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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol. 37 No. 3. March 20, 1974

Books

page 14

Books

I.T.T.: Stronger than any state

The Sovereign State. The Secret History of ITT:

Drawing of a Victorian man reading a book

ITT is the stuff from which a drama could be written. All the elements are there; untold wealth and power to be pedalled and the fate of nations hanging in the balance. Anthony Sampson, the author of the excellent 'Anatomies' of Britain has now turned his attention to the people, the workings and history of ITT.

International Telephone and Telegraph ranks eleventh by sales in the multinational corporations that have developed in the western world this century. Most of them have concentrated on the United States but ITT is different. It began in Puerto Rico and never really found a home base, gaining its first major contract in Spain, spreading through Europe and only more recently concentrating in the United States. ITT is also a conglomerate which means that it deals in items as diverse as communications, hotels, insurance, housing, education, food, printing and car hire.

Chairman & President Geneen

Chairman & President Geneen

Growth, growth, growth.

Sampson traces the development of ITT from its origins at the hands of the bucaneer entrepreneur Sosthenes Behn. Born in the Virgin Islands when it was a Dutch colony, Behn had a Danish father and French mother: suitably multinational. He utilised his communications systems not only to make profit but as an intelligence gathering network. Information gained from eavesdropping was used to anticipate and pressure governments from Spain to the Argentine. In Germany ITT collaborated with the Nazi leaders. Behn frequently met with Goering and Hitler even during the war years. Focke-Wulf, the aircraft manufacturers were 28% owned by ITT through a subsiduary. In 1967 ITT received $27 million in compensation from the US Government for damage to Focke-Wulf plants by Allied bombing.

Monthly Meeting of International Telephone and Telegraph Executives in Brussels

Monthly Meeting of International Telephone and Telegraph Executives in Brussels

Of course there were many who were suspicious of ITT, even in those early days. Antitrust legislation was passed in the United States in 1934 specifically directed against the expansionist, monopolist tendencies shown by ITT. The FBI also kept tabs on ITT and US government data on the company is incredibly extensive, gleaned from surveillance and Senate and Judicial hearings. It is this unique knowledge which has been extensively used by Sampson in his book.

After the war was over for Hitler, Behn rapidly rebuilt his shattered ITT empire in Germany, even as the fighting continued. He was awarded the medal of merit by the US for his technical contributions to the allies war effort. In the social and political upheaval that followed the war ITT played a manipulatory role. In Hungary some of its agents were caught and were executed by the government. Meanwhile ITT employed a combination of fraud and its old boy network to attempt to pressure the Canadian, British and US governments into an Atlantic cable scheme. Sampson comments on these adventures, "the operations in Budapest and London were of course of quite different kinds; but both suggest that the companies own diplomatic and intelligence services were more effective, and more ruthless, than those of the Western nations it dealt with."

Sosthenes Behn retired at a ripe old age and the hierarchy of ITT needed a replacement for this remarkable individual. From Raytheon came Harold Sidney Geneen.

Sampson is infatuated with the character of this man and thinks of him as some combination of Captain Ahab, a spider and a master accountant, often making Geneen indistinguishable from his company which apparently is in turn a combination of white whale and elephant. Behn was the creator of ITT; Geneen the builder who reads accounts as a hobby. He is the only man aware of how the vast organisation fits together and is maintained and he constantly manipulates both businessmen and politicians for ITT. Nader described him as being more interested in power than profit.

Profit however is the means of his power. At this level of activity profit becomes more of an abstract identity, takeovers are achieved by offers of ITT stock, termed "Chinese money" and the profit announcements to shareholders show a remarkably steady increase by turning assets into profit as needed. This process is called "Hot pants accounting". Accounting has become for ITT a branch of creative writing.

ITT is thus a secret outfit that reveals only what it wants to reveal. A vast army of public relations men lobby throughout the world to present ITT and ITT's interests in the best possible light. This means of course, one thing in one place and quite another somewhere else. In an anti-trust case ITT was a provider of capital to a company in local investigations but incredibly at the same time ITT personnel were saying in Washington that ITT needed the capital from this company to compete overseas.

Such duplicity does not survive within ITT. When Geneen took over he was horrified at the lack of reports or checking. Geneen's paramount demand is that he wants "no surprises", every economic trend in the world must be anticipated for ITT's super planning ethos. Planning, reports and Big Brother Geneen create amazing tensions. Sampson describes the look of ITT executives as "shellshocked", but because of the huge salaries few want out. Geneen, who is the highest paid executive in the US himself, has "got them by their limousines".

Only recently have much of the workings of ITT become public beginning with the Republican party convention scandal in 1972. Geneen promised underwriting money to the GOP for their San Diego-convention, ostensibly to help promote an ITT subsidiary hotel there. The convention fell through but ITT had an anti-trust suit against it dropped by the Justice Department a matter of days afterwards.

Cartoon of a man from ITT as a puppet master holding a German bomber and American warship

The scandal burst. Top Nixon underlings were implicated in the deal worked out between ITT and the Justice Department. H.R. Haldeman, Erlichmen, Dean, Stans, Mitchel, Agnew, Colson and Kliendenst all had some role to play.

The characters that Sampson prefers to bring out are not Nixon's functionaries though but Geneen's. Felix Rohatyn and Andre Meyer of Lazard's bank, Ned Gerrity the PR man, Bergerac of ITT in Europe, the Washington chief Merriam and the lobbyist Dita Beard. Mrs Beard was at the centre of the Republican Party scandal, one of only three female executives of the three thousand that ITT employs. It is these people that Sampson dwells upon as he uncovers ITT inextensive detail. It is the personal emphasis that makes the book highly readable, that makes it indeed drama.

One rather recent act in the ITT play concerned the election of the late Salvador Allende to the presidency of Chile. ITT had extensive interests in Chile and feared lossing them so first of all a rival candidate was backed and then when Allende was elected by popular vote ITT plotted to have him overthrown before the congressional elections. John McCone, a former head of the CIA and now an ITT executive, met with Nixon men such as Haig and worked out elaborate plans to have the Chilean economy thrown into chaos and the Allende Government discredited. Geneen talked about "freedom dying every-where" in reference to Chile under Allende: he is no doubt pleased with the junta.

ITT is quite prepared to deal in the Soviet Union though which says a great deal for both ITT and the USSR. When the full extent of ITT's dealings in Chile became public Allende nationalised ITT's enterprises in Chile without compensation and ITT's insurance claim in the US failed to get redress there either.

It is the personal emphasis that makes Sampson's book highly readable. ITT is a state itself, peopled by ITT nationals who live a sort of ITT land, they live in Sheraton Hotels and Levitt homes, eat Wonder bread, insure with Hartford Insurance and drive Avis cars, they rarely need to leave the ITT or ITT subsidiary life. In Sampson's eyes this makes ITT an arch-type or at least some sort of new breed. The old financial empires like JP Morgan's or Rockefeller! were relatively 'good'. Corrupt perhaps on occasions but certainly responsible and usually accountable. ITT is one of a select group along with such conglomerates as Gulf and Western and Ling-Temco-Vought, they are accountant's creations, based on mergers and takeovers not development.

Sampson thinks that only national governments can stop such monsters as ITT. He thus draws back from the conclusions that his data would strongly indicate. That is, the multinational corporations are too big even for the strongest government. Incredible pressures are brought to bear on personnel in government no matter how well intentioned they are; many finish up working for ITT. Revelations subsequent to Sampson's book show that the pressures on the Justice Department to drop the anti-trust case included Nixon himself. Arhcibald Cox said after his dismissal as the special Watergate Prosecutor that the most important secrets at the top of US government were related to ITT.

ITT, like Nixon, is embroiled in scandal. Both could find themselves sacrificial lambs to the ethic of capitalism. Being found out was their wrongdoing, for there are many other equally infamous imperialists who are still getting away with their crimes. Sampson does not see that only the people affected by the activities of companies like ITT can stop them, be they Chilean peasants, workers in South Africa where ITT is rapidly expanding, or ITT employed journalists forced into prostitution. Sovereign State is thus a narrative, a drama of power and manipulation in one organisation. It is an incisive and very readable study but its lessons must be drawn in a wider context.

page 15

Whose Heaven, Whose Earth?:

If you do away with the yoke,
the clenched fist, the wicked word,
if you give your bread to the hungry
and relief to the persecuted
your light will shine in the darkness
and your shadows will become like noon.

—Isaiah 58: 9 — 10.

800 years after that was written, Jesus Christ preached his message of love. The poor were still bound to the yoke of slavery, oppressed, maligned and starved. 2000 years later, Christians who bother to look will see much the same situation in Africa, Asia, South America, and, yes even here in New Zealand.

For the first time in our 2000 year history however, we Christians are faced with an alternate philosophy which has proved extremely effective in freeing the oppressed not only does it "proclaim liberty to captives" but it creates the situation and the awareness in which the oppressed can free themselves. This is what Pope John XXIII spoke of when he said "who can deny that these movements, insofar as they conform to the dictates of right reason and are interpreters of the lawful aspirations of the human person, contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval?"

These people are Marxists, and it would seem that thoughtful co-operation with them is well in keeping with Church teaching.

Whose Heaven. Whose Earth? is the story of two people, a nun and a priest who attempted to put the teaching of Isaiah, Jesus and the Pope into practice and found themselves thwarted by the Church authorities in Guatemala.

It tells of their gradual alienation from the mainstream Church and of their transformation from Father Thomas Melville and Sister Marian Peter, priest and religious, conservative, rabidly anti-communist Catholics into Marjorie and Tom Melville, married, excommunicated and revolutionary Catholics, imprisoned for burning draft files in Cantonsville, USA.

Father Melville began his religious life as a seminarian in the Maryknoll seminary. He recalls that they had television installed so that they could watch Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate Subcommittee. McCarthy, he recalls "became a big hero to most of us". Sent to Guatamela, he became the instigator of a "land reform" programme which involved the transportation of peasants to more fertile areas where the land would be farmed co-operatively. Finally he realised that his programme would basically change nothing only a few peasants would be allowed to move and the rest would remain as before enslaved on the big plantations. Worse still the project was being used by the government to convince the liberal factions of the US government that they were doing something to 'destroy poverty'.

Sister Marian was a teacher in a school for the daughters of the Guatamelan upper class. Gradually she became aware of the hypocrisy and self-deception this involved. Outside people were starving. Inside she taught the daughters of those who starved them to become the wives of those who would starve their children.

She too, tried reforms, she set up a free school for the children of the poor. Like Father Melville she realised that this was doing nothing more than treat the symptoms of this oppressive society and that some sort of assault on the system itself was needed. This point was made especially clear when the school authorities built a fence around the free school to prevent the "contamination" of the wealthy girls.

Eventually Tom and Marian met and dedicated themselves to building awareness of this need among their fellow clergy and religious. They also worked among Catholic university students, and it was through them that they came in contact with the Guatemalan Liberation Front, a guerrilla movement operating in the urban areas of Guatamela.

Sister Marion was the first of the pair to join the guerrillas, and she convinced Father Melville of its value. Their involvement was discovered at an early stage and they escaped through Mexico to the USA where they were imprisoned in 1968 for burning draft files.

They planned (indeed they may have done so) to return to Guatamela to continue their fight for a people's right to be human.

I have my doubts, however about the advisability of violent revolutionary activity at the time they employed these tactics. The peasants and workers' understanding of their situation was, and is now, at a low level. Any movement such as theirs, based around intellectuals, is doomed. Without the support of the, masses, no one can wage revolution and any attempt to do so leads to an intensifying of oppression so that any educational work accompanying the revolution becomes impossible. Hence, in the long run, it must be seen that their, actions favoured the status quo.

Nonetheless, this book stands as a powerful indictment of those Catholics who ignore the message of Christ and the Church in calling on people everywhere to fight for an end to injustice and exploitation in all its forms. It was the failure of these people to do this that drove Tom and Marjorie to the extreme actions they involved themselves in and it is these people, 'Christians' who support the status quo who ensure the persecution of Christianity in any country where our Marxists brothers and sisters lead the people to revolution.

"A Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in a state of mortal sin...."

Father Camilo Torres

Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays:

"Since we are looked up to as moral leaders, and since it is our responsibility to guide the faithful, some of us have decided, after six years of deliberation, that the war may be immoral."

"Since we are looked up to as moral leaders, and since it is our responsibility to guide the faithful, some of us have decided, after six years of deliberation, that the war may be immoral."

There are two types of critics of NZ literature; the creative and the analytic. The creative critic faced with a work, void of quality, wit, ideas, originality, in short anything but words, tends to read and write things into the work, that the original author was unaware of, and praise or damn it in terms of strengths and weaknesses that it doesn't possess. A refinement of this method is to head up an essay on a particular author or work and then subtly ignore the official subject and discuss instead the critic's favourite hobbyhorse. This method is legitimate, except that competent creative critics would tend also to be competent creative writers and as the number of living genuine creative writers in NZ can be counted on the thumb of one hand, most creative critics end up sounding pretentious or ridiculous.

The analytic critic however does something quite different. He approaches his subject honestly, and attempts to analyse the work and highlight its qualities and weaknesses. This sounds commendable in theory, but in practice it rarely succeeds; the poverty of NZ literature means that the analytic critic rarely rises from being dull.

Mr Pearson is of the analytic type and strangely enough manages to avoid dullness. His book is a collection of his reviews of NZ books, essays on aspects of NZ life and tributes to Winston Rhodes and James Baxter. The pieces have been written at various times between 1952 and 1973. The point of placing book reviews between hard covers is dubious. Reviews are ephemeral things and should not be placed like dried pressed flowers between a books pages. Some of the reviews cover works equally ephemeral, though there is some sensible reviewing of works by Shadbolt, Duggan and Hilliard. The tone of these reviews however are dictated by conditions that are no longer relevant. The reviews are included presumably to enable the three or four essays that provide the worth of the book to be published in book form.

The most important of the essays is the title one, "Fretful Sleepers", which as itssubtitle indicates is "A Sketch of NZ Behaviour and its Implications for the Artist". That it was written in 1952 make one wary of it; that its comments and conclusions on the NZ way of life are chillingly relevant is an indictment that NZ's essential character has changed, developed or grown little in that time.

Mr Pearson condemns the average NZ adult life for its conformity, its narrowness and lack of rich emotional experience. The New Zealander is one who "has made the grade by doing violence to himself, by sneering at his impulses and illusions" and for whom "the evil is to disagree or be different".

It is the New Zealander whose life revolves around his mates and the pub, who fears intimacy as an act of disloyalty to the mates, who distrusts and represses his private feelings and sensitivity, thereby destroying his capacity for spontaneity, imagination or joy, leaving himself only the security of his mates and a continual sneer for those who do not fit into this system. This sneer is turned not only on the arty, the creative, the sensitive or the spontaneous but leads also to an unhealthy distrust of other cultures and an arrogant enthnocentrism. This essay is an important one and is obviously far more extensive than this brief summary permits. It is also written in a coherent, direct style that passes occasionally into the sublime: "Any platform statement in NZ is suspect: the orator is only emptying his lungs to fill an occasion."

There is another extremely important essay, "Under Pressure to Integrate", discussing the situation of Maoris in 1962. This again is relevant to the present in its essence, but its arguments are backed up by many facts and figures and it is more than a little annoying to find the author continually justifying himself in terms of figures from 1960 or even 1957. One wishes that he had spent a little time revising this essay for the purposes of a 1974 publication, rather than leave it as it is; 40% outdated statistical fact and 60% truth. I can't summarise the essay any better than Mr Pearson does in its final chapter which is quoted here almost in its entirety.

"The way of life we have been trying to "integrate" on to the Maoris is a spiritually impoverished version of a deeply anxious, individualistic, and often sadistic (and dirty-minded) Euro-American culture. If instead of forcing them into our uniform, we would allow Maoris to be themselves, we could at once rid ourselves of our intermittment worry about what we are "doing for the Maoris" and at the same time, they could enter more confidently into biracial New Zealand activities to our enrichment."

The other writings in this book revolve also around these three themes, NZ life, NZ literature and the racial question, or takes them on two or three at a time. Mr Pearson does in a minor way for NZ what George Orwell did for England, looks at us without affection, but clearly and without sentiment, illusion or doctrinal blinders.

As Associate Professor of English for Auckland University he also provides a superb though unintentional piece of irony, which we shall in our resentment aim at the clowns responsible for Victoria's English Syllabus:

"In a time when this years novel is on next year's course, it is perhaps not easy to imagine a time when (since the English course stopped at 1910) students were grateful to a lecturer who put on voluntary courses on ' modern literature".

The book on the whole is well worth reading, especially the two essays mentioned above, but since much of it would only be of value or interest to a student of NZ literature, whether it is worth paying $6 for a copy is not something I intend to pass judgement on.