Edwin W. Pauley

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Edwin Wendell Pauley Sr. (January 7, 1903—July 28, 1981) was an American oilman and political appointee.

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[edit] Early life

Born in Indiana to Elbert L. Pauley and the former Ellen Van Petten, he attended Occidental College northeast of Los Angeles during 1919-20 before getting a degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1922, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, and an M.S. a year later.

Edwin Pauley (r) meets with Gov. Ronald Reagan, c.1967.
Edwin Pauley (r) meets with Gov. Ronald Reagan, c.1967.

[edit] Oil career

Pauley made his fortune running oil companies from the mid-1920s onward. He founded The Petrol Corp. in 1923. Pauley was president of Fortuna Petroleum by 1933. In 1938 he was appointed to fill an unexpired term on the UC Berkeley Board of Regents, and remained a regent until 1972. In 1940 he served as a member of the Interstate Oil and Compact Commission; then in 1941 became Roosevelt's petroleum coordinator for war in Europe on petroleum lend-lease supplies for Russia and England. He was involved in a wide variety of oil business deals, and was sometimes described as an "oil king-pin." In 1947 he bought Coconut Island in Hawaii, as a private retreat.[1]Several of his deals involved Zapata Corporation, run by George H. W. Bush, including a joint-venture with Pemargo in 1960. In 1958 he founded Pauley Petroleum which, with Howard Hughes, expanded oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Later Pauley also became a part owner of the Los Angeles Rams football team and a director of Western Airlines.

[edit] Politics

Pauley became involved with the Democratic Party as a fundraiser in 1930s, eventually becoming treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. He was director of the Democratic convention in 1944. He was a friend and confidante of Harry S. Truman, and through Truman's influence he was appointed as Petroleum Coordinator of Lend-Lease Supplies for the Soviet Union and Britain. As president, Truman appointed him United States representative to the Allied Reparations Committee from 1945-1947. With the rank of ambassador, as well as industrial and commercial advisor to the Potsdam Conference, his chief task was to renegotiate the reparations agreements formulated at Yalta (many of which affected Dulles' former clients). When Truman tried to appoint him Undersecretary of the Navy in 1946, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes resigned in protest at the conflict of interest given Pauley's ties to the oil industry. Ickes' resignation scuttled the appointment, and Pauley worked behind the scenes thereafter.

By successive appointments from several California governors, Pauley served as a University of California Regent from 1940 to 1972. The Pauley Pavilion at University of California, Los Angeles is named in his honor for his philanthropy and service as a Regent.

By the 1960s, Pauley came to support Ronald Reagan. He was the Board of Regents' harshest critic of student protests on UC campuses.[2]

[edit] Ties to OSS, CIA, and FBI

[edit] 1945-1965: OSS, and CIA?

Pauley allegedly had close ties to OSS officer Allen Dulles (later CIA Director), and it is confirmed that CIA Director John McCone knew him personally, despite Dulles' and McCone's Republican affiliations.[3] Pauley aided the Dulles brothers former clients in shifting Nazi assets out of Europe and out of Soviet hands or knowledge. Pauley also assisted surveying Japan's assets and determining the amount of its war debt.

Pauley left government in the late 1940s and returned to being an independent oil-man. Through his business in the Caribbean he and Howard Hughes allegedly granted some access to CIA officials. It is not known if the deal with Zapata Corporation was similarly useful to the CIA. He also allegedly engaged in money-laundering through Mexican banks, in part to disguise campaign contributions -- including those to Richard Nixon.[citation needed]

[edit] 1965-1972: CIA, FBI, and UC Berkeley anti-war protests

In 1965, Pauley was serving as a Regent at the University of California, when anti-Vietnam war campus protests began to grow. At Pauley's request, CIA Director John McCone met with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on January 28th and Hoover agreed to leak to Pauley information about UC Berkeley President Clark Kerr. (See memo regarding McCone's request to meet with Hoover. McCone graduated from UC Berkeley in 1922, the year before Pauley.) At that meeting, McCone told Hoover that Pauley was very upset about the "situation at Berkeley", and was "anxious to get a line on any persons who are communists or have communist associations, either on the faculty or in the student body." As soon as McCone left his office, Hoover phoned Los Angeles FBI chief Wesley Grapp, and ordered him to give Pauley anonymous memos on regents, faculty members, and students who were "causing trouble at Berkeley." Hoover admonished Grapp, "It must be impressed upon Mr. Pauley that this data is being furnished in strict confidence."[4]

1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover from CIA Director John McCone, re: UC Berkeley protests.
1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover from CIA Director John McCone, re: UC Berkeley protests.

Five days later (February 2nd) Grapp met with Pauley for two hours at his office in the Pauley Petroleum Building in Los Angeles. Grapp provided him information from FBI files on other Regents, faculty, and students who were considered "ultra-liberal." The CIA and FBI worked in conjunction with Ronald Reagan, who sought to mount a "psychological warfare campaign" against the budding Free Speech Movement and anti-war sit-ins, including using tax-evasion and "any other available" charges in which the FBI agreed to assist. "This has been done in the past, and has worked quite successfully," Hoover noted.[5][6] [7]

(This information was not made public until 2002, after a fifteen-year legal battle with the FBI that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, as a result of a FOIA request for an in-depth San Francisco Chronicle investigation. The FBI had claimed it needed to maintain secrecy to "protect law enforcement operations." The National Security Act of 1947 bars the CIA from engaging in domestic intelligence activities.) [8]

Pauley began the February 2, 1965 meeting with Grapp by saying he was upset about the Free Speech Movement and recalled that "obnoxious question... concerning the FBI being a secret police" (referring to a 1959 entry exam question.) He told Grapp he had "no use for [UC President] Kerr" and had accused Kerr of being a "communist or a communist follower." Pauley explained that the 24-member Board of Regents was divided and that his faction wanted "strong positive action taken immediately to clean up the mess."[citation needed] The problem, he said, was that so far he'd been unable to muster the votes to fire Kerr. He blamed the impasse on three "ultra-liberal" regents who staunchly backed Kerr. Governor Pat Brown (D)) had named to the board: William Coblentz (Brown's former special counsel); William M. Roth (member of the ACLU executive committee); and Elinor Raas Heller (member of the Democratic National Committee).

Pauley told Grapp that in the 1950s the FBI secretly gave the university reports on professors it was considering hiring. He said he wanted to restore the procedure -- which the FBI had code-named the Responsibilities Program -- and offered to pay someone to check FBI files. After obtaining Pauley's promise not to reveal that the FBI was his source, Grapp handed him Hoover's memos. Pauley quickly read one. "This is perfect," he said. "This is just what I need."[citation needed] It was a three-page report on UC Berkeley immunology professor Leon Wofsy that summarized news stories from 1945 to 1956, noting that Wofsy had been a self-avowed Communist Party official who tried to get young people involved with the party. (The report failed to note that since 1957 the FBI had found no evidence that Wofsy had been involved with the party.)

Two days later, Grapp reported to Hoover that Pauley would be "an excellent source of information" about internal university affairs. Pauley could also "use his influence to curtail, harass and at times eliminate communists and ultra-liberal members on the faculty"[citation needed] -- and on the Board of Regents. About a week later, Grapp secretly gave Pauley verbal reports containing confidential information about regents Coblentz, Roth and Heller -- even though they had fully disclosed it to the bureau and held top-level security clearances. Pauley, Grapp reported to Hoover, was "most appreciative" of the information on his opponents. As Pauley saw it, according to Grapp's report, UC would remain in turmoil "as long as the current officials were in power at the university."

That fall, thousands of students joined the escalating protests. To Pauley and the FBI, it was further proof that Kerr had lost control of the university. Pauley confided to Grapp that two alumni were taking things into their own hands. They had recruited athletes to "beat up the demonstrators" and hired a barber to "forcibly 'shear' the students who need it."[citation needed] Grapp continued to slip Pauley anonymous memos about students and faculty -- at least two dozen more -- that he could use in persuading the regents to fire Kerr. But in October, a frustrated Pauley told Grapp he was still "two votes short to fire Clark Kerr."[citation needed] Kerr would remain in charge of the university, it seemed, as long as Brown remained governor.

When Ronald Reagan was elected California's governor in 1966, after campaigning against "campus malcontents and filthy speech advocates" at Berkeley, one of his first moves was to fire Kerr. Reagan's Legal Affairs Secretary, Herbert Ellingwood, met with FBI agent Cartha "Deke" DeLoach at FBI Headquarters, and noted that Reagan was "dedicated to the destruction of disruptive elements on college campuses."[9]

[edit] References