Proof:  Therapy Cultists Lied to Community

By Jack Finn

Heights and Valley News, Holiday Season, 1977

Heights and Valley News has obtained confidential internal bulletins of the Fred Newman therapy cult, which prove conclusively that District 3 School Board member Nancy Ross and her associates in the Newman group have been lying to the community for the past year and a half regarding their relationship to the allegedly defunct International Workers Party (IWP), a splinter group modeled in spirit and practice on the National Caucus of Labor Committees.

When Nancy Ross was campaigning for the school board last spring, she told various parents at P.S. 75 and also Heights and Valley News that the IWP had been disbanded--since its members, including IWP chairman Fred Newman--had learned from their previous mistakes that this type of organization is not relevant to the needs of the community.

This assertion that the tightly disciplined structure had been disbanded was repeated on Nov. 9, 1977 in a mimeographed public statement of the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council, the Newman cult's "reform-oriented" front group.  The statement, signed by Council president Joyce Dattner and intended as a reply to a November Heights and Valley News article ("West Side 'therapy cult' conceals its true aims"), said:  "The IWP disbanded soon after [a faction fight in early 1976], its members continuing to work on issues directly affecting poor, working, as well as middle income people."

In fact, the IWP is still very much alive, the confidential documents reveal, although it operates now as a strictly "clandestine" organization.  At least a dozen issues of "Party Building," the internal bulletin of the IWP, have emerged from the group's mimeograph machine since the alleged time of the party's disbanding.

These bulletins mention again and again the ongoing work of a "central committee" and of "chairman Fred Newman."  They also mention over and over the "Party" and the "work of the Party," as well as explicitly referring to the IWP (defined as the "apparatus").

The "Party" referred to is clearly, in all of these cases, the IWP and not the New York Working People's Party (a reformist electoral front for the IWP) or the People's Party (a national organization headed by Dr. Benjamin Spock, which the IWP is currently attempting to disrupt and split), since the bulletins give instructions on how the "Party" will work inside these groups.

Nancy Ross a Member

Each internal bulletin in our possession is marked "confidential," and each copy has the name of the comrade for whom it is intended written at the top.  Sources close to the IWP tell us that these documents are delivered to each member by a party "courier" and are not to be shown to nonmembers under any circumstances.

That Nancy Ross and Joyce Dattner were not themselves misled by the IWP, and that they were consciously lying to the community during the school board campaign, is proven by the explicit references to them as party members.  (Ms. Dattner, in fact, is a member of the IWP Central Committee.)

The implications of this fact were under scored by a leading schools movement activist and parent at P.S. 75; who told us in an interview last week that "Nancy could never have gotten elected to the school board if parents had believed she still belonged to the IWP--that group was simply too closely identified with the National Caucus of Labor Committees in the minds of too many activists."

The IWP bulletins make it clear that the "CommUNITY Citywide Coalition," the slate which Nancy Ross and her associates fielded in the school board elections last spring, was purely and simply a creature of the IWP.  The Dec. 26, 1976 bulletin contains a section entitled "Perspective on the Community School Board Elections," which gives details on how the IWP attempted to manipulate and/or pump for information various schools movement people who were unaware of the organization's existence.

Rev. Kirkpatrick Approached

For instance, one part of this "Perspective" was devoted to the question of "Gaining Black Support" (the membership of the IWP is entirely white).  We quote:  "Nancy Ross met with one of the black leaders in District 3, Sarah A., who said she would support Nancy and be happy to work with the Council on the campaign.  She put Nancy in touch with some black leaders from Harlem."  Heights and Valley News checked with Sarah A., who said that Nancy Ross never told her about the CommUNITY Coalition Slate's affiliation with the IWP.  "She never mentioned any such organization to me," said Mrs. A.

Again, the document says:  "Joyce Dattner met with Rev. F.D. Kirkpatrick, well known local black radical....  He responded favorably (though with characteristic Left apathy) to the perspective on the campaign.  He will be recontacted after the slate is further developed and determinations can be made as to how he can be made use of."  Heights and Valley News talked with Rev. Kirkpatrick, who said that Ms. Dattner failed to inform him of her and Nancy Ross' connection to the IWP.  Rev. Kirkpatrick assured us that, as a "sly old fox," he continued to respond with "characteristic Left apathy" to the attempts of this pair to "make use of him."

Intelligence Networks

But the IWP is into far more suspicious activities than running candidates in elections.  In the Dec. 26, 1976 bulletin, a report on party regionals (the basic units of the party) emphasizes the role of these units as "intelligence and communications networks, reporting on the social movement of various strata in particular areas of the country."

IWP cadre, the bulletins reveal, take this task seriously.  From the New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild to the California Peace and Freedom Party, they are busy gathering information and names, and using their reformist "cover" to gain influence within unsuspecting groups.

A special effort is made to contact and win the confidence of civil liberties lawyers and other legal defense workers who are involved in sensitive cases such as defending the Weather Underground or the Black Liberation Army.  The bulletin for March 1, 1977 described how "Comrade Harry Jackson" (the political name for attorney Harry Kresky, who has admitted informing to the FBI on the Weather Underground and fugitive Jane Alpert) had begun work on organizing a conference on "The Law and the Poor," which was envisioned as "a vehicle through which to reach progressive lawyers and other people concerned with issues of repression, law, etc."

The bulletin went on to say that Kresky "will be meeting with Conrad Lynn [a noted civil liberties lawyer--Ed.] to request he take major responsibility..  Harry has also written to [Dr. Benjamin] Spock asking him for names of possible speakers and, as well, a letter on his letterhead which can be used for fundraising to build support for the conference and Committee."

The IWP's intelligence-gathering, of course, had its comical aspect, as revealed in a section of the Dec. 26, 1976 bulletin entitled "CTU knows nothing."  We quote:  "Joyce and Nancy also met with Bruce Bailey and Dennis King (now heading up Columbia Tenants Union--a liberal radical tenants' union).  We were hoping to gain some information--they didn't have any."

"Dialogue" with Palestinians

At the same time, however, Harry Kresky and Anne Green (his co-participant in the 1974 meetings with the FBI) met with F _____ (an Arab name) from the Palestine Information Committee "to begin opening dialogue on the situation in the Middle East, to present our perspective to him and learn about the current perspective of the PLO.  We will be meeting with S ______ from the Lebanese Solidarity Committee this week to do the same."  Close observers say that Kresky, Green, and other IWP emissaries appear to have a "compulsive curiosity" about international revolutionary groups of the type the U.S. government would be most interested in penetrating.

The description of the IWP's organizing as "paternalistic racism" (November H & V) was fully confirmed by the March 1, 1977 bulletin in a section entitled "Building a Political Center."  This report divides the membership of the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council (the IWP's chief front group) into two parts:  the "organic members" (Black and Latin people) and the secret IWP "fraction" (described as "white and educated").  The task of the latter, according to this report, is to "proletarianize" the Blacks and Latins.

We quote the relevant passage:  "A most significant aspect ... is the changing role of organic members.  The upcoming period is a test of their reliability (and, of course, ours!) and capacity to carry out ongoing work--a reflection of the extent to which they have been proletarianized.  In this process, the politics of different members are emerging more clearly ... the process of Council members accepting other organic members as leadership will raise political issues and psychological tensions to a much greater degree than the acceptance of fraction members (white and educated) as leaders."

Social Psychological Techniques

With this type of attitude, one can easily understand the real source of "psychological tensions" within the Unemployed Council.  But the IWP felt a need to handle these tensions.  As the Dec. 26, 1976 bulletin said, "We need to exercise to a greater extent and develop further within the party our existing expertise in the area of social psychological techniques."  This also involved a scheme to inflict Fred Newman's brainwashing therapy techniques (described in the November H & V) on Black and Latin people in Queens and Brooklyn.  Heretofore, these techniques had been restricted to Newman's West End Avenue guinea pigs, but now:  "Comrades Fred, Hazel and Gail E. met with two Queens local Unemployed Council members, Phyllis B. and Alma, to develop a drug counseling program.. Their first assignment is to identify six other qualified people to be in a political therapy training program.  This program, led by Fred, will serve as a model for these trainees to use in . deprogramming and detoxing and training other drug addicts:"

Mindless Obedience

Some readers might have thought H&V News' description of Fred Newman's cult as based on a system of "mindless obedience" was over-stated, but one of the documents we obtained lays it all out, in the cult's own terminology.  What is being described is the relationship between leadership (i.e., Newman) and the cadre.  We quote:

"The leadership serves the cadre, exactly as the revolutionary party serves the, people.  It serves the cadre by clearly defining reality, via decisions, which demand of cadre the fullest expression of their creative potential as revolutionary organizers.  What is demanded of cadre is no mere passive acceptance of leadership--and their decisions.. What is demanded is the fully creative act of internalizing those decisions as fully correct (i.e., as literally defining reality), as well as creative, enthusiastic implementation of those decisions."