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A colorful yet enigmatic figure in the postwar American racialist movement was the well-to-do anti-Jewish businessman DeWest “West” Hooker (1918–1999). His portrait emerges primarily through self-descriptions he provided to leading white activists (the most notable of whom was George Lincoln Rockwell) over a period of forty years. He appears to have been a WASP well-endowed with the gift of gab. In particular, Rockwell’s immensely colorful portrait of the man in his autobiography This Time the World, published in 1963 but written in 1960, more than any other source appears to have established the legend of DeWest Hooker.
I have pieced together DeWest Hooker’s story as best I can from numerous scattered accounts, all brief, including Ed Fields, “West Hooker Sought First Christian TV Network: Wes Hooker is Dead,” The Truth At Last No. 417 (n.d., but c. early 2000), Rockwell’s autobiography, Michael Collins Piper’s references in his books Final Judgment (6th ed., 2004) and The Judas Goats (2006), brief references to Hooker by Rockwell biographers William H. Schmaltz (Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, 1999; Schmaltz interviewed Hooker in Washington D.C. on Sept. 30, 1993) and Frederick J. Simonelli (American Fuehrer, 1999), and former entrepreneur, state representative (representing Lighthouse Point, Fla.), and Church of the Creator founder Ben Klassen’s account of his 1988 meeting with Hooker in Trials, Tribulations, Triumphs: A History of the Church of the Creator (1993).
In Final Judgment Piper refers to Hooker as “a personal long-time friend of mine, international businessman and long-time patriotic leader.”
For those interested, Schmaltz’s biography of Rockwell, despite its lurid-sounding title, strikes me as factually more reliable than Simonelli’s, and is quite informative and interesting besides.
Together, these accounts depict, if sketchily, the epitome of the fabulously wealthy, successful, radical old stock WASP-American activist and éminence grise of Jewish and white nationalist myth and legend.
But was there less to Hooker than meets the eye? Rockwell’s portrait of Hooker is so powerful and engaging that it tends to propel the reader unthinkingly along. Still, one might have reservations.
Digging into DeWest Hooker’s background to the limited extent possible, my reaction was like that of the perplexed character in the old TV commercial—”Where’s the beef?”
Some Background
Hooker was born Lendrum De West Murrelle Jr., but upon his mother’s marriage to John Palmer Hooker, his name was changed by adoption to DeWest Hooker. He had a younger brother, Enoch Ensley Hooker, born in 1919, as well as several half-siblings, and was descended, on his mother’s side, from Englishman John Beecher, who immigrated to New Haven, Connecticut in 1637.
Hooker’s stepfather, John Palmer Hooker, was a 9th generation descendant of Congregationalist minister Thomas Hooker (the information about English Anglican theologian Richard Hooker at Rootsweb is faulty), the Puritan founder of the Colony of Connecticut.
White racialist Ed Fields says that Hooker was born “to socially prominent parents in Greenwich, Connecticut.”
However, Hooker’s 1999 Washington Post obituary states that he was “a native of Memphis.” (His mother was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1892.) He married his first wife in 1946 in Kentucky, and spent the last 15 years of his life in Washington, DC. He is buried in a Virginia cemetery 65 miles south of the capital.
Rockwell wrote that Hooker was a descendant of “the Hooker who signed the Declaration of Independence,” an assertion repeated (but not quoted) by both Ed Fields and Michael Collins Piper. (Piper says “a signer” rather than “the Hooker who signed,” but does not specify the name of the alleged ancestor.)
Unfortunately, no Hooker signed the Declaration—or the Constitution, for that matter. Besides, DeWest Hooker was really a Murrelle, not a Hooker.
Hooker graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1938 he was reported by the Cornell Alumni News as belonging to that university’s secret undergraduate honors society Quill and Dagger (which is today top-heavy with Establishment Jews and women), an analogue of Yale’s Skull and Bones.
He married Mary Glyde “Molly” Barbey (1920–2002) in Louisville, Kentucky in 1946. The couple eventually had 5 children. His wife remarried in 1963, so the two were divorced by that time. Miss Barbey does not appear to have been a member of the DuPont family as stated by Fields. Rockwell said that Hooker’s first wife was a millionaire, but this statement is the sole evidence I’ve seen that Hooker married into wealth. Hooker had one daughter by his Italian-born second wife, Elena Brunelli Hooker, for a total of six children in all.
DeWest Hooker According to Ed Fields
Fields, the co-founder of the National States Rights Party and The Thunderbolt newspaper (later re-named The Truth at Last) was member No. 90 of Hooker’s “Nationalist Party of the U.S.A.,” 224 E. 38th St., NYC, launched in November 1954. Fields, a native Georgian, was not in New York at the time, but attending the Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa.
Fields says Hooker was “a football star at Cornell.” A “Lendrum DeWest Hooker” is mentioned as being a member of the college team in 1936, whether or not he was a star. Fields also states that Hooker “was not only president of his senior class but president of the entire student body” at Cornell. I cannot verify this.
Real fame came in the late 1940s, “when he appeared in every national magazine as the model for Hathaway shirts and wore a patch over one eye as all older readers will recall.” “He was dashingly handsome, and, in the 1940s, was the lead male model for Chesterfield cigarettes and Hathaway shirts.”
This accords with Rockwell’s statement that “He was handsome, so handsome that he made money as a professional model, whom I still see in cigarette ads.”
Fields says that Hooker performed as an actor in the Broadway production of Command Decision (1947) and, indeed, a “West Hooker” is listed in the cast.
Hooker then became a “Broadway producer” (Piper in Judas Goats says his focus was television production) for “the Jewish-owned MCA theatrical agency,” at a salary of $20,000 a year, “considered very high at the time.”
If this is correct, he was evidently a minor figure in the firm. Despite his colorful later “Nazi” history, and Piper’s claim that Hooker managed the MCA contract of Ronald Reagan—factors that should have provoked interest from journalists who have written extensively about the powerful, criminally-connected Hollywood enterprise and the people associated with it—Hooker’s name appears nowhere in any of their books: Dan Moldea’s Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (1986), Dennis McDougal’s The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood (2001), Connie Bruck’s When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent Into Power and Influence (2003), or Gus Russo’s Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Power Brokers (2006).
After leaving MCA, Hooker periodically produced and acted in syndicated television programs.
Fields relates that in February 1953 Hooker launched Film Network, Inc. with the objective, essentially, of establishing a white “television network” (Fields’s term), “our last chance to crack the Marxian-Socialist monopoly of the entire telecasting industry” (1953 Hooker newsletter).
It appears from the brief excerpts from Hooker’s newsletter that Fields displays facsimiles of or quotes from that Hooker in fact proposed launching a television production and distribution company, not a network. This would have entailed selling product to the three existing Jewish systems plus the lone non-Jewish network, DuMont, which went out of business in 1956—a serious flaw in the business plan, given his ideological objectives. Hooker wrote in the proposal,
Such is the aim of Film Network—to create, produce, sell, distribute, and exhibit programs to the mass of the American people. “Our kind” of people are going to handle “the program” from beginning to end, and we’re only going to attempt to sell to “our kind” of sponsors; and there are plenty of such sponsors around, but unfortunately, in broadcasting today, “our kind” of sponsors have no source of “our kind” of program producer-distributors.
85% of our effort will be put into producing and selling generally the same kind of top-quality, half-hour dramatic shows—both adventure and miscellaneous drama. Any propaganda in them will go unnoticed by the public. Instead of being slanted toward the left, they will be slanted toward “our own”—but, as I say, the “mass” of viewers will not be “conscious” of this.
According to Fields, Hooker succeeded in signing on to his board prominent Old Rightists Gen. Robert E. Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck, and former US Rep. Samuel Pettengill (D.-Ind.), chief counsel of the Pure Oil Co. I do not think that Wood owned Chicago’s WGN TV, as Fields says.
In short order, the ADL attacked Hooker to forestall the threat of white influence in the broadcasting industry. According to Piper, who likewise tells the story of an attempt to establish a “fourth television network” (because of DuMont, it would in fact have been the fifth), “in 1954 the ADL devoted a two-page spread in its bulletin to ‘exposing’ Hooker under the title ‘The Case of the Charming Bigot.'”
With tremendous alacrity, New York Attorney General (later US Senator) Jacob Javits, a Jew, filed stock fraud charges against Film Network, inducing a trial judge named Irving Levy to issue an injunction barring further sale of Film Network stock. This triggered the resignation of Wood, Pettengill, and others from the company’s board and put the firm out of business.
“Outraged by this sabotage,” Hooker founded the aforementioned Nationalist Party in November 1954, of which Fields became a member. There is no indication that it was anything other than a paper organization.
In Final Judgment, Michael Collins Piper reports that Hooker told him in a January 20, 1992 interview about a private meeting he’d had (again, no witnesses, and only Hooker’s word to rely upon) with Joseph P. Kennedy in Palm Beach, Florida in 1956. His objective, which failed, was to obtain Kennedy’s backing for Film Network. (Kennedy had had Hollywood production experience.)
Joseph Kennedy explained to Hooker that “we lost the war,” and “I don’t go with the loser, I’ve joined the winners. I’m going to work with the Jews.” Backing Hooker’s enterprise would jeopardize John’s chances of becoming president.
Kennedy allegedly proposed instead that Hooker encourage his right-wing contacts to attack his son in order to allay Jewish suspicions arising out of Joseph Kennedy’s pre-war isolationism. Hooker did so, thereby, he boasted to Piper, winning the 1960 election for John Kennedy.
A lot of what’s known about Hooker appears to consist of unsubstantiated and frankly rather dubious stories of this kind told to credulous listeners by Hooker himself.
Hooker in This Time the World: The Genesis of a Legend
George Lincoln Rockwell dedicated his highly entertaining autobiography This Time the World to a number of people, one of whom was “DeWest Hooker, who first taught me to know the cunning and evil ways of the enemy.”
Rockwell met Hooker shortly after conservative multimillionaire businessman Russell Maguire hired Rockwell to promote his patriotic magazine The American Mercury:
When I met Hooker, once again, my life changed permanently. Hooker already knew Maguire and Hooker had been the nearest thing to a Nazi since the Bund. He was a graduate of Cornell, exactly my age, with the same temperament, same ideas, and infinitely more experience. He was handsome, so handsome that he made money as a professional model, whom I still see in cigarette ads. His rugged, aristocratic face was framed by perfectly groomed hair, greying at the temples. His build was athletic and tall, and he walked with a bounce and spring in his step which is rarely seen among our beat people. He was a descendant of the Hooker who had signed the Declaration of Independence [incorrect; see above], with millionaire parents and a millionaire wife.
But, most important of all, Hooker was a Nazi! He was not a “patriot” or a “right-winger” or a “conservative,” but a fighting, tough, all-out-Nazi. He had gone into the streets of New York City and rounded up gangs of tough kids and potential juvenile delinquents, and converted them to fanatical loyalty to the United States, the White Race and Adolf Hitler. He called this gang of little hoods the Nationalist Youth League, and I was deeply impressed when I saw what leadership and guts will do to make decent, dedicated Americans out of little lost baby gangsters. Hooker had those kids worshiping him! He was an obvious aristocrat from a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, who wore a Homburg and a Chesterfield with supreme dignity, and he led those little New York gutter kids out of despondency to form picket lines against Jewish Communism, right in its filthy stronghold: New York City!
The NYL sounds like a precursor of the skinheads.
Rockwell was enormously impressed by DeWest Hooker. He relates at length Hooker’s account of how the Jews allegedly set up, manipulated, and destroyed Senator Joseph McCarthy. In Judas Goats, pp. 163–66, Piper reproduces the text of what he calls a “sworn statement” or “affidavit” by Hooker dated September 30, 1954—essentially a file memorandum—detailing Hooker’s alleged meeting in New York City at the time with leaders of the American Jewish League Against Communism, Inc. (AJLAC), which substantiates portions of Rockwell’s account.
Rockwell also describes at length his unsuccessful attempt to persuade Russell Maguire (whom Hooker hated) to fund a hardcore “Nazi” vanguard to be headed by Rockwell and Hooker.
This troubling episode raises some serious questions about both Rockwell and Hooker. For example, if Hooker was as wealthy and hardcore as Rockwell claims, why did the two need Maguire’s money? Hooker could have funded the entire venture himself. In fact, there is no indication that he provided any funding to Rockwell at all.
Hooker also claimed, according to Rockwell, “that Maguire had tried to hire him, Bill Evans, and another man to kill key Jews at $10,000 a head, but that he became so difficult to pin down on the money question, they felt he would never pay. In fact, some of the boys wanted to shoot Maguire instead.”
The odds of Maguire having done such a thing are nil. So why didn’t this tall tale set off alarm bells in Rockwell’s mind?
In 1957 DeWest Hooker left the US for Europe, where he owned and managed the 7-Up bottling franchise in northern Italy for several decades (probably 1957–1984). Before Hooker left, he threw a farewell bash for the members of the Nationalist Youth League at his home, which Rockwell attended.
It was at this fateful party that one of Hooker’s young toughs, John Patsolos—Rockwell’s future assassin—first made the Commander’s acquaintance.
It was also through Hooker that Rockwell learned of an upcoming meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee to form the United White Party (the precursor of the National States Rights Party), led by segregationists J. B. Stoner, an attorney, and Ed Fields. Rockwell spoke at the meeting, where he met some of the leading racialists of the day—Stoner, Fields, advertising executive Wallace Allen, and Emory Burke.
Ben Klassen on Hooker
In 1988, Will Williams, then “Hasta Primus” at Klassen’s church headquarters, brought Hooker to Klassen’s attention after reading Rockwell’s This Time the World. Klassen longed for a “financial angel,” so both men agreed that he should travel to Washington, DC to meet Hooker in an attempt to drum up financial support for the Church of the Creator. (Later, while working for William Pierce’s National Alliance, Williams met with Hooker himself at the former’s Washington, DC apartment to solicit funding for the Alliance. Neither effort appears to have borne fruit.)
Hooker spoke flatteringly to Klassen, who reacted much like everyone else: “DeWest was an interesting and unusually attractive man”—fine appearance, alleged wealth, background in modeling, etc.
But Klassen possessed a sober streak. Hooker, he noted, was living in a small, cramped, paper-strewn two-room efficiency apartment in Washington, despite (allegedly) having a villa in Italy where his Italian second wife and several of his children were staying. Klassen wrote:
I was particularly interested in how he got together with George Lincoln Rockwell, and what he told me was rather revealing. It seems that back in the 1950’s DeWest was on rather intimate terms with Arnold Forster, a head honcho of the ADL, and who for many years served as general counsel for that sinister and subversive organization. Forster, as I remember, was at that time a very vocal and the most visible and aggressive head of the Jewish ADL, and remained such for many years. According to DeWest, he and Forster were in close communication and on a first name basis, but in an adversary sense. The Jews wanted to whip up more fervent support for the ADL among their own, and in order to do so Forster had an idea. They would print and distribute half a million Nazi flyers in Miami Beach, which would scare the hell out of the rank and file Jews and get them to cough up more shekels for the support of the ADL. But they wanted some goyim to head up this project and do the distributing and dirty work, although they, the Jews, would get the flyers printed and pay all the expenses. Forster approached DeWest Hooker and asked him if he would do the job. DeWest told him no, but he knew a young man out of the Navy that would be glad to take it on and take advantage of the opportunity to spread such Nazi propaganda. His name was Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. DeWest contacted Rockwell, and sure enough, he was ready, willing and eager to do the job just the way the Jews planned it. And sure enough, it achieved the very results the ADL had anticipated. It stirred the Jews up into a frenzy, and the money started rolling into the ADL coffers by the bushel. And that was how the American Nazi Party got its start and continued to function.
As seems to have been his habit, Hooker showed Klassen pictures of the homes he had lived in while growing up, pictures of his house in Italy, pictures of his first wife, of his second wife, of his six children, and pictures of himself when he was modeling for agencies back in the ’40s and ’50s.
Klassen was displeased that Hooker believed whites should align with like-minded Arabs and blacks, including Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, against Jews. This stance is consistent with Michael Collins Piper’s report that Piper first met Minister Farrakhan while accompanying Hooker to a by-invitation-only rally of the Nation of Islam in Washington, D.C. in 1985.
With the inimitable humor and cynicism that only pro-white fighters can truly appreciate, Klassen observed that
The girl friend that [Hooker] was sleeping with in his apartment was not only Jewish, but also a member of the ADL. He explained that he was using her, pumping her for information as to what the Jews were up to, but as to who was pumping whom most successfully was not too hard to guess.
Klassen wondered what help Hooker could give his organization.
Well, he said, he was all for us, and he was working on a deal with the Arabs to contract and to ship 25,000 barrels of oil a day to Israel [N.B.], and if successful he would be getting a commission of a dollar on each barrel. When successful, he would supply our church with ample funding, because he was convinced that we had the right and only answer—it was their racial religion that had brought the Jews to the position where they now had control of the world, and we could not only do the same, but we could do it better.
I am not aware that Klassen ever saw a dime of this, or any other legendary Hooker money.
Last Hurrah
After returning to the US from Italy, Hooker became the owner and president of Independent Refineries Co-op, Inc., a Washington, DC oil brokerage firm, from 1984 to 1999.
According to Piper—who, like Rockwell and so many others, placed an inordinate amount of faith in Hooker’s word:
For many years, Hooker was working quietly behind the scenes in an energetic effort to set in place an international petroleum distribution network—in concert with sympathetic interests in the Arab world—that would provide funding for the American nationalist movement. Unfortunately, however, Hooker’s efforts were frustrated by figures in a certain Arab regime that had been co-opted by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad. In fact, one of Hooker’s working partners in the project was murdered. The oil venture, if successfully launched, would have, by his estimate, provided a minimum of $10,000,000 per year for the nationalist cause. (The Judas Goats, p. 162)
We last hear of Hooker attending a meeting of the National Capital Region chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) in Washington DC in December 1998.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a powerful Jewish hate group, had a spy present, who later wrote about the meeting for the group’s Intelligence Report magazine (Winter 1999).
Among other things, the obnoxious, prying, obsessive, censorial Jews wanted to know the size of the gathering (63 people) and the racial makeup (white), age (old, with the exception of a few skinheads, “reflecting the age of much of the CCC’s membership”), and gender (5 women, 58 men) of the attendees.
The meeting was presided over by “a dynamic man who gives his name as Mark Cerr”—in reality Mark Cotterill, the British National Party’s representative in the US at the time. The spy reported that the literature table included copies of David Duke’s My Awakening (1998), together with material from William Pierce’s National Alliance and Resistance Records, Willis Carto’s America First Party, “and even a far-right paramilitary group in Northern Ireland.”
The featured speaker was Michael Collins Piper, who discussed his book Final Judgment (Washington, DC: American Free Press, 1994), which speculates that Israel’s Mossad, the legendary spy, dirty tricks, torture, and assassination agency, was responsible for the murder of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The SPLC’s mole reported that Piper was accompanied by a Negro bodyguard wearing sunglasses—”the only person of color present”—seated at a table piled high with literature from “white supremacist groups.”
After Piper finished, Cotterill opened the floor to comments, and one “very tall, imposing man” strode to the podium.
“Don’t be yeller!” this speaker shouts suddenly, raising both fists in the air and jolting his sleepy afternoon audience in their seats.
“Only the Nazis can compete with the Jews! Until we form a group like that, we ain’t gonna get anywhere. We need a young movement of guys ready to do things. That’s the only way to save this country.”
The audience is wide awake now.
“We’ve got to stick together to be white, but collaborate with the other races against that one man-made race — the Jews,” the man exhorts. “Jesus has been written up in history as a sissy with all that turn-the-other-cheek stuff.
“We gotta get tough, folks.”
With this recommendation, 80-year-old DeWest Hooker — who later says coyly that he “may be” a member of the CCC — steps down.
A second man took the podium, stating that he was half-Jewish and offended by Hooker’s comments. (They worm their way in everywhere—consider the angles Jews worked against just this one tiny meeting of elderly whites.)
Hooker, the Jews’ undercover agent reported, shouted angrily at the speaker. “How much did they pay you to come here?”
The SPLC agent added, “There is a rumbling among the youths. ‘Maybe you’re at the wrong meeting!’ one of them yells.”
This incident caused a small stir in the press and, as I recall, the CCC publicly disavowed Hooker.
Of course, the advice he gave to the CCC attendees in 1999 was essentially the same he’d given to George Lincoln Rockwell in 1956.
Apart from exhortations to others, however, it’s unclear how much, if anything, Hooker actually did to make his vision a reality.
In Judas Goats, Michael Collins Piper called Hooker “one of the legendary, behind-the-scenes figures in the American nationalist movement,” “a fascinating and memorable man” who “devoted much of his personal fortune to fighting for the nationalist cause, a cause that he never abandoned.” This pretty well sums up the DeWest Hooker legend.
Piper is a longtime associate and employee of Willis Carto, a leading figure of the postwar racialist right. Yet Hooker’s name does not appear in the standard Carto biography, George Michael’s Willis Carto and the American Far Right (2008).
Nor does it appear in any of several ADL-sponsored attacks on white Americans penned by Jews Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein during the 1950s and 1960s, or a similar book by Harry and Bonaro Overstreet.
According to Will Williams, formerly associated with Ben Klassen, the Populist Party, and William Pierce’s National Alliance, Williams met Hooker “in 1986 at a Populist Party convention in Washington, DC, the highlight of which was when the then 70ish Mr. Hooker punched out Populist Party founder Willis Carto in front of his assembled Populists.”
In conclusion, I haven’t discovered proof that Hooker funded anyone, or assisted them significantly in any other way. The only substantiated support I’m aware of is two $25 contributions he made to the Buchanan for President Republican primary campaign in 1996.
DeWest Hooker died of cancer on September 22, 1999 at the age of 81. He is buried in the Emmanuel Episcopal Church Cemetery [photo of tombstone] in Port Conway, Virginia, together with his mother, stepfather, and two half-siblings (one of whom died in 1929).
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18 comments
Hooker appears to have been a most enigmatic figure, indeed. Was he a real racial revolutionary, or a double dealer trading with the enemy? Many obviously believed in him, yet as Hamilton shows, there seems to have been a lot of smoke, and little real fire. Perhaps this article will bring forth more witnesses.
THEIR GOAL IS GENOCIDE. OURS. WHAT’S YOURS?
Junghans wins full marks for this most astute observation:
Reviewing my hypothesis regarding the development of post-War self-identified “White Nationalists,” I think he was both, to one degree or another, depending on time and place. He was also singularly inept at either, which says more than it might seem at first sight.
And, the dog that didn’t bark is the same I have seen elsewhere.
George Lincoln Rockwell in blockquote:
I don’t believe Rockwell actually laid eyes on such “kids.” I think there may have been one or two staged events, and they would not have been very hard to stage; de facto Potemkin villages, if you will, designed to be seen but not looked at too closely.
Remember, the issue of the “Nationalist Youth Movement” is one of several where no one bothered to look very closely, and this is the area where the silence of our nominal “Leaders” has spoken the greatest volumes.
This could tie into the “Skinheads” thread, and Covington’s “t-shirt kids,” to good value.
All smoke, no fire; all money, and no cash; all show, and no “GO!”
Yes, I understand now.
Have I mentioned the importance of sending money to counter-currents, each and every month? Today would be fine.
More on this important topic to follow in this most insightful thread.
Thanks to Andrew Hamilton for helping me to fill in some more of the blanks.
What’s In YOUR Future? Focus Northwest!
THEIR GOAL IS GENOCIDE. OURS. WHAT’S YOURS?
I’ve had some time to think on this, and my blood pressure is back to normal.
Total substantial contributions of Hooker to White Nationalism – zero.
Read the piece through slowly, and outline the verifiable facts. Ask yourself, if what Rockwell described was remotely true – that is, if Rockwell actually saw it himself – wouldn’t “gangs of tough kids and potential juvenile delinquents, and converted them to fanatical loyalty to the United States, the White Race and Adolf Hitler,” this so-called “Nationalist Youth League” have made Page ONE of every newspaper in New York, and from there, to the national media?
Has ANYONE ever admitted to being a member of this “Nationalist Youth League?” No. If someone did, would they offer proof? No.
My test of support is doing what you can, starting here you are, starting now.
DeWest Hooker did less for the Race than anyone who sent one dollar to counter-currents. There’s a lesson in that. Political effectiveness costs time, skillful organization, discipline, and money.
Hooker offered none of the above, and had no Plans to Do Something, even if he did.
Let’s learn from the multigenerational example of LePen, and the NF. Let’s learn, and apply those lessons to building our own Racial Homeland in the Northwest Republic. Let’s start by sending some money to counter-currents, each and every month.
Today would be fine, and when you do so, be proud of yourself.
What you just did is more than DeWest Hooker ever did, or would ever do.
What’s In YOUR Future? Focus Northwest!
I’ve only read Rockwell quite recently. That passage really reminded me of The Dead End Kids crossed with Rand’s portrait of the young “Stretch” Wynand. Which is to say, too fictional to be true; like one of those old “crusty bachelor/professor/drama critic has heart of gold and wins over the kids. For the film role, I suggest Clifton Webb.
THEIR GOAL IS GENOCIDE. OURS. WHAT’S YOURS?
Just go through this line by line, and enjoy a good laugh with me on this alleged quote from DeWest Hooker:
DeWest Hooker in blockquote:
Reread the phrase that pays SLOWLY, so you can savor the irony:
“We need a young movement of guys ready to do things. That’s the only way to save this country.”
Whatever happened to that “Nationalist Youth Movement,” DeWest?
Incidentally, this was in 1999.
Wasn’t there something called a “National Youth Alliance” that Rockwell was supposed to have been working on?
Did he ever think to pick up the phone and see how things were going with that “National Youth Alliance?” I am confident the vast DeWest Hooker financial empire could have afforded the long-distance call to William Pierce’s “National Alliance.”
It is certainly educational to realize how easily we have been rolled when we played THEIR Game, by THEIR Rules.
All too many of us – Dr. Revilo Oliver, Dr. Sam Francis – took the words they were told at face value, and did not stop to try to match the words they heard, with the actions – the proven intentions – of the speakers they listened to. They then accepted the words at face value, in spite of the fact that somehow, the actions rarely matched up to the stated meanings of the words. Meetings were mysteriously cancelled, and no explanation why, for example, in the case of Dr. Oliver.
Where have we seen this behavior before?
Domestic abuse.
“They really are good people, they really do share our Plans, they really do share our Dreams, they’re just going through a rough time right now, just keep supporting them and they will turn that bus pass into the glass coach you really deserve, Cinderella. And those mice downstairs? Why, they will become beautiful Arabian stallions, pulling that glass coach to the ball. Why, all of those fine young men in the ‘National Youth Alliance’ are working night and day on making sure that magic glass slipper fits your foot just perfectly, Cinderella. Don’t do anything in the meantime; just wait for Prince Charming to come along with the glass slipper, Real Soon Now. Don’t ask embarrassing questions about all of the damn mice, and the rotted old pumpkin outside. Just keep the faith with these fine Leaders. They know what their doing. They’ll take care of us. ”
(1) No, they don’t. (2) Yes, they will.
To paraphrase Gal-Ron, Leader of the Klingon Empire:
“Someday, perhaps, Cinderella. But not today.”
I have a very simple test of seriousness:
Sending money, regularly, to counter-curents.
Otherwise, we shall enter the SECOND century of bitter failure, and one hundred years of pathetic ineffectiveness is more than enough.
What’s In YOUR Future? Focus Northwest!
A fascinating topic. Very well written!
He looks like Ted Baxter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Baxter
It occurred to me to do a Google image search on “Hathaway shirt.” It turns out that the man-with-the-eyepatch is one of the most famous print ads of all time, devised by ad man David Ogilvy for the C. F. Hathaway Co. in 1951. Several sites show the ad.
For example: http://www.directmarketinginstitute.com/HathawayShirtAd.htm
The model is identified, again on numerous sites, not as DeWest Hooker, but as Baron George Wrangell, a Russian aristocrat with 20/20 vision. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._F._Hathaway_Company
Obviously Hooker was a pathological liar and Rockwell and others who bought his stories were duped. This is such an important article, because DeWest Hooker was not the last of his kind. The WN scene still attracts pathological liars and narcissistic drama queens, and if they have money (or convince people that they have money), they are particularly dangerous.
This movement is so starved for money that anyone, no matter how freakish or bizarre or unsavory, can immediately command a very eager and indulgent audience simply by waving a checkbook around. Once they have your attention, then they wreak havoc by raising false hopes and expectations, diverting scarce time, energy, and talent into their crank hobby-horse projects, or selling people on false strategies or outrageous moral compromises (like Hooker’s proposal to fund the Church of the Creator by brokering an oil deal with Israel).
This is why it is important for Counter-Currents to fund itself with many small donors, since a group with such funding is far less vulnerable to a blowhard (or system agent) promising big money. So, at the risk of sounding like 4mile, why not click the donation link above and sign up to send us a monthly donation. We would be most grateful.
It would be very interesting to get a copy of DeWest Hooker’s FBI file. I would not at all be surprised if he worked with the FBI and/or the ADL.
But far more important than getting to the bottom of the Hooker story is for WNs to learn to spot and avoid such types today and in the future.
I don’t think that the time, energy, and talent of White nationalists is as scarce as it often appears to be. In these matters, it is necessary to distinguish between the active and the latent, the existing and the potential. What is most lacking is the trust without which people will not commit their time, energy, and talent to White nationalism. (Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive, promises to be extremely interesting concerning trust. I’ll definitely order it when I next place an order with Amazon through Counter-Currents.)
One might say that White nationalism today is largely “caught in the web” and that White nationalists are largely isolated and either unemployed or underemployed in terms of constructive activism.
We need to work at establishing real communities rather than virtual communities. We need to move away from a subculture which is largely rootless, individualistic, anonymous, and irresponsible. The French and Spanish term for company, “anonymous society,” describes this subculture well. It’s often hard to meet up with and work with like-minded people, which means that very few people are “known quantities” in terms of their background, character, interests, and abilities. One can make great sacrifices for a tightly knit in-group, even a tiny one (“we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”), but one can’t do this for strangers. As the renegade Nick Griffin once remarked, anonymous appeals to sacrifice are about as welcome as a parking ticket.
We need to increase the average level of commitment and activism. We need to put activism within the view and the reach of people of ordinary abilities and means, activism which is concrete, meaningful, and edifying, activism which gives those involved a real stake in and a sense of responsibility towards a particular collectivity and a particular project. When people have such a relationship, they can give a lot in terms of time, energy, and talent, and do so reliably and continuously. They can also give a lot of money, at least collectively if not individually.
The isolation and unemployment of White nationalists makes them vulnerable to flimflam men such as DeWest Hooker. If the former were engaged in real work, they would recognize that the projects proposed by the latter would take them away from their real work, work in which they would have already invested much, work which they must continue if they are to succeed. But because they are largely idle, they are prone to irrational behavior. They are emotionally frustrated and their lack of real work and therefore real experience means that their perceptions and judgments are often poor. They can easily swing from extreme skepticism to extreme credulity, from extreme pessimism to extreme optimism. The promise of large sums of money can easily excite magical thinking among such people.
THEIR GOAL IS GENOCIDE. OURS. WHAT’S YOURS?
This topic has been of greater concern to me than I would have thought at first glanced.
The thread, “In Memory of Louis T. Byers c. Oct, 1922 – 1981,” drives home how easily we have been neutralized at all points. Juxtapose that with the claims of DeWest Hooker, and you see the beginning of our lack of substance, and I mean “substance” as a synonym for political effectiveness. Incidentally, this issue lends itself well to the Pierce Symposium.
Now, juxtapose them with Jonathan Bowden.
What do you have, but Dreams and a Plan (Byers), Dreams With No Plan (Hooker), and Visions Needing a Plan (Bowden)?
People believed in Hooker because they WANTED to believe that Someone, Somewhere, Somehow, was going to write out the Big Checks needed to make it happen. Enough money for agents, uniforms, offices, newspapers, media – all based on the implicit promises of a man who simply fed your own projections back to you, using your own energy to do so.
So, Byers had a Plan – a true “Youth for Wallace” foundation for a National Youth Alliance, Hooker simply fed our own Dream back to us, without writing a check, and Bowden gave us a Vision worthy of an Elect of the Druidic Order of the Pagan Priesthood.
Byers lacked the people, Hooker lacked the money (for us, st any rate, an I suspect for himself), and Bowden saw neither would be worthwhile without a clear Vision without which the people perish.
Yet, Promised Lands require long development times, and the work of generations. Hence, my continue emphasis on the Northwest Republic as the temporal bridge to the metapolitical order, which, I suspect, Bowden will be working on as soon as possible.
White Republican hit the nail bang on the head:
“The promise of large sums of money can easily excite magical thinking among such people.”
Isn’t that a good description of most “White Nationalism” to date?
“Magical thinking,” involving “the promise of large sums of money.”
You see, White Republican got it right, and the foundation of both “magical thinking” and “the promise of large sums of money” comes down to wishful thinking, magical empowerment, and validation – the approval of those who do not support us in the slightest.
Where have we seen this before? As I mentioned before, this is junior high school cafeteria thinking, which has elements of wishful thinking, magical thinking, magical empowerment, and validation as Adults – to he truly respected and admired.
The place to start is to simply send money, regularly, to counter-currents. THAT is the Adult answer, the substantial, tangible proof that separates the effective work of Adults, from the ineffective, comfortable, magical thinking of Children.
Or, as I think Bowden might say, the Child-like Dreams of Movement Past, from the clear Adult Vision of Movement Future.
What’s In YOUR Future? Focus Northwest!
Thanks for your interesting article on West Hooker. Some comments:
1) There were a number of people who did Hathaway shirt ads, and I have a vague memory of having seen the one featuring Hooker (although in my advanced years I couldn’t swear to it).
2) Hooker’s first wife was not a duPont; she was an heir, however, according to West, to the Conde Nast publishing fortune; she did not share West’s views, nor her money with West;
3) West never claimed to be wealthy himself; he did have the benefit of living off a trust fund left to him by his mother, but he never claimed to have the giant fortune that apparently many perceived. He certainly never led me to believe that he had a lot of money, but in the “right wing” ANY trust fund is probably unique (ha ha)! At any rate, he never had access to his wife’s money. He did make a lot of money in the 7-Up business in Europe, but he one told me something to the effect that “it’s all gone.”
4) Hooker claimed to have been introduced to Joe Kennedy by Lawrence Dennis and that is probably true, since I know that Hooker was the one who introduced Willis Carto to Lawrence Dennis around this same time, so there was a connection there.
5) Hooker showed me some of the correspondence he had with a number of Arab oil sheikhs, so those negotiations were in operation for some time, but ultimately fell through.
6) Hooker did have a modest condo in Washington for some time (while his second wife was in Italy) and he later relocated to another location (where he spent his final years) when Elena came to DC to life with him; in fact, she gave me West’s modest library after his death, having contacted me about the matter, saying, “I know West really liked you and he would have wanted you to have his books.”
7) Hooker did tell me he was, “screwing” a Jewish woman that he met on the tennis court, and he did suggest that he thought that the ADL had indeed sent her to keep an eye on him, but he figured he would take advantage of her. I tend to think that the ADL’s primary interest in Hooker at this time was their concern about his oil dealings which (as I say) were very real but which eventually fell apart.
8 ) The Carto biography by George Michael doesn’t mention Hooker primarily because Hooker, although friendly with Willis for many years, was largely peripheral to any of Willis’s activities in the 60s through the 80s (at which time Hooker was in Italy) and then from the 80’s onward, Hooker was focused on his failed oil deal.
9) The character “Carl Brewster” in Henry Denker’s roman a clef about Reagan and MCA (that preceded the Moldea book) was, according to Hooker, based on him and Brewster is indeed an anti-Semitic executive at the talent agency in New York.
10) Hooker was a charming and colorful guy and, all told, quite sincere. He was working for nobody but “the movement” as he saw it. He was bombastic and combative but I never sensed any deception or disingenuousness on his part (and I might mention that in two instances in my sordid career where I pinpointed certain individuals as being ‘agents” I was loudly shouted down, only to be proven right on the mark—-eventually.
Anyway, I may have missed responding to a point or two, but on the whole this was an interesting piece and I’m glad somebody wrote it. However, I think it’s unfair to condemn Hooker for not bankrolling the “movement” with his own money when he never claimed, at least to me, to have any such big sums available to him.
Thanks for your time.
THEIR GOAL IS GENOCIDE. OURS. WHAT’S YOURS?
Michael Collins Piper in blockquote:
Two quick comments:
One, I suspect Hooker certainly did noting to dissuade those who thought he had money from thinking that he had money – real money, investment type capital. After all, it didn’t hurt him to play along with them.
It helped him keep tabs on their efforts. It also allowed him to act as a controller for their enterprises. After all, if they were coming to Hooker for money, Hooker would know exactly what they were doing, all along, and would put tight controls on the money. And who was Hooker talking to about them?
Hooker, in short, shared an Illusion – and did nothing to dispel it – that some White nationalists fell into. The fault was theirs for listening to a man who talked a good game, but never engaged in actions that matched his words.
For instance, we are told that Hooker made comments at the CoCC meeting in Washingotn, DC, back in 1998, saying the only answer was organization; in particular:
DeWest Hooker in blockquote:
Hold that thought.
Wasn’t that what Rockwell described as the “Nationalist Youth Movement?”
George Lincoln Rockwell in blockquote:
Two, isn’t it rather unusual for the head of the “Nationalist Party of the U.S.A.” – Hooker, apparently – to have this bunch of reformed thugs – “Our Gang,” on steroids, I guess – demonstrsating for Rockwell, and yet there is no ONE record of these young men anywhere. Not ONE. Yet, FORTY years later, Hooker is telling the CoCC that they were our only hope.
What happened? Did they ever exist at all? Think of it for a moment on what Rockwell described Hooker as having created from scratch:
“Gangs,” with “fanatical loyalty to the United States, the White Race, and Adolph Hitler.”
That is the triumph of wishful thinking over simple, honest, truthful observation; Charlie Brown trying ONE MORE TIME to kick Lucy’s football.
THAT is the telling Insight of White Republican.
Too many of our “Leaders” put responsible activism, responsible organizational development, where they can be effective today, on “hold,” hoping that Someone was going to write out the Big Checks needed to make it work.
That’s why I see DeWest Hooker as something of a counterfeit, making sure nothing actually developed a critical mass of effectiveness. Certainly, too many of us would share out latest plans with DeWest, looking for the most tangible form of approval available – money.
The money never arrived, except for FIFTY WHOLE DOLLARS to the Buchanan Campaign, and I do wonder who Hooker shared the plans with.
No, I know who Hooker shared the plans with. After discussing the plans, they all had a good laugh, and went downstairs, toasting Hooker’s ability to mislead, misguide, and cripple a gang of incompetent, trusting fools with the crisp, clean taste of 7-Up.
As for Hooker not “bankrolling the movement”, we are not accusing him of doing that. We are stating it seems he acted as a lightning rod to insure potentially effective organizations never got off the ground, and never trusted anyone enough to tell them the truth, that he would never put a dime into their fantastical dreams.
It seems Hooker never put a dime into HIS “Nationalist Youth Movement.” THAT is far more telling about the man, than many would feel comfortable discussing. He never put a dime into it, because there never was a “Nationalist Youth Movement,” and he made damn sure there wouldn’t ever BE a “Nationalist Youth Movement.”
Take Home Lesson: “If it is to be, it is up to me.”
Sending money to counter-currents, each and every month, is the best way for it to not only be, but to be better.
What’s In YOUR Future? Focus Northwest!
When I have the time, I intend to write something concerning how many White nationalists define the terms “solutions” and “success” in terms of time, space, and agency. I don’t intend to focus on proposing solutions of my own, but rather to examine the perspectives and measures White nationalists apply in these matters, and how they are often defective and misleading. This will mean looking at values, ideas, expectations, assumptions, and timeframes.
Of course, there is no single solution, and success is relative. The tasks before us span generations. In this strategic and historical context, the concept of victory is arguably misplaced, for reasons that Everett Carl Dolman states in Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Space and Information Age:
“The first notion the military strategist must discard is victory, for strategy is not about winning. The pure strategist understands that war is but one aspect of social and political competition, an ongoing interaction that has no finality. This is not to say that victory has no place in strategy. The outcomes of battles and campaigns are critical variables within the strategist’s plan, but victory is a concept that has no meaning there; it belongs wholly within the realm of tactics. To the tactical and operational planner, wars are indeed won and lost, and the difference is clear. Success is measurable; failure is obvious.
“The differences between strategy and tactics are many, but the meaningful ones are located in the focus of effort and the relationship of the planner to boundaries. Both strategist and tactician are necessary to the prosecution of war; each conducts one dimension of the military way. Tactical thinking is concerned with individual actions and decisions; strategic thinking with aggregate interactions and conditions. Tactical planning takes into account the numerous boundaries that restrict action; strategic planning attempts to manipulate the boundaries that enable action. From the tactical perspective, war is bound by real and artificial restrictions of time and space. Social, historical, geographical, and technological characteristics further provide the context of conflict, offering a structure for actions taken. To be sure, in any socio-political dispute in which a beginning and an end can be discerned, and a culmination of events is desired, victory and defeat are the standards of success.”
I sometimes get the impression that some White nationalists fantasize of an end to history, with themselves on the winning side (indeed, William Pierce ended The Turner Diaries on this very note). Dolman indicates a more realistic approach when he writes:
“In this broadest and most encompassing view, strategy represents the link between policy and military action. It connects the conduct of war with the intent of politics. It is subtler than the tactical and operational arts of directly matching means to ends, however. It shapes and guides military means in anticipation of an array of possible coming events. In the process, strategy changes the context within which those events will happen. Thus strategy, in its simplest form, is a plan for attaining continuing advantage. For the goal of strategy is not to culminate events, to establish finality in the discourse between states, but to influence states’ discourse in such a way that it will go forward on favorable terms. For continue it will.”
As Oswald Spengler said, life is war. As long as there is life, there will be war. The objective of strategy is to ensure that one secures “continuing advantage” and can “go forward on favorable terms.” (Incidentally, this outlook is more in keeping with the spherical view of history than the linear or cyclical view of history.)
I might take some cues from Jean Ousset and Pierre Chateau-Jobert on methods of political activism, Wendell Berry concerning localism, and Emile Pouget on direct action. We need small-scale activism which is widespread, continuous, and constructive; which gives people work commensurate with their abilities and resources; which gives people confidence in themselves, their co-workers, and their cause; and which establishes a high level of activity, effectiveness, and resilience at the level of an organization or movement. We need, to use Pouget’s words, “clear-cut, practical notions inspiring the rebelliousness that the times require . . . the destruction of the spirit of submissiveness and resignation that degrades individuals and turns them into willing slaves — and a blossoming of the spirit of revolt, the factor fertilising human societies.” We need forms of culture and organisation that link day to day effort with revolutionary struggle. As Pouget put it:
“This task of laying the groundwork for the future is, thanks to Direct Action, in no way at odds with the day to day struggle. The tactical superiority of Direct Action resists precisely in its unparalleled plasticity: organisations actively engaged in the practice are not required to confine themselves to beatific waiting for the advent of social changes. They live in the present with all possible combativity, sacrificing neither the present to the future, nor the future to the present. It follows from this, from this capacity for facing up simultaneously to the demands of the moment and those of the future and from this compatibility in the two-pronged task to be carried forward, that the ideal for which they strive, far from being overshadowed or neglected, is thereby clarified, defined, and made more discernible.”
In his essay on direct action, Pouget contrasted parliamentarianism with direct action. While Pouget wrote in the context of the nineteenth-century French labor movement, some of his ideas can be applied to White nationalism. Many White nationalists seem to think of activism in parliamentarist terms of representation within the system; they want to delegate work to leaders who will act as their proxies; they are like absentee owners who hold shares in a company, who don’t participate in or even understand its work, and who expect to receive high dividends. But absenteeism leads to isolation, failure, and dispossession. Setting up new companies and issuing new shares on the basis of absentee ownership is no solution.
We need to form a militant minority, a minority which, as Pouget wrote, “is not willing to abandon its demands and aspirations before the inertia of a mass that the spirit of revolt has not yet animated and enlightened. Consequently, the conscious minority has an obligation to act, without reckoning with the refractory mass.” Direct action can be both populist and elitist, and it can “express itself in a benevolent and peaceful way or in a very forceful and violent manner.”
Mr. Piper,
Thanks for providing the additional information. Since you knew Hooker, your input is greatly appreciated.
In a forthcoming piece about Russell Maguire, I speculate that Hooker and/or George Lincoln Rockwell might have driven him out of participation in racial conservatism. I don’t assert that that’s what happened—there isn’t sufficient evidence for that—but it does strike me as a reasonable possibility.
As to your main point, G. L. Rockwell, whose autobiography I think established Hooker as a legendary figure in the movement, definitely depicts a wealthy WASP aristocrat. He says nothing to temper that image.
Likewise, in Judas Goats you wrote:
“Born to wealth and privilege, and later married into an immensely wealthy family, Hooker was a graduate of Cornell and a veteran of World War II . . . Hooker devoted much of his personal fortune to fighting for the nationalist cause, a cause that he never abandoned.”
After researching my piece, I admit I have become dubious about the guy. Thinking about his interactions with people, and the way they responded to him, as well as your reference to the ADL’s characterization of the man as “charming,” I have to admit that he reminded me not a little of Roy Bullock as described in Judas Goats!
I’m two-thirds of the way through that book, and find it very valuable, although at times my interpretation of the evidence, or the way I would frame conclusions drawn from it, differ from your own.
I also own The Garbage Man, which you were involved with.
In fact, the two books that converted me to race realism were The International Jew (the full 4-vol. ed., not the 1-vol. abridgment) and Liberty Lobby’s Conspiracy Against Freedom.
Much of Liberty Lobby’s and Carto’s success, I believe, has been due to paying close attention to how power really works in society—something most white nationalists are for some reason averse to doing.
Thanks for your response to mine.
Since I first responded, I sent a copy of yours (and mine) to Willis Carto and Willis reminded me that it was General Robert Wood, rather than Hooker, who introduced him (Willis) to Lawrence Dennis. I stand corrected.
In addition, I should mention that West’s effort to punch Willis in the nose took place not in Washington, DC, but at the Pittsburgh airport. I should know. I was there. it was quite public, but not before the Populist Party gathering, although I imagine Will Williams heard a variation of the story from someone (possibly me) and assumed that it took place in DC. Here is the story (which I reminded Willis about today, laughing the whole way through):
Hooker and I flew up together from Washington, DC to the Populist Party meeting. Arriving in Pittsburgh, we encountered Willis Carto and Charles Ulmschneider, a San Diego-based Populist Party activist, at the airport. Willis had not seen Hooker since the Populist Party National Convention in Nashville in 1984—two years earlier–and Willis was still pissed off about the fact that Hooker (who was most assuredly NOT a Zionist agent or an agent for anybody) had raised questions at the convention about a Jewish advisor to the Populist Party presidential candidate Bob Richards.
Well, Hooker’s instincts were right, and the Jewish advisor to Richards did manage to screw the party up and actually turn Richards against the party itself (even though the damned fool remained its candidate). But Willis knew that Richards was unstable (which we had all-too-quickly discovered) and wanted to keep things calm, and Hooker was all-too energetically raising the point that this rather oily Jew was clinging to Richards and constantly whispering in his tender ear. At any rate, Hooker was right (as I reminded Willis today when I recalled the whole affair).
In any case, upon seeing Hooker at the Pittsburgh airport, Willis said flatly: “Well, West, are you here to bust up this meeting like you did in Nashville?” Hooker muttered something and shook his head and then we all split up to gather our luggage. Hooker said to me, “Willis and I have been friends for a long time, but if he says something like that to me again, I’ll punch him in the nose.” I said, “Ah, come on, West, you know how Willis is. Don’t worry about it.” He said, “No, I mean it.” I just laughed.
We returned to the shuttle area where Willis and Charles Ulmschneider were waiting to go to our hotel where the Populist Party meeting was being held. Hooker went up to Willis and said, “Willis, did you really mean what you said?” Willis looked up at Hooker and said, “I sure did,” and Hooker pulled back, took a swing at Willis and knocked his glasses off.
Willis pulled away and said, “I’m going to get the cops.” In the meantime, Charles Ulmschneider stepped up and he and Hooker stand there before God and the Pittsburgh airport—both, quite comically, with “dukes up” (just as one might see in a 30’s film)—and I stepped between them and pushed them apart, saying, “Oh come on you guys.”
Then, I waddled off—I waddle— to find Willis and managed to catch up with him and said, “Do you really want the ADL to report that West Hooker punched Willis Carto in the Pittsburgh airport?” He shook his head, then nodded, saying, “I think you’re right.” He added: “That son of a bitch is crazy.”
The two did not speak again until the 1993 protest outside the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Hooker came up to me and said, “Do you think Willis will forgive me and be friends again?” I said, “Sure, West, why not go talk to him.” Hooker came up to Willis, said, “Willis, do you forgive me? Can we be friends again.” Willis stared at Hooker for a moment and said—quite frankly—“Oh, West, I don’t think so. You and I are just too different.” (Profound and quite accurate, as I said to Willis in talking about the matter.)
Anyway, THAT is the story.
Willis and I laughed in a fond way about Hooker and he said, “Say what you will about West, he was a good guy and he was sincere.” So that’s an assessment from someone who was on the receiving end of a punch from the big guy.
I assure your reader that Clifton Webb would not have been the type to portray West Hooker on screen. Hardly.
Hooker was more akin to two Dallas actors, Jim Davis, who played Jock Ewing, or Morgan Woodward who played one of Ewing’s pals. But without the Southern accent. Hooker’s voice was clear, crisp, accent-less, but rasping, somewhat akin to William Holden or Gene Hackman.
And now that I think about it, an old Gene Hackman could play Hooker!
Thanks for this research on DeWest Hooker! As a Michael C. Piper listener I’ve been intrigued by his stories about Hooker and Jack Bernstein, both of whom I could never find much out about. De West Hooker supposedly introduced George Lincoln Rockwell to Russell McGuire Sr. who bought The American Mercury from Willliam Bradford Huie. McGuire really did have money, the result of being a major shareholder in the Thompson Sub-Machine Gun Co. He would make an excellent subject for another article by Andrew Hamilton on pioneers of the WN movement.His son Russell McGuire Jr. lived on a trust fund in a gated community a few blocks from where I grew up. He was run out of town (Seattle) for pedophilia, but never convicted. I remember the stories in the newspapers and didn’t put the scandal surrounding this wealthy neighbor together with his father’s right wing “extremism” until decades later when I drifted towards conservatism myself. “Cavalcade of Hate: Gems from The American Mercury 1953-1981.” Now, there’s a future publishing project for someone with a lot of time and money.
A piece about Russell Maguire has already been written!
As you indicate, the topic seemed to flow naturally from this one . . .
Thanks for the information about Russell Maguire Jr. Unfortunately, all sons are not as admirable as their fathers. For example, Robert Taft Jr. was no Robert Taft Sr. (Of course, some sons turn out better than their fathers.)
I did not include the information about Maguire Jr. in my article because the piece was already so long and it was not really germane to my topic.
However, you will be interested in the one online item about this I came across, which was published in 1997. Although no source for the information was given (presumably it was a newspaper item) I assumed it was probably correct because it came from a gun website with no obvious racial animus motivating it. Anyway, it brings your story further up to date.
“Millionaire molester sent to prison” http://www.nfatoys.com/tsmg/tcn/1997/may/may97p6.htm
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