would be 550 euros and some benefits would remain.”

(“Finns May Get Paid for Being Finns”, by Leonid Bershidsky, November 3, 2015, Bloomberg View)

A few days later the news appeared among the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda, referring to the pilot stage as a “hybrid programme”:

“… The Finnish proposal, slated to be finalized in 2016, will first be rolled out as a hybrid programme in 2017, offering 550 euros a month while maintaining some social services. …”

(“Finland’s basic income experiment – can it work?”, by Donald Armbrecht, December 10, 2015, Global Agenda, World Economic Forum)

But it was “too good to be true”.

On the same day of the World Economic Forum article, Britain’s The Guardian dampened the euphoria by reporting that what Finland was planning was only a policy experiment – on a small scale and with no commitment to what would come next:

“Finland is not planning to scrap its existing benefit system and give everyone an unconditional grant of €800 a month – contrary to what some recent headlines may have told you.

What it is planning promises to be an interesting policy experiment involving a sample of the population, which may or may not include some form of basic income paid to all participants: which in turn may not be unconditional, and may be worth a lot less than €800. Still the general excitement was testimony to widespread interest in the basic income idea.”

(“Even in Finland, universal basic income is too good to be true”, by Declan Gaffney, December 10, 2015, The Guardian)

It “may be worth a lot less than €800”, because that level of a guaranteed income for all would occupy the Finnish government’s entire current budget, as noted by Jim Edwards of Business Insider UK:

“In Finland, €800 a month will cost the government €52.2 billion a year. The government’s revenue for 2016 is €49.1 billion. In theory, the shortfall should not be a problem because not every Finn is an adult (only those of working age will receive it) and richer Finns’ payments will be taxed. In addition, the end of other social programmes should produce savings.”

(“Here’s how much we’d all get if the UK dumped its welfare state and introduced a universal basic income scheme instead”, by Jim Edwards, December 13, 2015, Business Insider UK)

So for what the Finnish government could afford, it might not be enough for a living income – unless, of course, the government finds additional revenue, e.g., by increasing taxes as suggested by U.S. basic income advocate Scott Santens, who had proposed a basic annual income at a similar level, $12,000 per adult and $4,000 per child:

“Basic income is entirely affordable given all the current and hugely wasteful means-tested programs full of unnecessary bureaucracy that can be consolidated into it. And the cost also depends greatly on the chosen plan. A plan of $12,000 per U.S. citizen over 18, and $4,000 per citizen under 18 amounts to a revenue need of $2.98 trillion, which after all the programs that can be eliminated are rolled into it, requires an additional need of $1.5 trillion or so. So where do we come up with an additional $1.5 trillion?

• A land value tax has been estimated to be a source of revenue of about $1.7 trillion.

• A flat tax of around 40% would be sufficient. Due to the way such a tax works in combination with UBI, this would effectively be a reduction in taxes for about 80% of the population.

• A 10% value added tax (VAT) has been estimated to be a source of revenue of about $750 billion. That could be increased to reach $1.5 trillion or added to other sources of additional revenue.

• These other sources of revenue could be a carbon tax ($440 billion), a financial transaction tax ($350 billion), or taxing capital gains like ordinary income and creating new upper tax brackets ($160 billion). Did you know that for fifty years – between 1932 and 1982 – the top income tax rate averaged 82%? Our current highest rate is 39%.

…”

(“Why Should We Support the Idea of Universal Basic Income?”, by Scott Santens, June 26, 2015, Huffington Politics)

Ambitious taxation plans, but I am puzzled by some of Scott Santens’s numbers: the current highest U.S. income tax rate of 39% is pretty much the proposed flat-tax rate of 40% already; if that highest tax rate is currently paid by Americans with the highest incomes, then little additional money would be squeezed from them through the flat tax; and now where would the money for “reduction in taxes for about 80% of the population” come from?

Oh well, big taxes tend to be less popular than their advocates claim. Santens obviously understood it, and went on to suggest other big revenues:

“…

• From 2008 to 2014, we created about $5 trillion out of thin air, and handed it to banks in hopes they would lend it to people. It was called quantitative easing. The result was rich people got even richer. Why not skip the banks, and just hand debt-free money directly and equally to all citizens? Potentially, a quarter of basic income could require no taxes at all.

• There is a place in the world that already pays a regular dividend to everyone living there, universally to child and adult, through a wealth fund it has created through royalty fees paid by companies for the rights to profit from its natural resources. This place is Alaska, and the “Alaska Model” could be applied anywhere as a means of granting a basic income as the social dividend from a sovereign wealth fund of resource-based revenue.

…”

(Scott Santens, June 26, 2015, Huffington Politics)

Yeah, everyone would be rich if money could be made out of thin air, or could flow nonstop from oil.

Like with the reported Finnish plan of €800/month per adult, Santens’s $2.98 trillion plan of $12,000 per adult and $4,000 per child would gobble up much of the government budget:

“The U.S. spent about $3.7 trillion in the fiscal year that just ended, about $12,000 for every American. …”

(“5 myths about the budget”, by Michael Grunwald, October 21, 2015, Politico)

The difference is that the 2015 U.S. government budget could also pay each child $12,000, not just $4,000.

It is hard to imagine the government spending the bulk of the budget on a universal basic income like that, rather than raising big taxes to pay for it.

In early 2014 when the Liberal Party of Canada adopted two resolutions advocating for a “Basic Annual Income”, Toronto Star columnist Carol Goar immediately reminded the public that this was an idea Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, had dodged decades earlier due to taxation concerns:

“The Liberal Party has handed Justin Trudeau a gift he dared not refuse, but will soon regret accepting.

One of the “priority resolutions” approved by delegates at their biennial convention in Montreal this past weekend calls for a Liberal government to “work with provinces and territories to design and implement a Basic Annual Income” for all Canadians.

The same gift was thrust into his father’s hands 42 years ago. Sen. David Croll, author of a groundbreaking parliamentary report, entreated Pierre Elliott Trudeau to introduce a Guaranteed Annual Income. “Let this be our priority project; a project that will stir the world’s imagination,” he urged Canada’s 15th prime minister. “We need search no further for a national purpose.”

Trudeau’s heart said yes. His head said no.

He chose reason over passion. “It’s a good theory,” he acknowledged. “But we cannot guarantee to bring everyone over the poverty line by giving them part of the taxpayers’ pocket.””

(“‘Basic annual income’ loaded with pitfalls: Goar”, by Carol Goar, February 25, 2014, Toronto Star)

But this time, Trudeau the son did not say “no” right away, perhaps because the party resolutions made no reference to taxes.

The first of the two February 2014 Canadian Liberal Party resolutions on Basic Annual Income, Policy Resolution 97, put forth by National Women’s Liberal Commission, stated:

“…

BE IT RESOLVED that the Liberal Party of Canada advocate for a federal pilot of a basic income supplement in at least one Canadian town or city, in cooperation with the appropriate provincial and municipal government(s).”

(“Policy Resolution 97: Basic Income Supplement: Testing a Dignified Approach to Income Security for Working-age Canadians”, National Women’s Liberal Commission, Liberal Party of Canada)

“A federal pilot” involving “at least one Canadian town or city” would be like a minimal version of the Finnish “policy experiment” to be decided in November 2016. On this scale, obviously no new tax is needed.

For such a small-scale policy experiment, Finland and Canada would not be alone. Twenty municipalities in the Netherlands, Utrecht among them, are working to put a basic income into experiment, though keeping a low profile about it:

“It’s an idea whose adherents over the centuries have ranged from socialists to libertarians to far-right mavericks. It was first proposed by Thomas Paine in his 1797 pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, as a system in which at the “age of majority” everyone would receive an equal capital grant, a “basic income” handed over by the state to each and all, no questions asked, to do with what they wanted.

… in Utrecht, one of the largest cities in the Netherlands, and 19 other Dutch municipalities, a tentative step towards realising the dream of many a marginal and disappointed political theorist is being made.

The politicians, well aware of a possible backlash, are rather shy of admitting it. “We had to delete mention of basic income from all the documents to get the policy signed off by the council,” confided Lisa Westerveld, a Green councillor for the city of Nijmegen, near the Dutch-German border.

“We don’t call it a basic income in Utrecht because people have an idea about it – that it is just free money and people will sit at home and watch TV,” said Heleen de Boer, a Green councillor in that city, which is half an hour south of Amsterdam.

Nevertheless, the municipalities are, in the words of de Boer, taking a “small step” towards a basic income for all by allowing small groups of benefit claimants to be paid £660 a month – and keep any earnings they make from work on top of that. Their monthly pay will not be means-tested. They will instead have the security of that cash every month, and the option to decide whether they want to add to that by finding work. The outcomes will be analysed by eminent economist Loek Groot, a professor at the University of Utrecht.

A start date for the scheme has yet to be settled – and only benefit claimants involved in the pilots will receive the cash – but there is no doubting the radical intent. The motivation behind the experiment in Utrecht, according to Nienke Horst, a senior policy adviser to the municipality’s Liberal Democrat leadership, is for claimants to avoid the “poverty trap” – the fact that if they earn, they will lose benefits, and potentially be worse off.”

(“Dutch city plans to pay citizens a ‘basic income’, and Greens say it could work in the UK”, by Daniel Boffey, December 26, 2015, The Guardian)

Elsewhere, a small-scale experiment was recently carried out in 2008-2009 in an African village in Namibia, with considerable success according to the German aid organizations that conducted it:

“It sounds like a communist utopia, but a basic income program pioneered by German aid workers has helped alleviate poverty in a Nambian village. Crime is down and children can finally attend school. Only the local white farmers are unhappy.

…

The African continent receives roughly €30 billion in annual development aid, through charitable organizations, humanitarian assistance projects or direct payments to governments. The money flows into thousands of aid projects, into things like well-digging and malaria prevention, but some of it also ends up in the private bank accounts of corrupt statesmen or is spent on wars, and often never reaches its intended recipients. Indeed, the results of half a century of aid to the developing world are devastating: Out of the 40 nations that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) categorizes as “heavily indebted poor countries,” 33 are in Africa.

It seems that the financial assistance coming from donor nations is barely keeping the continent alive, which leads to two possible conclusions: Either development aid is not a solution, or Africa is beyond help.

In the small Namibian village of Otjivero, a coalition of aid organizations is attempting to prove that both conclusions are wrong. They insist that Africa can be helped — provided it gets the right kind of help, which requires a new and different approach to aid.

The idea is simple: The payment of a basic monthly income, funded with tax revenues, of 100 Namibia dollars, or about €9 ($13), for each citizen. There are no conditions, and nothing is expected in return. The money comes from various organizations, including AIDS foundations, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and Protestant churches in Germany’s Rhineland and Westphalia regions.”

(“A New Approach to Aid: How a Basic Income Program Saved a Namibian Village”, by Dialika Krahe, August 10, 2009, Spiegel Online International)

But the Namibia experiment’s scientific validity has been questioned by social policy expert Rigmar Osterkamp:

“In January 2008, an innovative civil society initiative was started in the Namibian village of Otjivero. It paid a basic income grant to all residents with financial backing from Germany. The aim was to demonstrate how poverty and high levels of inequality can be reduced. The project was not evaluated diligently, however, so it did not serve as a valid pilot scheme. Its impacts remain unclear, but are certainly unsustainable.

…”

(“Lessons from failure”, by Rigmar Osterkamp, May 3, 2013, D+C Development and Cooperation)

The affordability of a broader basic income at this level is certainly doubtful, considering that for Africa’s 1.1 billion people to receive an international aid of €108 each annually would require nearly €120 billion, several times the €30 billion Africa received as per the 2009 Spiegel report.

As for “a communist utopia” the Namibia project might sound like, the income without requirement of work would certainly be much ‘freer’ than the communist rule in which I grew up in China: there was no income without work, but the government aimed at full employment by assigning mandatory jobs to people of working age.

Also confusing is the notion of rations, related to a basic income experiment in India. Under the communist rule decades ago in Chinese cities the rations were quotas, within the limits of which residents could purchase living necessities such as food stuff; that is quite different from the present rations in Delhi, provided free of charge to the residents, as in the following story about basic income experiments in India:

“In 2011 two pilot schemes have started in India, one conducted by the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a well-known trade union for women who earn a low income through their own labour or small businesses. The project was supported by UNICEF. In eight villages the pilot provided all adults for one year with an unconditional payment of 200 Rupees (about 3.75 US Dollars | 2.80 Euros) per month and each child under the age of 14 with 100 Rupees a month. These payments represented about 40% of the bare subsistence level.

The other pilot is supported by the Delhi Government. It gives households a choice between continuing to receive food rations in an existing scheme or taking a monthly cash transfer instead. Many have opted for the cash.”

(“GROWING SUPPORT FOR BI WORLWIDE”, December 2012, Global Basic Income Foundation)

In Canada in February 2014, the second Liberal Party resolution adopted on universal basic income, Policy Resolution 100 – a Priority Resolution mentioned in Carol Goar’s Toronto Star article – proposed by the party’s Prince Edward Island wing, demanded the design and implementation of a Basic Annual Income:

“…

BE IT RESOLVED that a Federal Liberal Government work with the provinces and territories to design and implement a Basic Annual Income in such a way that differences are taken into consideration under the existing Canada Social Transfer System.”

(“Policy Resolution 100: Priority Resolution: Creating a Basic Annual Income to be Designed and Implemented for a Fair Economy”, Liberal Party of Canada (Prince Edward Island), Liberal Party of Canada)

The existing “Canada Social Transfer System”, referred to in this policy resolution, is defined as follows:

“The Canada Social Transfer (CST) is the primary federal contribution in Canada to provincial and territorial social programs related to post-secondary education (PSE), social assistance and social services, and programs for children.”

(“The Canada Social Transfer: Past, Present and Future Considerations”, by James Gauthier, September 13, 2012, Library of Parliament Canada)

This Liberal Party Priority Resolution is thus about turning the “existing” federal government fund transfer to the provinces and territories for post-secondary education, social assistance, social services and children’s programs, together with funds the provinces and territories already have, into a system of Basic Annual Income – whatever the income amount comes to, presumably.

The basic income normally does not include allowance for higher education:

“… Bettering oneself beyond basic needs – attaining higher education and pursuing a rewarding, long-term career – are aims that a basic income was never intended to replace.”

(“How can we not afford a ‘basic annual income’?”, by Rob Rainer and Kelly Ernst, February 27, 2014, Toronto Star)

Since government funds for post-secondary education are unlikely to be diverted to the basic income, the parts of the Canada Social Transfer that may be utilized would be funds for social assistance, social services and children’s programs.

The latest signal from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government indicates that funds for children’s benefits would likely be separate from any basic income, and more importantly, the basic income is currently not on the government agenda although future discussions would be welcome:

“Veteran economist Jean-Yves Duclos, who is Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, told The Globe and Mail the concept has merit as a policy to consider after the government implements more immediate reforms promised during the election campaign.

…

Interest in the idea of a guaranteed income is heating up since the Finnish government announced last year that it will research and test the concept.

That has led to growing calls to explore the idea here. Former senator Hugh Segal and Conference Board of Canada chief economist Glen Hodgson are among those recommending pilot projects.

…

A guaranteed income was not part of the federal Liberal platform, and Mr. Duclos said it is not currently on the government’s agenda given the focus on delivering campaign commitments. However, the minister is clearly interested in exploring the idea over the longer term.

One of Mr. Duclos’s most pressing files is folding several existing benefits for parents into a single monthly payment that is geared to income. That has a target implementation date of July. The minister noted that elements of that plan are in line with a guaranteed national income.

“Most importantly, I think it’s the principles behind the idea [of a guaranteed income] that matter. These principles are greater simplicity for the government, greater transparency on the part of families and greater equity for everyone,” he said. “In fact, it’s the same principles that are behind the implementation of our Canadian child benefit in the next budget, so it’s great that different versions of different systems can achieve the same objectives of greater simplicity, transparency and equity.”

…

Conservative MP and finance critic Lisa Raitt said she would like the House of Commons finance committee to study the idea. She also said she raised the issue with Finance Minister Bill Morneau recently during a private pre-budget meeting.

“He seemed favourable,” she said. “I have an open mind on it. I know that there’s been progress made on it around the world in terms of how people are viewing it. I don’t know if it will work in Canada but the work of the committee will help us figure out whether or not it is something that is good or not good.””

(“Minister eyes guaranteed minimum income to tackle poverty”. by Bill Curry, February 5, 2016, The Globe and Mail)

Apparently, a party policy priority resolution is not necessarily in the party’s election platform, not in this case.

As Jean-Yves Duclos, the Canadian Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, explained, the Liberal government’s new Canadian child benefit is a different version of a different system but follows the same principles that would be for a “guaranteed national income”: “greater simplicity for the government, greater transparency on the part of families and greater equity for everyone”.

Whatever the principles, if the money has been for social assistance and social services, i.e., social welfare only, how much of a “guaranteed national income”for everyone can it be turned into?

Quite a lot more money than what the relative small number of welfare recipients get, because a larger amount of money is spent on others. For example, the U.S. data is staggering, although it includes some assistance on education (Pell grants):

“New data compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee shows that, last year, the United States spent over $60,000 to support welfare programs per each household that is in poverty. The calculations are based on data from the Census, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congressional Research Services.

“According to the Census’s American Community Survey, the number of households with incomes below the poverty line in 2011 was 16,807,795,” the Senate Budget Committee notes. “If you divide total federal and state spending by the number of households with incomes below the poverty line, the average spending per household in poverty was $61,194 in 2011.”

This dollar figure is almost three times the amount the average household on poverty lives on per year. “If the spending on these programs were converted into cash, and distributed exclusively to the nation’s households below the poverty line, this cash amount would be over 2.5 times the federal poverty threshold for a family of four, which in 2011 was $22,350 …” the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note.

To be clear, not all households living below the poverty line receive $61,194 worth of assistance per year. After all, many above the poverty line also receive benefits from social welfare programs (e.g. pell grants).

…

As for the welfare programs, the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note:

A congressional report from CRS recently revealed that the United States now spends more on means-tested welfare than any other item in the federal budget—including Social Security, Medicare, or national defense. Including state contributions to the roughly 80 federal poverty programs, the total amount spent in 2011 was approximately $1 trillion. Federal spending alone on these programs was up 32 percent since 2008.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that almost 110 million Americans received some form of means-tested welfare in 2011. These figures exclude entitlements like Medicare and Social Security to which people contribute, and they refer exclusively to low-income direct and indirect financial support—such as food stamps, public housing, child care, energy assistance, direct cash aid, etc. For instance, 47 million Americans currently receive food stamps…”

(“Over $60,000 in Welfare Spent Per Household in Poverty”, by Daniel Halper, October 26, 2012, The Weekly Standard)

Still, $1 trillion is just over 1/3 of the $2.98 trillion needed, according to basic income advocate Scott Santens quoted earlier, for a U.S. national basic income of $12,000 per adult and $4,000 per child per year.

But it is a lot of money that presumably can be consolidated into one basic income program to achieve “greater simplicity, transparency and equity”, as phrased by Canada’s Jean-Yves Duclos.

The British data is similar:

“So how might this work out in the UK?

We decided to use numbers for the 2013-14 financial year because those are the most-complete numbers provided by the Office of National Statistics and the Office for Budget Responsibility:

• UK WELFARE BUDGET FOR 2013-14

• Total welfare spending: £251 billion
• Population: 64.5 million
• Of which, children: 15 million

If that budget was recast as a universal basic income, this is what you would get:

• UK BASIC INCOME BUDGET FOR 2013-14

• Basic income per head for all residents, annually: £3,891
• Basic income per head for all residents, monthly: £324
• Basic income per head for adults only, annually: £5,081
• Basic income per head for adults only, monthly: £423”

(Jim Edwards, December 13, 2015, Business Insider UK)

In 2013, £3,891 was over $5,800, and £5,081 was over $7,600.

(“Yearly Average Currency Exchange Rates: Translating foreign currency into U.S. dollars”, last updated January 15, 2016, U.S. Internal Revenue Service)

So the British government welfare spending is clearly more than 1/3 of what is needed for a basic income at the same level as the U.S. one advocated by Santens.

The idea that a universal basic income would provide better “equity”, or more equality for the poor, appeals to the political left, while the notion that it provides “simplicity” in government management appeals to the political right:

“… To those on the left, a UBI would create greater equality by ending poverty and providing a minimum living standard. It would also increase bargaining power for workers, who could demand better working conditions with a safety cushion. …

…

Meanwhile, a few conservatives have advocated a form of basic income for a different set of reasons. The right likes basic income because it would allow for the removal of many overlapping and piecemeal government programs, such as food stamps and unemployment insurance, as well as programs the government directly runs. …”

(“Thinking Utopian: How about a universal basic income?”, by Mike Konczal, May 11, 2013, Wonkblog, The Washington Post)

The history of attempts at introducing a universal basic income by politicians and intellectual advocates in the Western world has been quite long, in the U.S. dating back to at least the Richard Nixon era:

“… Milton Friedman, the libertarian Nobel laureate economist, proposed a version of this idea called a “negative income tax,” in which every household would be given a check for a set amount, such that some people actually had a negative tax burden. That got picked up by the Nixon administration, in particular then-aide and future U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Congress almost passed a version of the proposal. George McGovern proposed a $1,000 tax credit for every man woman in child during his 1972 run against Nixon, which he called a “demogrant”. …

Despite the current unpopularity of the idea — commonly known as a “basic income” when it takes the form of an unconditional payment to all citizens — among policymakers, it has some adherents among intellectuals, including Charles Murray of AEI – of The Bell Curve and Coming Apart fame – and the political philosopher Philippe van Parijs.”

(“Obama doesn’t want to just write welfare recipients checks. But what if we did?”, by Dylan Matthews, August 8, 2012, Wonkblog, The Washington Post)

I note that the U.S. politicians’ approaches were more pragmatic than universal: they simply proposed tax credits which would be universal when not dependent on income level, and the amount may not be at all close to the basic living level.

One of the most recent such proposals was put forward by then U.S. Congressman Bob Filner:

“The most recent version of the idea introduced in Congress was California Rep. Bob Filner’s “A Tax Cut for the Rest of Us Act,” designed by basic income activists, which would have replaced the standard deduction of the income tax with a $2,000 credit per adult and $1,000 credit per child, both fully refundable. The bill, introduced in 2006, didn’t catch on, only gaining one other cosponsor, and is not large enough to eliminate poverty, but it did give tax analysts a chance to crunch the numbers on what a basic income would actually cost.

According to Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-leaning think tank and advocacy group, the Filner proposal came to … $186 billion annually, a figure made lower by the fact that the credit is optional, only applies to those who doesn’t itemize deductions and replaces rather than supplements the standard deduction. …”

(Dylan Matthews, August 8, 2012, The Washington Post)

I note that Bob Filner, the main subject of my February 9, 2015 blog post, was a high-profile and successful Democratic Congressman who went on to become Mayor of San Diego only to resign in disgrace due to a sexual-impropriety scandal, while losing in his efforts campaigning for a U.S.-Mexico bi-national Olympics for the year 2024.

(“Sexual complaints against a seasoned U.S. Democrat, and the end of a U.S.-Mexico bi-national Olympics dream”, February 9, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Filner’s tax credit plan was proposed in 2006. According to the estimation of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index calculator, $1,000 U.S. in 1972, when then Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern proposed a universal tax credit, would equal $4,822.97 in 2006.

(“H.R. 5257 (109th): Tax Cut for the Rest of Us Act of 2006”, GOVTRACK; and,“CPI Inflation Calculator”, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

So Filner’s plan of $2,000 per adult and $1,000 per child would have given every American an amount just over 40% or just over 20%, respectively, of McGovern’s plan. Moreover, the tax credit would replace the standard deduction, and so the real gain would be even smaller.

Filner’s plan not only would have been very inadequate as a basic income, but paled in comparison to the proposals of others, including conservative scholar Charles Murray’s, according to Dylan Matthews in his Washington Post Wonkblog article:

“Basic income activists have pegged the amount for a full basic income at $10,000 per adult and $2,000 per child. Here’s how much proposals between Filner’s and that plan would cost, given the current size of the population:

…

Filner’s proposal, not including any offsets from repealing the standard deduction, would cost a little over $500 billion a year. A plan with $5,000 grants for adults, or about half the $10,000 annual poverty line for adults, costs about $1.25 trillion a year, and Murray’s proposal to give $10,000 annually for every adult over 21 comes to about $2.25 trillion.”

(Dylan Matthews, August 8, 2012, The Washington Post)

While the basic income amounts in the proposals analyzed in Matthews’s article are all less than basic income advocate Scott Santens’ vision of $12,000 per adult and $4,000 per child, Murray’s is close to it, and is noteworthy given his fame as a conservative scholar.

Charles Murray, as reviewed in my January 23, 2015 blog post, has been highly controversial for his view on racial difference in IQ intelligence:

“Murray was one of the authors of the infamous 1994 book, The Bell Curve, whose claims about the genetic roots of the black/white IQ gap set off the most famous public intellectual debate over race and IQ.”

(“A Harvard Ph.D. thesis on “Hispanic IQ”, bad publicity even for the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.”, January 23, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Murray’s proposal was cheered on by British writer Tim Worstall in a Forbes magazine article on December 6, 2015 – the same day of the Independent story quoted at the start of this blog post – who emphasized that it would cost only about as much as the current U.S. spending on welfare:

“There’s rather a lot of discussion around these days about the merits of a universal basic income. We have, for example, those who tell us that the robots are about to steal all our jobs and therefore we need to tax the capital owners in order to provide that basic income for all. Well, maybe, but it’s not going to work out that way. However, that universal basic income is still a startlingly good idea simply because it’s better than any of the various welfare systems we have at present. But do note: It works by being universal and basic.

…

Charles Murray (in his book In Our Hands) did the math for the US: $10,000 a year to each adult over 21. It works. We spend about the same amount we currently do on welfare providing it. Chris Dillow, the thinking man’s Marxist, has pointed to similar studies for the UK suggesting £130 a week works.

This is a basic income. It is not a living wage, it doesn’t even reach the full year full time minimum wage. But you can, just about, in all the countries mentioned and with the sums for those countries, just about get by.”

(“Finally, Someone Does Something Sensible: Finland To Bring In A Universal Basic Income”, by Tim Worstall, December 6, 2015, Forbes)

But wait. Dylan Matthews’s August 2012 Washington Post article, quoted earlier, had stated Murray’s proposal would cost $2.25 trillion/year, whereas Scott Santens’s estimation of $2.98 trillion annual costs for his proposal, cited earlier, stated an additional $1.5 trillion was needed on top of elimination of existent programs – closer to a U.S. Congressional report figure cited earlier in Daniel Halper’s The Weekly Standard article, that in 2011 the entire U.S. governmental spending on poverty programs was about $1 trillion.

So how then could Murray’s math be so much smarter, than even the U.S. Congress, that his proposal’s estimated spending of  $2.25 trillion was what the U.S. already spent on welfare, and thus would carry no additional tax burden?

Here is what Murray wrote in a 2008 article, referring to his 2006 book, In Our Hands:

“To frame the discussion, it is useful to think in terms of a specific proposal. The one I have proposed in a book entitled In Our Hands converts all transfer payments to a single cash payment for everyone aged twenty-one and older (Murray 2006). It would require an amendment to the American Constitution that I am not competent to frame in legal language, but its sense is easy to express: ‘Henceforth, federal, state, and local governments shall make no law nor establish any program that provides benefits to some citizens but not to others. All programs currently providing such benefits are to be terminated. The funds formerly allocated to them are to be used instead to provide every citizen with a cash grant beginning at age twenty-one and continuing until death. The annual value of the cash grant at the program’s outset is to be US$10,000.’

…

The GI [Guaranteed Income] eliminates programmes that are unambiguously transfers — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare programmes, social service programmes, agricultural subsidies, and corporate welfare. It does not apply a strict libertarian definition of transfer, leaving activities such as state-funded education, and funding for transportation infrastructure and the Post Office in place. …

…

Once benefits replacement is used as the basis for financing a GI, the money problem becomes manageable. By about 2011, the GI will be cheaper than maintaining the system the United States has in place, and the cost savings will increase geometrically in the years to come.”

(“The Social Contract Revisited: Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State”, by Charles Murray, April 22, 2008, The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society)

Aha, although Murray’s definition of welfare does not include education, it includes “Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid”, in addition to the standard welfare and social services; it even includes agricultural subsidies. In this manner, Murray’s Guaranteed Income would actually save the U.S. government money.

No wonder this staunch conservative scholar is sure he can provide a $10,000 guaranteed income while balancing the government books: in giving every U.S. citizen that one check, he would take away all their current entitlements and benefits.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator, $10,000 in 2006 would equal $11,756.80 in 2015. So in terms of the size of the check, Murray’s proposal is as generous as basic income advocate Scott Santens’s $12,000. However, when a person gets sick and needs medical care, $12,000 can be very little!

Murray proposed a mandatory medical insurance requirement to accompany the guaranteed income:

“The GI requires that every recipient of the grant, beginning at age twenty-one, spends US$3000 of the US$10,000 grant on a health care insurance package that includes coverage for high-cost single events such as surgery and for catastrophic longterm illnesses or disability. The GI also requires that insurance companies treat the entire population as a single risk pool. Given that environment, health insurance companies can offer plans with excellent coverage for somewhere around US$3000. They can be so inexpensive for the same reason that life insurance companies can sell generous life insurance cheaply if people buy it when they are young.”

(Charles Murray, April 22, 2008, The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society)

With $3,000 going to health insurance, the actual amount for basic living would be no more than $7,000. By the estimation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator, that amount in 2006 would equal $8,229.76 in 2015.

Charles Murray’s proposed guaranteed income for basic living would only be $685.81/month in 2015.

Tell that to the retirees.

According to the U.S. Social Security Administration, the basic social security income for 2016 is $733/month for one person and $1,100/month for a couple, but in December 2015 the average income has reached $1,228.12/month per beneficiary and $1,341.77/month for a retired worker – nearly twice the size of Murray’s proposed Guaranteed Income – and the retirees enjoy Medicare, most of them at a small premium of $104.90/month in 2015 and 2016.

(“It’s Official: Medicare Part B Premiums Will Rise 16% In 2016 For Some Seniors”, by Ashlea Ebeling, November 16, 2015, Forbes; and, “Monthly Statistical Snapshot, December 2015”, December 2015, and, “You May Be Able To Get Supplemental Security Income (SSI)”, January 2016, U.S. Social Security Administration)

The key here is that the Social Security is a retirement savings mechanism financed through payroll taxes, and as a result many retirees receive substantially higher benefits than the basic amount. Likewise, Medicare is a health insurance program financed primarily through payroll taxes.

(“Social Security: Medicare”, October 2015, “How is Social Security Financed?”, and, “Social Security Benefit Amounts”, U.S. Social Security Administration)

So for many of the retirees, Charles Murray’s proposed Guaranteed Income to replace not only the standard welfare but the government-administered retirement savings and health insurance schemes, would mean a substantial loss of income.

I wonder when Tim Worstall of the Adam Smith Institute in London leaped into the frenzy starting the latest media blitz on universal basic income, did he ever see ‘the devil in the details’?

To be fair, the current Social Security benefit eligibility requirements  include “limited income”, and “limited resources”, i.e., limited personal assets, whereas Murray’s guaranteed income would be in addition to the personal income, and independent of the personal assets:

“With regard to the elderly living in retirement, the first and largest advantage of the GI over the current system is that it is truly universal (American Social Security is not), and even in the worst case provides US$10,000 a year for every elderly person in the country. But the GI does more than give everyone a guaranteed floor income. The GI makes it easy for low-income people to have a comfortable retirement. Summarizing the more detailed discussion in the book, consider someone who puts US$2000 a year in an index-based stock fund every year from age twenty-one until he retires at sixty-six. If one applies a worst-case scenario, assuming a lower compound average growth rate (4%) than has actually occurred in any forty-five-year period in the history of the American stock market, that person will have about US$253,000 at age sixty-six, with which they could purchase an annuity worth about US$20,500 a year, on top of the US$10,000 continuing grant. What about people who don’t save any money or invest it unwisely? Everyone, including the improvident and incompetent who have squandered everything, still have US$10,000 a year each, US$20,000 for a couple, no matter what. …”

(Charles Murray, April 22, 2008, The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society)

So the rich would be getting richer while retired workers with limited means would get poorer, under Murray’s proposal?

Well, not exactly. Murray’s is able to save the government welfare money also because the guaranteed income amount would be reduced through taxation if one’s earned income is higher, meaning that those who make high incomes might not actually get the guaranteed income:

“… Earned income has no effect on the grant until it reaches US$25,000. From US$25,000 to US$50,000, surtax is levied that reimburses the grant up to a maximum of US$5000. The surtax is 20 per cent of incremental earned income. The grant is administered for individuals without regard to earned income from other members of the household.”

(Charles Murray, April 22, 2008, The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society)

So when a person’s earned income reaches $50,000, 20% surtax would return $5,000 Guaranteed Income back to the government coffer.

Murray did not specify what to do with income higher than $50,000. But if the 20% surtax is applied to all earned incomes over $25,000, Murray’s Guaranteed Income would not be a basic income for all even though no one is barred from it, but a basic income for all those making less than $75,000.

The simplicity of the earned income surtax with which Murray would implement the guaranteed income is significant.

In this manner, I think, perhaps, without drastically increasing taxes as advocated by Scott Santens or eliminating “Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid” as suggested by Charles Murray, a sizable budget from the existing government welfare-type programs can be rolled into a single basic income for all those in need fully or partially, thus effectively eliminating poverty.

According to Daniel Halper of The Weekly Standard quoted earlier, in 2011 the amount spent by the 80 or so U.S. government poverty programs was around $1 trillion, and the number of households with incomes below the poverty line was 16,807,795.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau data, the number of households in the U.S. in 2010-2014 was 116,211,092, the average size of the households was 2.63 persons, and the total population per the April 1, 2010 census was 308,745,538.

(“QuickFacts United States”, U.S. Census Bureau)

The percentage of households in poverty in 2011 was thus just under 14.5%.

By household percentage, since $2.98 trillion is needed for Scott Santens’s basic income of $12,000 per adult and $4,000 per child, and 14.5% of $2.98 billion is $432.1 billion, that would be an average amount needed to provide a basic income to those living in poverty; the rest of the $1 trillion in the government poverty program spending would then go to ‘partial’ basic income for the households above the poverty line, e.g., receiving the basic income but with their higher earned income subject to a surtax as in Murray’s proposal.

Unfortunately, like with the retirees’ Medicare benefits that would be taken away in Murray’s plan, the $1 trillion government spending on poverty programs included a substantial portion spent on medical care for the poor, primarily Medicaid:

“Although the public is aware that Social Security and Medicare are large expensive programs, few are aware that for every $1.00 spent on these two program, government spends 76 cents on assistance to the poor or means-tested welfare.

In FY2011, federal spending on means-tested welfare came to $717 billion. State contributions into federal programs added another $201 billion, and independent state programs contributed around $9 billion. Total spending from all sources reached $927 billion.

About half of means-tested spending is for medical care. Roughly 40 percent goes to cash, food, and housing aid. The remaining 10 to 12 percent goes what might be called “enabling” programs, programs that are intended to help poor individuals become more self-sufficient. These programs include child development, job training, targeted federal education aid and a few other minor functions.

The total of $927 billion per year in means-tested aid is an enormous sum of money. One way to think about this figure is that $927 billion amounts to $19,082 for each American defined as “poor” by the Census. However, since some means-tested assistance goes to individuals who are low income but not poor, a more meaningful figure is that total means-tested aid equals $9,040 for each lower income American (i.e., persons in the lowest income third of the population).”

(“Examining the Means-tested Welfare State: 79 Programs and $927 Billion in Annual Spending. Testimony before Committee on the Budget United States House of Representatives”, Robert Rector, April 17, 2012, The Heritage Foundation)

As in the above quote from the testimony of the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector before the U.S. House Committee on the Budget, when those not in poverty but of low-income are included, the average amount per person from the $927 billion total is not high, not to mention that about half of it went to cover medical care in 2011.

The actual Fiscal Year 2011 Medicaid spending figures cited in the above report were: $274.964 billion in federal spending and $157.600 billion in state spending, for a total of $432.564 billion.

In any case, consider the rough figures from the above quote: about half of the $927 billion went to medical care, and 10-12% to child development, job training and education aid and other minor functions; assuming these funds would be kept intact, it would leave only the 40% for cash, food and housing aid to be rolled into a basic income for the poor and low-income.

A more careful scrutiny of the Heritage Foundation report shows the amount for cash, food and housing aid as only around 38.1% in 2011: $182.12988 billion in cash aid – including Earned Income Tax Credit, Refundable Child Credit, Make Work Pay Tax Credit, and small amounts for refugee assistance and assistance to Indians, etc. – $109.41473 billion in food aid, and $56.143 billion in housing aid, for a total of $347.68761 billion of federal and state spending on cash, food and housing aid.

The availability of some of this $347.7 billion warrants further consideration: public housing has long been a useful subsidy for the needy and may deserve preservation; now if the $56.143 billion spending on housing aid is kept intact, the 2011 cash and food aid total would be under $292 billion – $140 billion short of the average $432.1 billion calculated earlier just for the households in poverty, for Santens’s proposal of basic income.

The 2012 U.S. federal budget showed a significant improvement over 2011, to around $325 billion in federal spending for cash aid and food aid, according to a U.S. House Committee on the Budget report in March 2014:

““Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice.”
– President Lyndon Johnson, 1964 State of the Union Address

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Since then, Washington has created dozens of programs and spent trillions of dollars. But few people have stopped to ask, “Are they working?”

In “The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later,” the House Budget Committee majority staff starts to answer that question.

There are at least 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans. For instance, there are dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 different food-aid programs, and over 20 housing programs. The federal government spent $799 billion on these programs in fiscal year 2012.

Program Area	# Of Federal Programs	Cost In FY2012
Cash aid	5	$220 billion
Education and job training	28	$94.4 billion
Energy	2	$3.9 billion
Food aid	17	$105 billion
Health care	8	$291.3 billion
Housing	22	$49.6 billion
Social Services	8	$13 billion
Veterans	2	$21.8 billion
TOTALS	92	$799 billion

But rather than provide a roadmap out of poverty, Washington has created a complex web of programs that are often difficult to navigate. Some programs provide critical aid to families in need. Others discourage families from getting ahead. And for many of these programs, we just don’t know. There’s little evidence either way.”

(“The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later: A House Budget Committee Report”, Committee on the Budget, Chairman Tom Price, M.D., March 3, 2014, U.S. House of Representatives)

The federal budget on poverty programs was substantially increased from $717 billion in 2011 to $799 billion in 2012. As a result, federal cash aid and food aid figures alone, i..e, not counting funding from the states, add up to $325 billion – $328.9 billion if energy aid is also added – that could be converted to basic income, with the other program expenditures intact.

The U.S. Census Bureau has more detailed data on poverty that can help my analysis on how far $325 billion could go for basic income:

“The nation’s official poverty rate in 2011 was 15.0 percent, with 46.2 million people in poverty. …

…

Thresholds

• As defined by the Office of Management and Budget and updated for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, the weighted average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2011 was $23,021.

…

Age

• In 2011, 13.7 percent of people 18 to 64 (26.5 million) were in poverty compared with 8.7 percent of people 65 and older (3.6 million) and 21.9 percent of children under 18 (16.1 million).
• …”

(“Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2011”, September 12, 2012, U.S. Census Bureau)

A $10,000 – not $12,000 – basic annual income for each of the 30.1 million poor adults would come to $301 billion, and a $1,500 – not $4,000 – basic annual income for each of the 16.1 million children would come to another $24.15 billion, for a total of $324.25 billion, just under $325 billion – without cutting funding for medical care, housing, child development, job training and education.

I guess one can say that it is simply not enough, that while the adults may get by the children would have a hard time surviving.

A little more thought reveals that the adults could be squeezed further, because the current norm of both tax filing and social benefit allocation is not based on the number of individuals, but on the size of the household as a whole. For instance, the Social Security basic benefit for 2012, cited earlier, was $733/month for one person but $1,100 for a couple – the second adult in the household received only $367, i.e., half of the first adult’s amount.

Underlying such benefit rules is an official measure: the poverty guidelines.

Below are the 2011 poverty guidelines of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:

“The following guideline figures represent annual income.

The 2011 Poverty Guidelines for the 48 Contiguous States and the District of Columbia

PERSONS IN FAMILY	POVERTY GUIDELINE
1	$10,890
2	14,710
3	18,530
4	22,350
5	26,170
6	29,990
7	33,810
8	37,630

For families with more than 8 persons, add $3,820 for each additional person.”

(“FEDERAL REGISTER: JANUARY 20, 2011 (VOLUME 76, NUMBER 13)”, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)

Note that in the earlier-quoted Census Bureau document published in September 2012, the “weighted average poverty threshold” for a 4-person household was $23,021, slightly higher than in the “poverty guideline” above.

As shown above, the poverty guideline for 1 person was just under $11,000, but for 2 persons was under $15,000; thus, if giving one person a basic annual income of $12,000 makes sense, giving a couple $16,000 instead of $24,000 would not be unreasonable.

Hence, I devise a different but reasonable notion of basic income:

• basic income is granted to each household rather than each individual;
• to eliminate poverty, the amount of the official poverty guideline+$1 is the granted basic income amount.

Now I ask the question, using the existing government budget figures reviewed earlier, i.e., 2011’s federal and state cash and food aid budget total of $292 billion, or 2012’s federal cash and food aid budget of $325 billion, will I be able to lift all people out of official poverty – without cutting funding to medical care, housing, child development, job training and education?

Simple estimations indicate that the answer is likely affirmative for the improved 2012 figure: the Census Bureau figure of poverty for 2011 was 46.2 million Americans, and the The Weekly Standard figure (reported from Census Bureau) of the 2011 number of households in poverty was 16,807,795, which come to an average of under 2.75 persons per household, consistent with Census Bureau’s 2.63 persons for all households; using the Department of Health and Human Resources’ 3-person household poverty guideline for 2011, $18,530+$1 for each of the 16,807,795 poverty households, would require a total of 311,465,249,145, i.e., under $312 billion – the 2011 federal and state cash and food aid budget total of $292 billion wasn’t enough, but the 2012 federal cash and food aid budget of $325 billion would be enough.

Another method of estimation yields a figure lower than $312 billion to lift all out of poverty. For this lower estimate, I first convert the 2011 poverty household number 16,807,795 to 16.808 million, and cite a more precise number of Americans in poverty in 2011: 46.247 million.

(“Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2011”, by Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor and Jessica C. Smith, September 2012, U.S. Census Bureau)

Now in the 2011 poverty guidelines quoted above, I note that the guideline amount for a family or household of any size is 1x$10,890+(size-1)x$3,820, i.e., the first household member gets $10,890 and each of the rest gets $3,820.

(“2011 POVERTY GUIDELINE COMPUTATIONS”, December 31, 1969, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)

Therefore, for 16.808 million poverty households of 46.247 million members, the total costs of poverty guideline+$1 per household would be: 16.808 million x ($10,890+$1) + (46.247 million – 16.808 million) x $3,820, which come to $295.512908 billion, under $296 billion – much lower than the estimate of $312 billion using average 3-person households, let alone the 2012 federal cash and food aid budget of $325 billion, though still exceeding the 2011 federal and state cash and food aid budget total of $292 billion.

Nonetheless, the higher $312 billion is a safer estimate than the lower $296 billion, because the poverty guidelines my estimations utilize are themselves a simplification of the much more detailed “poverty thresholds”.

(“U.S. FEDERAL POVERTY GUIDELINES USED TO DETERMINE FINANCIAL ELIGIBILITY FOR CERTAIN FEDERAL PROGRAMS”, January 25, 2016, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)

Note that my poverty guideline-based basic income scheme so far has taken care of all those living under poverty, but has not done so with those living slightly above, who should be partially subsidized as well; the most obvious situation is to compare a 3-person household of an earned income of $18,530-$1, that would qualify for an additional basic income of $18,530+1 – for a total actual income of 2x$18,530 – to a household of an earned income of $18,530+$1, that would not qualify for any basic income.

A more generic reason that households above the poverty line should also benefit from some basic income is that the U.S. cash aid budget already included tax credits such as earned income tax credit, refundable child credit and making work pay tax credit – they can be claimed by households with modest income above the poverty line.

(“Taxation and the Family: What is the Earned Income Tax Credit?”, by Elaine Maag and Adam Carasso, updated February 12, 2014, Tax Policy Center; and, “Withholding of Income Taxes and the Making Work Pay Tax Credit”, by John J. Topoleski, January 30, 2013, and, “The Child Tax Credit: Current Law and Legislative History”, by Margot L. Crandall-Hollick, January 19, 2016, Congressional Research Service)

A reasonable modification to my revised basic income scheme is to adopt Charles Murray’s idea of a surtax on earned income (or income other than the basic income), but apply it to the entire earned income, not just $25,000 and above: allow all households, in poverty or not, to be eligible for a basic income of poverty guideline+$1, subject to a 50% surtax on earned income.

Now, in the earlier example, a household with earned income of poverty guideline-$1 and another with earned income of poverty guideline+$1, each can receive the basic income of poverty guideline+$1, and the difference of their incomes after the 50% surtax would be only $1. The benefit of the basic income ends when a household’s earned income reaches twice the poverty guideline, above which claiming the basic income becomes disadvantageous.

With this surtax, households under the poverty line most likely would not need to take up the average without-surtax figure of $312 billion (or the lower estimate of $296 billion), because many of them have some earned income. The question is how far the $312 billion can stretch to cover the households with modest income above the poverty line.

Consider an example where a hypothetical 3-person Household #1 has an earned income of $10,530, i.e., $8,000 under the poverty guideline. With the basic income and after the surtax, this household’s actual income should be $18,530+$1+$10,530/2 = $23,796. The surtax amount of $10,530/2, i.e., $5,265, saved from the $312 billion government spending, can cover the basic income subsidy for a hypothetical 3-person Household #2 with an earned income of $26,530, i.e., $8,000 above the poverty guideline, as follows: Household #2 should get the actual income of $18,530+$1+$26,530/2 = $31,796; so the actual basic income amount from the government should be $31,796-$26,530 = $5,266.

In a hypothetical scenario, when the earned incomes of the households that have earned income above $0 but below twice the poverty guideline are evenly spread, then the $312 billion for the 46.2 million Americans living under the poverty line, with the help of the surtax, can cover another 46.2 million Americans not in poverty but living under twice the poverty line, for a total of 92.4 million Americans.

A U.S. household with income below twice the poverty line is called a “low-income” household:

“Yet for a growing number of working families, economic security is out of reach. Between 2007 and 2011, the share of working families that are low-income—below 200 percent of the official poverty threshold—increased annually and rose from 28 percent to 32 percent nationally (see figure 1)”

(“LOW-INCOME WORKING FAMILIES: THE GROWING ECONOMIC GAP”, by Brandon Roberts, Deborah Povich and Mark Mather, Winter 2012-2013, Working Poor Families Project)

Low-income American families had increased from 28% to 32%, from 2007 to 2011.

The number of Americans in low-income households in 2011 can be found in a Census Bureau report: it was 106.011 million, 34.4% of the 308.456 million population.

(“Table 5. People With Income Below Specified Ratios of Their Poverty Thresholds by Selected Characteristics: 2011”, U.S. Census Bureau)

The hypothetical scenario when a basic income budget of $312 billion – not exceeding the 2012 federal cash aid and food aid budget of $325 billion – is sufficient for 92.4 million low-income Americans, i.e., twice the 46.2 million of Americans in poverty in 2011, likely would not cover all of the 106 million real-life low-income people; but that budget amount should be fairly close to meeting that goal.

Note that the 2012 federal cash and food aid budget of $325 billion has not included budgets of the states.

Thus, the conclusion from my simple estimations – based on U.S. government data – for a proposed household poverty guideline-based national basic income scheme incorporating an earned income surtax, to keep all Americans above the poverty line, is that the size of the existing U.S. government poverty budget should be able to cover most of the costs – without cutting the budget’s funding for medical care, housing, child development, job training and education.

The merit of this revised basic income scheme is its “simplicity”, solely characterized by two officially defined and practical parameters, poverty guideline and surtax rate, that also reflect “transparency” and “equity” – as Canadian government minister Jean-Yves Duclos would like to see.

The scheme can be implemented within the existing income tax system, with discrepancies taken care of through tax filing and assessment calculations; the only urgent adjustment mechanism needed is when a household experiences a sudden drop in income and produces proof such as job loss, whereby an increased basic income amount is dispensed by the government.

Looking forward with this basic income scheme, one can imagine that when the economy is strong, the surtax rate can be reduced so that all lower-income households get to keep more of their earned income, and more households of modest earned income can benefit from the basic income; one can also imagine that as the general living standards improve, the official annual poverty guidelines will also improve so that all people can enjoy a better basic living.

Observing the fact that in 2011 the percentage of poverty and low-income Americans was 34.4%, i.e., just over 1/3 of the total population, and taking my conclusion that a conversion of the standard welfare budget into a reasonably devised basic income scheme can lift all out of poverty and also better most of the low-income, I study the similarities to the budget numbers for Britain.

As quoted earlier from Jim Edwards of Business Insider UK, Britain’s total welfare spending for the year 2013-14 was £251 billion. The population was 64.5 million, with 15 million children, and if that budget was converted to a basic income, for all it would be £3,891/year each, while for adults only it would be £5,081/year each.

£3,891 is over $5,500 US, and £5,081 is over $7,200 US. So, while the current British welfare budget is not sufficient to cover a basic income for all, it would be enough for half of it, or for a basic income for half of the population.

But like with the U.S. budgets, the question is how much of the British total can be realistically converted to a national basic income.

According to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, the British welfare budget of £223 billion for 2009/10 consists of 6 parts:

1. Pensions (state & public service), £104,442m, 42% of total;
2. Incapacity, disability & injury benefits, £37,537m, 15% of total;
3. Unemployment benefits, £4,945m, 2% of total;
4. Housing benefits, £26,386m, 11% of total;
5. Family benefits, income support & tax credits, £44,934m, 18% of total;
6. Personal social services and other benefits, £33,028m, 13% of total.

(“How is the welfare budget spent?”, July 7, 2015, U.K. Office for National Statistics)

The figures appear better than with the U.S. budget.

Firstly, although the £223 billion spending included retirement pensions and various service programs, it did not need to cover medical care, and thus more of it could be converted into a basic income.

And secondly, the British state pension benefits, in part #1 above, do not pay out high amounts like the U.S. Social Security benefits do, and thus could be consolidated into a basic income:

“The full new State Pension will be £155.65 per week.

Your National Insurance record is used to calculate your new State Pension.”

(“The new State Pension”, Government of U.K.)

£155.65 per week comes to £8093.8 per year (52 weeks), or about $11,885 US in 2015 – close to but not exceeding the amount of $12,000 per adult in Scott Santens’s proposal for a U.S. basic income.

(last updated January 15, 2016, U.S. Internal Revenue Service)

The personal social services portion, i.e., part #6 of the Office for National Statistics’ breakdown, was not monetary benefits, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies:

“… Total spending on social protection comes in at £251 billion in 2013-14, which is about 37% of total public spending of £686 billion (before accounting adjustments). Take off £83 billion of spending on state pensions and you get to £168 billion on “welfare” – very nearly a quarter of total spending.

What is included in that “welfare” total?

It includes £28.5 billion on “personal social services”. This is a number that in many analyses one would want to report separately from other welfare spending. It includes spending on a range of things, such as looked-after children and long term care for the elderly, the sick and disabled. Unlike other elements of “social protection” it is not a cash transfer payment and in many ways has more in common with spending on health than spending on social security benefits.

Another £20 billion of the spending counted under welfare is pensions to older people other than state pensions. That includes spending on public service pensions – to retired nurses, soldiers and so on[1]. This is not spending that would normally be classed as “welfare”. …”

(“What is welfare spending?”, November 4, 2014, by Andrew Hood and Paul Johnson, Institute for Fiscal Studies)

As stated in the above quote, for part #1, in 2014 £20 billion of it were public service pensions, not typical welfare. Still, £83 billion of the pensions were state pension, which as discussed earlier has a maximum payout similar to a basic income amount, and thus could be consolidated into a basic income – with special age consideration if necessary. 

Part #4, housing benefits, should probably be left intact as with the analysis of the U.S. budget.

The under £45 billion of part #5 was similar to the cash aid in the US budget.

The under £5 billion unemployment benefits of part #3 can probably be added to part #5 for a total of just under £50 billion. 

The under £38 billion of part #2, i.e., incapacity, disability & injury benefits, if consolidated into the basic income may require special consideration for the disabled:

“About £38 billion goes on benefits for people who are ill or disabled… Disabled people are more likely to live in deprived areas and work in routine occupations. In the 2011 Census, 18% of people (10 million) reported some form of disability.”

(July 7, 2015, U.K. Office for National Statistics)

So, if I only consider those amounts – as in the Office for National Statistics’ 2009/10 welfare spending figures – that can be easily consolidated into a basic income, namely the just under £50 billion in parts #3 and #5, it would come to about $74 billion US in 2010.

(last updated January 15, 2016, U.S. Internal Revenue Service)

Without going further into estimations that would be dependent on the British living standards and poverty data, I observe that just the under £50 billion, about $74 billion US in 2010, for Britain’s 64.5 million people is proportional to about $353 billion for the United States’ 308.5 million people – substantially more than the 2012 U.S. federal cash and food aid budget of $325 billion, or the $312 billion in 2011 in my estimation for a poverty guideline-based basic income scheme to lift all out of poverty and improve the lots of many of the low-income.

Hence, the fiscal picture for a national basic income for Britain should be even more optimistic than for the United States.

However, the official American and British poverty lines may be quite different.

The U.S. poverty guidelines were originally calculated in 1963-1964 on the basis of costs of living, and have been updated annually on the basis of the Census Bureau’s Consumer Price Index.

(“How the Census Bureau Measures Poverty”, U.S. Census Bureau)

The British poverty line can be higher, because it is calculated as 60% of the median household income in Britain:

“Each year, the Government publishes a survey of income poverty in the UK called Households Below Average income (HBAI).

This survey sets the poverty line in the UK at 60 per cent of the median UK household income. In other words, if a household’s income is less than 60 per cent of this average, HBAI considers them to be living in poverty.

…

The table below shows the HBAI poverty line for 2009 to 2012.¹

Family Composition
Lone parent	Per month	Per year
1 (under 14)	£957	£11,484
2 (1 under 14, 1 over 14)	£1,178	£14,136
Couple
1 (under 14)	£1,326	£15,912
2 (1 under 14, 1 over 14)	£1,547	£18,564

 

1.Child poverty transitions: exploring the routes into and out of poverty 2009 to 2012, Department for Work and Pensions, 2015.”

(“The UK poverty line”, Child Poverty Action Group)

For a 3-person household of lone parent and 2 children, the British poverty line was £14,136, or about $21,781 US in 2011, and for one of 2 parents and one child, it was £15,912, or about $24,518 US.

(last updated January 15, 2016, U.S. Internal Revenue Service)

At 60% of the median household income, the British 3-person household poverty line can be as high as the 4-person U.S. household poverty guideline listed earlier.

The U.S. poverty guidelines are substantially less than 60% of the median household income. For example, in 2013 the median 3-person household income in U.S. states ranged from a low of $46,062 in Mississippi to a high of $87,206 in Maryland – and the 3-person household poverty guideline was only $19,530, i.e., about 42.4% of the Mississippi median and only about 22.4% of the Maryland median.

(“Census Bureau Median Family Income By Family Size (Cases Filed Between May 1, 2013, and November 14, 2013, Inclusive)”, U.S. Department of Justice; and, “2013 POVERTY GUIDELINES”, December 1, 2013, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)

For Canada, the fiscal picture appears less clear.

When compared to the $325 billion US cash aid and food aid in the 2012 U.S. federal budget for a total population of around 308.5 million, and the £50 billion British cash and tax credit benefits in 2009/10 for a total population of 64.5 million, the figure of $32 billion Canadian dollars, mentioned by Toronto Star columnist Carol Goar in her 2014 article on basic income, seems easily attainable, even a tad conservative:

“…

• Where do they set the income floor? A Senate committee seeking solutions to urban poverty did some rudimentary calculations six years ago. It found that bringing everyone up to 70 per cent of Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off would cost roughly $20 billion. Using that as a yardstick — and taking inflation into account — it would cost about $32 billion to set the income floor at the poverty line.
• What programs would be collapsed into the new benefit? The wider the net is cast, the lower the cost would be. Welfare and disability support and employment insurance are the obvious candidates. Beyond those three, tensions arise. Old age security is a possibility. But very few seniors live in poverty. The national child benefit could be included. But it, too, keeps thousands of low-income youngsters out of poverty. What about war veterans’ allowances, the universal child care benefit, funding to aboriginal organizations, support for agencies that serve the poor, the mentally ill, the homeless and hungry, new immigrants and racial minorities? What about the all the tax breaks targeted at low-income Canadians? The longer the list grows, the more potential losers there are.
• …”

(Carol Goar, February 25, 2014, Toronto Star)

Canada’s population in 2014 was 35.5437 million, according to Statistics Canada.

(“Population by year, by province and territory (Number)”, September 29, 2015, Statistics Canada)

$32 billion Canadian, normally less than $32 billion US, for a 35.5 million Canadian population is proportional to about $278 billion US for a 308.5 million American population – much lower than my estimate of $312 billion US, or the lower $296 billion US, for a poverty guideline-based basic income scheme in the U.S.

But Goar based her number on a Canadian Senate committee estimate. So let’s accept it for now.

What, then, has the recent Canadian government budget fiscal picture been like, when compared to the American and the British?

Like with the states in the U.S., there was spending by the Canadian provincial governments; also like the U.S., there was Canadian federal government spending.

A Statistics Canada document on government spending on social services in 2007 – the most recent comprehensive survey I find online – showed that provincial spending on “social assistance”, i.e., cash benefits for the poor, was quite small; moreover, there was no mention of the federal funds going to regular social assistance:

“In the fiscal year ending March 2007, total social services spending in Canada amounted to $172.4 billion, compared with $79.5 billion in 1989.

…

Of the $172.4 billion, federal government spending on social services, including transfer payments to other levels of government, accounted for roughly 49% of expenditures in 2007, compared with 59% in 1989.

In 2007, the provincial, territorial and local governments’ share was 33% (34% in 1989) and the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans’ (CPP/QPP) was 20% (14% in 1989).

Federal government spending: Old Age Security and Employment Insurance are major components

The federal government is responsible for Old Age Security and Employment Insurance. Total spending for these two programs alone amounted to $44 billion, or 52% of gross federal spending on social services in 2007.

The other 48% was spent on a number of programs, including vocational rehabilitation for disabled persons, veteran’s benefits, day care assistance and social services for First Nations, as well as on contributions as an employer to workers’ compensation plans and to the CPP/QPP.

In 2007, the federal government spent $12.8 billion on Employment Insurance, representing 6.2% of program expenditures. …

…

Old Age Security, the other big component of social services spending at the federal level, amounted to $31.4 billion in 2007, or 15.1% of program expenditures. …

…

Provincial, territorial and local government spending more than doubles

Between 1989 and 2007, social services spending at the provincial, territorial and local levels of government more than doubled to $56.3 billion. This is the third largest component of spending after health and education.

…

Among social services expenditures, spending on social assistance, which consists of transfer payments to help individuals and families maintain a socially acceptable level of earnings, represented 33% of expenditures on social services in 2007.”

(“Government spending on social services”, June 22, 2007, Statistics Canada)

In short, total government spending in Canada on social services was $172.4 billion in 2007:

• About 49% came from the federal government, 52% of it spent on Old Age Security and Employment Insurance benefits, and the other 48% on a number of programs including: vocational rehabilitation for disabled persons, veteran’s benefits, day care assistance and social services for First Nations, as well as on contributions as an employer to workers’ compensation plans and to the CPP/QPP;
• Employment Insurance expenditure was $12.8 billion;
• Old Age Security expenditure was $31.4 billion;
• About 20% came from Canada and Quebec Pension Plans;
• About 33% came from provincial, territorial and local governments, totalling $56.3 billion, of which 33% was spent on social assistance.

1/3 of $56.3 billion was about $18.77 billion. According to the Bank of Canada, $18.77 billion in 2007 would be worth $21.12 billion in 2014.

(“Inflation Calculator”, Bank of Canada)

By itself, $21 billion is far short of the $32 billion needed in Goar’s estimation for the basic income. However, Goar mentioned a Senate committee estimate 6 year earlier, which should be around 2007, when $20 billion would be enough:

“… A Senate committee seeking solutions to urban poverty did some rudimentary calculations six years ago. It found that bringing everyone up to 70 per cent of Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off would cost roughly $20 billion. Using that as a yardstick — and taking inflation into account — it would cost about $32 billion to set the income floor at the poverty line.”

(Carol Goar, February 25, 2014, Toronto Star)

My sense is that, besides inflation, the Senate committee’s notion of “bringing everyone up to …” may not be the same as Goar’s “set the income floor at …”. In my earlier estimations for the U.S. poverty guideline-based basic income, not only that the poverty households would be lifted above the poverty line, but also that the low-income households would receive partial basic income.

In the earlier quote from her article, Goar referred to several types of social spending, in addition to welfare.

Goar mentioned the Canadian Employment Insurance, which had a $12.8 billion budget in 2007. This is not an entitlement benefit, but a government-administered insurance scheme with premiums paid by both employees and employers, and thus, contrary to Goar’s opinion, cannot be easily integrated into a basic income.

(“Employment insurance (EI)”, modified December 17, 2015, Canada Revenue Agency)

On the other hand, the Old Age Security mentioned by Goar, on which the federal government spent $31.4 billion in 2007, is an entitlement benefit:

“Apart from private money squirreled away in an RRSP or other savings vehicles, the OAS and complementary Canada Pension Plan are key components in the retirement planning of many Canadians. …

…

The Old Age Security pension is a monthly payment available to Canadians age 65 and older who apply and meet certain requirements. Unlike CPP, it is not dependent on a person’s employment history and a person does not need to be retired from a job to qualify for it.

The government adjusts the OAS payment every three months to account for increases in the cost of living according to the Consumer Price Index. The average monthly amount as of October 2012 was $514.56. The maximum payout for the first quarter of 2013 is $546.07, according to Service Canada.

There are also supplementary programs, including the Guaranteed Income Supplement, which provide additional income to low-income seniors.

The government claws back OAS payments from high-income Canadians. In 2013, if you are retired but have an income of more than $70,954 (from things like pensions and personal investments), the government will reclaim part of your OAS payment — 15 cents for every dollar of income above the $70,954 threshold, which is adjusted annually for inflation.”

(“Canada Pension Plan vs. Old Age Security – the differences explained”, February 1, 2012, CBC News)

However, because high-income seniors also received this benefit, probably only a small portion of 2007’s $31.4 billion went to seniors in poverty or of low-income, as Goar noted:

“Old age security is a possibility. But very few seniors live in poverty.”

(Carol Goar, February 25, 2014, Toronto Star)

Goar’s article mentioned the national child benefit and the universal child care benefit. The Canada Child Tax Benefit and the Universal Child Care Benefit are tax credits and of sizable government spending: $11.2 billion in the fiscal year 2006-2007, and $13.1 billion in the fiscal year 2013-2014.

(“Archived – Where Your Tax Dollar Goes”, modified September 19, 2008, and, “Your Tax Dollar: 2013–2014 Fiscal Year”, modified December 19, 2014, Department of Finance Canada)

But an integration of the child benefits with the basic income appears unlikely, as indicated by Jean-Yves Duclos, the Canadian Minister of Families, Children and Social Development cited earlier.

Goar’s article also mentioned “all the tax breaks targeted at low-income Canadians”. But the most obvious of them, the Goods and Services Tax/Harmonized Sales Tax Credit and the Working Income Tax Benefit, are both of small sizes.

(“Child and family benefits”, modified January 4, 2016, Canada Revenue Agency; “GST/HST Credit”, Nisga’a Nation Knowledge Network; and, “Enhancing the Working Income Tax Benefit”, Economic Action Plan 2015, Canada’s Economic Action Plan)

Perhaps my interpretation of the Statistics Canada data for 2007 isn’t accurate.

For instance, what about the “Canada Social Transfer”, the framework touted in the 2014 Liberal Party Priority Resolution for designing and implementing a Basic Annual Income?

The Canadian Department of Finance’s definition of Canada Social Transfer does mention “social assistance”:

“What is the Canada Social Transfer (CST)?

• The CST is a federal block transfer to provinces and territories in support of post-secondary education, social assistance and social services, and early childhood development and early learning and childcare.
• …”

(“Canada Social Transfer”, modified December 19, 2011, Department of Finance Canada)

But despite its grandiose name, the transfer amount on social assistance was likely very small, because the Canada Social Transfer totalled only $8.5 billion in 2007 and was spread among post-secondary education, children’s programs and social programs – social assistance wasn’t even explicitly mentioned in this Department of Finance report:

“…

• The Canada Social Transfer (CST)—to support post-secondary education, social programs, and programs for children—gave provinces and territories cash funding representing over 3½ cents of each federal tax dollar ($8.5 billion). ”

(modified September 19, 2008, Department of Finance Canada)

In the fiscal year 2013-2014, the Canada Social Transfer has increased to $12.2 billion, but social assistance still wasn’t mentioned in the online Department of Finance report:

“The Canada Social Transfer provided $12.2 billion for post-secondary education, social programs and programs for children, representing close to 5 cents of each tax dollar spent.”

(modified December 19, 2014, Department of Finance Canada)

A fraction of $8.5 billion, or of the increased $12.2 billion, would only be a very few billions at best for “social assistance”. Adding it to the $18.77 billion provincial spending on social assistance in 2007, worth about $21.12 billion in 2014, would still be far short of Carol Goar’s estimated need of $32 billion.

Hopefully, in the huge pool of Canada’s government spending on social services – $172.4 billion in 2007 – here and there money can be found to integrate with the provincial social assistance funds, to make up the $32 billion needed for the basic income according to Carol Goar’s 2014 analysis based on a Senate committee estimate.

But again, in my view, Goar’s figure seems low when compared to my estimations with the U.S. and U.K. budgets: $32 billion Canadian, less than $32 billion US, for a 35.5 million population, compared to the $325 billion US in the 2012 U.S. cash aid and food aid budget for a 308.5 million population, or to the £50 billion in the 2009/10 British cash benefits budget for a 64.5 million population, that can be converted to basic income.

Nonetheless, the Canadian Senate committee estimate has been aimed at “bringing everyone up to 70 per cent of Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off”, as quoted earlier from Goar’s article.

Canada does not have official poverty guidelines or thresholds, only the Low-Income Cut-Offs as measured by Statistics Canada, which have been calculated from the Family Expenditure Survey done in a base year and then updated using the Consumer Price Index – the oldest survey base year was 1959, and the most recent was 1992.

(“Low income cut-offs”, modified November 27, 2015, Statistics Canada)

While in the U.S. the low-income line is 200% of the poverty guideline, in this case the Canadian Senate committee used a generous 70%, not 50%, of LICO as a poverty line.

For 2011, the LICO amount was $30,487 for a family of 4:

“…

Thus for 2011, the 1992 based after-tax LICO for a family of four living in an community with a population between 30,000 and 99,999 is $30,487, expressed in current dollars.”

(modified November 27, 2015, Statistics Canada)

70% of $30,487 was $21,340.9 Canadian, for a family of 4 in 2011 – just in the dollar number it was already considerably less than the 2011 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ poverty guideline quoted earlier, $22,350 US for a family of 4.

I think the lower Canadian poverty line partially explains why Carol Goar’s $32 billion in 2014 would be enough to lift all out of poverty in a basic income for Canada’s 35.5 million people, whereas in my estimation $312 billion US would be needed for the 308.5 million Americans in 2011.

The above comparison leads to the question: why is it that the estimations based on government data do not show Canada, a country of a long social welfare tradition and reputation, to be clearly more generous than the United States in this regard?

I do not have an obvious answer. But apparently my observation, derived from my analysis, is not alone, as in 2012 the U.S. surpassed Canada in total social expenditures as a share of the GDP:

“America spends a bigger share of its national paycheck on social services than its health care-providing neighbor to the north.

New numbers published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that public “social expenditures” in the US have overtaken those of Canada. The report defines “social expenditures” as essentially spending by public institutions aimed at households or people to support their welfare, such as jobless aid, healthcare and pension benefits. US social spending as a share of GDP hit 19.7% in 2012, compared to Canada’s 18.3%. In 2013, the US is expected to spend about 20%, compared to 18.3% for Canada.”

(“The US spends more on social services than its health care-loving neighbor Canada”, by Matt Phillips, July 25, 2013, Quartz)

This fiscally relatively conservative course on social spending is not an exclusive trademark of the recent Conservative government under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2015, but has also been observed by the Liberal Party and the government it now leads when it comes to basic income; as discussed earlier, the Liberal Party’s resolutions on basic income in 2014 did not become a part of the party’s 2015 election platform, and are not on the Liberal government’s current official agenda.

A most often cited concern about socialist economic policies, the basic income being one, is that they would lead to loss of productivity. Jim Edwards of Business Insider UK opined in regard to the basic income numbers he analyzed, cited earlier:

“One of the criticisms of basic income is that it would kill off the desire to work. Few studies have been done of this, but those that have indicate that people only reduce their work hours by a small amount on average.

The fact that a fiscally neutral basic income scheme would pay out only £423 per month (€585 or $644) means almost everyone receiving it would still need a job. £423 a month is simply not enough to survive — or even pay rent — in most areas of Britain.”

(Jim Edwards, December 13, 2015, Business Insider UK)

Edwards’s logic is that a basic income that is simply not enough for basic living is actually good, as it would keep people continue working, if at reduced work hours.

I can imagine this argument appeals to the conservative scholar Charles Murray, whose proposed basic income would be only $7,000/year after mandatory health insurance cost is deducted.

In the 2008-2009 German aid experiment in a village in Namibia, discussed earlier, the aid organizations reported that the basic income led to improved economic activity and improved savings, although these positive conclusions have been questioned by Rigmar Osterkamp as exaggerated:

“… The number of underweight children was said to have fallen considerably because of the basic income grant. According to the figures, school attendance rose, and so did attendance at the local health clinic. The BIG Coalition reported that a number of people living in Otjivero, encouraged by the cash transfer, had started small businesses as bakers, tailors and brick layers.

According to the BIG promoters’ calculations, the per capita income (minus the BIG payments) increased by 29% in 2008, and a sample of households supposedly revealed a private savings rate of 38%. The BIG supporters concluded that popular prejudices against the basic income grant were proven wrong, at least in Namibia, since the BIG has not made people “lazy”, but rather had led to socially desirable behaviour and even motivated recipients to become economically active.

However, the question arises whether these claims are plausible. In a single year, an economic growth of 29% would be three times the rate of China (and is supposed to be sustainable on top of that). According to the World Bank, Namibia’s national growth rate averaged a mere 4.4% from 2000 to 2008, and GDP even declined slightly in 2009. The extremely high savings rate that was indicated is similarly hard to believe, given that the households concerned are quite poor.

The figures on the reduction of hunger and the improvements in children’s weight are also astonishing in a just six months period. …”

(Rigmar Osterkamp, May 3, 2013, D+C Development and Cooperation)

Less controversial benefits of the basic income, such as improvements in nutrition, health and education, were also reported for a UNICEF-supported experiment in India cited earlier:

“The preliminary findings of the SEWA project have been published, and the results are extremely encouraging. The project was accompagnied by a study conducted in 20 villages including the eight villages where the unconditional cash transfer was provided. Residents of the other 12 villages were observed as a control group. Residents could do whatever they wanted with the money.

Positive results were found in terms of nutrition, health, education, housing and infrastructure, and economic activity. Researchers found a positive impact on health and access to medical treatment. The most visible impact however was on educational attainment. School attendance in the cash transfer villages shot up, three times the level of the control villages.”

(December 2012, Global Basic Income Foundation)

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a proponent-turned opponent of the universal basic income, argued that a full universal basic income would lead to a vicious cycle of economic decline:

“… Many conservatives like the idea of a simple welfare system that would replace arcane programs and nosy bureaucracies.

And indeed, right-winger that I am, I was for a very long time a strong proponent of a UBI. But now I oppose it.

What happened? I looked at the best science and changed my mind.

Here I must make a slight detour into epistemology. Most social “science” research is actually not science, technically speaking. … Most published social science studies rely on modeling and statistical analysis to try to formulate theories as to what is going on. Most studies are really elaborate thought experiments that, until they are or can be validated by experiment, are not scientific results, properly speaking. …

There is, however, one way to gain relatively reliable social-scientific evidence: randomized field trials (RFTs). …

…

What does that have to do with the UBI? Well, it just so happens that the UBI is one of the very few, if not the only, domains of social science policy where we have exactly that: extensive, long-term, repeated RFTs, which are the gold standard of evidence in social science.

… more than 30 experiments were done in the U.S. from the ’60s to the ’90s and there was another set of experiments done in Canada in the ’90s. The universal basic income is one of the few areas of social policy where we can say with some confidence “Science says…”

And science says the UBI doesn’t work.

… All the evidence strongly suggests that if you have a UBI, the outcome is exactly what many conservatives fear will happen: Millions of people who could work won’t, just listing away in socially destructive idleness (with the consequences of this lost productivity reverberating throughout the society in lower growth and, probably, lower employment, in a UBI-enabled vicious cycle).”

(“Progressives’ hot new poverty-fighting idea has just one basic problem: Science”, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, July 21, 2014, The Week)

Gobry’s article referred to more than 30 experiments on the basic income in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, and one in Canada in the 1990s.

While I am unfamiliar with the Canadian experiment Gobry mentioned, another Canadian experiment during the 1970s – first of its kind in North America in terms of coverage – in the small city of Dauphin in Manitoba province, has been ‘rediscovered’ by social science researchers:

“Between 1974 and 1979, residents of a small Manitoba city were selected to be subjects in a project that ensured basic annual incomes for everyone. For five years, monthly cheques were delivered to the poorest residents of Dauphin, Man. – no strings attached.

And for five years, poverty was completely eliminated.

The program was dubbed “Mincome” – a neologism of “minimum income” – and it was the first of its kind in North America. It stood out from similar American projects at the time because it didn’t shut out seniors and the disabled from qualification.

The project’s original intent was to evaluate if giving cheques to the working poor, enough to top-up their incomes to a living wage, would kill people’s motivation to work. It didn’t.

But the Conservative government that took power provincially in 1977 – and federally in 1979 – had no interest in implementing the project more widely. Researchers were told to pack up the project’s records into 1,800 boxes and place them in storage.

A final report was never released.

…

Why Dauphin? How did a farming community play host to such a landmark social assistance program?

Good political timing didn’t hurt.

In 1969, the left-leaning provincial NDP led by Edward Schreyer swept into power for the first time. The transition injected new rural sensitivities and democratic socialist influences into politics.

On the federal level, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister. The two men worked swiftly to set up conditions for a basic income experiment.

In 1973, Manitoba and the federal government signed a cost-sharing agreement: 75 per cent of the $17-million budget would be paid for by the feds; the rest by the province.

The project rolled out the next year.”

(“A Canadian City Once Eliminated Poverty And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It”, by Zi-Ann Lum, December 23, 2014 (updated December 19, 2015), The Huffington Post Canada)

So although in the early 1970s then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau dodged the idea of introducing a universal basic income, as recalled in Carol Goar’s article discussed earlier, his Liberal government did fund and lead a pilot experiment that lasted 5 years, ending due to changes of the provincial and federal governments.

About 1/3 of the Dauphin residents received the basic income, with the income amount set at 60% of Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off:

“All Dauphinites were automatically considered for benefits. One-third of residents qualified for Mincome cheques. 

How Mincome cheques were calculated:

1. Everyone was given the same base amount: 60 per cent of Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off. The cut-off varied, depending on family size and where they lived. But in 1975, a single Canadian who was considered low-income earned $3,386 on average.

	1975	2014 dollars
Individual	$3,386	$16,094
Family of two	$4,907	$20,443

2. Base amount was modified: 50 cents was subtracted from every dollar earned from other income sources

“It was sort of something new and utopian. It was completely different,” said Dauphin’s current mayor Eric Irwin. “It was an attempt to define social services in a different way.””

(by Zi-Ann Lum, December 23, 2014 (updated December 19, 2015), The Huffington Post Canada)

Note that the recent Canadian Senate committee basic income idea cited by Goar in her Toronto Star article considered 70% of LICO as the income amount, which would be an improvement over the Dauphin “Mincome” level.

In 2005, the archived documents of the Dauphin pilot experiment was ‘rediscovered’ by researcher Evelyn Forget:

“Dr. Evelyn Forget is the researcher at University of Manitoba credited for tracking down those 1,800 dusty boxes of Mincome raw data that sat forgotten for 30 years.

She first heard about the project in an undergraduate economics class at the University of Toronto in the ’70s. Mincome cheques were still being delivered when her professors praised the experiment as “really important,” saying it was going to “revolutionize” the delivery of social programs. It stuck with her.

In 2005, she began looking for the Mincome data. After a strenuous search, she located the records at the provincial archives in Winnipeg. She was the first to look at them since they were packed up in 1979.”

(by Zi-Ann Lum, December 23, 2014 (updated December 19, 2015), The Huffington Post Canada)

The ‘rediscovery’ of the Dauphin “Mincome” experiment led more interest to similar ideas, such as that advocated by Canadian Conservative Senator Hugh Segal:

“Former Conservative senator Hugh Segal is a longtime proponent of a guaranteed annual income policy. He believes the program could save provinces millions in social assistance spending on programs like welfare.

Instead of being forced through the welfare system, people’s eligibility would be assessed and reassessed with every income tax filing. Those who don’t make above the low-income cut-off in their area would be automatically topped up, similar to Mincome in Dauphin.

How guaranteed annual income could work today:

• Distributed as a federal Negative Income Tax
• Top-ups are calculated automatically and delivered after income tax filings
• Top-ups would render people ineligible for provincial welfare
• Provincial welfare money gets reallocated to other priorities (i.e. elder care, expanded early childcare programs)”

(by Zi-Ann Lum, December 23, 2014 (updated December 19, 2015), The Huffington Post Canada)

In reference to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s opposing view, I point out that Hugh Segal’s notion of an earned income top-up would discourage work, because all who make below the low-income cut-off level would get top-up to the same.

The approach of the 1970s Dauphin “Mincome” experiment, on the other hand, was remarkably similar to my universal basic income scheme adapted and modified from Charles Murray’s: household was the basic unit, each granted an mount according to the official line of poverty or low-income; the other incomes were taxed at 50%, and so the more a household earned the more it would keep; and, similar to the U.S. case where in 2011 just over 1/3 of the population was low-income, in Dauphin 1/3 of the residents qualified for the “Mincome”.

The main difference between my scheme and the Dauphin “Mincome” is that I use the U.S. official poverty guideline which is 50% of the low-income line, whereas “Mincome” used 60% of Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off.

Evelyn Forget, the leading expert on the Dauphin experiment, has also pointed out that “Mincome” did not have the effect of discouraging work:

“The American experiments had the same results. Few people stopped working and hardly anyone with a full time job reduced the hours they worked at all. This is because a well designed guaranteed income (and this one was designed like a refundable tax credit) creates incentives for people to work. it does a much better job of supplementing the incomes of the working poor than does other kinds of social assistance.”

(“A Way to Get Healthy: Basic Income Experiments in Canada”, August 7, 2013, Basic Income UK)

Despite being a Conservative Senator, Segal criticized the Conservative government of then Prime Minister Stephen Harper for showing no interest in universal basic income:

“But the idea never took off in Canada. The lessons of Mincome never spread. Simply put: The Mincome experiment discontinued because the governments changed.

Segal says what happened in Dauphin was a “classic Ottawa initiative,” with a lot of money spent putting a program in place, but without adequate investment to evaluate if it was effective or not.

During his nine years in the Senate, Segal advocated strongly for basic income for Canadians. But in his time as a member of the Conservative caucus, he “didn’t see the tiniest indication of interest on the part of the government” in another test site or implementation.

That’s because the current government shares the Mulroney administration view that “the best social policy is a job,” he said.

The one exception was late finance minister Jim Flaherty who established the working income tax benefit to aid working Canadians living in poverty. He was the only one to engage constructively, Segal says.

Segal said he doesn’t expect the concept to gain traction again among the Harper Conservatives.

…

In Canada, the idea of an universal basic income was first presented at a Progressive Conservative policy convention in October of 1969. Then-leader Robert Stanfield argued the idea would consolidate overlapping security programs and reduce bureaucracy.”

(by Zi-Ann Lum, December 23, 2014 (updated December 19, 2015), The Huffington Post Canada)

Like the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives in the 1980s, the Harper Conservatives have shown no interest. But now after Stephen Harper’s departure from the party leadership, Conservative MP and finance critic Lisa Raitt has expressed interest that the Canadian House of Commons finance committee should study the idea, as quoted earlier from a story reporting the view of Liberal government minister Jean-Yves Duclos.

I wonder if the Canadian Liberals’ knowledge of the Dauphin “Mincome” experiment in the era of party leader Justin Trudeau’s father – despite most Canadians’ unfamiliarity with it – had to do with the party’s recent adoption of the proposal of “a federal pilot of a basic income supplement” only as an ordinary resolution, but the proposal, “to design and implement a Basic Annual Income” “under the existing Canada Social Transfer System”, as a “Priority Resolution”.

If so, the son should pick up where the father had left off.

Canada can quickly overtake Finland and the Netherlands, where, for all the latest international media publicity, only pilot experiments are being planned.

But even if that happens, Canada is behind one country in the world, Brazil, in becoming the first.

In 2004, i.e., a year before Canadian researcher Evelyn Forget searched and found the archived documents of the 1970s Dauphin “Mincome” experiment, Brazil enacted a law for a universal basic income:

“While Alaska is the only place in the world with an ongoing basic income program, they are not the only jurisdiction to have shown interest. Brazil actually has a law mandating the progressive institution of a basic income program.

The law was introduced by Senator Eduardo Suplicy of the Brazilian Workers’ Party in 2001. He had previously introduced a bill to create a Negative Income Tax model of a guaranteed livable income, but that bill failed to pass. This second bill called for a universal basic income program to be progressively instituted, beginning with those most in need.

The bill was approved by the Senate in 2002 and by the Chamber of Deputies in 2003. It was signed into law by President Lula da Silva in 2004. The bill leaves implementation in the hands of the President.

No progress has been made toward implementing a basic income since then.

However, Brazil does have an interesting, albeit conditional, income security program for the poorest Brazilians. The Bolsa Familia, or Family Grant, was created in 2003 by merging 4 existing cash transfer programs. It could be used as a stepping stone to a basic income program, even though it was not created with that intention.

The Bolsa Familia is paid to 11 million of Brazil’s poorest families, which means that the money reaches 46 million people. It has contributed to a reduction in inequality, although it is not the only factor. Brazil, one of the most unequal countries in the world, has made astonishing progress in reducing inequality since 2001. In the last five years, the incomes of the poorest Brazilians have risen 22%, compared to only 4.9% for the richest Brazilians.”

(“Basic income in Brazil”, by Chandra Pasma, July 14, 2009, Citizens for Public Justice)

So Brazil, an ambitious developing country where progress was recently made in improving the livelihood of the poor families, already has had a universal basic income law for over a decade now, even though the government does not have the money for a full implementation.

Brazilian Senator Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy’s bill that turned the “Citizen’s Basic Income” into law had been in the works since 1991.

(“Brazil: Imagine a World Free of Hunger and Need”, Rema Nagarajan, September 6, 2012, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting)

Meanwhile, in the wealthy developed countries, where such a notion had been banished until the 1960s and 1970s, and is still treated with trepidation, some have come to wonder, ponder, and dither.

Or as Tim Worstall suggests, wait until the coming of the robots and see what happens then.

A review of postings about scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, with observations regarding elite centrism – Part 4: academics in the kingdom of intellectual legacies and traditions

(Continued from Part 3)

In 1988 when Maria Klawe moved from IBM in California to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, along with her theoretical computer scientist husband Nick Pippenger, to become UBC computer science department head, I had received a computer science postdoctoral fellowship offer from the University of Toronto, a fixed-term assistant professorship offer from UBC, and a tenure-track assistant professorship offer from Simon Fraser University, also in the Vancouver region of Canada. My decision to go to UBC led to my subsequent experience of an academic political dispute with my boss Klawe, described in earlier Parts, with an employment aspect involving senior colleagues David Kirkpatrick and Alain Fournier.

As in Part 3, had Klawe and Pippenger chosen not to go to UBC my job offer there would have been upgraded to tenure-track. Thus, my dilemma in choosing a faculty job between UBC or SFU in 1988 had a Klawe-related context.

Then in 1990 when I was again applying for a tenure-track position, Klawe chose not to inform me that 2 of the 5 recommendation letters I had requested did not arrive, one of the two to have been from her close friend, computer science professor Richard “Dick” Karp at the University of California, Berkeley, who had promised to affirm that my recent research was in theoretical computer science – my 1988 Berkeley Ph.D. had been in mathematics.

The deception involving both Klawe and Karp, deployed to my detriment, had started in 1988 at Berkeley when Karp suggested that I choose UBC because of Klawe and Pippenger, as I recalled in a July 2012 blog post:

“The arrival of Maria Klawe and her husband Nicholas Pippenger made UBC Computer Science more important but reduced my prospect of a longer employment, so between ‘fate’ and ‘luck’ – SFU professor Wo-Shun Luk had been particularly interested in my going there – I had chosen fate.

Worse yet, it was a ‘double’ fate: while still at UC Berkeley in April-May 1988 it had been Klawe’s good friend Professor Richard Karp – today the founding director of Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing – informing me of the couple’s decision to go to UBC – thus no immediate chance of tenure-track for me – and also advising me to choose UBC over Simon Fraser because of the new strength; then in 1990 when I applied for a tenure-track position under Head Klawe, “Dick” Karp’s promised reference letter was a no show without my knowledge …”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 8) — when political power games rule”, July 6, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It was in May 1988 that I went to Karp’s office to seek his advice, telling him of Toronto’s postdoc offer, SFU’s tenure-track offer, and UBC’s fixed-term offer that would become tenure-track if Klawe and Pippenger decided not to go there.

Karp expressed surprise that I had a Toronto postdoc offer, i.e., without his help, and then informed me that Maria and Nick had just told him they would be going to UBC. Karp then suggested that I accept the UBC offer because the arrival of Maria and Nick would make it a much stronger department, adding, “Vancouver is a very liveable city. David Kirkpatrick is a very smart guy. Jim Varah is a distinguished numerical analyst; I met him when I visited UBC and he was the department head”.

But Karp also cautioned, “after one year you can go anywhere in Canada” – I would be applying for the Canadian immigrant status – and at some point advised, indirectly, that Pippenger was not to be contradicted, as previously quoted in Part 3:

“Whatever Nick says must be right.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 4) — when power and control are the agenda”, May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Karp gave me the phone number of Klawe, then manager of the mathematics and related computer science department at IBM Almaden Research Center, telling me that she would like me to contact her. I was disappointed that their going to UBC took away my prospect of a tenure-track job, but felt privileged to get acquainted with the distinguished couple in theoretical computer science prior to her becoming my boss. On the phone I accepted Klawe’s invitation to give a seminar presentation at IBM Almaden, and met her, Nick and a few others there.

My Berkeley Ph.D. was only in mathematics, but my bachelor’s degree from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, had been in computer science, with a concentration in computational mathematics. Computer science had just begun in China in the late 1970s-early 1980s, and Chinese computers of that time were mainframes comparable only to American computers of the 1960s.

(Marshall C. Yovits, ed., Advances in Computers, Volume 27, 1988, Academic Press)

In the academic year 1987-1988, my last at Berkeley, I audited graduate courses taught by computer science professors, such as computer vision by Jitendra Malik, computer architecture by Alvin Despain, parallel processing and pipelining by David Messerschmitt, operating systems by John Ousterhout, and two courses by Richard Karp, on the analysis of probabilistic and random algorithms and on the analysis of parallel algorithms.

Courses in mathematical theories usually did not attract large audiences but Karp’s were exceptional, with his sharp command of mathematical concepts and algorithmic techniques, and his logical organization and articulate presentation of the course materials.

Karp assigned every student, including me who was only auditing, the task of taking notes for at least one lecture, notes that he would review, compile and distribute so that everyone would have a full copy of his course as recorded by the students – reflecting Karp’s confidence in his lectures’ legibility and clarity – in addition to his concise course notes. Later at UBC, I taught these two graduate courses and utilized Karp’s lectures for 2/3 of my course materials.

So at that point in the summer of 1988, I felt confident of integrating into the computer science teaching and research profession in due course.

It had always been in my intellectually youthful personality not to settle on the safest route to personal progress, but on some degree of safety from which I could get into the intrigue of, and make better, the unknown.

In the case of going to Canada, Karp’s advice made sense to me as there should be enough personal security to focus on the scientific prospect: the UBC fixed-term job offer included helping with Canadian immigration, a given part of the SFU tenure-track offer but not in the U of T postdoc offer; UBC had a stronger academic research reputation, also a longer history and a more scenic campus, than SFU, although neither was at the level of overall strength as U of T, Canada’s leading university.

At the previous stage of my career, in 1981-1982 in China applying for Ph.D. study in the United States, I had done similarly with my choices.

I applied to 3 graduate programs: the scientific computing and computational mathematics program in Stanford University’s computer science department, the mathematics department of UC Berkeley, and the applied mathematics department at State University of New York at Stony Brook. Stanford computer science was ranked the best in the world, Berkeley’s mathematics department was the largest – with over 70 faculty members – and one of the very best in the world, while Stony Brook’s applied mathematics was good but did not enjoy a top ranking.

I soon received Stony Brook’s admission, partly because Professor Yung Ming Chen (陳永明), its applied math department chairman at the time, had in 1981 visited our department at Sun Yat-sen university, with me assigned his tour guide, and during his short visit I learned that his father had been an army general and deputy governor of Guangdong province, of which Guangzhou is the capital, during the Nationalist government era, i.e., before the 1949 Communist takeover of China.

My bachelor’s thesis adviser was Professor Yuesheng Li (李岳生), chairman of the computer science department founded after our computational mathematics major class had finished the first year in the mathematics department. Understanding of my ambitiousness Li suggested, as I was thinking, to wait for responses from the other two schools. But having gotten his graduate study, at Moscow State University in the 1950s, after working as a student interpreter for a Soviet mathematics professor fostering research at Jilin University in China’s Northeast, Li also tried to talk me into applying to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Professor Carl de Boor at the U.S. Army Mathematics Research Center was a peer of his. I recalled the anecdote in a March 2011 blog post:

“When I applied for graduate study in the United States Professor Li seriously recommended the U. S. Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison – Dr. Carl de Boor there and his General Motors connection were Professor Li’s favorite and it also had Dr. Grace Wahba – but I preferred the Math program at the University of California, Berkeley, although Computer Science at Stanford was my first choice.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”, March 29, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

But Berkeley’s politically liberal reputation, its mathematics department’s world leading status and the U.S. West Coast’s mild climate – I had grown up in Guangzhou without any snowy winter – were to my liking, and so I took Li’s respect for Carl de Boor seriously but not so much Wisconsin-Madison as my place of Ph.D. study.

I was accepted by Berkeley but not by Stanford. In a context resembling 6 years later choosing UBC over SFU, I then chose Berkeley over Stony Brook: a more leading Ph.D. program, a university of longer history, and a locality of easier life adjustment.

Berkeley was the original campus of the University of California, founded 90 years before the State University of New York in the 1940s, and a century before SUNY Stony Brook in the 1950s.

(“A brief history of the University of California”, Office of the President, University of California; “History of SUNY”, The State University of New York; and, “Fast Facts”, Stony Brook University)

I had understood that Stanford computer science was hard to get into, its brochure stating that it annually admitted only a small class and few foreign students; also, at the time I wasn’t familiar with the research of its faculty, except some of Prof. James Wilkinson’s in numerical analysis, although I was familiar with some of Stanford math professor Samuel Karlin’s research – more so than with the Berkeley mathematicians’ – as a result of my undergraduate study influenced by Prof. Li.

But the bottom line might be that I wasn’t that strong an applicant; and there was an interesting, related background story.

I had 3 SYSU professors agreeing to provide letters of recommendation: Prof. Li, Prof. Mingjun Chen (陳銘俊), Li’s close associate and former colleague at Jilin University, and Prof. Youqian Huang (黃友謙).

My entrance class of 1977, the first class admitted through a nationwide exam after the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, composed mostly of students of mixed school-and-work backgrounds – I had worked as a factory apprentice for over a year – and in our performance wasn’t rated too highly by Chen, whose favorites were the entrance class of 1979, the first composed primarily of fresh middle school graduates.

The Stanford application form asked the professor to rate the applicant as being in the top 2% of the class, the top 10%, or lower, whereas the Berkeley form had a top 5% category. I recall I was cleaning a window on a classroom-cleaning day and Chen was present telling me that he could not rate me as in the top 2% – I had no argument since at least several girls among our graduating class were ahead of me in the grade-point average – but he would rate me as in the top 5% for Berkeley given that it was the school I liked most.

Obviously not a chance for the world’s top computer science department to accept a not-at-the-top graduate from the developing world.

Prof. Huang was more reassuring. An original SYSU graduate and an articulate teacher, Huang was friendly partly because he and my maternal family were from the same Shantou (Swatow) region of Guangdong.

Born and growing up in Cantonese-speaking Guangzhou, I could also speak the Swatow dialect because my maternal grandparents lived with us and helped my parents raise me and my sister, as I have told in a 2010 Chinese blog post.

(“忆往昔，学历史智慧 (Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom)”, April 10, 2010, FengGao.ORG)

Born in Indonesia, Prof. Mingjun Chen died of cancer on July 20, 2008, at the age of 74.

(“讣告”, by 程月华, and, “我们敬爱的陈老师——一路走好”, by Elsa, July 21, 2008, 中山大学, Yat-sen Channel)

A former student reminisced about what a conscientious and demanding teacher Chen had been:

“… 老师上课总是几十年如一日那样从来不迟到！实际上每次八点钟的课他都是七点半就到了！每次七点起身时就看到老师在慢慢向教室走去了！我用十分钟走的路程，想必老师要用半个钟才到吧！从他家里一直走到那，估计至少老师会提前一个小时出发！因为老师有癌症，化疗过，但是身体一直不是很好！每走几分钟就要停下来休息。在中大校道上你常会见到一个满脸皱纹的老头，大清晨带着个装着前晚写的讲义的塑料袋，蹲在路旁休息！每次经过他身边都想上前跟老师说一声：老师您辛苦了，但是一直没有，现在我再也没机会了！一次听同学说他常常五点就起了，或者是为了批改我们的作业会熬通宵！每当老师在评讲作业时说他前一晚的事情，我们都会觉得很心痛！老师看到我们不认真的字迹，错误的运用符号，乱增加言语，就会暴跳如雷，彻夜未眠，第二天仍要赶早去上课！其实如果是助教上课的话他完全可以不来的，因为他没讲一句话，但是他还是静静地做在最左边！不知道大家是不是习惯了，哪天老师不来，我们就会不专心，但是只要老师坐在那，大家就会觉得很安心，才会很认真的听课！”

(Elsa, July 21, 2008, 中山大学, Yat-sen Channel)

English translation of the above quote:

… Everyday in decades Teacher was never late for class! As a matter of fact, for every 8 o’clock class he arrived at 7:30! Each time I got up at 7 I saw Teacher walk slowly toward the classroom! A 10-minute walk for me, I think it took Teacher about half an hour! From his home walking there, I estimate that Teacher would start at least an hour ahead of time! Because Teacher had cancer, he had done chemotherapy, but his health has not been very good! Every few minutes of walk he needed a rest. On Sun-Yat-sen University campus roads you would often see a wrinkled old man, early in the morning carrying a plastic bag filled with lecture notes written the night before, squatting on the roadside resting! Every time walking by him I wanted to come up and say, Teacher your hard work is appreciated, but I never did, and now there is no more chance! I once heard from a classmate that he often got up at 5 o’clock, or staying up all night marking our homework! Whenever Teacher talked about the night before when commenting on our homework, we would all feel heartache! When Teacher saw our careless writings, erroneous used notations and arbitrarily added words, he would fly into a rage and lose sleep all night, but would still attend class early the next morning! Actually, if it was a teaching assistant’s class Teacher would not have to come at all, because he did not say a word, but still he sat quietly at the far left! I do not know if if had become our habit, that any day Teacher did not come, we would not concentrate, but as long as Teacher sat there, we would all feel reassured, and would then very seriously listen to the lecture!

I remember well that in teaching our courses, Chen’s favorite mathematical subject was “inequalities” – like professed by Louis Nirenberg of New York University’ Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, John Nash’s co-recipient of the 2015 Abel Prize, as in Part 2.

I have noticed the coincidence that in 1982 Chen’s evaluation ruled out any chance of my attending Stanford, and 8 years later in 1990 the plan of Alain Fournier, who had moved from U of T to UBC, to hire new Stanford Ph.D. Jack Snoeyink as in Part 3, ended my chance of a tenure-track position in theoretical computer science at UBC – and both Chen and Fournier later died of cancer, Chen nearly 8 years after Fournier.

In 1982 at Sun Yat-sen university a more senior, technically solid and practically experienced student, with a master’s degree earned under Prof. Li and closely associated with Prof. Chen, was also going to the U.S. for Ph.D. study. Guanrong Chen (陳關榮) would soon go by his English name of Ron Chen.

During the Cultural Revolution, like many youths of his age Ron was sent to work in a farm, in his case on the big island of Hainan. Like my later Berkeley roommate Kezheng Li (李克正) mentioned in Part 2, Ron studied mathematics on his own; later through a family connection Ron got Mingjun Chen’s tutoring, and after the Cultural Revolution joined Sun Yat-sen University’s first class of graduate students.

Ron was very good at applying what he had mastered. I recall that by the time of his master’s thesis he had found applications for spline functions – Prof. Li’s specialty – in control theory, and soon linked up with Prof. Charles K. Chui of Texas A&M University, College Station, where Chui, as well as Prof. Larry Shumaker, director of Texas A&M’s Center for Approximation Theory, were peers of Li’s.

(“Vita (August 6, 2015): Larry L. Schumaker”, Department of Mathematics, Vanderbilt University)

Along with Texas A&M’s admission Ron secured a teaching assistantship – most of us at SYSU going to U.S. graduate schools in 1982 couldn’t get it prior to attending – and in his Ph.D. study under Chui, continued to apply approximation theory techniques to control theory. One year before my Ph.D., in 1987 Ron received his Ph.D. and co-authored a book on Kalman filters – a mathematical estimation tool in control theory – with his adviser Chui.

(Charles K. Chui and Guanrong Chen, Kalman Filtering with Real-Time Applications, 1987, Springer-Verlag)

After teaching in Houston at Rice University and then at University of Houston, Ron became a tenured professor at the latter. In 1996 he became a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – an honor Nick Pippenger has had as in Part 3 – and the next year he co-authored a book with his former mentor Mingjun Chen and his former SYSU fellow graduate student Zhongying Chen (陳仲英) – three Chens – on approximate solutions of operator equations, a subject I had once audited at Prof. Chen’s SYSU graduate course.

(Mingjun Chen, Zhongying Chen and Guanrong Chen, Approximate Solutions of Operator Equations, 1997, World Scientific; and, “GUANRONG CHEN”, Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong)

Since 2000, Guanrong Ron Chen has been a professor at the City University of Hong Kong, and is an honorary professor at around 30 universities internationally.

( “Guanrong (Ron) Chen, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong”, Hindawi Publishing Corporation; and, Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong)

In 2008, Ron missed delivering a keynote speech at a July 18-19 international workshop in Austria, due to attending the “final interview” in China for the 2008 “National Natural Science Award of China”:

“… As the date of final interview coincides with the workshop, he will not be able to attend and give his interesting talk. We wish Professor Chen all the best …”

(“Professor Guanrong Ron Chen, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong”, First International Workshop on Nonlinear Dynamics and Synchronization, July 18-19, 2008, Klagenfurt, Austria)

A day later Ron’s former mentor Mingjun Chen died at SYSU in Guangzhou, and a week later on July 25 Ron gave a eulogy at the memorial service.

(“许罗丹教授主持陈铭俊告别仪式”, guosheng.sunbo9.net)

In his tearful reminiscences, Ron told of his own mother’s passing half a year before, his last meeting with his mentor on Father’s Day, and the tale that he had been informed of receiving the National Natural Science Award but been waiting till after the October State Council signing event to give his mentor a surprise, but it was all too late:

“陈铭俊老师：今天我也是60 岁的人了，这几年送走了好几位亲戚朋友，半年前才送走了我母亲，也在这里 ，但都没有觉得像今天那样伤心 。。。(哭泣-编者注) 这里的年轻同学们可能不知道，我和陈铭俊老师的关系非常特殊。简单说来，没有陈铭俊老师的过去，也就没有我陈关荣的今天。。。(哭泣–编者注) 陈铭俊老师：本来，我今年获得了国家自然科学奖，打算到十月份国务院签字以后再告诉您，给您一个惊喜，但都来不及了 。。。(又是哭泣–编者注) 幸好今年父亲节的时候，还见到过您最后一面。当时您对我说的最后一句话是：“陈关荣，只要您还有一口气，就不要停止（工作）。” 陈铭俊老师：我不会停止的……”

(“现场播报:陈关荣致陈铭俊的悼词”, guosheng.sunbo9.net)

English translation of the above quote:

Teacher Chen Mingjun: Today I am also a 60-year-old person, in the last few years I bid farewell to several of my relatives and friends, and six months ago to my mother, also here [at the cemetery’s farewell hall], but none felt as sad as it is today. . . (crying – editor’s note) Young students here may not know, that my relationship with Teacher Chen Mingjun was very special. Simply put, without Teacher Chen Mingjun’s past, there would not be I Chen Guanrong’s today. . . (crying – editor’s note) Teacher Chen Mingjun: Originally, this year I received the National Natural Science Award, and intended to wait until after the October State Council signing before telling you, to give you a surprise, but it is all too late. . . (again crying – editor’s note) Fortunately on Father’s Day this year, I got to see your one last time. At that time the last sentence your said to me was: “Chen Guanrong, as long as you still have a breath, do not stop (working).” Teacher Chen Mingjun: I will not stop……

Ron won one of the second prizes, i.e., second-class awards, in 2008 and went on to win another second-class award in 2012.

(“IAS Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor: Guanrong Chen, June-August 2013”, Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bristol; and, “Staff Achievements”, Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong)

Ron has dedicated a 2010 book he co-edited, Evolutionary Algorithms and Chaotic Systems, “to the memory of his mentor Professor Mingjun Chen (1934-2008).”

(“Evolutionary Algorithms and Chaotic Systems, Editors: Prof. Ivan Zelinka, Prof. Sergej Celikovsky, Prof. Hendrik Richter, Prof. Guanrong Chen”, Springer)

After his UC Berkeley retirement, in 1995 my former Ph.D. adviser Stephen Smale became a University Distinguished Professor – a type of prominent professorship former U.S. President Jimmy Carter holds at Emory University as in Part 3 – at City University of Hong Kong, before Ron Chen moving there in 2000 and founding the Center for Chaos and Complex Networks – Smale had been a founder of the mathematical theory of chaos in the 1960s.

(“Finding a Horseshoe on the Beaches of Rio”, by Steve Smale, 1998, Volume 20, Number 1, The Mathematical Intelligencer; “Prof. Stephen SMALE (史梅爾)”, City University of Hong Kong; and, “Guanrong (Ron) Chen, Director”, Center for Chaos and Complex Networks, City University of Hong Kong)

By 2003, an international symposium held in Shanghai, China, listed Smale as an honorary chairman of its organizing committee, and Guanrong Chen the vice chairman, and assured international scientists that China, Shanghai especially, was now safe from the SARS epidemic:

“Now SARS is under well control in China. WHO announced on June 24 that WHO had canceled its warning for traveling to Beijing – the last city in the mainland of China, and Beijing now is also not in the list of SARS infected areas again. Thus, people can travel all over China safely now. Even in the worst days, Shanghai has always been lucky. No people were really infected in Shanghai (except one who is the father of a patient coming back from southern China and was infected there). No doctors and nurses were infected in Shanghai. The total number of SARS patients were 8. There is no identified patient or suspect now. …

…

Honorary Chairs:

Chaohao Gu, Fudan University, China

Stephen Smale, University of California at Berkeley, USA

General Chairs:

Gaolian Liu, Shanghai University, China

A. Jameson, Stanford University, USA

Vice Chairman:

Guanrong Chen, City University of Hong Kong, China”

(“SHANGHAI INTERNATIONALSYMPOSIUM ON NONLINEAR SCIENCE AND APPLICATIONS ( Shanghai NSA’03ˈNovember 9 – 13, 2003 ): Call for Paper”)

SARS was of course scarier and deadlier than cancer.

Chen and Smale coming together was a tale of convergence of separate figures from my SYSU days and Berkeley days – not known to have been connected back then.

Back in August 1982 when Ron and I went to the United States, there was not yet Smale in the picture. Unlike Ron, I was going to a school where no math professor was an expert in spline function theory or the more general approximation theory, in which Ron had done his masters’ thesis and I my bachelor’s thesis under Yuesheng Li.

I had to start afresh.

In the spring of 1982, Prof. Li had seriously advised that when I got to Berkeley I should pursue my Ph.D. study under Professor Alexandre Chorin, a leading expert on the computation of fluid dynamics, whose “random vortex methods” Li had taught us during his precious teaching time outside of his department chair duties. Influenced by his Soviet math training, Li deemed fluid dynamics very important. He also told me that Chorin was of a Soviet Union-related background and received substantial research funding.

To earn a Ph.D. at a world-leading mathematics program I needed to learn the comprehensive basics in order to have a solid foundation. The mathematics of fluid flows centered on the subject of “partial differential equations”, i.e., equations involving not only derivatives – calculus of variations of mathematical functions – but derivatives in space of 3 dimensions, plus a time dimension. I had learned some at the advanced undergraduate level, but the research specialties of Yuesheng Li and Mingjun Chen had been in “ordinary differential equations”, i.e., in only one spatial dimension.

However, at Berkeley I soon found out that Chorin did not really do the mathematics of partial differential equations: he led a large group of students and researchers doing experimental computing of fluid dynamics equations.

More so than Ron Chen utilizing his specialty since his graduate school days, Chorin had practiced his specialty of fluid-dynamics computing since before graduate school, and his focus was not too mathematical as he has admitted in a recent interview:

“… Born in Poland only a few years before Hitler’s invasion, Chorin is no stranger to a different sort of flight: his family fled through Lithuania and Russia before spending 10 years in Israel and 11 years in Switzerland. By the time Chorin came to the United States for graduate study at the age of 23, he had already started working on the front line of computational mathematics, programming algorithms to solve equations describing ocean tides. Over the last half century, Chorin has tackled questions relating to the motion of fluids—some of the most challenging problems in applied mathematics.

Chorin developed computational methods that are used not only to study the flow of air around aircraft wings, but also the innards of combustion engines, the movement of blood through the heart, and the formation of stars. …

AL: When did you decide to study math?

AC: When I was a small kid, some distant relative of ours (whom I’ve never been able to find as a grown-up) used to ask me math questions, and decided I was good at math. If you asked me when I was seven or eight what I wanted to do, I would have said I wanted to be a mathematician. In Israel I’d been in the gifted program. In Switzerland, I was a fairly mediocre student. My grades did not qualify me to study math. So I studied engineering instead. In college, I did very well in math and got lots of encouragement, so I went back to it.

AL: Do you think that detour into engineering drew you to be in applied math rather than pure math?

AC: Oh, it’s very likely. Actually, at the end of engineering school I intended to be in pure math… but in Israel I was a programmer for someone who did numerical analysis for physics problems, and I got enamored with it.

AL: I’m sure you’ve seen the field of applied math change over the course of your career.

AC: It’s changed tremendously! The words “applied math” are too vague—I do mostly computational mathematics, and that has changed a lot. In fact, it is getting more distant from math. When I was a student, the computational issue was “How do you approximate [this] partial differential equation?” That’s a math question. Nowadays, we’ve been successful, so you can ask much more specific questions which are less mathematical. …”

(“ALEXANDRE CHORIN”, by Anna Lieb, April 29, 2015, Berkeley Science Review)

As quoted above, Chorin wasn’t from the Soviet Union but a Polish Jew escaping Nazi occupation by way of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless I wasn’t the only one with a misconception about his origin, as even his former Ph.D. adviser, Professor Peter Lax – a colleague of Louis Nirenberg’s – at NYU’s Courant Institute, had mistaken Chorin for a Hungarian compatriot:

“… In a fateful chance encounter on the street, he met his former teacher, de Rham, who advised him to pick a school in the United States and wrote letters on his behalf. De Rham counseled him, in particular, to study with another famous mathematician, Peter Lax, at New York University’s Courant Institute. Courant was then what Chorin calls the “mother ship” of computational and applied math. …

Lax, now 87 and a professor emeritus at Courant, recollects being initially drawn to Chorin because of a misunderstanding. Lax thought that Chorin was a fellow Hungarian emigré because there was a very prominent family named Chorin in Hungary. But Chorin’s original Polish surname was Choroszczański; the family had changed it in Israel. (In contrast, he never Anglicized his French first name because he wanted to avoid being confused with another fluid-mechanics researcher whose first name was “Alexander” and whose surname was similar to Chorin.)”

(“Science Lives: Alexandre Chorin”, by Douglas Steinberg, May 8, 2014, Simons Foundation)

In contrast to Stephen Smale whose anti-war history had risked his eligibility for U.S. National Science Foundation grants as in Part 2, Chorin’s research received substantial U.S. military funding, such as acknowledged in his 1973 papers, partly collaborated with his Berkeley student Peter S. Bernard, that established his “vortex methods”:

“… the Office of Naval Research under Contract no. N00014-69-A-0200-1052.”

(“Numerical study of slightly viscous flow”, by Alexandre Joel Chorin, 1973, Volume 57, Part 4, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and, “Discretization of a vortex sheet, with an example of roll-up”, by Alexandre Joel Chorin and Peter S. Bernard, November 1973, Volume 13, Issue 3, Journal of Computational Physics, in Alexandre Joel Chorin, Computational Fluid Mechanics: Selected Papers, 1989, Academic Press)

That was a navy grant, a type mentioned in Part 2 about John Nash’s former MIT senior colleague, former Communist party member Norman Levinson, who in the 1960s held both NSF and navy grants.

Still, Lax described Chorin as “very independent”:

“Even though Chorin turned out not to be Hungarian, Lax recounts that once he got to know him, “I thought highly of him. He had a very lively mind.” Lax also notes that Chorin “was always very independent.” …”

In my impression Chorin was a proud loner, often strolling alone with his German Shepherd or a pet like it. His “lively” comment about the United States, “as if I belonged”, drew remarks from President Barack Obama on November 20, 2014, when awarding the National Medal of Science to Chorin and others:

“After he came here as a foreign student from Israel, Eli Harari co-founded SanDisk with two colleagues, one from India, another from China. Alexandre Chorin, whose accomplishments led to a sea change in the way a generations of mathematicians use computers, sums up his experience this way:  “I came here as a foreigner on an American fellowship, received the opportunity to study at great schools and work at great universities, and have been treated as if I belonged.”

Treated as if I belonged. You do belong — because this is America and we welcome people from all around the world who have that same striving spirit. We’re not defined by tribe or bloodlines. We’re defined by a creed, idea. And we want that tradition to continue. But too often, we’re losing talent because — after the enormous investment we make in students and young researchers — we tell them to go home after they graduate. We tell them, take your talents and potential someplace else.”

(“Remarks by the President at National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation Award Ceremony”, November 20, 2014, The White House)

Look, “a foreigner on an American fellowship” was clearly treated better than ones like Ron Chen arriving on a teaching assistantship, let alone others like me.

In fact, receiving a National Medal at 76 while active as one of only 24 University Professors in the entire University of California, including UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego and UC Riverside mentioned in earlier Parts, and other campuses, Chorin has belonged to the U.S. more than Smale.

Smale received a National Medal of Science after he had retired from Berkeley and gone to CityU of Hong Kong – in 1996 along with Richard Karp and 6 others nationally, from President Bill Clinton:

“Also receiving a medal was Stephen Smale, 66, a professor, emeritus, of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Smale, who now conducts research and teaches at the City University of Hong Kong, was cited “for four decades of pioneering work on basic research questions which have led to major advances in pure and applied mathematics. He is responsible for formulating key definitions, proofs, and conjectures which have energized an ever-growing number of mathematicians and scientists.””

(“Eight Researchers Accept The National Medal Of Science For 1996”, by Thomas Durso, August 19, 1996, The Scientist)

Nonetheless, Obama chose a well-suited example to make his point, which must have felt personal because his own father, Barack Obama, Sr., had studied at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and then earned a graduate degree at Harvard University but eventually returned to Kenya, where his intellectual goals were never realized. I wrote about this history in a November 2009 blog post:

“Barack Obama, Sr. had left Kenya at age 23 to study at the University of Hawaii (the same age also for me when I went to study in the U.S., but I later taught at the University of Hawaii…), where he met and married President Obama’s mother and produced a future U.S. president – the only one from Hawaii; he then went to study at Harvard, met Mark Ndesandjo’s mother and returned to Kenya with her, where Mark was born.

…

In 1963 when his father left him and his mother Stanley Ann Dunham, a white student at the University of Hawaii born in Kansas and grown up in various parts of the continental United States, Barack Obama was only two-years-old; neither side of his parents’ families had approved of the interracial marriage, which at the time was legally permitted in Hawaii but not in 22 other states in the United States. Barack’s mother later remarried an Indonesian student and took Barack to that country after her husband was summoned back to his home country following the rise to power of military strongman Suharto, sending Barack back to Hawaii to live with the grandparents when she wanted a good education for her son at the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu, which Barack liked better than schooling in Indonesia.

It could be Kenyan presidential politics as Barack Obama described in his 1995 book, or the economy of life in Africa, or still something more, that his ambitious, U.S.-educated economist father later suffered career setback in Kenya and became an alcoholic and physical abuser…”

(““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou (Part 1)”, November 22, 2009, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Another well-suited reason for Obama’s remarks on Chorin’s lively comment, from my vantage point, is that Chorin had been the Ph.D. adviser of Nathaniel Whitaker I knew at Berkeley, one of the few African-American mathematics Ph.D. students in the U.S., as I noted in a February 2013 blog post:

““Whitaker” is reputed to be one of the most ancient Anglo-Saxon names, traceable in the written records to the 11th-12th centuries or earlier, with “white acre” and “wheat acre” being its origin…

Back in my UC Berkeley days there was a fellow graduate student one year ahead of me by the name of Nathaniel Whitaker, except that he was African American so I don’t know how his name had been inherited. …

Nate and my classmate friend Paul Wright … were among a very small number of African American Mathematics Ph.D. students in the United States.”

(“Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)”, February 28, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

At Berkeley I continued to think of Chorin as of Russian Jewish background, and that the only Polish mathematician I knew in the early 1980s was a visiting assistant or associate professor whose name I have not been able to recall, who taught the first-semester graduate course on set theory and topology, was very friendly and wrote a strong letter of recommendation for my application for the foreign student tuition waiver and teaching assistantship.

Another basic course, on measure theory and functional analysis, was a second-semester continuation of it and was taught by a strict Prof. William Bade, the department’s vice chair of graduate affairs from whom obtaining the tuition waiver and teaching assistantship was not easy for me.

My Berkeley roommate Kezheng Li, as in Part 2 a senior math graduate student who gave me considerable help, for his Ph.D. studied algebraic geometry, a specialty field within algebra, the latter an important basic subject on which I took another 2-semester course.

The first semester of algebra was taught by a retired professor, Gerhard Hochschild, an easygoing teacher from whom most students expected good grades.

The second semester was taught by another senior professor, Abraham Seidenberg, a demanding teacher who gave a final exam so long that it came like a shock; learning the Galois theory for the first time I could not finish the exam, but the final grade wasn’t too bad as many students didn’t finish.

An interesting episode about Seidenberg, a narcissistic version of Albert Einstein in his looks, happened near the end of the last class when students were filling out teaching evaluation forms, a time when the professor was supposed to be absent and a student would bring the evaluations to the department: Seidenberg not only stayed in the classroom but took peeks into the filled-out forms on the lectern, sometimes as a form was being placed there by a student.

I would encounter this kind of intimidating antic only one more time, as in Part 1 by UBC computer science department head Maria Klawe in February 1992, when she insisted on staying in the room for a faculty meeting that would hear my grievance about her management.

The first time was easier and the second time harder – that seemed to be a pattern in my experience, not just for these two 2-semester courses.

The other 2-semester course I took was partial differential equations – as mentioned important for my anticipated future study – taught by Professor Tosio Kato.

An exemplary scholar, Kato’s presentation was detailed and thorough, yet covering a broad range of topics of interest, especially impressive when his own education had been in physics. S. T. Kuroda, a former physics student of Kato’s at the University of Tokyo, had had a similar experience:

“My recollection of Kato goes back to my younger days when I attended his course on mathematical physics at the Department of Physics, University of Tokyo. It was 1953–54. The course covered, thoroughly but efficiently, most of the standard material from the theory of functions through partial differential equations. The style of his lecture never gave an impression that he went quickly, but at the end of each class I was surprised by how much he had covered within one session.”

(“Tosio Kato (1917–1999)”, by Heinz Cordes, Arne Jensen, S. T. Kuroda, Gustavo Ponce, Barry Simon, and Michael Taylor, June/July 2000, Volume 47, Number 6, Notices of the American Mathematical Society)

Recall, as in Part 2, the tale of John Nash’s Princeton Ph.D. work in game theory in the early 1950s, that later won him the Nobel Prize in Economics: Nash’s original idea was dismissed by John von Neumann, a powerful mathematician who had founded game theory but become preoccupied with nuclear bomb development and advising U.S. military leaders; David Gale, later a UC Berkeley math professor I worked as a teaching assistant for, then encouraged Nash to pursue the idea for his Ph.D. thesis.

Half a world away in Japan, Kato’s entrance into advanced mathematical research also had a von Neumann factor, in this case von Neumann’s acceptance of Kato’s work on Hamiltonian operators, and a World War II wartime factor. The story was told by the mathematical physicist Barry Simon in 2000, in memory of Kato who had passed away in October 1999:

“Kato’s most celebrated result is undoubtedly his proof, published in 1951 [K51a], of the essential self-adjointness of atomic Hamiltonians:

…

In a case of scientific serendipity, J. von Neumann concluded his basic work on the theory of unbounded self-adjoint operators just as quantum theory was being invented, and he had realized by 1928 that the critical question was to define the Hamiltonian as a self-adjoint operator. Kato proved that the operator … defined initially on smooth functions of compact support, has a unique self-adjoint extension (and he was even able to describe that extension).

I have often wondered why it took so long for this fundamental question to be answered. As Kato remarks in his Wiener Prize acceptance [K80], the proof is “rather easy.” … I would have expected Rellich or K. O. Friedrichs to have found the result by the late 1930s.

One factor could have been von Neumann’s attitude. V. Bargmann told me of a conversation he had with von Neumann in 1948 in which von Neumann asserted that the multiparticle result was an impossibly hard problem and even the case of hydrogen was a difficult open problem (even though the hydrogen case can be solved by separation of variables and the use of H. Weyl’s 1912 theory, which von Neumann certainly knew!). Perhaps this is a case like the existence of the Haar integral, in which von Neumann’s opinion stopped work by the establishment, leaving the important discovery to the isolated researcher unaware of von Neumann’s opinion.

Another factor surely was the Second World War. … In [K80] Kato remarks dryly: “During World War II, I was working in the countryside of Japan.” In fact, from a conversation I had with Kato one evening at a conference, it was clear that his experiences while evacuated to the countryside and in the chaos immediately after the war were horrific. He barely escaped death several times, and he caught tuberculosis. …

Formally trained as a physicist, Kato submitted his paper to Physical Review, which could not figure out how and who should referee it, and that journal eventually transferred it to the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. Along the way the paper was lost several times, but it finally reached von Neumann, who recommended its acceptance. The refereeing process took over three years.”

(Heinz Cordes, Arne Jensen, S. T. Kuroda, Gustavo Ponce, Barry Simon, and Michael Taylor, June/July 2000, Notices of the American Mathematical Society)

I can understand the “von Neumann’s attitude” factor leading to a long delay of a mathematical discovery, as can be glimpsed also in Nash’s case. But I can’t quite agree with Simon’s take of the “Second World War” factor: Kato’s difficult life during that time no doubt was a delay to Japanese research in mathematical physics, but wouldn’t that have allowed researchers in the West to achieve Kato’s “most celebrated result” first – had it not been for von Neumann’s oppressive or authoritarian influence?

A different biography of Kato seemed to deemphasize the devastation of World War II to his research career:

“… In 1941 he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Tokyo, commencing a relationship that would last two more decades. After a year away Kato rejoined the University of Tokyo in 1943 to start his teaching career while also pursuing a doctorate there. In 1944 he married Mizue Suzuki. In 1951 he became a doctor of science, and the same year he became a full professor. In 1962 he immigrated to the United States to accept a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley from which he retired in 1989.

In 1949, while still working on his doctorate, Kato published one of his early important papers, “On the Convergence of the Pertubation Method, I, II” in Progressive Theories of Physics. …”

(Elizabeth H. Oakes, Encyclopedia of World Scientists, 2007, Infobase Publishing)

In 1942, the year of the Midway naval battles and the year Kato was away from his university, there was no real war in Japan proper, whatever the reason for his evacuation to the countryside; and in the year 1944 when war was closing in on Tokyo, Kato got married.

Having studied with Prof. Kato, I would not make the kind of leap of logic Prof. Barry Simon did.

Well, unless there was no choice, I suppose. As in the pattern of the second being harder, near the end of the second semester Kato gave the students a list of, I have forgotten how many, probably 7 or 8 problems, and several weeks of time for each to independently solve 3 of them. One of them, in topology, had been posed in class weeks earlier and a few days later I had gone to his office and communicated a solution to him; and another I soon solved; but for a third problem, I went around the rest, worked on several of them in some details, and did not obtain any complete solution with full confidence – in the end I also handed in what I got for one of the others, no doubt with leap of logic somewhere.

As the first year ended, I liked partial differential equations well enough that I was contemplating Ph.D. study under Kato.

In the summer of 1983, on July 11-29 at UC Berkeley there was a major international conference partially funded by the NSF, Summer Research Institute on Nonlinear Functional Analysis and Its Applications, on a subject with deep connections to partial differential equations. The organizing committee consisted of Kato, Felix Browder and Louis Nirenberg – 2 senior mathematicians mentioned in Part 2 in relation to John Nash – French mathematicians Haim Brezis and Jacques-Louis Lions, and Paul Rabinowitz of the University of Wisconsin.

I attended the plenary presentations and paid special attention to one by Paul Rabinowitz, partly because he was a Wisconsin-Madison colleague of Carl de Boor whom my undergraduate adviser Yuesheng Li had highly recommended, and he had the same last name as Philip Rabinowitz in the numerical analysis field of my undergraduate study. Later in 1997 when de Boor was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and Rabinowitz received the George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics, their department’s newsletter gave informative introductions of the two:

“Carl de Boor, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, was among the 60 scholars elected this year to the National Academy of Sciences. Carl grew up in East Germany and received the PhD from the University of Michigan in 1966. …

… Splines were introduced in the 40’s (by the late I.J. Schoenberg of Wisconsin) as a means for approximating discrete data by curves. Their practical application was delayed almost twenty years until computers became powerful enough to handle the requisite computations. Since then they have become indispensible tools in computer-aided design and manufacture (cars and airplanes, in particular), in the production of printer’s typesets, in automated cartography… Carl is the worldwide leader and authority in the theory and applications of spline functions. His contributions have been more fundamental and numerous than any other researcher in this field, ranging from rigorous theories through highly efficient and reliable algorithms to complete software packages. Carl has made Wisconsin-Madison a major international center in approximation theory and numerical analysis…

…

Professor Paul Rabinowitz has been awarded by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the 1998 G.D. Birkhoff Prize for his outstanding contributions to mathematics. … Paul received the PhD in Mathematics from New York University in 1966…

The citation for the Prize reads in part:

“Perhaps more than anyone else Paul Rabinowitz has deeply influenced the field of non linear analysis. His methods for the analysis of nonlinear systems has changed the way we think of them. … Paul Rabinowitz broke new ground to invent general mini-max methods for problems not necessarily satisfying the Palais-Smale [compactness] condition and that are indefinite. …

He has also introduced the use of sophisticated topological tools to obtain multiple solutions of nonlinear problems. Rabinowitz is a powerful mathematician who combines abstract mathematics with concrete applications to problems arising in various fields.””

(“Van Vleck Notes: Dedications, Honors and Awards …”, Fall 1997, Department of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin)

At the summer 1983 Berkeley conference, Rabinowitz’s powerful mathematical theorem, the “Mountain-Pass Lemma”, was a focus of interest, even though the conference proceedings’ titles showed that term only in another researcher’s paper, “The topological degree at a critical point of mountain-pass type” by Helmut Hofer; the titles also referred to the “Palais-Smale condition” bearing the name of Berkeley’s Stephen Smale, in one paper, “A generalized Palais-Smale condition and applications” by Michael Struwe.

(Felix E. Browder, ed., Nonlinear Functional Analysis and Its Applications, 1986, Volume 45, Part 1, Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics, American Mathematical Society)

As I recall, Peking University professor and Berkeley visiting scholar Gongqing Zhang (張恭慶) attended the conference. Several Chinese mathematicians presented papers, prominent among them Jilin University professor Zhuoqun Wu (伍卓群) – a 1950s classmate of Yuesheng Li’s.

(Felix E. Browder, ed., 1986, American Mathematical Society)

Just prior to the Fall 1983 semester I passed the Preliminary Examination, the required written exam for the Ph.D. program. Kezheng had helped me over the summer by having me study previous prelim exam problems, discuss with him and hear his insights on the fine points. Kato happened to be the examiner, and though I did not fully solve all the problems in a long list, I did pretty well.

The oral Qualifying Examination remained, to be taken in front of a committee after a Ph.D. adviser was chosen.

Prof. Kato was generous. When I went to his office, likely shortly after passing the Prelim Exam, to ask him to be my Ph.D. adviser, he told me that he was retiring, but would give me a research assistantship for one semester while I looked for a younger, more research active Ph.D. adviser – it was very helpful as my teaching assistantship did not start until the spring semester of the 1983-1984 academic year – and he also advised that, given my interest in the mathematics of computation more than in computing, Andrew Majda or Stephen Smale would be the choice.

Except the more junior Polish visiting professor, it had been a distinguished group of senior professors teaching these basic graduate courses in 1982-1983: Tosio Kato was a 1980 winner of the Norbert Wiener Prize, a leading prize in applied mathematics awarded jointly by the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics – Alexandre Chorin later received it in 2000 – while Gerhard Hochschild was a 1980 winner of the Leroy P. Steele Prize for his research, a leading prize awarded by the AMS – John Nash later received it in 1999.

(“The Leroy P Steele Prize of the AMS”, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive; and, “The Norbert Wiener Prize”, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

So 5 years before taking Karp’s advice regarding a faculty job at UBC or SFU, I followed Kato’s advice in finding a Ph.D. adviser.

Kato’s advice was sensible. From a background in partial differential equations and computation, Chorin would have been the choice had I liked programming and computing more than the mathematics.

The next professor who did research in mathematics in relation to fluid dynamics computation was Ole Hald. In 1978, Hald and collaborator Vincenza Mauceri Del Prête were the first to prove some desirable property of convergence, i.e., that the computed approximate solutions would converge to the true solution, for Chorin’s random vortex methods:

“Introduction. In this paper we will prove the convergence of Chorin’s vortex method for the flow of a two dimensional, inviscid fluid. …

…

The convergence of Chorin’s method has already been considered by Dushane [4]. However, his proof is incorrect… Our proof follows the general outline of Dushane but introduces two new ideas. …

In one respect our result is less than satisfying. It can be shown that the solution of the Euler equations for a two dimensional flow exists for all time (see Wolibner [14], McGrath [7] and Kato [6]). However, we have only been able to prove the convergence of Chorin’s method for a small time interval. …”

(“Convergence of Vortex Methods for Euler’s Equations”, by Ole Hald and Vincenza Mauceri Del Prête, July 1978, Volume 32, Number 143, Mathematics of Computation)

Look, someone else did the mathematics for Alexandre Chorin.

I recall it was also in the Fall of 1983 that I took a numerical matrix computation course taught by Hald, did erratically with the large amount of hand calculations, and received a B-level grade – any C-level grade would disqualify a student from the Ph.D. program.

Something I heard might give insight to Ole Hald’s conscientiously demanding attitude about subtle details. My classmate Mei Kobayashi, daughter of Prof. Shoshichi Kobayashi – as cited in Part 2 in the 1960s he had applied for NSF grants together with Smale – told me that Hald’s wife was a former fashion model and their car was not only vacuumed very clean but delicately treated with fragrance.

I don’t know if Mei’s observation was accurate but like Chorin, Hald had earned his Ph.D. from NYU’s Courant Institute; also, Catherine Willis, Hald’s Ph.D. graduate prior to Mei, became a financial analyst at the Wall Street investment firm Kidder-Peabody after working for the U.S. Geological Survey.

(“Catherine Willis: Modeling the World of High Finance”, 1991, Association for Women in Mathematics; Anna Lieb, April 29, 2015, Berkeley Science Review; and, “Ole Hansen Hald”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

Mei’s Ph.D. thesis, which I helped proofread, was titled “Discontinuous Inverse Sturm-Liouville Problems with Symmetric Potentials”. I had first encountered inverse problems for partial differential equations in Stony Brook professor Yung Ming Chen’s lecture at SYSU; at the time, Ron’s master’s classmate Luoluo Li (黎羅羅) worked on trigonometric spline functions, but my bachelor’s thesis turned out  to do better in that subject, and Li then switched to the inverse problems.

Mei was a Princeton graduate and liked to boast she had been a Princeton cheerleader, adding, “actually I was a pom pom” – I obviously knew about cheerleaders, but Mei would explain that “pom poms” were ones lifted up by the cheerleaders.

After Hald, the next professor who came to Berkeley and did research in the mathematics of fluid dynamics equations was Andrew Majda.

Like Hald, Majda did research related to Chorin’s vortex methods; in the early 1980s he and collaborator J. Thomas Beale introduced a new class of vortex methods improved over Chorin’s, and proved their excellent convergence property:

“… The methods of Leonard and Del Prête require a large amount of detailed information … On the other hand, the three-dimensional vortex blob method recently introduced by Chorin [4], [5] is more flexible and requires less information. … Can such a “crude” three-dimensional vortex algorithm accurately represent fluid flows?

In the work presented here, we answer this question affirmatively. We formulate below a new class of three-dimensional vortex methods and then prove that these 3-D vortex methods are stable and convergent with arbitrarily high order accuracy. In these new algorithms, we update the velocity crudely in a fashion completely analogous to the 3-D vortex blob method of Chorin; however, unlike the algorithm in [4], we incorporate the vortex stretching through a Lagrangian update. …”

(“Vortex Methods. I: Convergence in Three Dimensions”, and, “Vortex Methods. II: Higher Order Accuracy in Two and Three Dimensions”, by J. Thomas Beale and Andrew Majda, July 1982, Volume 39, Number 159, Mathematics of Computation)

Majda’s sense of ‘smarterness’ – than Chorin, that is – was brimming in the above quote.

As in Part 2, in the fall of 1983 I asked Smale to be my Ph.D. adviser and he said yes. At the time I was taking Smale’s graduate topics course, and I was also taking Majda’s seminar course, who said he was in the process of moving to Princeton and would not accept new students – unless taking me to Princeton along with his current Ph.D. students, that he might.

I told Smale that I would opt for Princeton if I could but otherwise at Berkeley he would be my adviser, and it was okay with him.

In an October 2010 blog post I recalled Majda’s strong temperament:

“Prof. Andrew Majda was known for his strong temperament, and the year I was auditing a graduate class from him he was in the process of moving to Princeton which had made him an important job offer. Near the Berkeley classroom there was construction work going on at the time and the noise sometimes got really loud, and Majda would burst into tantrums like, “It’s driving me crazy, they are driving me out of Berkeley.””

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 1) — when democracy can be trumped by issue-based politics”, October 8, 2010, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The show of temper cited above was during a graduate class on solutions of partial differential equations, not the seminar course.

The seminar course saw Majda present the basics of equations for fluid flows with shock waves, pose a long list of open problems, and then schedule the students to give presentations, either on their research or surveying other researchers’ works.

To me who had not studied shock waves before, Majda handed a paper by Tai-Ping Liu, a University of Maryland mathematician, pointed to the last paragraph that had claimed a result without giving the proof, and asked me to present the proof.

Prof. Tai-Ping Liu had done significant pioneering work on shock waves, such as in a 1982 paper titled, “Nonlinear Stability and Instability of Transonic Flows Through a Nozzle”, that also referenced past key papers in the field.

(“Nonlinear Stability and Instability of Transonic Flows Through a Nozzle”, T.-P. Liu, 1982, Volume 83, Communications in Mathematical Physics)

I went through the thrust of the paper Majda provided, the relevant references listed in the paper, and what I thought were relevant sections of a book Majda lent me, Shock Waves and Reaction-Diffusion Equations by Joel Smoller, in search of mathematical lemmas and theorems that might serve as basis to prove that claim. I did not find any obviously useful ones, and settled on trying to tackle it through some mathematical techniques I had learned.

What I came up with was not a full proof, but I decided to present it in the seminar course as my result. As scheduled my presentation was the last of the semester, and I started with an overview on the physics background, the differential equations, the problem and the claim, and only halfway into my proof the class time was up; others left, Majda asked me what the rest was, I mentioned the techniques to him, and he said, “That’s an original idea, but the proof is harder than that” – I knew but just hadn’t reached the end to show the deficiency.

Majda then said, “since you want to study with Smale, I am not going to take you to Princeton”.

Something about “inequalities”, perhaps? It might be Majda’s polite way to say that I wasn’t technically strong enough for his liking.

Nevertheless, previously when I mentioned to him that if he did not take me to Princeton I would study with Smale, Majda would become visibly uncomfortable, and once stated, “Steve Smale is a great mathematician, but he knows nothing about numerical analysis”.

Majda might not care much about Smale, but what choices did I have at Berkeley?

At the time other than Chorin, Hald and Majda, there were only two Berkeley mathematics professors with significant research in computational mathematics of differential equations: Paul Concus and Keith Miller, both with Ph.D. earlier than Chorin’s.

Paul Concus was not active at all when it came to producing Ph.D. students. A senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory but only an adjunct professor, in his entire academic career since receiving his Harvard Ph.D. in 1959 under adviser George Francis Carrier, Concus has produced only one Ph.D. graduate: Anne Greenbaum in 1981.

(“Capillary Surfaces in Microgravity”, by Paul Concus and Robert Finn, in Jean N. Koster and Robert L Sani, eds., Low-Gravity Fluid Dynamics and Transport Phenomena, 1990, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.; and, “Paul Concus”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

In contrast, from 1986 to 1995 Chorin served as head of the LBNL mathematics department where Concus was a senior scientist, and in that period at least 11 Ph.D.s graduated under his Berkeley professorship from 1987 to 1995.

(“Alexandre Chorin”, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and, “Alexandre Joel Chorin”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

Keith Miller was better than Paul Concus in producing Ph.D. students, 4 of them in the 1970s after receiving his Ph.D. in 1963 from Rice University. But during the entire 1980s Miller produced only one Ph.D. student: Steve Oslon in 1986.

(“C. Keith Miller”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

So shouldn’t Miller have time to take in another Ph.D. student or two? Not necessarily. The personal experience my classmate Robert Rainsberger told me, that of Miller’s rejection of his quest to be Miller’s Ph.D. student, revealed something stern yet preferential.

Miller specialized in the finite element method for solving partial differential equations, fluid dynamics in particular, and was the only Berkeley math professor to have the finite elements as the primary expertise.

Robert was a returning student, with prior U.S. air force experience, a University of Illinois degree in 1979, and computational work background at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about 40 miles from Berkeley. He enrolled at Berkeley mathematics department’s Ph.D. program while continuing to work part-time at LLNL, and we took Kato’s course together; he told me he was interacting with Miller, possibly doing some project if I recall correctly.

Then at some point after I had become Smale’s Ph.D. student, Robert told me that Miller stated if he continued to work at LLNL Miller would not be his Ph.D. adviser, because the national lab was involved in weapons research.

Disappointed, Robert eventually found Heinz Cordes, who like Kato was an older professor and whose expertise was in differential equations and operators, but not in computation, as his adviser. A 1987 book by Cordes on differential operators acknowledged Rainsberger’s help in proofreading; and Rainsberger’s thesis was titled, “On L2 Boundedness of Pseudo-Differential Operators”.

(Heinz Otto Cordes, Spectral Theory of Linear Differential Operators and Comparison Algebras, 1987, Cambridge University Press; and, “Robert Bell Rainsberger”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

Robert’s Ph.D. study turned out to be mostly pure-math labor. Before and after, Robert’s work was in computation, particularly mesh generation applicable to CAD in general, according to his current biography at Stanford:

“Robert Rainsberger spent his earliest 4 years in the U.S. Air Force before entering the University of Illinois to earn his B.S. in mathematics in 1979. He was then employed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for two years as a computer scientist before entered the University of California, Berkeley. In 1988 he received his Ph.D in mathematics. After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Rainsberger returned to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to continue working on 3D hexa mesh generation. During this same period, Dr. Rainsberger contracted to Control Data Corporation to develop the first versions of ICEM CFD. In 1991, Dr. Rainsberger founded XYZ Scientific Applications, Inc. where he remains the principle code developer of TrueGrid, President, and CEO of the corporation.”

(“Our People: Robert Rainsberger”, Stanford Composites Manufacturing Innovation Center)

A 2003 presentation by him at U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology showed that a usage of Rainsberger’s mesh generation was in the finite element method for fluid dynamics:

“The first part of this expository talk is an introduction on some of the elementary and advanced techniques of mesh generation for finite element analysis. The second part describes a technique to form nearly orthogonal meshes based on the solution to various systems of elliptic partial differential equations in fluid dynamics, hydrodynamics, heat transfer, solid and structural mechanics in order to minimize lower order error terms. …

… He is currently a consultant to NIST Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division on developing finite element analysis codes for applications in the NIST World Trade Center (WTC) investigation project.”

(“MESH GENERATION FOR NON-LINEAR FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS”, by Robert Rainsberger, December 4, 2003, Information Technology Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology)

The fall of the World Trade Center towers, which Robert studied in 2003, was not like fluid flow, though, but like crumbling rocks.

Some may comment that, given UC Berkeley’s strong anti-war tradition, Keith Miller was probably like Stephen Smale, in this case taking a stand against weapons research.

It appeared that way, until one learns about Miller’s next Ph.D. student, Andrew Kuprat, whose 1992 Ph.D. thesis was titled, “Creation and Annihilation of Nodes for the Moving Finite Element Method” – the kind of topic Rainsberger had wanted for his Ph.D. study.

(“Andrew Paul Kuprat”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

What about Kuprat? Right after receiving his Ph.D. he became a computational scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, working extensively on high-energy physics:

“Dr. Kuprat is an expert at computational geometry, mesh generation, and the solution of partial differential equations using finite elements. His current interests include generation of optimized meshes for computational fluid dynamics simulations on human and animal airway and cardiovascular geometries, efficient schemes for conservatively mapping quantities in multiphysics simulations, and moving finite element methods for materials microstructure modeling. Dr. Kuprat was a primary developer of LaGriT (Los Alamos Grid Toolbox) at Los Alamos between 1994 and 2005. …

Education

• B.Sc., Mathematics and Physics – University of Victoria, Victoria Canada – 1984
• Ph.D., Mathematics – University of California, Berkeley – 1992
• Post-Doc, Plasma Physics – Los Alamos National Laboratory – 1992–1995
• Post-Doc, Mechanics of Materials – Los Alamos National Laboratory – 1995–1996

Positions and Employment

• 1996–2005 – Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM
• 2005–Present – Senior Scientist, Battelle/Pacific Northwest Division (PNNL), Richland, WA”

(“Andrew Kuprat, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor”, The Gene & Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, Washington State University, Pullman)

Much more than LLNL in weapons research, LANL was the original birthplace of atomic bombs, including the ones exploding over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, and is the world’s leading nuclear weapons lab.

(“The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex: Major Facilities”, Union of Concerned Scientists)

Still, some may argue that Kuprat was a math and physics graduate from the University of Victoria, Canada, and so he might not have any prior weapons background – unlike Rainsberger – and if with his Berkeley Ph.D. he chose to work in LANL, his adviser Miller might not have expected that.

Well, Miller greeted his new Ph.D. graduate’s LANL job with acceptance and further collaboration, as indicated in the proceedings of a “physics computing” conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1993:

“Physics Computing ’93

The Division of Computational Physics will host Physics Computing’93 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, May 31 – June 4, 1993. Co-sponsors of the meeting, which will also be known as The 5th International Conference on Computational Physics, are the AIP journal Computers in Physics and the European Physical Society. The venue will be the Albuquerque Convention Center.

…

Tutorial Subjects

…

2D Moving Finite Elements: An Adaptive Grid Method for Computational Fluid Dynamics, Alan H. Glasser, Los Alamos National Laboratory, C. Keith Miller, University of California, Berkeley, and Andrew P. Kuprat, Los Alamos National Laboratory”

(“PHYSICS COMPUTING NEWS – SPRING 1993, Newsletter of the Division of Computational Physics”, American Physical Society)

See, Keith Miller went all the way to LANL’s heartland to participate in a tutorial on his specialty, surrounded by the nuclear weapons lab experts.

Even if Andrew Kuprat’s academic origin from Canada’s Victoria carried a magical aura of ‘peace’ – in contrast to Rainsberger’s U.S. air force and Illinois backgrounds – it wouldn’t be sufficient ground to justify his going all the way to become an expert at the world’s leading nuclear weapons lab and still enjoying (his Berkeley Ph.D. adviser’s) blessing of ‘peace’!

Perhaps not coincidentally, UC Berkeley had had a historical role in the invention of nuclear weapons, when the physicist Robert Oppenheimer founded LANL and led the atomic bomb development, as noted in my February 2013 blog post:

“The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the director of IAS at Princeton with whom von Neumann discussed his pending move in 1956, had hailed from UC Berkeley to become “father of the atomic bomb”, leading the development of nuclear bombs at Los Alamos National Lab founded by him in northern New Mexico; Oppenheimer later also died of cancer, at the age of 63.”

(“Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)”, February 28, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

This was the Robert Oppenheimer who, as in Part 2, brought the Chinese mathematician Shiing-shen Chern and his family to the IAS in Princeton in December 1948 when China was on the verge of being taken over by the Communists.

The former Berkeley physicist who had led the development of the atomic bomb later opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and presumably by that virtue became a victim of McCarthyism:

“In April of 1954, Robert Oppenheimer, the former head of the Manhattan Project, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and the most famous scientist in America, was declared a security risk by Eisenhower and stripped of his security clearance in the full glare of national publicity. The ostensible reason was Oppenheimer’s youthful left-wing association, but the real reason, as von Neumann and most scientists testified at the time, was Oppenheimer’s refusal to support the development of the H-bomb.”

(Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Hmm, “the most famous scientist in America” wasn’t Albert Einstein? Oh well, at least it wasn’t Norman Levinson, like in Nasar’s book as discussed in Part 2.

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, also a physicist involved in the original atomic bomb development, was also a victim of McCarthyism and became an activist for “nuclear disarmament and peace”:

“Here’s a look at the past. Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.

1985

Feb. 3: Frank Oppenheimer, the distinguished physicist who founded San Francisco’s famed Exploratorium, died in his Sausalito home Feb. 2 after a long illness. He was 72. In his varied career, Dr. Oppenheimer pioneered research in radiation and cosmic rays, conducted secret studies on uranium isotope separation during the Manhattan Project of World War II, spent years in university teaching and finally created and directed the unique museum whose imaginative presentation of science has earned it worldwide renown. He was the younger brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who won fame as the director of the Los Alamos laboratory, which designed and built America’s first atomic bombs. Frank Oppenheimer was passionately committed to the cause of nuclear disarmament and peace. As a graduate student during the Depression, he briefly joined the Communist Party, and that short-lived membership cost him dearly later in life. In 1949, he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, then forced to resign his assistant professorship at the University of Minnesota. …”

(“Exploratorium founder Frank Oppenheimer dies”, by Johnny Miller, January 31, 2010, SFGate.com)

So one shouldn’t take the weapons-or-peace logic too orthodoxly, or even too seriously, but should do so with a grain of salt when one realizes that the famous activists opposing the weapons of mass destruction, like the Oppenheimer brothers, could well be the ones who had invented them in the first place.

On the other hand, the scientific institutions created and/or shaped by these talented physicists could be treasures, like the Exploratorium founded by Frank Oppenheimer at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts:

“After the war, Frank became a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. But in 1949, he was forced to resign as a result of harassment by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Blackballed by McCarthy-era paranoia, Frank was unable to continue his physics research, and spent the next ten years as a cattle rancher in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

…

With improvement in the political climate, Frank was offered an appointment at the University of Colorado in 1959. There, he revamped the teaching laboratory, creating a “library of experiments” that was in many ways a prototype for the Exploratorium.

In 1965, while in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship, Frank explored and studied European museums and became convinced of the need for science museums in the United States that could supplement the science taught in schools. When he returned home, Frank was invited to plan a new branch of the Smithsonian, but he declined, preferring instead to work on what he called his “San Francisco project”— a museum of his own.

Frank proposed to house his new museum in the vacant Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina district of San Francisco. The proposal was accepted by the city, and in 1969, with no publicity or fanfare, the doors opened to Frank’s Exploratorium. Frank nurtured and shaped the growing museum until 1985, when he died from lung cancer.”

(“Dr. Frank Oppenheimer”, The Exploratorium)

The Palace of Fine Arts is the only surviving structure from the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exhibition hosted in a grandiose and palatial group of buildings made from temporary materials.

(“His Castles Outlive Their Kings: How Cal’s Architect Shaped and Scraped the Skyline”, by Cirrus Robert Wood, November 2, 2015, California Magazine, shared on Arts and the Community, and Fashion Statements)

So getting the famous mathematician Steve Smale, instead of one of the numerical analysts, as my Ph.D. adviser did not feel bad. In fact, in the early 1960s after he had moved from Berkeley to Columbia, Smale was offered a professorship by Princeton after he had solved the Generalized Poincare Conjecture, bettering the work of Princeton professor John Milnor, who then brought him the Princeton job offer. But Smale was more interested in negotiating for a higher salary at Berkeley to return to California.

(Steve Batterson, Stephen Smale: The Mathematician Who Broke the Dimension Barrier, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Smale also had fine tastes beyond mathematics, assembling and owning one of the world’s best private collections of mineral rocks.

(“The Very Model of a Modern Mineral Dealer”, May 20, 2015, Priceonomics)

My fellow math Ph.D. student friend William Geller cautioned me that Smale might not have much time for his students; but I felt that I was intellectually independent, anyway.

Smale was to go on sabbatical for the academic year 1984-1985, which he would spend in Paris, France, and so he scheduled my Qualifying Exam to be in the late spring, May 1984, not long before his departure.

In around February-March 1984 I moved out of the apartment shared with Kezheng Li and into an apartment rented by computer science Ph.D. student David Chin, mentioned in my March 2011 blog post:

“By the spring of 1984 I had moved to an apartment in Richmond near Albany and my new roommate David (Ngi) Chin was a Computer Science Ph.D. student specializing in a subfield of Artificial Intelligence – focusing on the role of intelligent agents in natural language systems. An MIT grad from Boston, born in Hong Kong, David played some chess and softball but I only played tennis and volleyball regularly with him. His previous roommate and fellow Computer Science student Vincent Lau had left school early for the computer industry.

By late spring I also passed the Ph.D. qualifying exam, marking the start of research-oriented Ph.D. study under my thesis adviser.”

(March 29, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The move was related to the upcoming qualifying exam. Kezheng was an active leader in the community of the Berkeley graduate students and visiting scholars from China, and so his place was busy, like an informal social activity center.

Kezheng had kindly offered to share his apartment with me before I had even left China:

“… a computer systems technician at Sun Yat-sen university who was also a friend and South China Teacher’s College’s affiliated middle school alumnus of my roommate “Jie Wang”, was from the circle of kids at South China Institute of Technology and knew a professor there whose son was a fellow Berkeley Math graduate student and former roommate of “Li”’s, and so before my journey a new connection was already made.”

(March 29, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It was in a gated apartment complex on Durant Avenue, with a small but representative group of math Ph.D. students living there, and a larger number of Chinese graduate students and some scholars.

Kezheng’s former roommate who had arranged for my sharing was Guojun Liao (廖國鈞), studying for his Ph.D. in the pure math field of differential geometry. Guojun’s late grandfather in the 1910s was the president of Guangdong Higher Normal College, one of the colleges that later in 1924 were combined to constitute National Guangdong University – I noted in a November 2010 blog post that it was soon renamed Sun Yat-sen University in honor of the father of the Chinese Republican Revolution, whose government founded the university at the provisional national capital Guangzhou, and who had been born in a village only 60 miles away.

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 2) – when violence is politically organized”, November 22, 2010, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest; and, “寻访梅州籍大学校长廖道传 梁启超称他为“嘉应健生””, July 15, 2015, 梅州日报)

In the 1990s, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, Guojun shifted his research focus to mesh generation related to the finite element method, i.e., to the same field as Keith Miller. A SIAM 45th anniversary meeting session at Stanford in July 1997, which Guojun co-organized with Paul Zegeling of Utrecht University – the place new Stanford Ph.D. Jack Snoeyink spent a postdoc year at in 1990 after getting an UBC tenure-track position I unsuccessfully sought, as in Part 3 – listed 4 presentations: one by R. D. Russell, W. Huang, and Weiming Cao of Simon Fraser University in Canada, one by Keith Miller of UC Berkeley, one by Andrew Kuprat of LANL, and one by Feng Liu of UC Irvine and Guojun G. Liao.

(“Moving-Grid Methods for Partial Differential Equations (Part II of II)”, July 17, 1997, SIAM’s 45th Anniversary Meeting, Stanford University) 

After Guojun, Kezheng’s roommate in the 1981-1982 academic year was math Ph.D. student Xiaolu Wang (王曉麓), who then moved to another unit in the same complex to share with a Caucasian graduate student. After his Ph.D., Xiaolu went to work in the U.S. East Coast and eventually ended up on Wall Street.

After Xiaolu, in the summer before my late August 1982 arrival, Kezheng’s roommate was Zhaowei Meng (孟昭偉) – as spelled by the Chinese Pinyin – who was on his way to attend Stanford’s business school, as mentioned and referred to as “ZWM” in my November 2009 blog post.

(November 22, 2009, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

A couple of white math Ph.D. students, my classmate Peter Detre and his wife Catherine Carroll, lived in the apartment complex. In late 1999 when I was looking for work in Silicon Valley I ran into Catherine, originally from Britain as I recall; she was teaching at Texas A&M University at Kingsville – a different campus of Ron Chen’s alma mater – and said that she and Peter had parted ways, and that Peter had gotten a Yale law degree and was a “practicing lawyer somewhere”. Peter was Canadian and William Bade’s Ph.D. graduate, but I would not have expected to see a The New York Times wedding announcement of his – without Catherine.

(“WEDDINGS; Claire O. Finkelstein, Peter A. Detre”, June 5, 1994, The New York Times; and, “ccarroll”, wikidot)

In comparison to where Zhaowei, Xiaolu and Peter later got to, in 1984 my move ended only with sharing with a Ph.D. student in computer science – my undergraduate discipline even if AI was a newer field – and a Chinese American who could speak his family’s native tongue Taishanese (Toisan) – a variant of Cantonese.

Steve Smale was quite pleased to accept me as his first Ph.D. student from the People’s Republic of China – as noted in Part 2 – and with a prior background in numerical analysis, a field he had recently moved into.

As in Part 2, Smale was a prominent mathematician who had received the Fields Medal, the highest honor of the mathematical community, in 1966 at the International Congress of Mathematician held that year in Moscow’s Kremlin Palace.

Smale had moved from one area of mathematics to another, discovering and proving original results and founding new theories. In his topics courses I took over the several years, Smale would present most of his core achievements, in fields ranging from differential manifolds to dynamical systems, from mathematical economics to models of population growth, and from the simplex method in linear programming to Newton’s method for solving equations – with the exception of his early work in topology and the generalized Poincare conjecture.

But from time to time criticisms could be heard from some experts, especially ones in more applied fields, as to whether Smale really understood their issues when making mathematics there.

For one, Smale concentrated on the mathematics of it, and experts he conversed with tended to be the highly mathematical types. For example, in 1981 he published an important paper studying some mathematics related to numerical analysis, and acknowledged several persons:

“1. The main goal of this account is to show that a classical algorithm, Newton’s method, with a standard modification, is a tractable method for finding a zero of a complex polynomial. Here, by “tractable” I mean that the cost of finding a zero doesn’t grow exponentially with the degree, in a certain statistical sense. …

…

Before stating the main result, we note that the practice of numerical analysis for solving nonlinear equations, or systems of such, is intimately connected to variants of Newton’s method; these are iterative methods and are called fast methods and generally speaking, they are fast in practice. The theory of these methods has a couple of components; one, proof of convergence and two, asymptotically, the speed of convergence. But, not usually included is the total cost of convergence.

…

There is a final comment on the spirit of the paper. I feel one problem of mathematics today is the division into the two separate disciplines, pure and applied mathematics. Oftentimes it is taken for granted that mathematical work should fall into one category or the other. This paper was not written to do so.

I would like to acknowledge useful conversations, with a number of mathematicians including L. Blum, S. S. Chern, G. Debreu, D. Fowler, W. Kahan, R. Osserman, R. Palais, G. Schober and H. Wu.

Special thanks are due Moe Hirsch and Mike Shub.”

(“The fundamental theorem of algebra and complexity theory”, by Steve Smale, 1981, Volume 4, Number 1, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society)

For the quote above I have selected several points Smale made in the paper: with standard modification, Newton’s method is a “tractable” algorithm in a statistical sense; the “total cost of convergence” had not been well addressed by the theory of numerical analysis; and, a problem of mathematics today was “the division into the two separate disciplines, pure and applied mathematics”, but his paper “was not written to do so”.

These were good points and worthwhile goals to pursue. But looking at the names Smale acknowledged, 9 for “useful conversations” plus 2 with special thanks to, a total of 11, only William Kahan was in the field of numerical analysis, even though other established Berkeley professors were acknowledged, such as mathematicians Shiing-shen Chern and Hung-Hsi Wu, and mathematical economist Gérard Debreu.

If Smale had not actually interacted with numerical analysts much, how could he be sure, given that his earlier background had not been in numerical analysis, that the progress he made would be useful for that field?

But the separation may have been the other way around; in other words, when Majda asserted that Smale knew nothing about numerical analysis, it wasn’t due to Smale’s lack of trying but the numerical analysts’ dismissive attitudes toward his efforts.

The Ph.D. oral qualifying exam committee would consist of several professors within the department, including the adviser, and one from outside the department. For my committee, Smale suggested: Prof. Charles Pugh, a close colleague in his former field of dynamical systems, whose graduate course on that subject I was taking; Alexandre Chorin, for my background in numerical analysis; and an engineering professor; and I suggested Andrew Majda.

The two numerical analysts took a little explanation to persuade.

I went to Chorin’s office to ask and his reaction, which I can only recall vaguely, was like, “You want to study with Smale; then why do you ask me to be on your committee?” I explained that my undergraduate background had been in numerical analysis and I would be doing related research, and Chorin responded with something like, “Smale doesn’t understand numerical analysis”, but grudgingly agreed.

This would become a pattern in my remaining years at UC Berkeley interacting with the professors in numerical analysis, that I had to emphasize my prior background for them to take me more seriously, and also had to ignore their comments about Smale.

I asked Majda to be on my committee and also to write a support letter for my application for a graduate fellowship, and his response was like, “since you want to study with Smale, you should not ask me for either”. After my explanation that his seminar course had been important and my research would be related to numerical analysis, Majda grudgingly agreed, wrote a letter on the spot, handed it to me – it was supposed to be confidential – and said, “this is the last I can do for you; from now on you should not ask me for more”.

With Majda’s letter, and confidential letters from Kato and Smale if I remember correctly, I later received my only fellowship, the Earl C. Anthony graduate fellowship, for the academic year 1984-1985.

It was a fellowship, even if not as much in prestige or amount as Kezheng received, which was either a UC Regents or UC Berkeley Chancellor’s graduate fellowship, not to mention the multi-year National Science Foundation fellowship my friend Will Geller received. But being sensitive, I sometimes wondered: my fellowship’s name had a “C.”.

In the spring of 1984, my former undergraduate adviser Yuesheng Li came by Berkeley on his way back to Sun Yat-sen University to assume its presidency. Prof. Li had spent some time at Texas A&M where his former master’s student Ron Chen was and where Prof. C. K. Chui and Prof. Larry Schumaker were peers of his in spline function theory and approximation theory as mentioned earlier.

Li told me he had also visited the mathematician Garrett Birkhoff at Harvard – son of the mathematician George David Birkhoff for whom the Birkhoff Prize for applied mathematics, which Wisconsin’s Paul Rabinowitz later won in 1997, had been named.

My Qualifying Exam was a near disaster. Since childhood I had had problems with shyness and nervousness, although I was okay with teaching when preparations ahead of time would enable me to present contents in structured and orderly fashions. When caught in an unprepared situation and I was nervous, for the moment I could sometimes be at a loss. In an oral exam in front of professors who could determine my fate added to my anxiety.

A part of the exam time was spent on my answers going in wrong directions. In one instance, Chorin asked a basic question but I misunderstood it as a question about something less well-defined and went on a long discussion, arguing with him before realizing it was my misinterpretation. In another instance, Pugh asked about the proof of a theorem from his dynamical systems course, I embarked on something halfway before realizing that it was a proof for another theorem, and said oh I should do it over, Pugh smiled and the committee deemed it enough time spent on that question.

After the exam I waited in the hallway for the committee’s decision; eventually Majda emerged first from the room, said with a stern look, “congratulations you passed”, and walked away; then the others came out and congratulated me. A few days later I met Majda, thanked him, and he said, “what you did was crazy. Your adviser was the only one who insisted on letting you pass”.

The Prelim Exam had been easier for me but the Qualifying Exam was harder partly due to my own fault, and it became etched in my mind that I passed because Smale was about to go to Paris for sabbatical and told other committee members he had no time for a second exam try – normally several months down the road.

For the Ph.D. degree two foreign languages were required, by passing exams translating math literature. I chose French first, passing easily as most French math terms had similar English versions. Then I took the German exam and failed, and subsequently spent much more time learning before passing on the second try. I later wondered if I could have gotten my Ph.D. had I chosen the third foreign language option, Russian, with its alien alphabet – I had looked at it back in my teenage days as my father knew some, and of course my undergraduate adviser had studied at Moscow State University.

After passing the two exams a Ph.D. student would file for the Ph.D. candidacy, in Mathematics or Applied Mathematics depending on the research field. Smale could be viewed as in math or applied math, as an earlier quote from his 1981 paper showed he did not consider himself separated by the two disciplines; the department’s graduate secretary, Janet Yonan, also said that as Smale’s student I could choose one or the other; so I filed for candidacy in “Applied Mathematics”. But when the certificate was issued to me, it was in “Mathematics”, I went to Janet, and she sort of said it just happened this way and if I wanted to change I would need to write a request letter to the department.

Given the hostility toward Smale I had encountered from the numerical analysts, I had the sense that for the applied mathematics category it would need to be approved by someone close to them and especially to Chorin, someone like Prof. Alberto Grünbaum, soon to become director of the Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics, 1985-1989, and later department chairman, 1989-1992. Originally from Argentina and with a Rockefeller University Ph.D., Grünbaum had taught at NYU’s Courant Institute – the “mother ship” Chorin, Hald and Majda had gone through either in Ph.D. study or teaching.

(“Francisco Alberto Grünbaum”, Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley)

I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, that mathematics was fine.

My classmate Mei Kobayashi had Ole Hald as her Ph.D. adviser, as described earlier, and her Ph.D. candidacy and later Ph.D. degree were in applied mathematics. At Berkeley most math graduate students went for their Ph.D. directly but Mei, whose Princeton bachelor’s degree had been in chemistry, felt the need to also get a master’s degree in mathematics prior to her Ph.D. in applied mathematics.

(“Class Notes”, November 11, 1987, Volume 88, Princeton Alumni Weekly; and, “Mei Kobayashi”, prabook)

Another classmate Paul Wright, previously cited in a quote in Part 3, was one of two African-American math Ph.D. students I knew at Berkeley – Chorin’s student Nate Whitaker being the other – and he also earned a master’s degree in mathematics, which he told me was useful because being originally from Jamaica he had only U.S. permanent residency at the time. Paul did his master’s thesis under Smale as I can recall, and then chose Grünbaum as his Ph.D. adviser; so like Mei, Paul’s Ph.D. was most likely in applied mathematics.

(“Paul Emerson Wright”, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, Department of Mathematics, University at Buffalo; and, Nathaniel Dean, ed., African Americans in Mathematics: DIMACS Workshop, June 26-28, 1996, 1997, American Mathematical Society)

Grünbaum’s field, partial differential equations with soliton solutions, was among the trendiest in the department, like Chorin’s, with a large number of graduate student followers. A more recent presentation by Grünbaum described it as follows:

“The study of nonlinear partial differential equations of mathematical physics such as those of Korteweg-deVries, Toda, nonlinear Schroedinger, etc starting around 1970 has given a unifying push to several parts of mathematics … All of these equations exhibit solitons. a nonlinear version of the superposition principle going back at least to Fourier in the case of linear equations. I run myself into this enchanted land while studying a concrete problem in medical imaging: X-ray tomography with a limited angle of views, and I am definitely not an expert on this grand scheme.”

(“Colloquium – F. Alberto Grünbaum – Soliton mathematics as a unifying force”, April 11, 2012, Department of Mathematics, Boğaziçi University)

Once, a student who regularly attended Chorin’s seminars commented to me that several famous computational fluid dynamics methods, including Chorin’s, were run on the same equations and same data, and their resulting flow graphs were drastically different from one another; “but it was the same flow so at most one of them was correct”, he said.

Chorin’s Ph.D. student Jim Shearer told me he found the soliton tunneling effect, presented in Grünbaum’s graduate course on nonlinear partial differential equations, quite hard to believe, that a same soliton could disappear and reappear on different sides of a barrier.

Having come from Communist China, during my Berkeley years I was keen at familiarizing myself with the broader modern intellectual curriculum. After the Preliminary Exam and after the Qualifying Exam were times when I could afford more time studying other subjects.

As mentioned in Part 2, besides the ideological indoctrination of the Cultural Revolution my father was a university philosophy teacher, and so I had read much of Mao Zedong’s published works, a selection of which I more recently surveyed in a blog post; and I had also read some of the works of Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Joseph Stalin.

(“Power, avengement, ideological cementation — Mao Zedong’s class politics in great forward leaps, tactical concessions”, April 6, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

In another recent blog post, originally posted on my website in 2011, I mentioned that I got to read some Chinese classics starting at the elementary-school age, during the Cultural Revolution time.

(“Some Chinese Cultural Revolution politics and life in the eyes of a youth”, November 7, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

In fact, Sun Yat-sen University’s library collections were one of the best among the libraries in China, as I remember my father said, that the several million volumes might be smaller than that of the National Library and that of Peking University Library but probably none else. In my November 2010 blog post, I mentioned that some Western reports of burning of library books during the Cultural Revolution were inaccurate.

(November 22, 2010, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In my middle-school days in the early to mid-1970s, using my father’s library card I read a good selection of Chinese editions of Western classics, including Greek philosophy, Roman history, and the Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers. What the Chinese publications really lacked was in modern Western thoughts, most not available until the 1980s.

So at Berkeley sometime during 1983-1985, I audited several upper-division undergraduate courses at the philosophy department, covering the philosophy of mind, meaning, language, etc., one probably taught by Prof. John Searle. I recall writing home telling my father, that UC Berkeley philosophy department’s graduate courses were mostly seminars and the Ph.D. curriculum used the upper-division courses as requirements.

One philosophy course I audited was taught by a visiting lecturer from Harvard University, on the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The lecturer was unusually energetic – reminding me a little of Lenin – and I sometimes saw him take fast strides between campus locations, cutting a standout figure from the culturally more reserved west-coast professors. I forgot his name at some point but believe it was Warren Goldfarb, today the Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic, and a founder of Harvard’s gay and lesbian movement in 1984 although I have not found public info of his visiting Berkeley – an internationally leading city of gay and lesbian movements – around that time.

(“Stories Transform Goldfarb Into Activist”, by Anna D. Wilde, June 10, 1993, and, “Nine Secondary Fields Approved”, by Peter R. Raymond, November 17, 2006, The Harvard Crimson; and, “Who’s Who: Members of the Board and leadership team of the HGSC”, Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus)

One of my keenest interests while in my middle-school senior and university undergraduate years was in the history of science and philosophy of science. Unfortunately, neither seemed to be among the research focuses at the world famous UC Berkeley, but I continued reading, without auditing courses, including books by Karl Popper and radical Berkeley philosopher Paul Feyerabend, and attending the occasional seminar talks of relevance.

On one occasion, the MIT philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn returned to give a lecture at Berkeley, where he was once a professor when publishing his most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, before moving to Princeton and then MIT. So I got to hear the author of one of my two most favorite books as an undergraduate – the other being Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times by Morris Kline.

Kuhn stated in the 1962 book:

“If science is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collected in current texts, then scientists are the men who, successfully or not, have striven to contribute one or another element to that particular constellation. Scientific development becomes the piecemeal process by which these items have been added, singly and in combination, to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific technique and knowledge. And history of science becomes the discipline that chronicles both these successive increments and the obstacles that have inhibited their accumulation. …”

(Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962, Volume II, Number 2, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, The University of Chicago Press)

The accumulative growth of scientific knowledge described above is probably what the public typically think of scientific research. But according to Kuhn, some historians of science found it untrue:

“In recent years, however, a few historians of science have been finding it more and more difficult to fulfil the functions that the concept of development-by-accumulation assigns to them. As chroniclers of an incremental process, they discover that additional research makes it harder, not easier, to answer questions like: When was oxygen discovered? Who first conceived of energy conservation? Increasingly, a few of them suspect that these are simply the wrong sorts of questions to ask. Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions. Simultaneously, these same historians confront growing difficulties in distinguishing the “scientific” component of past observation and belief from what their predecessors had readily labeled “error” and “superstition.” … If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today.”

(Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962, The University of Chicago Press)

Indeed, as I have described in the case of the Berkeley math professors’ research in numerical analysis, which I was learning at the time, they could be dismissive of one another, and though aware that their work was not always scientific each of them and the followers marched on.

Kuhn wrote that historians of science began to pay attention to such scientific research:

“… Gradually, and often without entirely realizing they are doing so, historians of science have begun to ask new sorts of questions and to trace different, and often less than cumulative, developmental lines for the sciences. Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, they attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time. They ask, for example, not about the relation of Galileo’s views to those of modern science, but rather about the relationship between his views and those of his group, i.e., his teachers, contemporaries, and immediate successors in the sciences. Furthermore, they insist upon studying the opinions of that group and other similar ones from the viewpoint—usually very different from that of modern science—that gives those opinions the maximum internal coherence and the closest possible fit to nature. …”

(Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962, The University of Chicago Press)

Kuhn referred to this type of scientific research as “normal science”, i.e, it was actually the norm:

“… Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost.”

(Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962, The University of Chicago Press)

“Normal science” tended to suppress other things that contradicted it:

“Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”

(Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962, The University of Chicago Press)

I can agree with that, given my experience discussed in earlier Parts, that at the University of British Columbia even the faculty association would take part in suppressing issues that might unravel the politically correct appearance of the academia.

But Kuhn argued that such suppression would not last very long:

“Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that novelty shall not be suppressed for very long. … The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.”

(Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962, The University of Chicago Press)

“So long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary” – that was a big “so long as”.

Prof. Kuhn might not have expected that contemporary political correctness could easily give a “revolutionary” label to a vested power status, thus usurping the notion of “scientific revolutions”. In my case as in Part 1, the faculty association was official not “arbitrary”, and an anti-Reagan and anti-Thatcher stereotype posture by its president William Bruneau was, by political correctness, “revolutionary” enough to exclude me of any political merit.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been purchased or read by more people in the world than any other book on the history and philosophy of science – books by Aristotle and René Descartes included:

“Thomas S. Kuhn was the most important, and the most famous, historian and philosopher of science within living memory. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been read, or purchased, by more people than any book on either subject ever written—the closest competitors in philosophy must be the Posterior Analytics and the Discourse on Method…”

(“Thomas S. Kuhn 1922-1996”, by N. M. Swerdlow, 2013, U.S. National Academy of Sciences)

But in his Berkeley talk I attended, sometime in 1986-1988, probably 1987, Kuhn did not speak on the scientific revolutions. In the room packed to its full seating and standing capacity, I noticed a familiar figure standing not far from Prof. Kuhn at the lectern: Betul Tanbay, a fellow math Ph.D. student from Istanbul, Turkey, and officemate of my friends Will Geller and Samy Zafrany, both Jewish and all three studying mathematical logic at the time.

Of the three, Samy, an Ethiopian Israeli Jew with a congenial personality, had been my officemate for my first period of TA stints. But by no later than 1985 my assigned officemates became more senior Ph.D. students Jeff McIver and Steve Pomerantz, both interested in financial banking; Steve studied under Prof. Murray Protter, a colleague of Kato’s in partial differential equations, and Jeff under Prof. Jack Wagoner, who later would also be Will’s adviser and the department chairman after Grünbaum, though in 1987 Will was probably studying mathematical logic under Prof. Leo Harrington as I recall.

Will was the fellow math graduate student I knew best outside of the Chinese student circle, as I recalled in a January 2013 blog post:

“… In UC Berkeley student days a classmate and good friend of mine had been William Geller, whose fiancee and later wife, Stephanie Montague, received her Ph.D. in 1989 from California School of Professional Psychology…

From a Italian American garment business family in New York City, Stephanie had liked to say, “My family name is that of Romeo’s in Romeo and Juliet”.”

(“Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 1)”, January 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Prof. Alfred Tarski, founder of UC Berkeley’s group in mathematical logic and methodologies of science, who had died in 1983, had been on the advisory committee that published Kuhn’s book in 1962. Tarksi has sometimes been compared to Kurt Gödel as the two most influential mathematical logicians of the 20th century.

(Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962, The University of Chicago Press; and, “Book Review: Alfred Tarski. Life and Logic”, by Hourya Benis Sinaceur, August 2007, Volume 54, Number 8, Notices of the American Mathematical Society)

I did not really study mathematical logic at Berkeley. As an undergraduate I had acquainted with some basics of Gödel’s work, which shed light on mathematics as a discipline by fundamentally clarifying the scopes of mathematical systems; but I had done so by independent reading, such as a book by NYU Courant Institute’s Prof. Martin Davis. My SYSU roommate Jie Wang (王潔) and his master’s adviser, Soviet Union-educated professor Guangkun Hou (侯廣坤), “Teacher Hou” as in my March 2011 blog post, did some research in that field.

(Martin Davis, Computability and Unsolvability, 1958, McGraw-Hill; and, March 29, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Another intellectual subject of my interest, which I became fascinated with at Berkeley, was cultural anthropology, especially structuralism. I spent time reading literature available at the anthropology department library.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas was the champion of cultural relativism:

“Boas outlined his views denying the importance of nature and emphasizing the influence of culture in several books, including The Mind of Primitive Man, published in 1911 and now considered a classic. Boas argued that the development of Western civilization was not the consequence of intrinsic genius on the part of the white race but simply owing to favorable circumstances. Other cultures could not be termed inferior, he declared, only different. …

…

Boas’s arguments were greatly strengthened because of a kind of linguistic revolution he launched in American social science by his novel use of the term “culture.” Before the nineteenth century, European writers spoke only of “civilization.” The term civilization comes from the Latin word civis meaning citizen. Used in the singular, civilization implies a certain form of government and a certain level of achievement. In the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold used the term “culture” in contrast with “civilization.” … The word culture comes from the Latin term cultura meaning to grow or cultivate. “Culture” arises out of “agriculture.” Arnold used culture in an elevated sense, however; culture was represented by the high traditions of Athens and Jerusalem. …

Boas, however, used a new definition, one that was initiated by the English anthropologist Edward Tylor, who defined culture as the “knowledge, belief, arts, morals, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” … Only some people may be considered to have civilization, but all people in the Boasian sense have culture, in that they have customs and beliefs. … Through the democratization of the term, Boas found it much easier to suggest the essential relativity of cultures… Over time, even Americans who did not espouse relativism began to speak of “culture” in the Boas sense of the term, which is the way we commonly use the term today.

Historically, one of the strongest arguments for Western civilizational superiority has been the spectacular political and economic successes of modern industrial society. According to George Stocking in The Ethnographer’s Magic, Boas qualified but never abandoned his belief in the concepts of modernity, technology, rationality, and civilization. … Boas was not a strict cultural relativist, although he moved increasingly in that direction over the years. He emphasized that his main argument with the scientific racists was not that they were wrong, but that their case was unproven.”

(Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism: Finding Values In An Age Of Technoaffluence, 1995, Simon & Shuster)

UC Berkeley’s anthropology department was founded at the beginning of the 20th century by Prof. Alfred Kroeber, and strongly influenced by Kroeber and Prof. Robert Lowie:

“Lowie was attracted to anthropology because it represented intellectual fulfillment without the difficulties of physical manipulation of objects. He was also no doubt attracted to it because Boas represented a liberal point of view and had devoted himself to fighting the prejudices directed toward Jews and other ethnic and racial minorities as well as toward the teaching of anthropology. Lowie never became a political activist but his sympathies were definitely on the liberal side and he wrote extensively on racist problems.

…

During 1917—1918 Lowie was invited to become visiting lecturer in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley by A. L. Kroeber, who had founded the department fifteen years earlier. In 1921, Lowie was appointed a permanent member of the staff at Berkeley and remained such until his retirement, although he held many visiting professorships and lectureships.

(“Robert Harry Lowie 1883—1957”, by, Julian H. Steward, 1974, U.S. National Academy of Sciences)

Kroeber and Lowie were former Ph.D. students of Franz Boas, and brought cultural relativism further to a level free of racism:

“As often happens with an influential teacher, however, Boas’s students extended his principles to construct a radically new framework for understanding race in the modern world. The names of Boas’s students at Columbia University read like a Who’s Who of early American anthropology: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, … Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, …

• Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie insisted that culture should be studied entirely independent of biology or heredity, which went far beyond anything Boas wrote.
• Margaret Mead virtually denied that human nature had anything to do with heredity: “Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding . . . to contrasting cultural conditions.”
• …”

(Dinesh D’Souza, 1995, Simon & Shuster)

Also influenced by Franz Boas, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss took a different intellectual route he deemed more scientific, that of discovering and analyzing hidden social relational patterns in human cultures, even the most primitive ones. In his influential book I read, Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss compared structural anthropology to the study of language grammars, crediting the motivation and inspiration to Franz Boas but asserting that the anthropology study was vastly underdeveloped:

“… We propose to show that the fundamental difference between the two disciplines is not one of subject, of goal, or of method. They share the same subject, which is social life; the same goal, which is a better understanding of man; and, in fact, the same method, in which only the proportion of research techniques varies. They differ, principally, in their choice of complementary perspectives: History organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology proceeds by examining its unconscious foundations.

…

Boas must be given credit for defining the unconscious nature of cultural phenomena with admirable lucidity. By comparing cultural phenomena to language from this point of view, he anticipated both the subsequent development of linguistic theory and a future for anthropology whose rich promise we are just beginning to perceive. He showed that the structure of a language remains unknown to the speaker until the introduction of a scientific grammar. Even then the language continues to mold discourse beyond the consciousness of the individual, imposing on his thought conceptual schemes which are taken as objective categories. Boas added that “the essential difference between linguistic phenomena and other ethnological phenomena is, that the linguistic classifications never rise to consciousness, while in other ethnological phenomena, although the same unconscious origin prevails, these often rise into consciousness, and thus give rise to secondary reasoning and to reinterpretations.” …

…

In the light of modern phonemics we can appreciate the immense scope of these propositions, which were formulated eight years before the publication of Cours de linguistique générale by Ferdinand de Saussure, which marked the advent of structural linguistics. But anthropologists have not yet applied these propositions to their field. …”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Structural Anthropology, 1963, Basic Books, Inc.)

Referring to the social relational patterns as “social structure”, Lévi-Strauss ambitiously declared that understanding a society’s social structure would lead to, in particular, comprehension of the culture and prediction of the results of changes:

“The term “social structure” has nothing to do with empirical reality but with models which are built up after it. This should help one to clarify the difference between two concepts which are so close to each other that they have often been confused, namely, those of social structure and of social relations. It will be enough to state at this time that social relations consist of the raw materials out of which the models making up the social structure are built, while social structure can, by no means, be reduced to the ensemble of the social relations to be described in a given society. …

The question then becomes that of ascertaining what kind of model deserves the name “structure.” This is not an anthropological question, but one which belongs to the methodology of science in general. Keeping this in mind, we can say that a structure consists of a model meeting with several requirements.

First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made up of several elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all the other elements.

Second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a series of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type.

Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if one or more of its elements are submitted to certain modifications.

Finally, the model should be constituted so as to make immediately
intelligible all the observed facts.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1963, Basic Books, Inc.)

Lévi-Strauss gave credits to Kroeber and Lowie, as well as other cultural anthropologists, for the structuralist aspects of their studies.

Credits were given to Kroeber on women’s fashion studies:

“Some of the researches of Kroeber appear to be of the greatest importance in suggesting approaches to our problem, particularly his work on changes in the styles of women’s dress. Fashion actually is, in the highest degree, a phenomenon that depends on the unconscious activity of the mind. We rarely take note of why a particular style pleases us or falls into disuse. Kroeber has demonstrated that this seemingly arbitrary evolution follows definite laws. These laws cannot be reached by purely empirical observation, or by intuitive consideration of phenomena, but result from measuring some basic relationships between the various elements of costume. The relationship thus obtained can be expressed in terms of mathematical functions, whose values, calculated at a given moment, make prediction possible.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1963, Basic Books, Inc.)

And credits were given to Lowie on kinship studies:

“… When he became active in research as well as in theoretical ethnology, the latter field was fraught with philosophical prejudices and an aura of sociological mysticism; therefore, his paramount contribution toward assessing the subject matter of social anthropology has sometimes been misunderstood and thought of as wholly negative. … However, it is Lowie who, as early as 1915, stated in modern terms the role of kinship studies in relation to social behavior and organization: “Sometimes the very essence of social fabric may be demonstrably connected with the mode of classifying kin.” …

… Thus he was laying the foundations for a structural analysis of kinship on two different levels: that of the terminological system, on the one hand, and, on the other, that of the correlation between the system of attitudes and terminology, thus revealing which later on was to be followed by others.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1963, Basic Books, Inc.)

Lévi-Strauss compared his structuralist views of anthropology to Karl Marx’s views on history, on the analysis of societies and on primitive societies:

“… the famous statement by Marx, “Men make their own history, but they do not know that they are making it,” justifies, first, history and, second, anthropology. At the same time, it shows that the two approaches are inseparable.

…

Marx himself, therefore, suggests that we uncover the symbolic systems which underlie both language and man’s relationship with the universe. …

…

If we grant, following Marxian thought, that infrastructures and superstructures are made up of multiple levels and that there are various types of transformations from one level to another, it becomes possible—in the final analysis, and on the condition that we disregard content—to characterize different types of societies in terms of the types of transformations which occur within them. …

…

Actually, Marx and Engels frequently express the idea that primitive, or allegedly primitive, societies are governed by “blood ties” (which, today, we call kinship systems) and not by economic relationships. If these societies were not destroyed from without, they might endure indefinitely. …”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1963, Basic Books, Inc.)

Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss sounded more than my father later did, who, mentioned in Part 2, started as a Chinese literature student and ended as a professor in the history of Marxist philosophy.

(November 7, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring; and, “High [Gao] Qiyun Self Selection (Chinese Edition)”, by Gao Qiyun, 2000, Abe Books)

Lévi-Strauss also credited the mathematician John von Neumann’s game theory for bringing the economist and the anthropologist closer together, and closer to Marxian thought:

“The complete upheaval of economic studies resulting from the publication of Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s book ushers in an era of closer cooperation between the economist and the anthropologist, and for two reasons. First—though economics achieves here a rigorous approach—this book deals not with abstractions such as those just mentioned but with concrete individuals and groups which are represented in their actual and empirical relations of cooperation and competition. Surprising though the parallel may seem, this formalism converges with certain aspects of Marxian thought.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1963, Basic Books, Inc.)

My reading cultural anthropology without auditing courses meant missing two public lectures in September 1984 by Lévi-Strauss, who was in Berkeley for the academic year 1984-1985 as the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Visiting Professor.

(“UCSF News”, 1984, The University of California, San Francisco; and, “Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures”, Berkeley Graduate Lectures)

But I did not miss it completely because later, sometime in 1986-1988, Prof. Lévi-Strauss gave a huge public lecture at the Crown Zellerbach Hall, the leading performing-arts venue at UC Berkeley, and I attended.

I have found one online reference, albeit anecdotal by a former Berkeley student, to that lecture:

“The first time I set foot into this huge hall was in my freshman year of college, to hear a talk by Claude Levi-Strauss.  Sure, I thought, I’d love to hear the founder of Levi’s!  I wear Levi’s after all!  Actually, I went b/c I had met a hot anthro major in a miniskirt who invited me to the talk, for, truth be told, I don’t give a whit about the jeans industry.

I found soon that Claude Levi-Strauss, among the last great intellectuals of his generation, right up there with Michel Foucault (who did NOT write Foucault’s Pendulum, apparently), has nothing to do with denim.

That didn’t keep the 5 level hall from being completely full that warm afternoon.  And I don’t quite know whatever happened to the lovely anthropologist in the miniskirt.”

(“Cal Performances: Recensioni Consigliate”, by T. W., January 25, 2007, yelp)

Michel Foucault mentioned above was a famous French philosopher who became a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, contracted HIV/AIDS in the San Francisco Bay Area and died in France in June 1984:

“… The original reports about the cause of death were ambiguous and contradictory. … Foucault’s fondness for San Francisco bath houses was widely discussed at the time. What we knew about AIDS, however, was not entirely clear. Nor was it clear what exactly was at stake in thinking AIDS was the cause of Foucault’s death. In 1984, it was possible (it still seems plausible, today) to believe in an AIDS conspiracy, in campaigns of disinformation disseminating news about the “gay plague,” and in a practiced neglect of AIDS cases because they were reported by homosexuals. …”

(“Fact and Fiction: Writing the Difference Between Suicide and Death”, by John Carvalho, 2006, Volume 4, Contemporary Aesthetics)

That was the same year when philosophy professor Warren Goldfarb co-founded Harvard’s gay and lesbian movement, who if I am not mistaken sometime in that period was a Berkeley visiting lecturer whose course I audited.

My experience with that Lévi-Strauss lecture had a similarity to the Cal freshman’s quoted above, that helped me remember when it took place: waiting in line at the Zellerbach Hall I saw and went in together with “Karen”, an undergraduate student who had been in my calculus TA class; a returning white student, Karen and her young Chinese American friend Kevin Mah, and their classmates were supportive of my teaching and I received an Outstanding TA Award for the academic year that I taught them, 1985-1986; so it could not have been the September 1984 Lévi-Strauss lectures.

As for the namesake of Levi Strauss jeans, a fame of San Francisco, they were too pricey for me then. Living in America I soon liked wearing jeans, but for my budget they started out Wranglers, and later mostly of the inexpensive start-up brand Gap from the Levi Strauss retailer The Gap.

Across Durant Avenue from the anthropology building was Cafe Roma, its patio the most popular hangout around campus. I often saw Alexandre Chorin, in his air of authority, walk in for a cup. Some math graduate students liked to hang around their bikes in the open space across the street, near the anthropology building, ones like Eric Kostlan, more senior than me and the only Ph.D. student of Smale’s also in Chorin’s circle.

The anthropology building was named after Alfred Kroeber, and the impressive anthropology museum after Robert Lowie, two late professors who had given prominence to UC Berkeley’s cultural anthropology:

“When a new anthropology building, which had been Kroeber’s lifelong ambition, was finally built at the University of California at Berkeley, it was officially named the Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology. This museum, together with the Museum of Art, was part of the A. L. Kroeber Hall, but the honor paid Lowie was especially significant in that Lowie was never identified with or personally attracted to museum work. His early connections with the American Museum of Natural History were mainly a means whereby he had the opportunity to do fieldwork under the direction of Clark Wissler, and he relinquished this job in 1921 to accept the more congenial role of Professor of Anthropology at the University of California.”

(Julian H. Steward, 1974, U.S. National Academy of Sciences)

Today the anthropology museum is no longer the Robert H. Lowie Museum. After my departure from Berkeley, in the early 1990s it was renamed Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in honor of the museum’s original founder, according to the museum’s official history:

“Museum Founding and Growth

The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, formerly the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, was founded in 1901. Its major patron, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, supported systematic collecting efforts by both archaeologists and ethnographers to provide the University of California with the materials for a museum to support a department of anthropology. …

… The Museum’s collections have grown from an initial nucleus of approximately 230,000 objects gathered under the patronage of Phoebe Hearst to an estimated 3.8 million items. The Museum was accredited by the American Association of Museums in 1973, and re-accredited in 1990.

Museum Locations

The Museum was physically housed from 1903 to 1931 in San Francisco, where exhibits opened to the public in October, 1911. A key figure during these years was Ishi, a Yahi Indian who lived at the Museum from 1911 until his death in 1916 and worked with the anthropologists to document the ways of his people. When the Museum moved back to the Berkeley campus in 1931, there was no space for public exhibitions, and the Museum focused on research and teaching. With the construction of a new building housing the Museum and anthropology department in 1959, space for exhibition again became available. The building, which the Museum continues to occupy, was named Kroeber Hall, and the Museum was named in honor of Robert H. Lowie, a pioneer in the Berkeley anthropology department. In 1991, the Museum’s name was changed to recognize the crucial role of Phoebe A. Hearst as founder and patron.”

(“History of the Museum”, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology)

Who said “economic successes”, or wealth, in this case of the Hearst family fame discussed in Part 2, and love of the museum did not matter? In the end, the millions in the museum collections and the thousands of visitors meant a more important law to the UC Berkeley anthropology museum than the laws of cultural anthropology Professor Robert Lowie may have discovered.

The Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock lectures that had featured Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1984, in 1988 featured the physicist Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a title once held by Isaac Newton.

I attended one of these March-April lectures by Hawking, and this time a familiar person I saw there, and chatted with, was my adviser Steve Smale.

During the timespan of his Berkeley lectures, on April Fool’s Day Prof. Hawking’s bestselling popular book, A Brief History of Time, was published. 8 years earlier in 1980, Smale had published a collection of articles under an interestingly similar title, The Mathematics of Time, on dynamical systems and mathematical economics. And 5 years before that in 1975, Hawking and co-author G. F. R. (George) Ellis had published an astrophysics textbook – his first book while the 1988 one his second – under a related but more advanced title, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time.

(S. W. Hawking and G. F. R. Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, 1975, Cambridge University Press; Steve Smale, The Mathematics of Time, 1980, Springer-Verlag; “Origin of the Universe”, March 21, 1988, “Black Holes, White Holes, and Worm Holes”, April 5, 1988, and, “Direction of Time”, April 7, 1988, by Stephen Hawking, Berkeley Graduate Lectures; and, “Excerpt from ‘A Brief History of Time’”, by Stephen Hawking, April 5, 2007, USA Today)

Theories of physics had always been among my interests since my middle-school days, when browsing through the Sun Yat-sen University central library bookshelves I liked to read the Scientific American magazine. In the 1977 national university entrance exams I didn’t do as well on the physics exam as on the math exam, and my hands-on experimental ability was rather poor; so that prospect did not become a reality.

A reason I focused on partial differential equations in my first year at Berkeley and wanted to do my Ph.D. study under Tosio Kato was that these equations were a major mathematical foundation of physics. I recall Prof. David Gale, whose math specialty was in ordinary differential equations, making an even stronger statement in a colloquium talk, asserting that the universe was governed by differential equations – as in Part 2 Gale had helped John Nash start Ph.D. study in game theory despite von Neumann’s dismissal of Nash’s idea.

So in 1984-1985 while Smale was away on sabbatical, I made an unsuccessful attempt at starting some research in mathematical physics.

In 1983 Professor Robert Anderson, originally Canadian and a U of T graduate, had moved from Princeton to Berkeley, and my first TA job was for his introductory calculus course. A professor of both mathematics and economics, Bob was nonetheless not a particularly electrifying speaker and would soon focus his teaching at the graduate level.

During the 1984-1985 academic year Anderson gave a graduate course on nonstandard analysis, a specialty of his since his Yale Ph.D. study, and Will Geller and I were two loyal students among the small class, Will being especially impressed that Bob was an openly gay faculty member active in community politics.

Formulated using mathematical logic, nonstandard analysis is a mathematical system that includes infinitesimals, i.e., infinitely small numbers and infinitely large numbers, a system constructed to be an equivalent and alternative to the standard calculus-based mathematical analysis, which handles infinity via the notion of limits.

Historically, the need for the infinite calculus had arisen from physics and astronomy, and the infinitesimals were used intuitively, without sufficient mathematical rigor:

“The concept of infinitesimal was beset by controversy from its beginnings. The idea makes an early appearance in the mathematics of the Greek atomist philosopher Democritus c. 450 B.C.E., only to be banished c. 350 B.C.E. by Eudoxus in what was to become official “Euclidean” mathematics. We have noted their reappearance as indivisibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: in this form they were systematically employed by Kepler, Galileo’s student Cavalieri, the Bernoulli clan…

However useful it may have been in practice, the concept of infinitesimal could scarcely withstand logical scrutiny. Derided by Berkeley in the 18^th century as “ghosts of departed quantities”, in the 19^th century execrated by Cantor as “cholera-bacilli” infecting mathematics, and in the 20^th roundly condemned by Bertrand Russell as “unnecessary, erroneous, and self-contradictory”, these useful, but logically dubious entities were believed to have been finally supplanted in the foundations of analysis by the limit concept which took rigorous and final form in the latter half of the 19^th century. …”

(“Continuity and Infinitesimals”, by John L. Bell, July 27, 2005 (revised September 6, 2013), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed a special liking for the infinitesimals, but their mathematical use was later replaced by the theory of limits started by Leibniz’s contemporary, the physicist Isaac Newton, until the 1960s when nonstandard analysis was invented by the mathematician Abraham Robinson:

“Newton developed three approaches for his calculus, all of which he regarded as leading to equivalent results, but which varied in their degree of rigour. The first employed infinitesimal quantities which, while not finite, are at the same time not exactly zero. Finding that these eluded precise formulation, Newton focussed instead on their ratio, which is in general a finite number. If this ratio is known, the infinitesimal quantities forming it may be replaced by any suitable finite magnitudes—such as velocities or fluxions—having the same ratio. This is the method of fluxions. Recognizing that this method itself required a foundation, Newton supplied it with one in the form of the doctrine of prime and ultimate ratios, a kinematic form of the theory of limits.

…

Among the best known of Leibniz’s doctrines is the Principle or Law of Continuity. In a somewhat nebulous form this principle had been employed on occasion by a number of Leibniz’s predecessors, including Cusanus and Kepler, but it was Leibniz who gave to the principle “a clarity of formulation which had previously been lacking and perhaps for this reason regarded it as his own discovery” …

The Principle of Continuity also played an important underlying role in Leibniz’s mathematical work, especially in his development of the infinitesimal calculus. … Given a curve determined by correlated variables x, y, he wrote dx and dy for infinitesimal differences, or differentials, between the values x and y: and dy/dx for the ratio of the two, which he then took to represent the slope of the curve at the corresponding point. …

…

… The first signs of a revival of the infinitesimal approach to analysis surfaced in 1958 with a paper by A. H. Laugwitz and C. Schmieden. But the major breakthrough came in 1960 when it occurred to the mathematical logician Abraham Robinson (1918–1974) that “the concepts and methods of contemporary Mathematical Logic are capable of providing a suitable framework for the development of the Differential and Integral Calculus by means of infinitely small and infinitely large numbers.” This insight led to the creation of nonstandard analysis, which Robinson regarded as realizing Leibniz’s conception of infinitesimals and infinities as ideal numbers possessing the same properties as ordinary real numbers.”

(John L. Bell, July 27, 2005 (revised September 6, 2013), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

In studying nonstandard analysis I was also intrigued by two facts, that the axiomatic framework can lead to different mathematical systems containing infinitesimals, and that in mathematical physics certain conventional use of infinities was quite common.

A well-known example of infinity use has been the Dirac delta function, originated from physics where when a charge is concentrated at an infinitely small local point, its magnitude is infinitely large:

“DIRAC DELTA FUNCTION

In electromagnetic field analysis we come across the source density and the point source. Take the situation of a point charge q and the corresponding charge density ρ_v. Obviously the charge density must be zero everywhere in space and become infinite at the location …”

(Devendra K. Misra, Practical Electromagnetics: From Biomedical Sciences to Wireless Communication, 2007, John Wiley & sons)

Such a one-point distribution in standard mathematical analysis is defined as a “generalized function”, and is a useful tool in approximation and solutions of differential equations.

(Philip J. Davis, Interpolation and Approximation, 1975, Dover Publications, Inc.; and, Sadri Hassani, Mathematical Physics: A Modern Introduction to Its Foundations, 2013, Springer)

I found two classical books, one by Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac on quantum mechanics and one by Robert Davis Richtmyer on mathematical physics, to be well written, suitable readings for me who had studied some relevant mathematics through Kato’s course on partial differential equations.

(P. A. M. Dirac, The Principles Of Quantum Mechanics, 1958, Oxford University Press; and, Robert D. Richtmyer, Principles of Advanced Mathematical Physics, 1978, Springer-Verlag)

The mathematics of quantum mechanics employed differential operators, related to differential equations, in a central role. Recall that my classmate Robert Rainsberger’s Ph.D. thesis under Heinz Cordes was related to differential operators; in fact, Cordes has written a book on quantum theory in the spirit and approach of Dirac.

(Heinz Otto Cordes, Precisely Predictable Dirac Observables, 2007, Springer)

But neither Dirac’s book nor Richtmyer’s book really covered a type of infinity I was most interested in: “divergence” occurring in the calculations of physical quantities in particle physics – related to Dirac delta function – and “regularization” and “renormalization” – procedures to remove the infinity, involving ad hoc rules that lack a rigorous and comprehensive mathematical foundation.

(“Ultraviolet divergence”, Wikipedia)

I needed directly relevant references; but in the 1980s there were few published resources accessible to non-specialists on quantum divergence. As I recall I settled on trying to understand the book, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, by Richard Feynmann and Albert Hibbs.

(R. P. Feynmann and A. R. Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, 1965, McGraw-Hill)

I found Feynman’s mathematics very different from those of Dirac and Richtmyer, not to mention his particle physics-centered presentation. I gained some sense of the occurrence of divergence but not any thorough understanding of either the physics or the particular mathematics to proceed with my attempt.

I spoke with a Berkeley biophysics Ph.D. student friend, Dar-Chone Chow (周達仲), who gave me an informal interpretation of quantum states and state transitions, as in ‘quantum leaps’, drew my attention to Feynmann’s notion of path integrals where divergence could occur, and otherwise said it was “too fundamental” to try.

I realized that on my own I was unable to really proceed, and soon put it on the backburner of my studies.

Later in 1987, Berkeley physics professor Eyvind Wichmann gave a math graduate course on von Neumann algebra. I audited, and at some point went to his office to try to gain a better understanding of divergence. I recall Prof. Wichmann drawing an unbounded stationery potential and a bounded moving potential, stating that their interaction was where divergence would occur. Somehow I felt that, even if so, the real physics was not truly captured at this level of mathematical modeling.

Dodging my interest in learning more about the physics, Wichmann said instead, quite seriously, “John von Neumann understood quantum physics, better than the physicists did”.

Given my limited knowledge I could not argue with Prof. Wichmann. I had read some literature on von Neumann’s mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, who supposedly proved that his probabilistic model was complete for the physics and “hidden parameters” could not exist, that in this sense “causality in nature” was highly unlikely – a claim I felt very questionable – and whose highly abstract, algebraic approach Wichmann espoused was mathematically elegant but of little pragmatic interest to me.

(Miklós Rédei and Michael Stöltzner, eds., John von Neumann and the Foundations of Quantum Physics, 2001, Springer Science and Business Media; and, “Quantum Theory: von Neumann vs. Dirac”, by Fred Kronz, 2012, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

In contrast to me, the more senior Xiaolu Wang, who later went to Wall Street as mentioned earlier, did his math Ph.D. thesis in the field of C*-algebra related to von Neumann algebra, with the title, “On the C*-algebras of a family of Solvable Lie Groups and Foliations”.

(“Xiaolu Wang”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

So in 1984-1985 my months of efforts, on and off, did not lead to any progress in starting research in mathematical quantum physics.

I also needed to find Ph.D. research topics that would be of interest to my adviser Steve Smale.

Recall Smale’s comment in his 1981 paper regarding the theory of numerical analysis, that it was lacking in the total cost of convergence:

“The theory of these methods has a couple of components; one, proof of convergence and two, asymptotically, the speed of convergence. But, not usually included is the total cost of convergence.”

(Steve Smale, 1981, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society)

I felt that an important component of the total cost was due to arithmetic round-off errors in the numerical computation. UC Berkeley had an expert, Professor William Kahan, a professor of both mathematics and computer science, in floating-point arithmetic and round-off error analysis; he had been the only numerical analyst acknowledged in Smale’s 1981 paper, as quoted earlier.

I approached Kahan, who gave me a few papers to read, and I began to attend seminars he led. I became aware of the research of Kahan’s former Ph.D. student James Demmel, an earlier part of which employed interval analysis to estimate fixed-point arithmetic round-off errors in solving systems of linear equations.

(“An interval algorithm for solving systems of linear equations to prespecified accuracy”, by James W. Demmel and Fritz Krückeberg, July 6, 1983, Computer Science Division (EECS), University of California, Berkeley)

However, for practical efficiency floating-point arithmetic was the choice of numerical computation. I looked into whether interval analysis, in which error intervals for the operands of an arithmetic operation lead to an error interval for the result, was applicable to floating-point arithmetic error analysis, and concluded that interval analysis did not seem useful for floating-point arithmetic error estimation in a worst-case model generally, i.e., without more concrete, problem-dependent assumptions about the possible distribution of actual error.

Kahan was popular with students wanting to get a master’s degree in computer science before going to the computer industry; his Ph.D. student from Hong Kong, Ping Tak Peter Tang, was in the mathematics department and Kahan asked that I helped read his thesis before he graduated to join Intel Corporation; and Demmel, a computer science professor at NYU’s Courant Institute before returning to Berkeley, was of course Kahan’s protégé.

Kahan’s office at the electrical engineering and computer science department’s computer science division, located in the same Evans Hall as the mathematics department, was next-door to the office of Prof. Lofti Zadeh, famous for his theory of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic that he applied to artificial intelligence. So I also did some reading on Zadeh’s theory, in relation to my interest in arithmetic round-off errors, probabilistic analysis and interval analysis.

(“Fuzzy Probabilities”, by Lofti A. Zadeh, 1984, Volume 20, Number 3, Information Processing & Management)

As earlier, by this time my roommate was computer science Ph.D. student David Chin, who specialized in artificial intelligence.

Like with quantum physics, I continued to maintain an interest in arithmetic round-off error issues, which were relevant to my research in numerical analysis. In the early 1990s when I met NASA scientist David Bailey, who had been pioneering multiprecision arithmetic, I felt it was a promising direction toward variable-precision arithmetic in general, that would bridge fixed-point arithmetic and floating-point arithmetic; so I requested and eagerly went over a preprint of his paper.

(“A Portable High Performance Multiprecision Package”, by David H. Bailey, (revised) May 18, 1993, RNR Technical Report RNR-90-022)

When Smale notified me that he would be back during the Christmas season in 1984 and would like to learn about my progress, I had little to show but a formulation of the observation that as a numerical algorithm’s accuracy of approximation increases, floating-point arithmetic errors become dominant and a limit to the total accuracy – thus raising an issue of the optimal choice of approximation relative to the precision of floating-point arithmetic.

In the note of several pages I sketched for a problem to illustrate the above, there was no advanced mathematics involved. When I met him, Smale was unhappy with what I had submitted, and asked me to look into a different matter instead: he had drafted a paper that included some average analysis of the cost of approximation of integrals, and encountered rebuttal from some researchers.

I studied it, and communicated my findings to Smale in the spring of 1985. When he returned in the summer, Smale was more encouraging: he had made appropriate changes, and the paper was being published in October 1985 and would be the main basis of his graduate topics course in Fall 1985.

(“On the efficiency of algorithms of analysis”, by Steve Smale, October 1985, Volume 13, Number 2, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society)

In this paper, Smale acknowledged conversations with, among others, A. Grunbaum, as discussed earlier the powerful new director of Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics, close to Alexandre Chorin and the numerical analysts:

“ACKNOWLEDGMENT. Conversations with L. Blum, A. Grunbaum, E. Kostlan, and A. Ocneanu were helpful to me in developing the ideas in this section.”

(Steve Smale, October 1985, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society)

Unlike in his 1981 paper, this time Grünbaum was the only established Berkeley professor acknowledged by Smale.

Apparently during his sabbatical Steve did not only spent time in Paris, as in this paper he mentioned that in July 1984 he was in Caracas, Venezuela:

“Besides the help of Traub and Wozniakowski, conversations with A. Calderon, P. Collet, J. Franks, M. Shub, and especially David Elworthy in Caracas, July 1984 (where I found these results) were important for me. …”

(Steve Smale, October 1985, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society)

After the mention of Caracas in July 1984, Steve acknowledged conversations with me and his son Nat, also a Berkeley math Ph.D. student:

“… So also were conversations with Feng Gao and Nat Smale.”

(Steve Smale, October 1985, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society)

In the section of the paper where I was mentioned, Smale deployed Gaussian measure as the setting for his average analysis of approximation of integrals, mentioning the related Wiener measure.

Gaussian measure is named after the 19th-century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose name is also associated with the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra in the title of Smale’s 1981 paper; Wiener measure is named after the late MIT mathematician and founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, as is the Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics Tosio Kato had received in 1980. These probability measures later became the settings for my Ph.D. thesis as well.

Later in 1988, this paper of Smale’s in Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society – the U.S. mathematical research community’s leading journal that had also published Smale’s 1981 paper – was awarded the Chauvenet Prize by the Mathematical Association of America for the outstanding exposition.

(“Chauvenet Prizes”, Mathematical Association of America)

During his Fall 1985 course, Smale also presented his α-theory, to be published in 1986, on computable convergence estimates for his modified Newton’s method-type algorithm for finding zeros of complex polynomials. The inspiration I got from Smale’s α-theory later led to the main body of my Ph.D. thesis.

Smale was quite pleased with my work in progress; in the paper for his plenary address at the 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians, he also acknowledged me when he acknowledged Lenore Blum and Jim Curry:

“… Lenore Blum’s MSRI talk on a condition number for linear programming via the LCP helped put the LCP back in my mind. Her comments and those of Jim Curry and Feng Gao have been generally useful to me.”

(“Algorithms for Solving Equations”, by Steve Smale, 1986, Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Berkeley, California)

Steve’s collaborator Lenore has previously been mentioned in Parts 2 & 3.

Jim Curry, who preferred to be referred to as “James”, not “Jim”, was a rare African-American math Ph.D. graduate of Berkeley originally from Oakland, a neighboring city mentioned in Part 2. James was an associate chairman of the mathematics department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on sabbatical at Berkeley’s Mathematical Sciences Research Institute; he had done computational research in dynamical systems using a Cray supercomputer, and was doing research related to Smale’s analysis of Newton’s method.

(“On zero finding methods of higher order from data at one point”, by James H. Curry, June 1989, Volume 5, Issue 2, Journal of Complexity; “James Howard Curry”, Mathematical Association of America; and, “James H. Curry”, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado, Boulder)

The International Congress of Mathematicians, as in Part 2, was the once-in-4-years international gathering of the mathematical community that in 1966 was held at the Kremlin Palace in Moscow where Smale and 3 others were awarded the Fields Medal.

20 years later in 1986, the ICM was held at UC Berkeley, and Smale led its 15 plenary speakers:

“Since the “World Congress of Mathematicians,” held in Chicago in 1893, the mathematicians of the world – as urged then by Felix Klein – have gone far in forming unions and holding international congresses. In the summer of 1986 the twentieth such congress took place at the University of California (Berkeley).

The city of Berkeley from which the University takes its designation was named for the Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685-1753), not for his perceptive comments regarding the newly invented calculus, but for another perceptive comment – “Westward the course of empire takes its way” – which occurs in a work entitled “On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America.”

…

The Congress itself was distinguished by an increasing emphasis on computer science. The New York Times headlined MATHEMATICIANS FINALLY LOG ON. Steve Smale, Berkeley’s own Fields Medalist (Moscow 1966), led off the stellar lineup of fifteen plenary speakers with a lecture on “Complexity aspects of numerical analysis” —a far cry from his Moscow lecture on “Differentiable dynamical systems.” …”

(Donald J. Albers, G. L. Alexanderson and Constance Reid, International Mathematical Congresses: An Illustrated History 1893-1986, 1987, Springer-Verlag)

Actually, the 1986 ICM Proceedings listed 16 plenary speakers, only that the speech of one of them, Jürgen Fröhlich, supposed to be on the mathematics of quantum mechanics, was listed as a no show:

“FRÖHLICH, JÜRG  (Paper not read at the Congress. No manuscript received.), Analytical approaches to quantum field theory and statistical mechanics”.

(“PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF MATHEMATICIANS AUGUST 3-11, 1986”, 1987, Berkeley, California, American Mathematical Society)

Haha! I wasn’t the only one who had spent time on quantum mechanics but come up with nothing to show.

It’s unclear why Fröhlich’s talk was a no show. The Swiss mathematical physicist’s official resume lists an invited address at the 1978 ICM in Helsinki and a plenary address at the 1994 ICM in Zurich, with no mention of the 1988 Berkeley ICM halfway in between.

(“Mathematical Physics — Prof. Jürg Fröhlich: CURRICULUM VITAE”, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich)

In 1990, in my paper contributed to the Smalefest conference celebrating Smale’s 60th birthday – as in Part 2 at that conference Smale gave a speech on his former Communist history – I recalled the inspiration of Smale’s α-theory to my Ph.D. research:

“In fall 1985 at Berkeley, when Steve Smale was disseminating this α-theory in his graduate course and also in one Mathematics Department colloquium talk, I was at the preliminary stage of my Ph.D. research under his supervision. Smale’s observation on computable error estimates struck me as pointing out a potentially important direction for the analysis of numerical approximation algorithms. … ”

(“On the Role of Computable Error Estimates in the Analysis of Numerical Approximation Algorithms”, by Feng Gao, in Morris W. Hirsch, Jerrold E. Marsden and Michael Shub, eds., From Topology to Computation: Proceedings of the Smalefest, 1993, Springer-Verlag)

Smale was pleased with the progress of my Ph.D. research. In the fall of 1986 when I asked him to be a reference for my academic job search, Smale responded, “Apply to the top-20 or so math departments, tenure-track positions, and I will write a letter for you”.

I applied to well over 20, mathematics as well as computer science departments. Then interestingly, all the job interviews – a total of 3 – came at computer science departments: at Princeton University, State University of New York at Buffalo, and University of Maryland at College Park – it resembled the 3 schools, Stanford, SUNY Stony Brook and UC Berkeley, 5 years earlier when I applied for Ph.D. study, as well as the 3 Canadian schools, U of T, SFU and UBC that offered me jobs in the following year.

An obvious reason for their all being in computer science in 1988 was that many of the university CS departments were much newer than their math counterparts and the needs for computer science teaching and research were fast growing.

A second possible reason, pointed out by Smale’s collaborator Lenore Blum, a professor at the all-women Mills College – mentioned in Part 3 in the context of 5 new college graduates featured in Life magazine in 1969 – in Oakland, was that Smale’s research was not universally accepted by mathematicians and none of his Ph.D. graduates had become professors at leading math departments in the United States.

I had heard something like it, from none other than Professor Shiing-shen Chern, founding director of Berkeley’s MSRI and a mathematical patriarch who, as in Part 2, had co-organized research activities with Smale. On one private occasion after I had become Smale’s Ph.D. student, Chern cautioned me that mathematicians might not always view Smale’s work as genuine mathematics.

Yet another possible reason, mentioned by Will Geller as discussed earlier, was that Smale might not have given a lot of attention to his students. Smale’s Ph.D. graduate James Renegar, who had taught mathematics for several years at the remote Colorado town of Fort Collins then returned for postdoctoral research at MSRI and at Stanford, before getting a job at the operations research department of Cornell University – a leading U.S. university that as in Part 3 has named its medical college after businessman Sanford Weill – lamented to me that Smale did not necessarily write strong support letters for his students, and that Smale’s collaborator Michael Shub wasn’t easy to get to know: Jim had lobbied Mike for a job at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York State, where Mike was a scientist, but got an offer only after Cornell had offered.

As cited in Part 2, Mike Shub had been Smale’s Ph.D. student in the 1960s following Smale into the Berkeley anti-war movement. In his 1986 ICM paper, right after mentioning Lenore, Jim Curry and me as quoted earlier, Smale gave special thanks to Renegar and, especially, Shub:

“Especially important through all of this has been the work of, and conversations with, Jim Renegar and Mike Shub. That contribution from Mike Shub, to me, has persisted over many years indeed.”

(Steve Smale, 1986, Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Berkeley, California)

Jim was very bright. During his postdoctoral time at Berkeley’s MSRI and Stanford he combined inspiration from Smale’s focus on Newton’s method with Stanford operations research department’s focus on linear programming, and came up with an innovative Newton’s method-type algorithm for the latter.

(“LINEAR PROGRAMMING (1986)”, by Nimrod Megiddo, 1987, Volume 2, Annual Review of Computer Science)

Still, Mike Shub’s contribution had persisted for much longer as Smale said. Shub had started following Smale in the early 1960s as a Columbia University undergraduate student. An anecdote discussed in Part 2 that, fearing a nuclear war and angry with President John Kennedy during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Smale abandoned his Columbia class and headed with his family towards Mexico, happened when Shub was taking Smale’s graduate course.

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

But even Lenore expressed to me sentiments similar to Jim’s, that Steve was a great mathematician but he did not provide much help for his students. In that respect, Lenore filled much of that void for Steve’s younger followers.

James Curry also told me his experience similar to Jim Renegar’s, though not about Steve. After his Berkeley Ph.D., James went to a tenure-track assistant professorship at Howard University, a private, leading black U.S. university located in Washington, D.C., only to find that faculty members there were not into math research; so after 2 years, James left for postdoctoral research at MIT, starting over looking for a faculty job.

James was very driven. I recall his reminiscence that as a graduate student he had seen familiar persons chat all the time in the department’s common coffee room, and after becoming a faculty member elsewhere he returned to visit and saw the same persons still hang out in the coffee room – “they did not accomplished much”, James said.

That might be the case, but the department coffee room was popular, especially at 3-4 in the afternoon on weekdays when free refreshments, like cookies, were available.

It’s a matter of one’s ambitions and standards, I guess. I remember David Witte, a tall, handsome and popular postdoctoral fellow who brought his bicycle everywhere, including to the coffee room, and who in around 1987-1988 told me he had a tenure-track assistant professorship offer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison but chose to go to MIT next as a short-term instructor; David said that in a few years some senior professors at the top universities would retire and positions would be open, but if one settled into a university at the next level it would be harder to move up.

Wow! For me, had there not been a famously liberal UC Berkeley with nice weather on the U.S. West Coast, I would have been happy to get into Wisconsin-Madison for graduate study as advised by my undergraduate adviser in China.

In the case of my seeking an academic job, Smale phoned his friend James Yorke, director of the Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology at the University of Maryland, before the institute contacted me for a joint-candidacy interview with the computer science department at College Park. So Steve did provide real help.

Steve’s phone lobbying for me happened after my February 1987 interviews at Princeton and Buffalo, likely in March as the Maryland interview took place in April; he dampened my enthusiasm of the Princeton interview experience – in 1984 Andrew Majda had talked about bringing me there as a Ph.D. student – by informing me that his other graduating Ph.D. student, Joel Friedman, was also being interviewed by Princeton.

Joel solved a conjecture of Smale’s, a feat few graduate students achieved. He had hailed from Harvard in 1984 with a multitude of fellowships, and was someone Will raved about, that Joel was also doing research at IBM Almaden Research Center with prominent theoretical computer scientist Nick Pippenger – in comparison, at the time I didn’t even know about Pippenger’s wife Maria Klawe, the IBM research group’s manager.

(“On the convergence of newton’s method”, by Joel Friedman, March 1989, Volume 5, Issue 1, Journal of Complexity)

I was also informed that Joel was son of the mathematician Avner Friedman, who was well known, in that year 1987 the new director of Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota – Berkeley’s MSRI and Minnesota’s IMA were the only U.S. math research institutes financed by the National Science Foundation.

(“Avner Friedman: Mathematician in Control”, Interview of Avner Friedman by Y.K. Leong, 2007, Issue 10, Newsletter of Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore; and, “DMS Mathematical Sciences Research Institutes Update”, November 1, 2015, Amstat News)

So in 1987 Jim Renegar landed a tenure-track job in operations research at Cornell, and Joel Freidman landed a tenure-track job in computer science at Princeton – Smale’s students were getting tenure-track positions at leading U.S. universities in various departments, just not mathematics.

As for me, 3 interviews were not bad; that none led to a tenure-track job offer probably had to do with the fact that I was in the U.S. on a foreign student-visiting scholar type visa and the extra requirements for such a hiring were not something academic institutions would easily undertake.

At College Park, I met a mathematician and numerical analyst I had great respect for. In a February 2013 blog post I quoted about Professor Ivo Babuska, when comparing pure mathematicians and applied mathematicians:

“Politically, the personalities in the fields of pure mathematics and those in the fields of applied mathematics were quite different. A large number of academicians in pure math were known to be political left-wings, active to various degrees as political dissidents, international human-rights activists, or in the case of Americans, anti-war activists.

…

But despite my Ph.D. adviser’s pure math pedigrees, my professional interests and studies were more in applied and computational mathematics, in fields where politics was usually not openly discussed as much, not the least because research was substantially funded by industry and by military-related sources.

…

Babuska’s background had a link to a major political event… he came to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1968. But here is one biography that offered more details about his 1968 move:

“… The Communists had seized control of the country in 1948 and it was under strong Soviet influence over the following years. Mathematics was allowed to develop without interference, however, and the applied and computational methods developed by Babuska found favour. Beginning in 1964 reformers had won many concessions which became more clear-cut in early 1968 when the country began to implement “socialism with a human face”. The reforms came to a sudden end, however, in August 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Babuska had just been appointed as a professor at the Charles University of Prague but, given the political situation, he travelled with his family to the United States where he spent a year as a visiting professor at the Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Maryland at College Park. He was given a permanent appointment as a professor at the University of Maryland in the following year and he held this position until 1995. He was then appointed Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Professor of Mathematics, and appointed to the Robert Trull Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. …

After coming to the United States, Babuska became the world-leading expert in finite element analysis.””

(“Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)”, February 28, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Just like Carl de Boor being “the worldwide leader and authority in the theory and applications of spline functions”, quoted earlier, Ivo Babuska was “the world-leading expert in finite element analysis”, or at least in my understanding a leading expert of great depth in both the mathematics and the applications of finite elements. My interest in a potential extension of my Ph.D. research direction to the finite elements had led to my wide reading of literature on that subject, including publications by prominent numerical analysts such as, in addition to Babuska: Babuska’s former Maryland colleague, Werner Rheinboldt of the University of Pittsburgh; Babuska’s collaborator, Olgierd Zienkiewicz of the University College of Swansea in Wales who – like Babuska going to the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 – became UT Austin’s  Joe C. Walter Chair of Engineering in 1989; Richard Varga of Kent State University; and Gilbert Strang of MIT.

(“The Finite Element Method—Linear and Nonlinear Applications”, by Gilbert Strang, 1974, Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vancouver; “Celebration of a Wide-ranging Community at Kent State”, by Daniel B. Szyld, July 23, 1999, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; “OBITUARY: OLGIERD C. ZIENKIEWICZ (18 May 1921–2 January 2009)”, September 1, 2009, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering; and, “Prof. Dr. Werner Rheinboldt: Honorary Professor at TUM since 2007”, Technische Universität München)

Note that finite element analysis was also the field of Berkeley professor Keith Miller who, as discussed earlier, denied my classmate Robert Rainsberger the chance to do Ph.D. study in it.

Babuska’s accomplishments have given him recognition beyond mathematics and engineering, as I noted:

“Ivo Babuska is one such fine example, an applied mathematician originally from Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, someone so accomplished that his birthday has been hailed as among:

“Prague’s “top 11 historical events” between 1197 and 1966 a.d. compiled by Mlada Fronta Dnes, the Czech Republic’s largest newspaper”.”

(February 28, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

So was the distinction Zienkiewicz received in 1989 as he became UT Austin’s Joe C. Walter Chair of Engineering, when he also became the UNESCO Chair of Numerical Methods in Engineering at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain – the first UNESCO chair in the world, hence an honor also for the field of numerical analysis:

“After retirement as Head of Civil Engineering at Swansea in 1987, Olek spent two months each year at the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) at Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona, Spain. In 1989 Olek was appointed as the UNESCO Chair of Numerical Methods in Engineering at UPC. This was the very first UNESCO chair in the world and arose from interactions with Geoff Holister who was working at UNESCO developing support to technology and engineering. The idea of such a position arose from an idea in the book “Small World” by David Lodge. In the book professors of English imagine a UNESCO Chair that will allow them to retire into a world of continuous travel with no lecture obligations at an extravagant salary – mostly things Olek already had achieved!”

(“Some Recollections of O.C. Zienkiewicz”, by R.L. Taylor, in “IACM Expressions”, Number 25, July 2009, Bulletin for The International Association for Computational Mechanics)

In 1987 at College Park, Maryland, Babuska was a professor at both the math department and at the institute headed by Smale’s peer Jim Yorke. With adaptive finite elements and computable a posteriori error estimates among his expertise, Babuska showed considerable interest in my computable average error estimates for numerical integration and their close links to spline functions in approximation theory.

After the computer science department’s decision not to offer me a job, Babuska forwarded my file to his peer, Prof. Thomas Seidman at Maryland’s Baltimore County campus, who on behalf of the math department there offered me a 2-year visiting assistant professorship.

As a foreign student, my U.S. study visa would expire after my Ph.D. graduation or another 18 months of postdoctoral research, unless a job led to a work visa. The visiting position would not include that; so after some thoughts I decided to stay in the Ph.D. program for one more year, and thanked Prof. Seidman for his help.

At this point in the early summer of 1987, Babuska agreed to forward my paper based on my upcoming Ph.D. thesis to a leading numerical analysis journal, of which he was an editorial board member, in Vienna, Austria. He also advised that for the next year 1988 I should focus on applying to Canadian universities. During that phone conversation, Babuska said something that made a lasting impression, something like, “It is possible. I believe everything is possible”.

Acting on the advice of Babuska and also that of Lenore Blum, whom I respected as a mentor and for whose Mills College math class I had once substituted for a week, in my last year at Berkeley I spent most of my study time on computer science, which had been my undergraduate major.

The fact that using my Ph.D. research work under a mathematician, whose current interest was in numerical computation but who was not a numerical analyst, I was able to become a computer science faculty candidate at three very good U.S. universities certainly boosted my confidence.

As discussed, my Ph.D. research was in the average analysis of numerical computation algorithms, a subject brought to my attention by Smale, and my focus on computable error estimates was inspired by Smale’s α-theory. In my Smalefest paper, after crediting Smale’s inspiration as quoted earlier I further elaborated on my rationale:

“Most numerical approximation methods simply do no have guaranteed and yet computable error bounds under a weak differentiability assumption; whereas a strong differentiability assumption is one way to obtain computable error estimates, estimates applicable under a weak differentiability assumption are also important, for this assumption usually captures the generality of a method and is the starting point of many algorithms in practice; most practical algorithms, thus, use computable but not guaranteed error estimates; they are heuristics that may be incorrect some of the time but prove to be generally useful in practice.”

(Feng Gao, in Morris W. Hirsch, Jerrold E. Marsden and Michael Shub, eds., 1993, Springer-Verlag)

As quoted, my goal was to use average analysis to bridge mathematical analysis and practical computable error estimates.

In 1987, Smale was turning in a different direction, a much more mathematical one.

In his 1981 and 1985 papers cited earlier, Smale had extensively used mathematics related to the Bieberbach conjecture, a major math problem since the 1910s, first solved by Louis de Branges in 1985, who like Smale became a plenary speaker at the 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians at Berkeley.

(1987, Berkeley, California, American Mathematical Society)

So in his 1987 graduate course, Smale spent much time developing some mathematics he hoped might lead to an alternate proof of the conjecture, i.e., by this time de Branges’s theorem; I followed it with considerable interest.

In contrast to his 1985 computable error estimates for his modified Newton’s method-type algorithm finding zeros of complex polynomials, namely his α-theory, in 1986-1988 Smale spent much time presenting another theory he and Mike Shub, in relation to the work of Curtis McMullen, developed regarding algorithms that would not need computable error estimates at all: when an algorithm is run in endless, “purely iterative” cycles it would be “generally convergent”, i.e., approach a solution pretty much every run.

In his 1985 paper, Smale had conjectured that for the class of complex polynomials with a fixed degree – one of the mathematically nicest classes of functions – no purely iterative algorithm is generally convergent.

(Steve Smale, October 1985, Volume 13, Number 2, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society)

In his Harvard math Ph.D. thesis and a 1988 paper, Curtis McMullen proved Smale’s negative conjecture. On the positive side, Smale and Shub had shown in a 1986 paper that if – in addition to the standard arithmetic of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division – the operation of complex conjugation is also used, then there are purely iterative algorithms that are generally convergent.

In his paper contributed to the 1990 Smalefest conference, Mike Shub summarised it:

“… Newton’s method is an example of a purely iterative algorithm for solving polynomial equations. … A purely iterative algorithm is generally convergent if for almost all (f, x) iterating the algorithm on x, the iterates converge to a root of f. Smale [1986] conjectures that there are no purely iterative generally convergent algorithms for general d. McMullen [1988] proved this for d ≥ 4 and produced a generally convergent iterative algorithm for d = 3. For d = 2, Newton’s method is generally convergent. Doyle and McMullen [1979] have gone on to add to this examining d = 5 in terms of a Galois theory of purely iterative algorithms. In contrast, Steve and I showed in [Shub-Smale, 1986b] that if complex conjugation is allowed, then there are generally convergent purely iterative algorithms even for systems of n complex polynomials of fixed degree in n variables.”

(“On the work of Steve Smale on the theory of computation”, by Michael Shub, in Morris W. Hirsch, Jerrold E. Marsden and Michael Shub, eds., 1993, Springer-Verlag)

I recall that the positive result when complex conjugation is permitted was presented by Smale in his graduate course; McMullen’s proof of Smale’s conjecture was presented by Smale at a department colloquium talk, but it came late as I was about to graduate and preoccupied with studying computer science. My lack of time and lack of specialization in the algebraic topology and Galois theory-related topics meant that I did not acquire a full technical understanding of it.

But I remember thinking that there was a Chris Mullin and now came a Curtis McMullen: Oakland NBA basketball team Golden State Warriors’ biggest star player was Chris Mullin, a former U.S. Olympic Dream Team gold medalist from St. John’s University in Queens, New York, while Curtis McMullen’s Ph.D. adviser Dennis Sullivan was the Einstein Chair of Science at Queens College of the City University of New York.

(“MAYOR GIULIANI HONORS FOUR NEW YORKERS FOR EXCELLENCE IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY”, February 24, 1998, New York City Mayor’s Press Office; and, “Chris Mullin Set for Appearance at Citi Field on Wednesday”, September 2, 2015, St. John’s University)

Subsequently in the 1990s McMullen became a UC Berkeley professor, but in 1997 returned to his alma mater Harvard before he was awarded the Fields Medal at the 1998 ICM, mainly for his research in chaos theory – Smale had been a founder of that field – and in that same year 1997 Mullin left the Warriors for the Indiana Pacers.

(September 2, 2015, St. John’s University; and, “1998 Fields Medalist Curtis T. McMullen”, American Mathematical Society)

McMullen was no doubt very bright. But the results in this direction by him, Smale and Shub also illustrated that, even for computational issues, focusing on a more pure-mathematics direction can lead to more advanced mathematical achievements.

More generally in 1987-1988, Smale and his collaborators took a more pure-mathematics direction by moving from analysis of algorithms to complexity theory.

There was an interesting title discrepancy for Smale’s plenary address at the 1986 ICM at Berkeley: the title was “Algorithms for Solving Equations” as in the ICM proceedings, but “Complexity aspects of numerical analysis” according to an 1987 book on the history of ICMs, quoting The New York Times, both cited earlier.

The The New York Times’ report in August 1986 quoted Smale on the difference between algorithm and complexity:

“… At the International Congress of Mathematicians this month in Berkeley, Calif., signs of the computer were everywhere. The opening plenary speaker, Stephen Smale of the University of California at Berkeley – a pure mathematician with a record of bringing fellow mathematicians into new areas – focused on the developing theory of complexity, which addresses questions of what sorts of problems can and cannot be solved on computers.

The problem-solving abilities of computers, Dr. Smale said, have created a challenge that is philosophical, logical and mathematical. “This subject is now likely to change mathematics itself,” he said. “Algorithms become an object of study, not just a means of solving problems.””

(“MATHEMATICIANS FINALLY LOG ON”, by James Gleick, August 24, 1988, The New York Times)

A computer algorithm is a means of solving problems, and so practical considerations would have to be important. Complexity is about what sorts of problems can or cannot be solved on computers, and so it may involve more fundamental mathematics about the problems and the algorithms – but understandably, studying if something “can” be done does not necessarily require all the practicalities of doing it.

Besides its dismissive title, “Mathematicians finally log on”, similar to the UC Berkeley numerical analysts’ attitudes I have described, the The New York Times article referred to Smale as a “pure mathematician with a record of bringing fellow mathematicians into new areas” – obviously, if they just got into the computer how could what they did be “applied”?

When first entering the numerical analysis field, Smale’s 1981 paper was titled, “The fundamental theorem of algebra and complexity theory”, concerned with fundamental mathematics and complexity theory. A few years later, his October 1985 paper’s title was “On the efficiency of algorithms of analysis”, concerning algorithms, and so more practically oriented. Now in 1986 his plenary address at the world’s leading gathering of mathematicians had both an “algorithm” title – for the printed proceedings – and a “complexity” title – for the actual talk at the congress.

More modestly on my part, in 1986 I derived computable average error estimates for a type of error estimation in numerical integration, and presented them for the first time in around May at an MSRI seminar – fulfilling a seminar-presentation requirement for the Ph.D. degree. That was also when my adviser first learned of the details of what would become my Ph.D. thesis.

But Smale was, after all, more of a “pure mathematician”: in 1987-1988 he was returning, along with his collaborators Lenore Blum and Michael Shub, to a complexity focus; they embarked on an ambitious project to develop an algebra-oriented, comprehensive complexity theory that would rival, and even encompass, the existent complexity theories in computer science.

Recall as in Part 3 that Lenore’s husband Manuel Blum had been a pioneer in complexity theory and for his achievements would be the 1995 winner of the A. M. Turing Award, computer science’s highest honor. Thus Lenore’s summary of their work was succinct, informative and telling:

“In 1989, Mike Shub, Steve Smale and I introduced a theory of computation and complexity over an arbitrary ring or field R [BSS89]. If R is Z2 = ({0, 1}, +, ⋅), the classical computer science theory is recovered. If R is the field of real numbers, Newton’s algorithm, the paradigm algorithm of numerical analysis, fits naturally into our model of computation.

Complexity classes P, NP and the fundamental question “Does P = NP?” can be formulated naturally over an arbitrary ring R. The answer to the fundamental question depends in general on the complexity of deciding feasibility of polynomial systems over R. When R is Z2, this becomes the classical satisfiability problem of Cook- Levin [Cook71, Levin73]. When R is the field of complex numbers, the answer depends on the complexity of Hilbert’s Nullstellensatz.

The notion of reduction between problems (e.g. between traveling salesman and satisfiability) has been a powerful tool in classical complexity theory. But now, in addition, the transfer of complexity results from one domain to another becomes a real possibility. …”

(“Computing over the Reals: Where Turing Meets Newton”, by Lenore Blum, October 2004, Volume 51, Number 9, Notices of the American Mathematical Society)

As Lenore put it in 2004, their theory cut across classical complexity theory of computer science, Newton’s method in numerical analysis, and the complexity aspect of classical mathematics – David Hilbert’s algebraic geometry a century earlier.

Lenore also pointed out that when certain “reduction” relationship between two things is established, a rich body of significant mathematical results in one can be transferrable to the other.

By the time of 2004, Lenore was the Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where Manuel and their son Avrim were also computer science professors:

“Professor Mom takes the office on one side of him, Professor Dad takes an office on the other. Son is caught up in parents’ well-meaning meddling both at work and at home. Hilarity ensues.

Think “Everybody Loves Avrim.”

…

The recruitment of Manuel and Lenore Blum, once happily ensconced in Berkeley, Calif., to the Carnegie Mellon computer science school two years ago was considered a coup, capping almost 20 years of effort.

…

A measure of their impact came last month, when Carnegie Mellon garnered a $24 million share of the National Science Foundation’s $156 million Information Technology Research program. Of the 14 Carnegie Mellon projects to receive funding, the largest was a $5.5 million award for Aladdin, which includes Manuel, Lenore and Avrim Blum among its investigators.”

(“Dad, mom join son to form a potent computer science team at CMU”, by Byron Spice, October 21, 2001, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Such a happy family finale would be incomplete without a story about the humbler beginnings:

“The romance began in Caracas, Venezuela, where Manuel and Lenore grew up.

Manuel’s parents had fled Europe ahead of the Holocaust and, unable to get into the United States, settled in Caracas.

His father, a jeweler and expert watchmaker, came from the town of Chernovtsy, then part of Romania, but in a border region that often changed hands (it is now part of Ukraine). The joke was that the people of Chernovtsy spoke the language of whoever won the last war. Manuel grew up in Caracas speaking German.

…

“I thought if I could only understand how the brain works, I could be smarter,” he said. It set him on a course that would lead him to the field of computer science. But when he left Caracas for the United States in the mid-1950s to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology, no such field existed. So he pursued his interest in the electrical activity of the brain by studying electrical engineering, then switched to neurobiology.

Lenore didn’t reach Caracas until she was 9, moving with her family from New York City in the 1950s. Unfamiliar with Spanish and initially unhappy in school, she persuaded her parents to let her take a year off. When she returned to school, her class was being taught long division. She found it fascinating, beginning her lifelong love of mathematics.

…

Following the advice of a high school teachers, she decided to study architecture, not mathematics, in college. Unable to gain admission to MIT, where Manuel was a graduate student, Lenore headed for the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

But after her first year at Carnegie Tech, she realized that math remained her true interest. She switched majors and ended up in an experimental mathematics class taught by Alan Perlis, a pioneer who would establish the computer science department at Carnegie Tech and, later, at Yale University.

…”

(Byron Spice, October 21, 2001, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

So it had begun in Caracas, Venezuela, where Smale later began his one-year sabbatical in July 1984, and now it has been happiness ever after for the Blums. I note that from Central America, Manuel went to a U.S. school where John Nash happened to teach though in a different field, and Lenore to Nash’s undergraduate alma mater in a different field.

But regarding me, as in Part 1, by 1999 Lenore refused to help my academic job prospect, stating:

If you can program, you don’t need to be in the academia”.

(January 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Back in 1987-1988, my focus on auditing computer science graduate courses was more practically oriented, and did not include the complexity theory course taught by none other than Manuel Blum. Fortunately, the two algorithm courses taught by Richard Karp did provide a reasonable coverage of the basic framework and concepts of complexity. As mentioned earlier, I then taught the corresponding graduate courses at UBC in 1988-1992. At UBC, the computer science complexity theory courses were the prerogative of our boss Maria Klawe’s husband, prominent theoretical computer scientist Nick Pippenger.

By the early fall of 1987 I had also produced first results in computer science research, on the analysis of intrinsic communication costs in parallel computation for some numerical computation algorithms, and so had a second topic for seminar presentation from that point on.

With Lenore’s networking help and arrangement, in October 1987 I gave seminar presentations at CUNY Queens College where Mike Shub had taught for many years, at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center where Mike was a scientist for about 2 years now, and at the University of Toronto’s computer science department that then offered me a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship, in affiliation with both the theoretical computer science group and the numerical analysis group.

The Toronto postdoc offer was the second job offer for me, after Baltimore County’s earlier in 1987, but the first from a major center of academic research. Berkeley math and CS professor Beresford Parlett, whom I respected as a mentor like Lenore, had suggested, after listening to my presentation at his numerical analysis seminar, that I do 18 months of postdoctoral research at MSRI, whereby I told him my consideration concerning my visa problem.

In December 1987 or January 1988, at James Curry’s invitation I gave seminar presentations at Boulder’s math and CS departments, and met also with computational scientists at the university’s computing center and at the Colorado School of Mines.

My interest in quantum physics and divergence had not vanished, and so on my own initiative I visited the retired physicist, Professor Robert Richtmyer in his office, whose book cited earlier was a major reference when I explored quantum mechanics in 1984-1985. Not unlike Berkeley’s Eyvind Wichmann, Richtmyer did not give me any real lead on the physics; instead he pointed to a book on his desk, “Difference Methods for Initial-Value Problems”, and asked if I knew.

(Robert D. Richtmyer, Difference Methods for Initial-Value Problems, 1957, Interscience Publishers; and, “Difference Methods for Initial-Value Problems (Robert D. Richtmyer and K. W. Morton)”, by Burton Wendroff, July 1968, Volume 10, Number 3, SIAM Review)

I had noticed Richtmyer’s numerical analysis book in my past library literature searches but had not really studied it, and so answered that my Ph.D. work also involved the use of divided differences – for computable average error estimates.

So when UBC computer science department acting head, numerical analyst Uri Ascher mentioned in Part 3, brought me there for a formal interview around mid-February, he emphasized that he had heard about me from a recent trip of his to Boulder and from his contacts at Toronto. The other UBC numerical analyst, former computer science head Jim Varah cited in Part 3, arranged with David Kirkpatrick to secure funding for the fixed-term position offered to me by Uri.

While visiting UBC, I was also brought over by the University of Victoria’s computer science department for an unofficial interview there.

In around early May when I was formally interviewed by Simon Fraser University’s school of computing science, which had a strong theoretical computer science group but did not have any numerical analyst, among the professors attending my seminar presentation was Bob Russell, a numerical analyst at the mathematics department.

Chatting at the lectern after my talk, Bob pointed to a spot in my resume where my paper, based on my Ph.D. thesis and submitted through Babuska to a numerical analysis journal, was listed as “to appear”, and asked when it would appear. I replied that I had not heard from the journal after the submission. Bob said then it should not be described as “to appear”; I acknowledged he was right.

I was offered a tenure-track position, and was expected to open numerical analysis courses within the school of computing science. After returning to Berkeley, I phoned school director James Delgrande – previously cited in Part 3 – to apologize for the infraction in my resume, and he replied that they liked what they saw so it did not matter.

Fortunately, my paper was later accepted and was published in October 1989.

Like Babuska, Bob Russell’s expertise included the finite element method. He was often cited as R. D. Russell, including in a SIAM 45th-anniversary meeting session in July 1997 at Stanford, mentioned earlier, where presentations were given by Bob, Berkeley’s Keith Miller, Miller’s Ph.D. graduate and UVic graduate, LANL’s Andrew Kuprat, and my former fellow Berkeley math Ph.D. student Guojun Liao.

After my arrival in Vancouver, Bob, who had a University of New Mexico math Ph.D., told me he was the son of a LANL scientist – a physicist if I am not mistaken.

Locally in the Vancouver region, Bob had often co-authored papers with UBC’s Uri Ascher – as in Part 3 Uri had once been a scientist at the Army Mathematical Research Center at Wisconsin-Madison, the place Carl de Boor was.

So, all 3 Canadian job offers were in relation to both theoretical computer science and numerical analysis.

In Summer 1988 I got to be the teaching assistant for a 3rd-year numerical analysis course, after years of TA work for introductory calculus classes including under professors Bob Anderson, David Gale and Ken Ribert. The instructor was Nate Whitaker, Alexandre Chorin’s African-American Ph.D. student who had graduated and was doing postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as I recall, and getting ready to become a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

It was a last-minute practice for me, as my scheduled UBC teaching duty in Fall 1988 would include a graduate course on numerical linear algebra (matrix computation), the specialty of former department head Jim Varah who by this time was the director of CICSR, the university-level Centre for Integrated Computer Systems Research.

During that summer Prof. Beresford Parlett, Berkeley’s expert on numerical linear algebra, gave me a month’s “postdoc” support partly because I was writing a short research paper with him.

But when I went to Bernice Gangale who, assisted by Jeanne Coffee, handled administrative support for the center for pure and applied mathematics, to finalize the paperwork for the financial support, I was told that the center director, Alberto Grünbaum, said my work should be categorized as “postgraduate” and the job description “postgraduate researcher”.

It was only a month’s time so whatever the title, and I understood that it wasn’t a serious postdoctoral fellowship in duration, work or pay. But when I had just received a doctoral degree, wouldn’t “postdoctoral” make sense? My classmate friend Mei Kobayashi had worked for a year at Harvard after her 1981 Princeton bachelor’s degree, and that I knew was “postgraduate” work.

Clearly, to the critically demanding I was short of the postdoctoral research and visiting faculty experiences.

Months before the May graduation commencement, Smale told me that he had nominated me to the department for the Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics for outstanding graduate student research.

I did not pin much hope on that, knowing the numerical analysts’ dismissiveness of Smale’s work and Grünbaum’s close relationship with them. As discussed, back in 1984 I did not bothered to apply to change my Ph.D. candidacy to my original declaration of “applied mathematics”, after it had been categorized as “mathematics”. Also, for the committee to approve my thesis, consisting of two professors in addition to the adviser, I sought the consents of Bob Anderson and Morris Hirsch, Smale’s long-time friend since the anti-war days cited in Part 2, rather than the numerical analysts.

The winner of the Bernard Friedman Prize that year was Yong-Geun Oh, a classmate from South Korea, with a Ph.D. thesis titled, “Nonlinear Schrodinger Equations with Potentials: Evolution, Existence, and Stability of Semi classical Bound States”. The title indicated relevance to quantum mechanics, while the type of issues studied were similar to what I had learned under Kato. I thought it must be close to Grünbaum’s interest, although Oh’s adviser was Prof. Alan Weinstein, a former Ph.D. student of Shiing-shen Chern’s, and Oh’s collaborators included Prof. Jerrold Marsden – later an editor, along with Hirsch and Shub, for the proceedings of the Smalefest conference cited earlier.

(“Stability of Semiclassical Bound States of Nonlinear Schrδdinger Equations with Potentials”, by Yong-Geun Oh, 1989, Volume 121, Number 1, Communications in Mathematical Physics; and, “Yong-Geun Oh”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

It wasn’t the first time Smale recommended me for an honor, though every time not to be.

Back in 1986 I went to ask if he could nominate me for the Sloan doctoral dissertation fellowship, Smale responded that he had already nominated Joel Friedman. I said that I should have been considered if only because of my seniority as his student, but since he had decided it was okay with me. A day later Smale left a note in my mailbox to get me to his office; there he said that, for technical reasons only and not as a precedent, he would also nominate me. In the end neither received it, but Joel soon graduated in 1987 for the Princeton job.

Unlike me or Joel Friedman, but like David Witte, the Bernard Friedman Prize winner Yong-Geun Oh started his academic career with years of postdoctoral research and short-term teaching at top universities, including a postdoctoral year at MSRI, 2 years of instructorship at NYU’s Courant Institute and a year of membership at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, before starting as an tenure-track assistant professor at Wisconsin-Madison – Witte could have settled on one there had not been for a higher ambition as discussed – where he became a full professor in 2001.

(Fall 1997, Department of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin; and, “Yong-Geun Oh: Brief Narrative Research Resume”, Center for Geometry and Physics, Institute for Basic Science, Pohang University of Science and Technology)

My choice of an immediate faculty job leaned toward an independent academic career but was a compromise: goal-oriented in choosing a fixed-term position at the academically stronger UBC partly because of the arrival of Klawe and Pippenger, as suggested by Karp, over a tenure-track one at SFU, yet with some disappointment that it wasn’t a scientifically more advanced route like at Canada’s academically leading University of Toronto.

The scientific prominence of the Berkeley professors I studied under over 6 years certainly reaffirmed and strengthened my sense of optimism in possibilities and potentials: Tosio Kato was a recent winner of the Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics, Andrew Majda was in the process to take up a professorship at the prestigious Princeton University, and of course Steve Smale was a Fields Medalist; as mentioned earlier, among my first-year professors was also recent Steele Prize winner Gerhard Hochschild, besides Kato.

The award-winning prominence was more ground-breaking, as both Smale and Kato were the first Berkeley winners of the respective prizes, which were among the leading prizes of mathematics.

In the 1980s, the leading mathematical prizes awarded by the mathematical community were the Fields Medal of the International Mathematical Union, the Steele Prizes of the American Mathematical Society, and the Wiener Prize and Birkhoff Prize awarded jointly by AMS and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

The International Mathematical Union, which organizes the International Congress of Mathematicians every 4 years with awarding of prizes, describes its current set of prizes as follows:

“… The Fields Medal recognizes outstanding mathematical achievement. The Rolf Nevanlinna Prize honors distinguished achievements in mathematical aspects of information science. The Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize is awarded for outstanding mathematical contributions that have found significant applications outside of mathematics. The Chern Medal is awarded to an individual whose accomplishments warrant the highest level of recognition for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics.

The Fields Medal was first awarded in 1936, the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize in 1982, and the Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize in 2006. The Chern Medal was awarded for the first time in 2010.”

(“IMU Awards and Prizes”, International Mathematical Union)

As described, in 1936 the Fields Medal became the first and only IMU prize, until 1982 when the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize was added for mathematical aspects of information science; more recently the Gauss Prize was added in 2006 in relation to applying mathematics to other subjects, and the Chern Medal in 2010 as “the highest level of recognition” in mathematics – without the Fields Medal’s age requirement of not exceeding 40 in the year of the award.

The Field Medal was first established through the efforts of Canadian mathematician J. C. Fields, who had organized the 1924 ICM:

“At the 1924 International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto, a resolution was adopted that at each ICM, two gold medals should be awarded to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement. Professor J. C. Fields, a Canadian mathematician who was Secretary of the 1924 Congress, later donated funds establishing the medals, which were named in his honor. In 1966 it was agreed that, in light of the great expansion of mathematical research, up to four medals could be awarded at each Congress.”

(“Fields Medal Details”, International Mathematical Union)

The IMU list of Fields Medal recipients shows that Stephen Smale, one of the four 1966 recipients, was the first for UC Berkeley. Per the IMU list, so was every of Smale’s co-recipients the first for his university: Paul Joseph Cohen of Stanford University, Michael Francis Atiyah of Oxford University and Alexander Grothendieck of the University of Paris; but as detailed in Part 2, Smale had stood out as a left-wing student activist during the McCarthy era of the 1950s at the University of Michigan, and then as a Berkeley anti-Vietnam War movement leader in 1965.

Tosio Kato enjoyed a similar status as Berkeley’s first with the Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics.

According to SIAM, the Norbert Wiener Prize and the George David Birkhoff Prize are the only two “highest” prizes, awarded for:

“an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense”.

(“Prizes, Awards and Lectures Sponsored by SIAM”, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

Both prizes have been jointly awarded by SIAM and AMS.

The SIAM list of recipients shows the Wiener Prize was first awarded in 1970, and has been awarded every several years; its second winner, in 1975, was Peter Lax of New York University – Chorin’s former Ph.D. adviser mentioned earlier.

Kato and co-recipient Gerald Whitham were winners of the Wiener Prize’s third awarding, in 1980, and Kato was the first UC Berkeley recipient.

The other leading prize awarded by the mathematical community was the Leroy P. Steele Prizes. Per AMS’s descriptions, among its prizes the Steele Prizes have been the only ones for mathematics in general and open to all mathematicians, awarded for lifetime achievement, research, or exposition; other prizes are specialized ones, such as the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry that Smale had received in 1964 as in part 2, the Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize “in the area of discrete mathematics”, and the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics for “mathematics research by a woman in the previous six years”. Beginning in 1988 there has been a National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics .

(“Prizes and Awards”, American Mathematical Society)

My first-year graduate algebra professor Gerhard Hochschild was a Steele Prize winner in 1980 for his research, but unlike Kato and Smale, Hochschild was not the first UC Berkeley recipient of that prize.

The Steele Prizes was first awarded in 1970. The second winner, Phillip Griffiths of Princeton University in 1971 for a 1970 paper, had formerly been a UC Berkeley fellow and faculty member, 1962-67.

(“Phillip A. Griffiths: Curriculum Vitae”, School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study)

The honor of the Steele Prizes’ first UC Berkeley recipient went to Professor Hans Lewy in 1979 for his research, one year before Hochschild.

Lewy’s award was like Smale’s, politically speaking. Lewy had been one of 3 tenured math professors among 29 Berkeley professors and 2 UCLA professors fired in the early 1950s in the McCarthy era due to their refusal to sign the University of California’s Loyalty Oath to declare that they were not and had never been Communists:

“Fear of communism was being developed and fanned for political purposes by a junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, in the late 1940s. McCarthy eventually formed a committee that went to universities to question professors concerning their connection to the Communist Party. More widely known are the inquisitions of Hollywood actors, but it extended to all levels of public influence. McCarthy was spreading fear of educators as well.

Wanting to show proof of loyalty, Robert Gordon Sproul, then President of the University of California, proposed the Loyalty Oath which would have all professors declare they were not and never had been communists.

Some 29 tenured professors from UC Berkeley and two from UCLA (one of whom later became a UC President) refused to sign. They declared that political affiliation should not be required to be made public, and the Communist Party was a legal party in the US. It was a matter of principle.

The Regents of the time mandated that all professors had to sign, or be fired. In the Mathematics Department, three professors refused: John Kelley, Hans Lewy, and Pauline Sperry. Another professor, D.H. Lehmer, attempted to avoid signing by taking a leave of absence to take a federal job at UCLA as Director at the Institute for Numerical Analysis. However, he was told he needed to sign before he could go on the payroll. With five children to support, he eventually signed but with objection.

…

Finally, in 1952-53 the California Supreme Court ruled the Loyalty Oath to be unconstitutional. …”

(“Loyalty Oath Controversy: Interview with Leon Henkin”, Fall 2000, Vol. VII, No. 1, Berkeley Mathematics Newsletter)

Lewy’s prior experience as a Jewish mathematician fleeing the rise of Nazism in Germany played a role in his resolve to refuse what he viewed as totalitarian tendency in the Loyalty Oath requirement:

“Hans Lewy was born on October 20, 1904 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland)…

Göttingen, in 1922 when Hans Lewy matriculated, was among the premier mathematical establishments in the world. With Klein and Hilbert still in residence, as well as Runge, Prandtl, Landau, and Emmy Noether, Courant, of course, and many others {Reid, 1970} it radiated irresistible scientific excitement. …

Friedrichs also arrived in 1922 and their lifelong friendship took hold immediately. …

He completed his thesis in 1926 with Courant and became, together with Friedrichs, Courant’s Assistant and a Privatdozent. …

…

Lewy left Germany quite soon after Hitler assumed power in 1933. He went first to Italy and then to Paris where Hadamard had managed to obtain for him a year’s support. … In Paris, on the recommendation of Hadamard, he was offered a one to two year position at Brown, funded by the Duggan Foundation. In the fall of 1933, Lewy was in Providence. …

On the invitation of G.C. Evans, Lewy went to Berkeley in 1935. Courant, visiting Berkeley in 1932, had spoken enthusiastically of Lewy’s work on that occasion. Courant himself was, in fact, offered a position at Berkeley. …

With the outbreak of the war, Lewy took flying lessons and obtained a solo license in the hope of offering his services, but was soon called to Aberdeen Proving Grounds as part of the University of California contingent. He also worked half-time with the Office of Naval Research in New York. Here he became interested in water waves and the Dock problem, resuming his collaboration with Friedrichs…

…

During the Loyalty Oath controversy in the state of California, Lewy was part of the group dismissed for refusal to sign the oath. Having seen Fascism at fist hand in Italy, and watched its rise in Germany, he was wary of cooperating with any totalitarian tendencies in his new country. … He was on the faculty at Harvard in the fall of 1952 and then at Stanford in 1952 and 1953. … In the settlement of this dispute by the courts, the professors were reinstated and Lewy returned to Berkeley. …”

(“Hans Lewy: A Brief Biographical Sketch”, by D. Kinderlehrer, in David Kinderlehrer ed., Hans Lewy Selecta, Volume 1, 2002, Birkhäuser)

Lewy’s stand against McCarthyism led not only to his firing by UC but also the German consul general’s refusal to extend his passport:

“A new exhibition at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life tells the stories of more than 70 scholars, writers and artists — many of them Jewish, related to Jews or political dissidents — who escaped the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s and brought their talents and dreams with them to UC Berkeley.

…

During an opening reception, University of California President Janet Napolitano praised the exhibition’s remarkable story and called the collaboration “a priceless learning opportunity.”

…

… The exhibit features, for example, war-rations books and anonymous hate mail sent to musicologist Alfred Einstein. Visitors can also see a German consult general’s rejection of a request to extend a passport, in response to math professor Hans Lewy’s three-year suspension when he refused to sign the campus Loyalty Oath. Family photos and a 1985 certificate, awarding Austria’s Medal of Honor to Max Knight, are also on view.”

(“Intellectual migration from fascist Europe to Berkeley”, by Kathleen Maclay, February 4, 2014, University of California)

So it was fitting, that a Jewish mathematician with a math Ph.D. from the world renowned University of Göttingen under the mathematical patriarch Richard Courant, having escaped Nazi Germany and participated in U.S. military research during World War II, took a stand against McCarthyism and later in 1979 became the first Berkeley winner of American Mathematical Society’s top general prize – in line with Steve Smale’s honor as Berkeley’s first Fields Medal winner in 1966.

As in Part 2, Courant, founder of NYU’s Courant Institute, and another mathematical patriarch, Oswald Veblen of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, were once featured with the young mathematician John Nash in a Fortune magazine article in the summer of 1958 – only months before Nash’s miserable attempt to start a world peace movement at MIT that would end with Nash’s psychiatric committal.

As quoted above, in the early 1930s UC Berkeley had tried to recruit Courant, who did not move there but recommended his student Hans Lewy enthusiastically. Lewy was only one of many young mathematicians who had worked under Courant at Göttingen, in a manner that later drew criticisms about Courant:

“As a Privatdozent, whose meager fees were paid by his students, usually few in number, Lewy jokingly reported in 1928 a “lucrative” semester: “Now when people ask why I went into mathematics I can answer, ‘For the money!’”

In addition to teaching, he served with Friedrichs as one of Courant’s many assistants. Although in the future Courant was often to be criticized for exploiting such younger men, Lewy always considered the time he spent as assistant exceedingly valuable.”

(“Hans Lewy, 1904-1988”, by Constance Reid, in David Kinderlehrer ed., Volume 1, 2002, Birkhäuser)

It was scientific prestige, but meager pay, to be a Privatdozent and Prof. Richard Courant’s assistant at the University of Göttingen.

Lewy’s specialty was in partial differential equations, the field in which I studied under Tosio Kato and my officemate Steve Pomerantz received his Ph.D. under Murray Protter, and related to the field my classmate Robert Rainsberger received his Ph.D. under Heinz Cordes as earlier.

After his passing in 1988, Lewy’s colleagues and peers Protter and Kato, along with colleagues John Kelley and Derrick Lehmer who had in 1950 shared his opposition to McCarthyism, wrote about his important contributions:

“Professor Lewy was known as a person of integrity and strong moral principles. In 1950, he refused to sign a special loyalty oath imposed on the faculty by the University of California’s Board of Regents; for this reason he and a number of other professors were fired. They were later vindicated and reinstated when the courts determined that taking the oath would have violated their civil rights.

Hans Lewy was one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century; he showed unparalleled originality in his work, which was characterized by the unexpected. In 1957 he started the mathematical world by exhibiting a simple partial differential equation which has no solution at all, thus changing the thinking of the experts in the field.

In another of his best known works, written in 1928 with Courant and Friedrichs, he developed criteria for determining conditions which guarantee the stability of numerical solutions of certain classes of differential equations. This work turned out to be crucial later for the use of high speed computers in solving such equations; thousands of research articles have been written on numerical solutions of differential equations based on his pioneering work.

While still in Göttingen, he published a series of fundamental papers on partial differential equations and the calculus of variations. He solved completely the initial value problem for general nonlinear hyperbolic equations in two independent variables. … He proved the well-posedness of the initial value problem for wave equations in what is now called Sobolev spaces two decades before these spaces became a common tool for specialists. …”

(“Hans Lewy, Mathematics: Berkeley: 1904-1988 Professor Emeritus”, by M. Protter, J.L. Kelley, T. Kato and D.H. Lehmer, 1988, University of California)

While studying under Kato I regularly, and later from time to time, attended the weekly seminar on partial differential equations and became familiar with this group of professors who were quite senior, and very genial and affable.

Quite a few times I mentioned Hans’s research to my roommate Kezheng. Sometimes when Kezheng menitoned the name “Hans” I wasn’t sure which one he was referring to, because I also knew another, Kezheng’s auto insurance agent who became my agent: soon after my arrival at Berkeley, Kezheng taught me driving and added my name as a driver to the Farmers Insurance auto policy for his old Ford, and his agent Hans was a very friendly man.

In the summer of 1983 with Kezheng and I the drivers, we and several Chinese visiting scholars took a tour of Western U.S., sightseeing at places like Salt Lake City, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Death Valley where our rental car had a flat tire as in my February 2013 blog post.

(February 28, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

One of those visiting scholars, Zhujia Lu (陸柱家), by the early 2000s when I visited Beijing was the director of scientific research at the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science in the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Another of the visiting scholars, Zeke Wang (王則柯), had just finished a visiting scholarship at Princeton where he did research with Prof. Harold Kuhn on a topic inspired by Smale’s work on finding zeros of complex polynomials. I hadn’t chosen Smale as my Ph.D. adviser at that point but Kuhn – the same last name as the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, once a Princeton professor also – was well-known for the mathematical work he had done with another Princeton professor, Albert Tucker – as in Part 2 John Nash’s Ph.D. adviser.

(“On the cost of computing roots of polynomials”, by Harold W. Kuhn, Zeke Wang and Senlin Xu, February 1984, Volume 28, Issue 2, Mathematical Programming; and, “Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions”, Wikipedia)

At the time I did not know about Tucker’s former Ph.D. student John Nash, but my father was a former graduate student of Zeke’s father, SYSU Chinese literature Professor Wang Qi (王起), mentioned in my Chinese blog posts in February and June 2011. At Berkeley was when I met Zeke, as he had gone to study and then teach at Peking University since the 1960s, and was only recently moving to Sun Yat-sen University – known in China as Zhongshan University for Sun Yat-sen’s more common name, Sun Zhongshan. 

(November 22, 2010, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest; “忆往昔，学历史智慧（三）——文革“破旧立新”开始的记忆”, February 20, 2011, and, “忆往昔，学历史智慧（四）——青少年时代的部分文化熏陶”, June 22, 2011, 高峰的博客 – A refreshed feeling)

Though the Farmers Insurance agent Hans was of a considerably larger build  and a more authoritative personality, than Hans Lewy, their friendliness reminded me of the old-time farmers, or perhaps in the case of Lewy as described by mathematical biographer Constance Reid, a gardener:

“The Lewy’s had one son, Michael, who is now also a mathematician.

Once he became a family man and a householder, Lewy discovered the joys of home repair, woodwork and gardening. He took pride in the fact that, unlike professors he had known in his youth, he could – and would – do things with his hands. … Because of his propensity for seeing both sides of a question, he could not make life and death decisions even for plants and left undisturbed “volunteers” that other gardeners would have eradicated. …

He was often joyously unrestrained and enthusiastic. …

…

The most dramatic event of his more than fifty years at Berkeley occurred during the McCarthy era when the Regents of the University decided that members of the faculty should sign a loyalty oath … Lewy recognized the threat to academic freedom and refused to sign… He was not, however, doctrinaire on the subject and counseled others, especially younger colleagues, that they must look at their weapons before they decided to fight. He himself was well armed, having resolved when he had had to leave Göttingen that he would save a year’s salary as soon as possible in case he ever had to leave another job. … he was one of the few who managed to remain on friendly terms with those who had different views. Ultimately the California Supreme Court declared the oath unconstitutional and ordered the University to reinstate the non-signers with back pay and privileges. …”

(Constance Reid, in David Kinderlehrer ed., Volume 1, 2002, Birkhäuser)

That sounds like Hans the professor I knew, joyful, intellectual, hardworking, principled yet flexible, and willing to counsel others with his wisdom – except that back at Göttingen his meager income as a Privatdozent and Courant’s assistant probably wouldn’t have let him save much.

I wonder if and what Lewy may have “counselled” the young John Nash in 1957, when Nash seriously questioned quantum mechanics and had an argument with the physicist Robert Oppenheimer at the IAS in Princeton – according to Sylvia Nasar’s book, A Beautiful Mind, Lewy might be among the persons Nash had discussions with:

“Nash left the Institute for Advanced Study on a fractious note. In early July he apparently had a serious argument with Oppenheimer about quantum theory – serious enough, at any rate, to warrant a lengthy letter of apology from Nash to Oppenheimer written around July 10, 1957… After calling his own behavior unjustified, Nash nonetheless immediately justified it by calling “most physicists (also some mathematicians who have studied Quantum Theory) . . . quite too dogmatic in their attitudes,” complaining of their tendency to treat “anyone with any sort of questioning attitude or a belief in “hidden parameters” . . . as stupid or at best a quite ignorant person.”

…

“I embarked on [a project] to revise quantum theory,”, Nash said in his 1996 Madrid lecture. “It was not a priori absurd for a non-physicist. Einstein had criticized the indeterminacy of the quantum mechanics of Heisenberg.”

He apparently had devoted what little time he spent at the Institute for Advanced Study that year talking with physicists and mathematicians about quantum theory. Whose brains he was picking is not clear. Freeman Dyson, Hans Lewy, and Abraham Pais were in residence at least one of the terms. …

It was this attempt that Nash would blame, decades later in a lecture to psychiatrists, for triggering his mental illness – calling his attempt to resolve the contradictions in quantum theory, on which he embarked in the summer of 1957, “possibly overreaching and psychologically destabilizing.””

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

You see, according to Nash, “most physicists” believed quite dogmatically that quantum mechanics as the theory of particle physics did not need other “hidden parameters”; “some mathematicians” like John von Neumann then catered to these physicists’ worldview by making efforts to prove that no “hidden parameters” exist – a claim I had serious doubts about as discussed earlier.

As in Part 2, while formally at the Institute for Advanced Study in the academic year 1956-1957, Nash spent most of his time at NYU Courant Institute instead; his looking into quantum theory was mentioned in the 1958 Fortune article mentioned earlier, along with his stock-market prediction hobby:

“He is now an associate professor at M.I.T. and is looking into quantum theory. He also applies mathematics to one of his hobbies: stock-market predictions.”

(“This 1958 Fortune article introduced the world to John Nash and his math”, by Stephen Gandel, May 30, 2015, Fortune)

Perhaps I should have brought my questions about the mathematics of quantum physics to Prof. Kato and his Berkeley peers in partial differential equations: their mathematics was close to physics and Kato himself had a physics Ph.D.

Or perhaps lucky that I didn’t. As Nash later insinuated in 1997, quoted earlier from Nasar’s book, even without getting into politics like he did in 1958 – and I did in 1992-1993 – that kind of scientific ambition could already be a ground for mental-health concern!

In Nash’s mind maybe, but not in mine.

But the professors who taught me, or whom I got to know, in my first year at Berkeley were overwhelmingly older seniors. While the computer science professors I audited graduate courses with in 1987-1988, namely Jitendra Malik, Alvin Despain, David Messerschmitt, John Ousterhout, and Richard Karp, are all living today, my first-year graduate math course professors – except the younger Polish visiting professor I have not re-identified – namely William Bade, Gerhard Hochschild, Abraham Seidenberg, and Tosio Kato, have all passed away.

The first to go, at an intriguing time from my vantage point, was Seidenberg, on May 3, 1988, only weeks short of his 72nd birthday on June 2, in Milan, Italy:

“The distinguished mathematician and historian of mathematics Abraham Seidenberg, who taught at Berkeley for 42 years, died in Milan, Italy, on May 3, 1988. He had been born in Washington, D.C., on June 2, 1916 and received his B.A. degree at the University of Maryland in 1937 and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1943 before joining the Department of Mathematics at Berkeley as Instructor in 1945. He became Professor in 1958 and Professor, Emeritus in 1987. His career included a Guggenheim Fellowship, Visiting Professorships at Harvard and at the University of Milan, and numerous invited addresses, including several series of lectures at the University of Milan, the National University of Mexico, and at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. At the time of his death, he was in the midst of another series of lectures at the University of Milan.”

(“Abraham Seidenberg, Mathematics: Berkeley: 1916-1988 Professor Emeritus”, by M. A. Rosenlicht, G. P. Hochschild and P. Lieber, 1989, University of California)

May 3, 1988, only days before my graduation commencement in mid-May.

This wasn’t the first such timing for me. As in Part 2, 10 years earlier in February 1978 when I entered Sun Yat-sen University mathematics department as a freshman, around that time Professor Lifu Jiang ( 姜立夫) passed away, who was the most senior professor at SYSU and a former teacher of Berkeley MSRI founding director Shiing-shen Chern.

Jiang was in a sense the founder of modern mathematics in China, as the founding director of the Institute of Mathematics at Academia Sinica – today’s Chinese Academy of Sciences – in the 1940s, but with Chern soon in actual charge:

“… The Institute had been in preparation since 1942 in wartime Kunming, but all its members had full-time jobs at universities, and sometimes even abroad. The director Chiang Li-fu (Jiang Lifu 姜立夫) left China for the USA in May 1946, and actual leadership passed into the hands of S.S. Chern, then a professor at Tsinghua University, who had become a leading expert on differential geometry during his studies in Hamburg and Paris in the mid-1930s. S.S. Chern had spent the years 1943-5 at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and arrived back in Shanghai in April 1946. He turned the Preparatory Office into a kind of graduate school …”

(Jiri Hudecek, Reviving Ancient Chinese Mathematics: Mathematics, History and Politics in the Work of Wu Wen-Tsun, 2014, Routledge)

Prof. Jiang lived to 87 years of age, passing on February 3, 1978:

“Lifu Jiang, original name Jiang Jiangzuo (born July 4, 1890, Zhejiang—died February 3, 1978, Guangzhou), mathematician, educator, founder of Department of Mathematics of Nankai University, and once was the director of Institute of Mathematics at the Academia Sinica.”

(“Lifu Jiang”, November 10, 2015, School of Mathematical Sciences, Nankai University)

That was the 3rd day of the month in which I became a mathematics freshman, when Jiang died. Then 10 years later, on the 3rd day of the month of my mathematics Ph.D. graduation, Seidenberg died.

Quite an eerie coincidence, given that I was the only member of the SYSU and UC Berkeley mathematics departments at those respective times.

Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence, or it was a more serious one, as Jiang had been a University of California graduate:

“Jiang graduated from University of California with a B.S. degree in 1915. In 1919, Jiang received a doctor of sciences degree from Harvard University.”

(November 10, 2015, School of Mathematical Sciences, Nankai University)

Was that Berkeley, math? In 1915 Berkeley was still the only UC campus, when what would later become UCLA was still a part of San Jose State University.

(“University of California”, Wikipedia)

Jiang’s original name was Jiang Jiangzuo (姜蔣​​佐); according to Chinese media sources his undergraduate education was at Berkeley, and his English name was Chan-Chan Tsoo as in his Harvard doctoral thesis.

(“数学家姜立夫”, August 13, 2002,  Xinuanet)

Now I can find “Chan Chan Tsoo” in the UC official record, published in 1916 by the University of California Press, Berkeley. Chan, i.e., Jiang, was the only obvious Asian on the graduation honor roll of December 20, 1915:

“Of the 165 who received the bachelor’s degree on December 20, 1915, twenty-six received “Honors” as follows: Anatomy, Alverda Elva Reische; Astronomy, Charles Donald Shane; Drawing, Elva Britomarte Spencer; English, Samuel Francis Batdorf, Sidney Coe Howard, Isabelle Elizabeth de Meyer, Neil Louise Long; French, Belle Elliott Bickford; German, Jennie Schwab; Hygiene, Florence Harriett Cadman; Latin, Mildred Goyette; Mathematics, Maryly Ida Krusi, Chan Chan Tsoo; Philosophy, Ruth Eloise Beckwith, Ada Rebecca Bray Fike; Physical Education, Frederick Warren Cozens; Zoology, Ebba Olga Hilda Braese, Pirie Davidson, Dorothy Sherman Rogers, Katherine Badeau Rogers, Frances Ansley Torrey; College of Mining, Omar Allen Cavins; College of Agriculture, Laurence Wood Fowler, Amram Khazanoff, William E. Gilfillan, Edith Henrietta Phillips.”

(“GRADUATED WITH HONORS”, 1916, Page 272, The University of California Chronicle An Official Record, Volume XVIII, University of California Press, Berkeley)

It looked like in those Zoology days the only subjects the university students were good at were English and Agriculture!

And maybe a little Mathematics and Philosophy?

Jiang was a professor at SYSU since 1952:

“… Jiang helped found and was the director of Institute of Mathematics at the Academia Sinica. Jiang founded department of Mathematics at Lingnan University in 1949, he taught there and Zhongshan University in 1952.”

(November 10, 2015, School of Mathematical Sciences, Nankai University)

1952 was when the private Christian Lingnan University was taken over by Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) University, on the decision of the Chinese Communist government as noted in my November 2010 blog post.

(November 22, 2010, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

While Abraham Seidenberg at UC Berkeley might not be as prominent as Lifu Jiang at Sun Yat-sen University, he was a brilliant research mathematician:

“Seidenberg’s writings, as were his lectures, are noted for their meticulous clarity of expression. His publications in pure mathematics include some very influential work in commutative algebra, notably his joint paper with I.S. Cohen that greatly simplified the existing proofs of the so-called going-up and going-down theorems of ideal theory… His papers on differential algebra include several on … the so-called Lefschetz-Seidenberg principle of differential algebra, an analog of the Lefschetz principle for algebraic geometry, which says, very roughly, that algebraic geometry of characteristic zero is the same as algebraic geometry over the field of complex numbers. Another famous result is the Tarski-Seidenberg theorem, to the effect that there is a decision procedure for algebra over the real number field and for elementary geometry, first proved by Tarski using complicated logical machinery, then restated more simply by Seidenberg and given a much simpler mathematical proof.

…

Among Seidenberg’s publications are a large number of articles on the mathematics of primitive peoples and on the history of mathematics, in particular on ancient mathematics. Most of these articles are in support of his thesis that both arithmetic and geometry have their origins in ritual. His sources are the anthropological literature and Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Indian and Chinese documents. Although this work was a center of some controversy, in large part because of the general aversion among anthropologists to diffusion theories of culture, important aspects of it have received striking vindication. …”

(M. A. Rosenlicht, G. P. Hochschild and P. Lieber, 1989, University of California)

No doubt Seidenberg’s English was better than his peers’, and he could help improve what they did if he figured out what they were doing.

The Berkeley math professors were among the top researchers in their fields, even ones like Seidenberg who have not been awarded major prizes. I remember Professor Shoshichi Kobayashi, on the occasion of a dinner at his home at the invitation of Mei, telling me that the department’s hiring criteria required the successful candidate to be within the top 3 or 5 in his or her research field.

There is another way to look at Seidenberg’s brilliance and generosity. Born in the United States Capital and educated in Maryland of that region, Seidenberg grew to love Italy, especially Milan, spending a significant amount of his time there lecturing on mathematics, as told in the UC article on his death.

Even though Berkeley’s Seidenberg live a life some 15 years shorter than SYSU’s Lifu Jiang, his wife Ebe Cagli Seidenberg, an Italian Jewish writer whom he had met at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, later moved to Rome and lived to 87 – the same age as Jiang.

(“Ebe Cagli Seidenberg”, Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London; and, “Abraham Seidenberg”, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland)

Like Zeke Wang mentioned earlier, son of my father’s former graduate adviser Prof. Wang Qi, Prof. Lifu Jiang’s son Boju Jiang (姜伯駒), more senior than Zeke, studied and then taught mathematics at Peking University since the 1950s, and Zeke later became a student of his and then a colleague. Like his contemporary Peking University professor Gongqing Zhang, mentioned earlier, Prof. Boju Jiang spent time as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley during my time there.

Shortly before my graduation, my Berkeley biophysics Ph.D. student friend Dar, mentioned earlier, suggested that I buy a car and bring it to Canada, for the reasons that a new immigrant’s belongings were free of customs duties and consumer cars were about 30% cheaper in the U.S.

Dar suggested, further, that I consider the Milano sedan, made by the Italian auto maker Fiat under the Alfa Romeo brand, a car his professor had liked very much during a recent European sabbatical – in Italy if I remember right – and brought two back.

Milano, that is Milan in Italian, no?

Dar knew more than I did about many things, not just quantum physics. In a December 2009 blog post I recalled about a Berkeley girl student I had had some infatuations with, and what Dar might have found out:

“And speaking of the Justine Bateman-lookalike student I had come across often at Berkeley in the 1980s, I returned to Berkeley in the summer of 1990 for a research stay when I was already teaching at UBC in Vancouver, and one evening a Berkeley old-time friend “Dar” who was also from Guangzhou, and I went to a Telegraph Avenue pub for a drink, and “Shawna” was sitting right there with a boy friend.

“Dar” has since finished his post-doctoral work at the Salk Institute in San Diego and at Stanford, and now works in Houston, Texas.”

(““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou (Part 2)”, December 15, 2009, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

There was no “Alfa Romeo and Juliet” in the plans of some, was there? Now in 2015 there is “Juliet and Alfa Romeo”, finally, but made in Slovenia and not – Ivo Babuska’s – Czech Republic.

(“FNE at Slovenian Film Festival in Portoroz: Juliet and Alfa Romeo”, by Damijan Vinter, September 14, 2015, Film New Europe)

In any case, the Milano model was recent and well equipped and Dar said it did not sell well in North America and so a buyer might get a good deal. Indeed, visiting a few dealerships, including one in San Jose with Dar, I found that the existing 1987 stock was selling slowly – at around $18,000 and equipped like a luxury car costing $10,000 more, but Alfa Romeo’s quality and maintenance costs were not reassuring.

In the end, the one I bought for Canada was a slightly used one costing around $15,000. The most appealing feature for me was the anti-lock braking system, ABS, available only in high-end cars at that point, something that was to be very useful in snowy climates, such as in Canada.

But I did not expect that the ABS was to become one of the faultiest parts of my car, as I recalled in my January 2013 blog post:

“… my previous car in Vancouver and Honolulu, an Alfa Romeo Milano sedan, had an elusive, borderline malfunctioning anti-lock braking system.”

(January 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

I arrived in Vancouver on August 24, 1988, unaware that it happened to be an anniversary of the most powerful domestic terror bombing in the United States up to that point, that had occurred in 1970 targeting none other than the Army Mathematics Research Center at Wisconsin-Madison – the place my undergraduate adviser had highly recommended for my graduate study.

I wrote about it in my March 2011 blog post, that the Army math research center headed by the mathematician J. Barkley Rosser was the target but the physics department bore the losses, and that one of the killers, Leo Frederick Burt, then escaped to Canada and was never caught:

“When I applied for graduate study in the United States Professor Li seriously recommended the U. S. Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison …

Little did I know that the Army Math Research Center had been a target of deadly violence, by anti-Vietnam War students in the 1970 “Sterling Hall bombing”: led by the mathematician J. Barkley Rosser the Center survived the most powerful domestic bombing prior to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing but much of the Physic department’s laboratories were destroyed and a talented postdoc researcher, Robert Fassnacht, was killed; one of the perpetrators, university rowing athlete Leo Frederick Burt, escaped to Canada and remains one of America’s Most Wanted to this day.

…

I arrived in Vancouver on August 24, 1988 – unaware that coincidentally it was an anniversary date of the 1970 Sterling Hall Bombing in Madison.”

(March 29, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Actually, I didn’t just arrive in Vancouver but drove across the U.S.-Canada border. The date of my arrival wasn’t exactly my choice, as the tentative date range was agreed upon with UBC computer science acting head Uri Ascher – he happened to have previously worked at the Wisconsin-Madison army math research center – in consideration of the Fall 1988 semester schedule and the time needed for my housing search, while Uri arranged in advance for my temporary stay at the Faculty Club. My car was then shipped from Berkeley to Seattle and I booked a San Francisco-Seattle flight for a day when my car would be available for the 140-mile drive to Vancouver.

What I didn’t know was not only it being an anniversary of a past U.S. army math research center bombing but also, on the eve of my crossing into Canada, the death of Hans Lewy:

“He died on August 23, 1988 in Berkeley. He and Helen had recently returned from a trip to Europe where he delivered his last paper, [73], in honor of Ennio De Giorgi.”

(D. Kinderlehrer, in David Kinderlehrer ed., Volume 1, 2002, Birkhäuser)

Jesus Christ, a second Berkeley math professor death with an Italian factor in the summer of 1988 – this one a leading mathematical prize winner, and related to the Italian mathematician Ennio De Giorgi.

Recall as in Part 2, De Giorgi was the Italian mathematician in Pisa who had proved a theorem before John Nash did in the 1950s, and still Nash’s credit for it contributed to his receiving the Abel Prize in May 2015, and unfortunately to the deaths of him and his wife in a taxi accident returning from the Oslo ceremony!

In Part 2 I have wondered about the metaphor of “vampire”, as opposed to “guardian angel”, over the circumstances of the deaths, that the Nash couple had a limo service prescheduled for 5 hours later and Lisa Macbride, daughter of Nash’s Abel Prize co-recipient Louis Nirenberg, suggested they take a taxi, and the taxi driver turned out to be named Girgis.

As for Hans Lewy, he may have been suffering from cancer, according to his The New York Times obituary at the time:

“Hans Lewy, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, died of leukemia Aug. 23 in Berkeley, where he lived. He was 83 years old.”

(“Dr. Hans Lewy, 83, Mathematics Profesor”, September 2, 1988, The New York Times)

At least it hadn’t been an auto accident. But Lewy’s cancer was not the direct cause of death – his Italian trip was, as later told by his friends such as his former Ph.D. student David Kinderlehrer, quoted earlier, and the mathematical biographer Constance Reid here:

“Lewy became emeritus in 1972, but he did not stop doing mathematics. Even in the summer of his death he gave a talk at a meeting in Cortona, Italy, on new work that involved attacking the Carathéodory conjecture from a different, variational angle. He had hoped to finish off the problem, but the complete solution was not to be granted to him. While in Europe, following a strenuous schedule in order to see as many as possible of his European friends, he caught a cold that developed into pleurisy. On his return to Berkeley he was hospitalized, fatally ill. He died on August 23, 1988, two months before his eighty-fourth birthday.”

(Constance Reid, in David Kinderlehrer ed., 2002, Birkhäuser)

It was only a cold, that then turned into pleurisy – two deaths in 4 months due to visiting Italy, one might have to wonder about the condition of public hygiene there.

Hans Lewy had a lifelong love of Italy since 1929:

“In 1929, again on Courant’s recommendation, Lewy obtained a year’s fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. He spent the first semester in Rome – the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Italy, to which he was to return on countless occasions – and the second semester in Paris. …”

(Constance Reid, in David Kinderlehrer ed., 2002, Birkhäuser)

For over two decades, Hans did collaborative research at the University of Pisa where De Giorgi was:

“In 1964-1965 Lewy accepted an invitation from the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa. During that time, Pisa was achieving stature as a vigorous world center with Andreotti, De Giorgi, and Stampacchia among its leaders. Here, Lewy helped create the emerging area of variational inequalities with Stampacchia. Their work was fundamental to the growth of the subject, introducing new types of free boundary problems. He published in this area through the 1980s. In 1969-1970, he returned to Rome on the invitation of the Accademia dei Lincei. He was elected a Foreign Member in 1972. He also retired in 1972, continuing his research with undiminished vitality.”

(D. Kinderlehrer, in David Kinderlehrer ed., 2002, Birkhäuser)

Hans Lewy’s relationship with China can also be traced back a long time. In 1947 when Hans married his wife Helen Crosby, they spent 3 months of their around-the-world honeymoon in China, including teaching mathematics there:

“ In 1947 he and Helen Crosby, an artist, writer, and translator, were married. Their honeymoon included a trip around the world, beginning with a return to Europe. Also included was a two month stay in Chengtu, Szechuan (Chengdu, Sichuan) where Lewy gave a course on water waves and a third month visiting other institutions in China. Still under Nationalist rule, China was rarely visited by westerners in those years.”

(D. Kinderlehrer, in David Kinderlehrer ed., 2002, Birkhäuser)

Hans became fond of the Chinese, calling them “the Italians of the Orient”:

“Lewy became very fond of the Chinese people, whom he liked to describe as “the Italians of the Orient”.”

(Constance Reid, in David Kinderlehrer ed., 2002, Birkhäuser)

Perhaps his “guardian angel” was no longer present – when he died only weeks short of his 84th birthday of October 20 – for the talented Hans Lewy, who spoke multiple languages fluently and “actively studied Chinese up to the time of his death”:

“Lewy was the first son and second child of Max and Greta (Rösel) Lewy. His father was a merchant who dealt in accessories for women’s millinery, and his mother before her marriage had been a teacher of German in an expatriate enclave in Hungary. Her interest and ability in languages were inherited by her son. In addition to a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin, which he had received in his Gymnasium days, he was so fluent in French and Italian that he was frequently mistaken for a native on the streets of Paris and Rome. He could converse in Russian, once delivering a lecture in that language, and he actively studied Chinese up to the time of his death. …”

(Constance Reid, in David Kinderlehrer ed., 2002, Birkhäuser)

In his youth, Hans could have chosen to become a professional musician, as his wife Helen reminisced:

“The combination of mathematics and music, while not uncommon, especially in the Europe of  Hans Lewy’s time, was, in his case, serious enough to force him to make, in his teens, a difficult career choice. He played the violin, the viola and the piano with mastery, and, at times in his life also the clarinet and the cello. He composed many string quartets—which unfortunately were lost,—and at least one string trio …

…

His parents would not permit the unusual skills of their son to be exploited, until, under pressure from his teacher, they agreed when he was 16 to allow him to perform in public, for one time only: the concert took place in Bautzen in July, 1920. …

…

Actually the teenager was allowed another performance before the public; it took place also in Bautzen, in October of the same year. This time he was soloist for Mozart’s D-sharp violin concerto. The reviews were, to say the least, enthusiastic. Here are excerpts…:

Bautzner Tageblatt: “… Mozart’s splendid work was interpreted with classic poise and superior precision, and the youthful violinist received rich applause that came from the heart.”

The Bautzner Nachrichten review hailed him as a “Virtuoso” and “Wunderkind with true Mozartian charm” and predicted for him a great future as a musician.

…

His father favored mathematics; his mother was not sure; and he, of course, wanted both.

In the end mathematics won, and he soon left home for his studies in Göttingen. There he played with the city orchestra …”

(“The Music in Hans Lewy’s Life”, by Helen Lewy, in David Kinderlehrer ed., 2002, Birkhäuser)

In August 1988 when I drove into Canada, the other Hans I had known, i.e., Kezheng’s Farmers Insurance agent, was no longer my auto insurance agent. By 1984 I no longer shared Kezheng’s old Ford but had jointly bought a used Datsun with a Chinese visiting scholar studying law, also by the family name Lu (陸), who later became an international trade lawyer in Beijing; establishing a good driving record then allowed me to switch to a State Farm Insurance policy with a cheaper rate.

The Ford had an auto transmission, but the Datsun and the Alfa Romeo were stick-shift cars. I had learned to drive the stick-shift in 1983-1984, taught by a musician friend, a Chinese orchestra conductor and composer who had come to UC Berkeley as a visiting music scholar, earned a San Francisco State University master’s degree, become a successful music teacher, worked as the music director for a North Berkeley Christian church, and excelled as an organizer for Bay Area community music events, including a Chinese music concert at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall which she conducted. She also co-signed my auto loan for the Milano.

When this talented female musician died of cancer in 1991, she was only 48.

(Continuing to Part 5)