Ronald Steel

Ronald Lewis Steel (born March 25, 1931) is an award-winning American writer, historian, and professor. He is the author of the definitive biography of Walter Lippmann.^{[1][lower-alpha 1]}

Biography

Ronald Steel was born in 1931 in Morris, Illinois outside of Chicago. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and English^[1] from Northwestern University (1953) and a Master of Arts degree in political economy from Harvard University (1955).^[2][3]

He served in the United States Army and was a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service.^[4]

He is the author of Walter Lippmann and the American Century,^[4][5] the definitive biography of Lippman.^[1] For this book, he was awarded the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction, a National Book Award,^{[6][lower-alpha 1]} and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973.^[7]

Steel is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations, History, and Journalism at the University of Southern California.^[4] Prior to teaching at USC, he taught at Yale University, Rutgers University, Wellesley College, Dartmouth College, George Washington University, UCLA, and Princeton University.^[4]

Steel wrote propaganda for the government about the JFK assassination:

The "RFK did it" idea was first offered up by Drew Pearson in his regular column in the Washington Post on March 3, 1967. Castro, Pearson speculated, had become aware of the plot to kill him and decided to retaliate by having President Kennedy killed. Add this to the assumption (also false) that RFK was personally behind the CIA's attempts to assassinate Fidel, and presto, we have Pearson's conclusion that not only was RFK ultimately responsible for his brother's murder (by Castro), but was also "plagued by the terrible thought that he had helped put into motion terrible forces that indirectly may have brought about his brother’s martyrdom."

All of this was based on hearsay "evidence" provided by an FBI spy named Edward Morgan, whose sources admittedly were not directly involved in the assassination and whom he refused to identify - in other words, pure gossip.

Ronald Steel continues this fantasy, speaking of "powerful" and even "overwhelming circumstantial evidence" that RFK, "through Operation Mongoose, had made the removal of Castro his personal responsibility and highest priority" and made "incessant demands of the CIA and the Mongoose planners to 'get Castro.'" This evidence consists exclusively of prattle directly attributable to CIA and Pentagon sources, which can hardly be considered reliable sources in this matter.

For example, Steel cites a statement in 1975 by then secretary of state Henry Kissinger to President Gerald Ford that Richard Helms of the CIA had informed him that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operations on the assassination of Castro." This triple hearsay, originating from the mouth of a convicted liar (Helms lied under oath to a Senate committee to cover up CIA improprieties) is what Steel calls "overwhelming circumstantial evidence."

As a further example of Steel's scholarship, he swallows whole the Warren Report's contention that Oswald was a pro-Castro agent, failing even to mention the work of Philip H. Melanson, who did in fact present overwhelming evidence eleven years ago to prove that Oswald was not an agent of Castro but of the CIA. Nor should we be surprised that Steel ignores the statement of Castro himself, made the day after the assassination, in which he said that Oswald "was never Secretary or Chairman of any Fair Play for Cuba Committee in any city of the United States" and that President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of some elements who disagreed with his international policy; that is to say, with his nuclear treaty, with his policy with respect to Cuba… And what happened yesterday can only benefit those ultra-rightist and ultra-reactionary sectors, among which President Kennedy…cannot be included." (cf. E. M. Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us, Appendix II, pp. 51-86).

But not unexpectedly, Steel, like the various post-Warren Commission government committees that "investigated" the assassination, hedges his bets. If it wasn't Castro, it was the Mafia.

Later, Steele wrote for The New Republic in the 1980s.^[8] He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and the The New York Review of Books.^[2]

Notes

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ronald Steel

• "Bibliography of books and articles by Ronald Steel". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2008-11-09. 

• Steel, Ronald (August 24, 2008). "A Superpower Is Reborn". New York Times. p. WK11. Retrieved 2008-11-09.