Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 7

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

Bill de Blasio’s Cambridge, Massachusetts Roots and Polaroid Connection

During the years that de Blasio’s mother was apparently working for Land as a Polaroid Corporation public relations manager, the recipient of the National Education Association [NEA]’s 2012 Rosa Parks Memorial Award, Caroline Hunter, discovered that Land’s Polaroid Corporation was also collaborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa. As the NEA website recalled:

“At the age of 21, fresh out of Xavier University, New Orleans, Hunter landed a good job as a chemist at the Polaroid Corporation. Then one day, quite by chance, she spotted in her workplace an enlarged South African photo identification card. The year was 1970, decades before the anti-apartheid movement in the U.S. had gathered steam. But Caroline Hunter knew the significance of that photo identification card. It was part of what Nelson Mandela called `the hated document’— that is, the South African passbook all Blacks in South Africa were required to carry at all times. It was an important link in the chain that the Apartheid regime used to control and monitor the movement of Blacks.

“Polaroid had in fact been doing business with the apartheid government of South Africa for years. Most important was its ID-2 system, which consisted of a camera, instant processor and laminator. It could generate a photo identification card in just two minutes and more than 200 in an hour—exactly the technology the apartheid government needed to enforce its Pass Laws Act.

“After finding the mock passbook, Caroline Hunter and her colleague (and later husband) Ken Williams, a photographer at Polaroid, launched their campaign. They distributed fliers around the workplace, alerting their colleagues to Polaroid’s complicity with apartheid. They organized demonstrations outside the company’s headquarters, and they spoke out to the larger community. Up until this point, Polaroid had a reputation as a liberal company—`an equal opportunity’ employer. But the Polaroid management did not take well to the protests, and they fired Hunter and Williams…”

In his book Sharpville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences, Tom Lodge also wrote that “the formation of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM) by black employees at Polaroid’s Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters signaled wider concerns with US-South African connections: the PRWM was formed to stop Polaroid’s processing of film for South Africa’s passbooks…” And according to Insisting On The Impossible:

 “…Early in 1971, demonstrators protesting Polaroid’s involvement in South Africa and Land’s key role in defense nearly prevented Land from speaking about his color-view research at the American Physical Society in New York…In 1970 and 1971, employees and outsiders demanded that Polaroid cease selling its products in South Africa, including its photo-identification equipment…Some critics even took out large advertisements urging a boycott of Polaroid products. To meet the criticism, Polaroid sent a committee…to South Africa. The committee…recommended continuing sales through Polaroid’s South African dealer, which amounted to $1.5 million a year…”

And Polaroid apparently did not stop selling its products in South Africa until 1977.

Yet during de Blasio’s years as a teenage junior high school and high school student government politico in Cambridge during the 1970s (who was also profiled in the Boston Globe during the late 1970s) he apparently never questioned the morality of the political role his mother was apparently playing as a public relations manager for a corporation that was collaborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Coincidentally, de Blasio joined some other local politicians in signing a Jan. 31, 2013 letter to Brooklyn College’s president which attempted to pressure the college’s Political Science Department to withdraw its sponsorship of a campus panel discussion about the non-violent BDS campaign to use economic divestment tactics (similar to those used by the anti-apartheid Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement in the 1970s against the Polaroid firm in whose public relations department his mother worked) to get the Israeli government to end its denial of Palestinian human rights; which led columnist Katha Pollit to criticize de Blasio and the other local politicians who signed this letter for setting “themselves up as micro-managers of campus programming, backed up by threats of financial punishment,” in her Feb. 5, 2013 column of The Nation magazine. 

(end of part 7)

Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 6

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

Bill de Blasio’s Cambridge, Massachusetts Roots and Polaroid Connection

When Hillary Clinton named de Blasio in December 1999 to be her full-time campaign manager during her successful campaign in 2000 to occupy one of New York’s seats in the U.S. Senate between 2001 and 2009, she claimed she had chosen “someone who…grew up in New York—a point that was prominently mentioned in the single-page news release announcing the appointment,” according to the Dec. 4, 1999 New York Times article; apparently, according to the Aug. 25, 2013 New York Times article, because of  “the carpetbagging charges that dogged Mrs. Clinton.”

Yet, in reality, in late 1999 Hillary “The Carpetbagger from Arkansas and Washington, D.C.” had chosen a “Carpetbagger from Cambridge, Massachusetts” to be her U.S. Senate campaign manager in 2000: because Bill de Blasio did not grew up in New York, but did grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As Dan Janison noted in an Aug. 17, 2013 Newsday article:

“De Blasio was raised in Cambridge, Mass., Bay State roots being one of the…things he shares with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And de Blasio remains a Red Sox fan…. De Blasio attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School..”.

And as the Boston Globe recalled in a Sept. 30, 2013 article, “De Blasio moved to Cambridge in 1966, when he was 5” and “his mother, Maria, was a public relations manager at Polaroid.”

The old Polaroid Corporation (that went bankrupt in 2001, had its assets purchased by OEP Imaging Corporation in 2002 and ceased to exist in 2002), in whose public relations department the now-deceased Maria de Blasio Wilhelm worked for nearly 20 years, was formed in 1937 by Edwin Land—a grandson of Avram Solomonivich and the son of Harry Land, the owner of the H.M. Land Waste Company in Connecticut. According to Victor McElheny’s Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land, during the 1920s the “main business” of Edwin Land’s father “was to handle all the scrap metal from Electric Boat, the principal builder of submarines in the United States;” and “by 1927, Harry Land had begun to invest his profits in real estate.”

Established in 1937 with the financial backing of Wall Street investment bankers like James P. Warburg, during World War II Polaroid profited from the war by supplying “$2 million dollars’ worth of still [3-D] Vectographs to the U.S. military,” producing “filters for goggles” for U.S. Navy gunners, and making “periscopes, lightweight stereoscopic rangefinders, aerial cameras, the Norden bombsight, and a mechanism that antiaircraft gunners could use in training their tracer fire,” according to Insisting On The Impossible. The same book also recalled that during World War II, “the Navy asked Polaroid to work on a plane-launched, guided anti-ship bomb,” “for the thousand-pound guided bomb, the Navy awarded a contract that paid a total of $7 million dollars to Polaroid over several years” and “the contract represented a substantial fraction of the company’s wartime business.”

During the Korean War, Cold War and Vietnam War eras of the 1950s and 1960s, Polaroid President and Chairman Land also headed the Republican Eisenhower administration’s Technological Capabilities Panel’s intelligence project that helped the CIA develop its secret U-2 spy plane and spy satellite programs. In addition, as a member of both the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities and the President’s Science Advisory Committee (along with former Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank board chairman and MIT President James Killian), Polaroid’s president and chairman was “virtually in control of the development of U.S. technical means for gathering intelligence, especially in the CIA and the National Security Agency, which monitored communications throughout the world” during the late 1950s and early 1960s, according to Insisting On The Impossible.

As the same book also recalled:

“Many years of largely secret government services had prepared Land for the work leading to U-2 and beyond…For the work on Project Charles, Land assigned one of his leading optical scientists, David Grey, to participate with him…The Project Charles report recommended use of one-step Land-type photography to record images off radar scopes…Land…set up a center for bringing together all the elements of the reconnaissance [U-2] plane. The small room was at 2 Osborn Street [in Cambridge] the modest red brick building that contained his office and laboratory…”

Coincidentally, some former CIA officials have apparently claimed that Bill Clinton spied on anti-war movement activists for the CIA in the UK while attending Oxford, not many years after Polaroid apparently collaborated with the CIA to develop its U-2 spy plane. According to a 1996 book written by a former senior aide to 1984 Democratic Party presidential nominee Walter Mondale named Roger Morris, titled Partners In Power:

“`Bill Clinton’s ties to the intelligence community go back all the way to Oxford and come forward from there,' says a former government official who claims to have seen files long since destroyed… One former agency official would claim later that the future president was a full-fledged `asset,’ that he was regularly `debriefed,’ and thus that he informed on his American friends in the peace movement in Britain. Similarly, he was said to have informed on draft resisters in Sweden during his brief trip there with Father McSorley…

“One more CIA retiree would recall going through archives of Operation Chaos at the Langley headquarters—part of an agency purge amid the looming congressional investigations of the mid-1970s—and seeing Bill Clinton listed, along with others, as a former informant who had gone on to run for or be elected to a political office of some import, in Clinton’s case attorney general of Arkansas. `He was there in the records,’ the former agent said, `with special designation.’ Still another CIA source contended that part of Clinton’s arrangement as an informer had been further insurance against the draft...”


In a footnote to his 1996 book, the author of Partners In Power, Roger Morris, also noted that “interviews on the issue of Clinton and the CIA were arranged in part through organizations of retired intelligence officers and other national security officials and included former ranking members of the CIA stations in London, Stockholm, Paris and Moscow, as well as some who served at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, during the late 1960s and who were familiar with the Operation Chaos files.”
(end of part 6)

Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 1

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

“Mr. de Blasio becomes Mrs. Clinton's campaign manager during an uneasy period for her campaign…, Mrs. Clinton, who has never lived in New York, came to New York City to announce that she was indeed going to run for office...In Mr. de Blasio, Mrs. Clinton chose someone who…grew up in New York -- a point that was prominently mentioned in the single-page news release announcing the appointment…”

--the New York Times on Dec. 4, 1999

“…De Blasio is the leading candidate for mayor of New York,…poised to become the city’s second consecutive mayor with Massachusetts roots, succeeding Michael R. Bloomberg, a Medford native….De Blasio, 52, said growing up in Cambridge gave him a `very progressive grounding.’….De Blasio moved to Cambridge in 1966, when he was 5. His mother, Maria, was a public relations manager at Polaroid…De Blasio’s name then was Warren Wilhelm Jr….De Blasio rarely mentions his youth in Cambridge…His roots in the city are a potential sore spot…`I am very much a Red Sox fan,’ de Blasio said in the interview this month….”

--the Boston Globe on Sept. 30, 2013

“What does Bill de Blasio…have to do with Polaroidland?...The Boston Globe today revealed that his connection is sturdier than most: His mother, Maria Wilhelm, worked in Polaroid’s public-relations department for nearly twenty years. A quick search of newspaper databases reveals plenty of quotes (and a few `no comment’s) that she offered the press down through the years…I asked Donald Dery and Sam Yanes, each of whom ran Polaroid’s PR operation (Don until 1980, Sam thereafter), and they remember her well. (She died in 2007.) Sam offered this:`…Maria Wilhelm would just plow ahead, like a pro, working from 9 to 5, always on deadline, always on point.  Her main job was to place `Amazing Things Are Happening Here’ stories everywhere…When I was out of town, she looked after our financial and corporate communications concerns…’”

--from a Polaroidland blog post of Sept. 30, 2013

“…In 1970, a union tried to organize workers at the company. [Polaroid President and Chairman Edwin] Land regarded the attempt as an intrusion. The union organizing effort failed…”

--from Victor McElheny’s Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land in 1998

“Over 100 people rallied in front of Polaroid's main office building in Tech Square yesterday and demanded that the Cambridge-based corporation immediately terminate its activities in South Africa.
“Speakers at the rally, held to commemorate the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, continued to level their charge that Polaroid's ID-2 identification system is instrumental in the maintenance of apartheid…Chris Nteta, a black South African, noted that the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid met earlier this month to discuss the firing of Polarold employees who had organized a boycott of Polaroid products to protest the company's continuing involvement in South Africa…Polaroid equipment…was responsible for 20 per cent of all pictures taken for passbooks in 1970, according to Polaroid statistics.

“Towards the close of the rally, Caroline Hunter, a member of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement who was fired by Polaroid for organizing a boycott of Polaroid products, issued a `People's Warrant’ against Edwin H. Land, president and chairman of the board of Polaroid, for `Mass Murder.’ Hunter then set fire to four Polaroid cameras to dramatize the protest….”


--the Harvard Crimson on Mar. 23, 1971

(end of part 1)