Mae Brussell died this week.
The question is, who killed her?
Mae was the grandest conspiracy theorist of them all, the
Madame Defarge of paranoia. Her last passion before she slipped through the
narrow door was investigating satanic cults in the military.
She found conspiratorial links in events large and small, from
the Kennedy assassinations to Watergate to Contragate, and anytime anyone of
note died, she was at the ready with a fascinating theory of why the death fit
The Pattern.
Not one of her many friends, which included this writer, would
doubt she would come up with a compelling conspiracy theory of her own death at
a vibrant 66. Among the many enemies she was constantly exposing on her weekly
radio show that was gospel to conspiracy buffs were Nazi scientists in the U.S.,
the Mafia, the CIA and the oil cartels -- and that's a mean lot of enemies. The
doctors say she died of cancer, but that was what they said about Jack Ruby, and
Mae knew better than that. "Mae was multimotivated," her old friend,
publisher and co-conspiratorialist Paul Krassner said, admiringly, "but her
specialty was Lee Harvey Oswald."
Mae was a complacent Carmel housewife raising a bunch of kids
until the John F. Kennedy assassination. The horror of having her kids watch
Jack Ruby bump off Lee Harvey Oswald right on daytime TV in what was obviously a
set piece of work made her a conspiratorial crusader. If at times Mae was short
on theory, she was always long on facts -- at the time of her death Monday she
had amassed more than 80,000 pages of research material amassed from a
compulsive clipping of 15 newspapers a day and a couple of hundred mags a month.
She was the first researcher to come up with the facts of Richard Nixon's career
links -- unquestionably earlier, more speculatively later -- to the mob.
Krassner said Mae had called him up after he published a
famously crude piece of faction in The Realist about an alleged act of
necrophilia between Lyndon Johnson and the corpse of John Kennedy aboard Air
Force One returning from Dallas to Washington, D.C., on Nov. 22, 1963, and told
him things even he hadn't imagined about the Kennedy assassination.
Mae remained in the pack of Kennedy assassination researchers
but came into her own with Watergate. "Three weeks after Watergate, when
the press was still treating it like a third-rate burglary, Mae sent me a piece
that had the goods on the entire cast of characters -- Hunt, McCord, Martinez
and the rest -- and linking them back to CIA-Mafia ties to the Kennedy
assassination," Krassner said.
The main Brussell thesis, if I dare risk commit the sin of
summary on her complex work, was that an ex-Nazi scientist-Old Boy OSS clique in
the CIA using Mafia hit men changed the course of American history this past
quarter-century by bumping off one and all, high and low, who became an irritant
to them. She believed the Manson family was set up by counterintelligence types
to blacken the image of anti-war-music-and-youth longhairs who were becoming a
threat to the dominant culture and that Jonestown was a medical and mind-control
experiment in getting rid of undesirables.
Mae never had a theory she couldn't back up with a bewildering
mass of news clippings and assorted facts. The question that must in all respect
and sobriety be asked about Mae Brussell is the one Tom Wolfe asked about
Marshall McLuhan: "Whaaaaat if she was right?"
"Way back then in the '60s, way back before Watergate
even happened, Mae told me that all the crazy and violent things going on in the
country were part of a plan to get Ronald Reagan in office," said Krassner.