West-Bloc Dissident A Cold War Memoir

by Blum, William

• ISBN13: 9781887128728
• ISBN10: 1887128727
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-03-11
• Publisher: Soft Skull

Summary

In the 1960s, after four years with IBM and two more with the U.S. State Department, William Blum became a radical dissident. As an insider in two worlds, he is well suited to assess the people, events, and ideology of both the “bourgeois” and “radical” cultures. In West-Bloc Dissident, Blum brings unexpected wit and insight to his portrayals of both sides of the ideological fence. He draws unsparing portraits of his movement comrades Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and others. An anti-war activist, he takes on the CIA, FBI, State Department, and police. Also included are firsthand accounts of everything from the underground press to Salvador Allende’s Chile.

Author Biography

William Blum left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, because of his opposition to what the United States was doing in Vietnam. A journalist and author, he became one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first “alternative” newspaper in the capital. He was one of the recipients of Project Censored’s awards for “exemplary journalism” for writing one of the top ten censored stories of 1998, an article on how, in the 1980s, the United States gave Iraq the material to develop a chemical and biological warfare capability. He died in 2012.

Table of Contents

Exposing the CIA	1	(11)
Passing through State Department security	11	(10)
Judaism and Quakers	21	(14)
Commie dupe	35	(8)
The legendary Anti-Vietnam War Movement	43	(14)
IBM and LSD	57	(8)
The Washington Free Press	65	(18)
Government sabotage of the underground press	83	(14)
Surrounded by informers	97	(8)
California bombing	105	(10)
Kill your parents	115	(12)
Radical psychiatry	127	(2)
10,000 miles overland through Latin America	129	(22)
The Chilean socialist experiment	151	(12)
Chain gang, Soledad prison, and coup d' etat	163	(8)
Down and out in Copenhagen, London, and Berlin	171	(22)
Patty Hearst and the gang	193	(12)
The author vs. Hollywood. Hollywood wins	205	(14)
Farewell cruel World	219	(12)
Photographs	231	(6)
Notes	237	(4)
Index	241