DeWest Hooker:
Portrait of a Radical

4,202 words

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 ^[2] 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. ^[3], 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 ^[4] of Congregationalist minister Thomas Hooker ^[5] (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 ^[6] 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 ^[7] 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 ^[8], 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 ^[9].

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 ^[10].

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 ^[11] 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 ^[12] 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 ^[11], 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 ^[13] 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 ^[14] [photo of tombstone] in Port Conway, Virginia, together with his mother, stepfather, and two half-siblings ^[15] (one of whom died in 1929).