The Lie Factory - the couple who start political consulting - read this one chilling passage
The Lie Factory
How politics became a business.
by Jill Lepore
The field of political consulting was unknown before Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker founded Campaigns, Inc., in 1933.
In 1945, months after Earl Warren proposed compulsory health insurance in California, Harry Truman proposed a national program. “The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility,” the President said. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1946, Truman’s proposed federal health-insurance program, which, like Warren’s, was funded by a payroll tax, stalled. In his State of the Union address in 1948, an election year, Truman urged passage of his plan, which enjoyed widespread popular support. In November, Truman won the election. Days afterward, the American Medical Association called up the San Francisco offices of Campaigns, Inc. The A.M.A. retained Whitaker and Baxter at a fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, and with an annual budget of more than a million dollars, to thwart Truman’s plan. The A.M.A. raised the money by assessing twenty-five dollars a year from every one of its members.
At the beginning of 1949, Whitaker and Baxter, the directors of the A.M.A.’s National Education Campaign, entered national politics, setting up headquarters in Chicago, with a staff of thirty-seven. “This must be a campaign to arouse and alert the American people in every walk of life, until it generates a great public crusade and a fundamental fight for freedom,” their Plan of Campaign began. “Any other plan of action, in view of the drift toward socialization and despotism all over the world, would invite disaster.” But when Whitaker told the Washington press corps, at a luncheon, that the F.B.I. was terrorizing the A.M.A., the Washington Post offered that maybe the A.M.A., at the hands of Whitaker and Baxter, ought to stop “whipping itself into a neurosis and attempting to terrorize the whole American public every time the Administration proposes a Welfare Department or a health program.”
Meanwhile, inside Campaigns, Inc., a much more detailed Plan of Campaign circulated, in typescript, marked “CONFIDENTIAL:— NOT FOR PUBLICATION.” (It can be found with the firm’s papers, which are housed at the California State Archives, in Sacramento.) It reads, in part:
1. The immediate objective is the defeat of the compulsory health insurance program pending in Congress. 2. The long-term objective is to put a permanent stop to the agitation for socialized medicine in this country by (a) awakening the people to the danger of a politically-controlled, government-regulated health system; (b) convincing the people, through a Nation wide campaign of education, of the superior advantages of private medicine, as practiced in America, over the State-dominated medical systems of other countries; (c) stimulating the growth of voluntary health insurance systems to take the economic shock out of illness and increase the availability of medical care to the American people.
As Whitaker and Baxter put it, in an earlier version of the plan, “Basically, the issue is whether we are to remain a free Nation, in which the individual can work out his own destiny, or whether we are to take one of the final steps toward becoming a Socialist or Communist State. We have to paint the picture, in vivid verbiage that no one can misunderstand, of Germany, Russia—and finally, England.” They settled on a slogan: “KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MEDICINE.” And they settled on a smear, one that they had used against Warren’s plan: they called Truman’s plan “socialized medicine.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/24/120924fa_fact_lepore
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