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Why Is So Little Known About the 1930s Coup Attempt Against FDR?

Business leaders like JP Morgan and Irénée du Pont were accused by a retired major general of plotting to install a fascist dictator.

Sally Denton

a man driving a convertible with his dog

‘The planned coup was thwarted when Butler reported it to J Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who reported it to FDR.’ Photograph: FPG / Staff / Getty Images

Donald Trump’s elaborate plot to overthrow the democratically elected president was neither impulsive nor uncoordinated, but straight out of the playbook of another American coup attempt – the 1933 “Wall Street putsch” against newly elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

America had hit rock bottom, beginning with the stock market crash three years earlier. Unemployment was at 16 million and rising. Farm foreclosures exceeded half a million. More than five thousand banks had failed, and hundreds of thousands of families had lost their homes. Financial capitalists had bilked millions of customers and rigged the market. There were no government safety nets – no unemployment insurance, minimum wage, social security or Medicare.

Economic despair gave rise to panic and unrest, and political firebrands and white supremacists eagerly fanned the paranoia of socialism, global conspiracies and threats from within the country. Populists Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin attacked FDR, spewing vitriolic anti-Jewish, pro-fascist refrains and brandishing the “America first” slogan coined by media magnate William Randolph Hearst.

On 4 March 1933, more than 100,000 people had gathered on the east side of the US Capitol for Roosevelt’s inauguration. The atmosphere was slate gray and ominous, the sky suggesting a calm before the storm. That morning, rioting was expected in cities throughout the nation, prompting predictions of a violent revolution. Army machine guns and sharpshooters were placed at strategic locations along the route. Not since the civil war had Washington been so fortified, with armed police guarding federal buildings.

FDR thought government in a civilized society had an obligation to abolish poverty, reduce unemployment, and redistribute wealth. Roosevelt’s bold New Deal experiments inflamed the upper class, provoking a backlash from the nation’s most powerful bankers, industrialists and Wall Street brokers, who thought the policy was not only radical but revolutionary. Worried about losing their personal fortunes to runaway government spending, this fertile field of loathing led to the “traitor to his class” epithet for FDR. “What that fellow Roosevelt needs is a 38-caliber revolver right at the back of his head,” a respectable citizen said at a Washington dinner party.

In a climate of conspiracies and intrigues, and against the backdrop of charismatic dictators in the world such as Hitler and Mussolini, the sparks of anti-Rooseveltism ignited into full-fledged hatred. Many American intellectuals and business leaders saw nazism and fascism as viable models for the US. The rise of Hitler and the explosion of the Nazi revolution, which frightened many European nations, struck a chord with prominent American elites and antisemites such as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. Hitler’s elite Brownshirts – a mass body of party storm troopers separate from the 100,000-man German army – was a stark symbol to the powerless American masses. Mussolini’s Blackshirts – the military arm of his organization made up of 200,000 soldiers – were a potent image of strength to a nation that felt emasculated.

A divided country and FDR’s emboldened powerful enemies made the plot to overthrow him seem plausible. With restless uncertainty, volatile protests and ominous threats, America’s right wing was inspired to form its own paramilitary organizations. Militias sprung up throughout the land, their self-described “patriots” chanting: “This is despotism! This is tyranny!”

Today’s Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have nothing on their extremist forbears. In 1933, a diehard core of conservative veterans formed the Khaki Shirts in Philadelphia and recruited pro-Mussolini immigrants. The Silver Shirts was an apocalyptic Christian militia patterned on the notoriously racist Texas Rangers that operated in 46 states and stockpiled weapons.

The Gray Shirts of New York organized to remove “Communist college professors” from the nation’s education system, and the Tennessee-based White Shirts wore a Crusader cross and agitated for the takeover of Washington. JP Morgan Jr, one of the nation’s richest men, had secured a $100m loan to Mussolini’s government. He defiantly refused to pay income tax and implored his peers to join him in undermining FDR.

So, when retired US Marine Corps Maj Gen Smedley Darlington Butler claimed he was recruited by a group of Wall Street financiers to lead a fascist coup against FDR and the US government in the summer of 1933, Washington took him seriously. Butler, a Quaker, and first world war hero dubbed the Maverick Marine, was a soldier’s soldier who was idolized by veterans – which represented a huge and powerful voting bloc in America. Famous for his daring exploits in China and Central America, Butler’s reputation was impeccable. He got rousing ovations when he claimed that during his 33 years in the marines: “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

Butler later testified before Congress that a bond-broker and American Legion member named Gerald MacGuire approached him with the plan. MacGuire told him the coup was backed by a group called the American Liberty League, a group of business leaders which formed in response to FDR’s victory, and whose mission it was to teach government “the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property”. Members included JP Morgan, Jr, Irénée du Pont, Robert Sterling Clark of the Singer sewing machine fortune, and the chief executives of General Motors, Birds Eye and General Foods.

The putsch called for him to lead a massive army of veterans – funded by $30m from Wall Street titans and with weapons supplied by Remington Arms – to march on Washington, oust Roosevelt and the entire line of succession, and establish a fascist dictatorship backed by a private army of 500,000 former soldiers.

As MacGuire laid it out to Butler, the coup was instigated after FDR eliminated the gold standard in April 1933, which threatened the country’s wealthiest men who thought if American currency wasn’t backed by gold, rising inflation would diminish their fortunes. He claimed the coup was sponsored by a group who controlled $40bn in assets – about $800bn today – and who had $300m available to support the coup and pay the veterans. The plotters had men, guns and money – the three elements that make for successful wars and revolutions. Butler referred to them as “the royal family of financiers” that had controlled the American Legion since its formation in 1919. He felt the Legion was a militaristic political force, notorious for its antisemitism and reactionary policies against labor unions and civil rights, that manipulated veterans.

The planned coup was thwarted when Butler reported it to J Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who reported it to FDR. How seriously the “Wall Street putsch” endangered the Roosevelt presidency remains unknown, with the national press at the time mocking it as a “gigantic hoax” and historians like Arthur M Schlesinger Jr surmising “the gap between contemplation and execution was considerable” and that democracy was not in real danger. Still, there is much evidence that the nation’s wealthiest men – Republicans and Democrats alike – were so threatened by FDR’s policies that they conspired with antigovernment paramilitarism to stage a coup.

The final report by the congressional committee tasked with investigating the allegations, delivered in February 1935, concluded: “[The committee] received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country”, adding “There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”

As Congressman John McCormack who headed the congressional investigation put it: “If General Butler had not been the patriot he was, and if they had been able to maintain secrecy, the plot certainly might very well have succeeded … When times are desperate and people are frustrated, anything could happen.”

There is still much that is not known about the coup attempt. Butler demanded to know why the names of the country’s richest men were removed from the final version of the committee’s report. “Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape,” Butler said in a Philadelphia radio interview in 1935. “The big shots weren’t even called to testify. They were all mentioned in the testimony. Why was all mention of these names suppressed from this testimony?”

While details of the conspiracy are still matters of historical debate, journalists and historians, including the BBC’s Mike Thomson and John Buchanan of the US, later concluded that FDR struck a deal with the plotters, allowing them to avoid treason charges – and possible execution – if Wall Street backed off its opposition to the New Deal. The presidential biographer Sidney Blumenthal recently said that Roosevelt should have pushed it all through, then reneged on his agreement and prosecuted them.

What might all of this portend for Americans today, as President Biden follows in FDR’s New Deal footsteps while democratic socialist Bernie Sanders also rises in popularity and influence? In 1933, rather than inflame a quavering nation, FDR calmly urged Americans to unite to overcome fear, banish apathy and restore their confidence in the country’s future. Now, 90 years later, a year on from Trump’s own coup attempt, Biden’s tone was more alarming, sounding a clarion call for Americans to save democracy itself, to make sure such an attack “never, never happens again”.

If the plotters had been held accountable in the 1930s, the forces behind the 6 January coup attempt might never have flourished into the next century.

Sally Denton is the author of The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right. Her forthcoming book is The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land.

Luis Echeverría Alvarez, Former President of Mexico, Dies at 100

He had faced accusations that, as interior secretary, he was responsible for repressing protests before the 1968 Olympics that ended in a massacre.

Luis Echeverría Alvarez in 1969 as he accepted his party’s nomination for president. He steered the country on a left-wing course, but his tenure was shadowed by his role in a massacre at the Olympic Games. (Photo credit: AP)

By Jonathan Kandell

July 9, 2022

Luis Echeverría Alvarez, who steered Mexico on a stormy left-wing course in the 1970s as president and who never escaped the shadow of a massacre before the 1968 Olympics, died on Friday at his home in Cuernavaca. He was 100.

His death was confirmed in a tweet by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Under Mr. Echeverría, the number of government employees tripled, state-owned businesses multiplied almost eightfold, and inflation exploded, undermining years of relative economic stability.

But Mr. Echeverría may best be remembered for accusations that he was largely responsible, as interior secretary, for the repression of student-led protests in 1968 before the Mexico City Olympic Games that culminated in the killings of scores of people, perhaps as many as 300.

Nearly four decades later, he was placed under house arrest when the case was revived, a spectacular turn for a former president.

The aftermath of the massacre helped shape his presidency, which began in 1970. Seeking to make amends, he brought left-wing intellectuals into the government, gave the government broad control over the economy, and embraced third world positions in international affairs. These measures alienated the business community, the middle class, and other politically conservative groups.

By the time he left office, Mr. Echeverría was being denounced by critics across the political spectrum, accused of authoritarianism and incompetence, and assailed for policies that provoked a flight of capital abroad, a steep devaluation of the peso, and economic stagnation.

Nonetheless, he campaigned for a Nobel Peace Prize and harbored hopes of becoming secretary general of the United Nations.

Born on Jan. 17, 1922, in Mexico City, the son of a civil servant, Mr. Echeverría in many ways typified the so-called “second generation” of the political elite who emerged from the country’s bloody revolution.

In the decades after that upheaval, politics was dominated by former officers of the revolutionary armies. But by the 1940s, a degree from the prestigious law school of the National Autonomous University of Mexico had become the surest passport into politics.

After graduating from that law school, Mr. Echeverría allied himself with a strong political family by marrying María Esther Zuno, the daughter of the governor of the state of Jalisco, with whom he had eight children. He then looked around for a powerful mentor, another prerequisite for aspiring politicians. He became a protégé of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, a cabinet minister and former state governor who was clearly headed for the presidency.

When Mr. Díaz Ordaz was elected president in 1964, he appointed Mr. Echeverría as his secretary of interior, the cabinet official in charge of domestic political affairs. That post assured him of succeeding Mr. Díaz Ordaz. But it also placed Mr. Echeverría on a collision course with young leftists who chafed at one-party rule, censorship, a pro-business climate, and the strong influence of the United States.

The protesters had staged their demonstrations in the months leading up to the October 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Mr. Díaz Ordaz ordered that the protest movement be quelled in time for the Games, and Mr. Echeverría sent troops to break up campus sit-ins.

On Oct. 2, 1968, during a peaceful rally at the Tlatelolco housing development, soldiers and government security agents opened fire on the crowd. The government claimed that about 30 people died, but witnesses said that the number was as high as 300.

Mr. Echeverría had always denied that he ordered the shooting, arguing that the soldiers who carried out the attack were not under his command.

The Tlatelolco massacre ripped away the benevolent mask covering rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had governed Mexico throughout most of the 20th century.

Mr. Echeverria in 2002 after meeting with prosecutors over his role in the repression of student protests in 1968 that led to a massacre. Credit…Jorge Uzon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer and intellectual, observed: “At the very moment in which the Mexican government was receiving international recognition for 40 years of political stability and economic progress, a swash of blood dispelled the official optimism and caused every citizen to doubt the meaning of that progress.”

The wounds of Tlatelolco were still raw when Mr. Echeverría became president in 1970 with the avowed intention of carrying out what he called “a democratic opening.”

He promised industrial workers and the poor a more equitable share of the national wealth. He vowed to increase the state’s role in the economy. He began to sport the leather jackets of factory workers; his entourage dressed the same way. And the wives of politicians were asked to appear at state dinners in Mexican folk costumes instead of their usual haute couture gowns.

Mr. Echeverría was especially intent on co-opting the intellectuals. To a surprising extent, he succeeded. His speeches began to appropriate the leftist rhetoric used by dissenters during the 1968 crisis. He led Mexico into the third world camp, and championed the cause of developing countries in their economic dealings with industrialized nations. He spoke out against the growing power of multinational corporations, once even threatening to expel Coca-Cola from Mexico unless it revealed its secret formula to local bottlers.

Mr. Echeverría often disagreed with Washington over hemispheric affairs. He strengthened Mexico’s ties with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. He was a supporter of Salvador Allende, and when the Chilean president died in a 1973 military coup, Mr. Echeverría broke relations with the new right-wing government in Chile and welcomed thousands of political refugees from that country to Mexico. Under the Echeverría government, Mexico became the foremost haven for Latin American exiles.

Besides expressing ideological sympathy for intellectuals, the president offered them important jobs and financial inducements. After releasing protesters who were jailed in the 1968 crisis, he gave many of them government jobs. This signaled the beginning of a spectacular expansion of the bureaucracy. Between 1970 and 1976, public sector employment rose from 600,000 jobs to 2.2 million.

During Mr. Echeverría’s presidency and its immediate aftermath, affluence and social status transformed intellectuals into a privileged class who “lived better in Mexico than in the United States or Western Europe,” wrote Alan Riding, the New York Times’s Mexico correspondent during that era.

While the courting of left-wing intellectuals proved successful, Mr. Echeverría stuck to his former violent methods against the more radical left. Small, armed guerrilla groups were routinely suppressed by torture and assassination. Between 1971 and 1978, more than 400 people “disappeared.”

Under President Echeverría, relations between government and business reached their lowest ebb in decades.

The number of state-owned corporations mushroomed from 86 to 740. Taxes on corporate profits and personal incomes rose sharply. So did public spending on education, housing and agriculture. Between 1970 and 1976, the federal deficit soared by 600 percent. Inflation leaped by more than 20 percent a year. The balance of payments deficit tripled.

Business confidence was shattered. Billions of dollars fled across the border into real estate, banks, stocks and bonds in the United States. Shortly before Mr. Echeverría finished his term, the peso was devalued by more than 50 percent, bringing to a close 22 years of stable currency.

Upon taking office in 1970, Mr. Echeverría had vowed to “reduce the gap between the powerful and the unprotected.” Six years later, inflation and recession had widened the gap.

As the economy soured and public opinion turned against him, Mr. Echeverría’s behavior grew erratic. Previous presidents accepted lame-duck status and a lower profile during their final months in office. But he seemed more combative than ever, setting off rumors that he intended to stage a military coup and keep himself in office despite having already picked José López Portillo as his successor.

In July 1976, with just four months left in his term, Mr. Echeverría took control of Excélsior, then considered the country’s best newspaper, whose editorial columns had become increasingly critical of his presidency. Mr. Echeverría was soon embroiled in more controversy. He blamed anti-patriotic speculators for the devaluation of the peso, and as the currency continued to fall, he escalated his attacks against the business community.

With coup rumors at their peak in November 1976, only a month before the scheduled end of his term, the president expropriated hundreds of thousand of acres of rich farmlands and turned them over to militant peasants. The coup rumors vanished only with the inauguration of Mr. López Portillo on Dec. 1, 1976.

For several years after his presidency, Mr. Echeverría stayed out of Mexico, accepting distant diplomatic posts in Australia and New Zealand. He eventually returned to play a behind-the-scenes role as a left-wing gadfly in the PRI.

Then, beginning in 2000, Mr. Echeverría was thrust back into the public eye, after an opposition government began to investigate his role in the Tlatelolco massacre and in the killing of 25 student demonstrators in 1971 by a special police unit known as Los Halcones.

Mr. Echeverría was placed under house arrest in 2006. By 2007, the cases against him had been dismissed, though he was not released from house arrest until 2009, when appeals went in his favor.

Mr. Echeverría’s wife, María Esther Zuno, died in 1999. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Elisabeth Malkin, Randal C. Archibold and Elda Lizzia Cantu contributed reporting.

Miguel Etchecolatz, enforcer of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ dies at 93

The former police deputy remained defiant over the atrocities committed during the 1976-1983 military rule

By Brian Murphy

July 5, 2022 at 4:37 p.m. EDT

Miguel Etchecolatz, a notorious police henchman in Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship who was convicted of prominent roles in baby snatching as well as the abduction of 10 high school students — a crime that became known as the “Night of the Pencils” — died July 2 at a clinic in Buenos Aires. He was 93.

His death, of undisclosed causes while receiving treatment under police guard, was announced by a court in La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires province. That was the region where many of the teenage students were seized in 1976 as part of the junta’s sweeping repression against leftist opponents and other perceived enemies. Only four left custody alive.

The arc of Mr. Etchecolatz’s infamy, as a junta enforcer and later for his unrepentant defiance after Argentina’s return to democracy, was a study in the country’s struggle for a full reckoning over the atrocities committed during the dictatorship. Human rights groups estimate as many as 30,000 people were killed or “disappeared,” and many more were tortured in clandestine detention camps, some under the direction of Mr. Etchecolatz as police deputy for the Buenos Aires region.

But Mr. Etchecolatz surrendered few secrets during a series of trials over the decades as crowds jeered him as a “killer” and “repressor,” once throwing red paint at him in 2006. A life-sentence judgment in that trial described him as complicit in “genocide,” a landmark ruling that, for the first time in Argentine jurisprudence, framed the “Dirty War” as fitting the United Nations definition for a genocidal campaign.

Mr. Etchecolatz, the conviction read, “was an essential part of an apparatus of destruction, death and terror.”

He refused to acknowledge the civilian courts’ authority, calling himself a prisoner of war or sometimes clutching a rosary and saying “only God” can judge him. Despite many opportunities, he also never offered any significant details to help account for the thousands still missing or give historians insights to piece together the junta’s complex web.

“I never had, or thought to have, or was haunted by, any sense of blame. For having killed? I was the executor of a law made by man,” he wrote in a 1988 autobiography, “La Otra Campaña del Nunca Más” (“The Other Never Again Campaign”). “I was the keeper of divine precepts. And I would do it again.” (The book title referred to Nunca Más, or Never Again, a national commission on state-directed human rights abuses during the junta.)

Mr. Etchecolatz, a chain smoker whose “investigative unit” ranged from street thugs to a Catholic priest who heard police confessions, became one of the most feared figures of the security apparatus. The junta took power at a time of near-total chaos: uncontrolled inflation and labor strikes as well as threats from leftist guerrillas and right-wing militias.

Mr. Etchecolatz appeared to have free rein to press the junta’s ruthless purges known as the National Reorganization Process, or simply “El Proceso.” More people were arrested or disappeared in Mr. Etchecolatz’s territory — the capital Buenos Aires and surrounding areas, including La Plata — than anywhere else in Argentina during the dictatorship’s early years, according to prosecutors.

Who was ‘Tex’ Harris, U.S. diplomat who exposed rights abuses in Argentina?

An early shock was the Night of the Pencils. Over two days in September 1976, masked agents rounded up eight high school students — four boys and four girls — suspected of leftist sympathies. Two other male students were taken in other raids that month. They all were held in Mr. Etchecolatz’s gulag, prosecutors say, and six were never seen again by their families.

One of the surviving students, Pablo Diaz, said he received electric shocks to his mouth and genitals at a detention center known as Arana. He was 18 at the time. “They tore out a toenail,” he told investigators, according to the BBC. “It was very usual to spend several days without food.”

Democracy returned in 1983, after the military regime proved unable to steady a faltering economy and made a disastrous attempt to take the Falkland Islands, which Argentina claimed as part of its territory, from the British.

Mr. Etchecolatz was first convicted in 1986 during a wave of prosecutions against junta officials. But laws passed later that year gave amnesty for many security officers in attempts to avoid post-junta upheavals in the military and police. Mr. Etchecolatz and others convicted of Dirty War abuses were released.

Mr. Etchecolatz wrote his memoir, appeared on TV shows to confront accusers and mingled openly with past functionaries of the dictatorship, including his former boss, Gen. Ramón Camps, whose 25-year sentence also was put aside.

The amnesty was ordered repealed in 2003 by the government of President Néstor Kirchner, a leftist who had been briefly jailed during the junta years for his student activism. Mr. Etchecolatz was back in court the next year, under a civil trial not covered by the immunity.

This time, he and a police physician, Jorge Bergés, were convicted of roles in taking hundreds of infants of the families of “disappeared” or imprisoned parents and putting them up for adoption by junta supporters. Camps, who died in 1994, openly acknowledged the theft of babies “because subversive parents will raise subversive children.” Mr. Etchecolatz and Bergés were each sentenced to seven years.

Declassified U.S. documents reveal internal tensions over Argentina’s Dirty War

In a separate trial in 2006, Mr. Etchecolatz became the first senior junta official tried for human rights abuses after Argentina’s high court approved lifting the amnesty. More than 100 witnesses were called, some describing in gruesome detail the conditions in the torture camps. Sitting in the front row were members of the group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, women who held weekly vigils outside the presidential palace for their children and grandchildren who were lost during the dictatorship.

Judge Carlos Rozanski read the accusations of torture and disappearances. He then turned to Mr. Etchecolatz. Your profession? the judge asked.

“Retired policeman,” Mr. Etchecolatz calmly replied. He held a rosary and said he would not recognize the court’s jurisdiction, claiming he should face a military trial.

Months later, just before the judge read the life sentence, Mr. Etchecolatz rose with a hand-lettered sign around his neck. “Lord Jesus, if they condemn me, it is for following your cause,” it read.

The crowd in court cheered the sentence.

Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz was born in Azul, Argentina, on May 1, 1929. He rose through the police ranks and after the coup in 1976, moved into the inner circle of junta loyalists.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. At least one daughter, Mariana Dopazo, has been outspoken in her rejection of her father, changing her last name and condemning Mr. Etchecolatz and other junta leaders.

Almost two generations removed from the junta era, Mr. Etchecolatz remained a powerful symbol of the iron grip once held by the military and police. He was back in court multiple times to face Dirty War charges, most recently in 2020 with another life sentence for crimes that included torture in detention camps including one, Brigada Lanús, widely known as El Infierno, or hell.

Mr. Etchecolatz continued to stonewall prosecutors and others seeking any clues over the missing. Just once he appeared to open a door.

In a 2014 trial, reporters noticed Mr. Etchecolatz holding a slip of paper with a name, Jorge Julio López, a survivor of junta-era torture who vanished in 2006 before he was scheduled to testify against Mr. Etchecolatz. One the other side of the paper was written: Kidnap. López remains missing.

Rights groups and others alleged that sympathizers of Mr. Etchecolatz kidnapped López to intimidate other potential witnesses at future trials. The enigmatic note by Mr. Etchecolatz was widely interpreted as reinforcing the warning.

“The perpetrators of genocide continue to die without revealing their secrets, without telling us where [the disappeared] are or what they did with our relatives and disappeared comrades,” wrote Argentina’s environment minister, Juan Cabandié, in a tweet after Mr. Etchecolatz’s death. “Neither forget nor forgive.”

Former Japanese Prime Minister Abe dies after being shot while campaigning in Nara

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wearing a face mask arrives at Prime Minister’s office in Tokyo, Monday, Aug. 31, 2020. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe died Friday after being shot while delivering a stump speech in the western city of Nara two days ahead of a national election.

Japan’s longest-serving leader was shot by a 41-year-old man from behind at around 11:30 a.m. when he was speaking in front of Kintetsu Railway’s Yamato-Saidaiji Station, police said, adding he collapsed on the ground after two shots were heard. He was rushed to a hospital with blood seen on his shirt.

A doctor with the Nara Medical University Hospital said at a press conference that Abe died at 5:03 p.m. and the wound was deep enough to reach his heart, adding the cause of death is believed to be blood loss.

Tetsuya Yamagami, a resident of Nara, was arrested at the scene on suspicion of attempted murder, the police said. The suspect was formerly a member of the Maritime Self-Defense Force, according to government sources.

“It’s not a grudge against the political beliefs of former Prime Minister Abe,” Nara prefectural police quoted Yamagami as saying. He was also quoted as saying he was dissatisfied with Abe and planned to kill him. His home was later searched by the police.

According to the disaster management agency, Abe, who was prime minister until 2020, was also wounded and bleeding on the right side of his neck with internal bleeding confirmed in the left side of his chest.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, after returning to his office in Tokyo by helicopter from Yamagata Prefecture where he was campaigning, condemned the shooting of the 67-year-old former leader “in the strongest possible terms,” saying such a barbaric act should never be tolerated.

The assailant’s motive is not fully known, he said.

Abe, who was also the longtime leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, was in the city to support a candidate running in Sunday’s House of Councillors election and there was a crowd of people listening to his speech near the railway station when the attack occurred.

A Kyodo News reporter at the scene saw the attacker silently approach Abe, who had been speaking for several minutes, before shooting him.

Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is given a heart massage after being shot in Nara on Friday. Photo: KYODO

Loud screams were heard from the crowd and Abe fell to the ground seconds later. Yamagami was immediately apprehended by police officers.

A campaign staff member was seen desperately trying to revive Abe by pushing on his chest with both hands as he lay on the ground with his eyes closed. People nearby called for medical assistance.

It is a rare case of a shooting in Japan, a country that has strict gun regulations.

The weapon used by Abe’s assailant made a noise that could be compared to an explosion, and white smoke rose into the air after it was discharged. A gunpowder-like smell could be detected afterward.

The weapon appeared to have its barrel wrapped with duct tape, the reporter said.

Kishida and his Cabinet ministers later discussed the government’s response to the incident.

Asked about any impact on Japanese politics, Kishida said it was not the right time to think about it, adding nothing has been decided on how to respond to the remaining campaign period through Sunday.

Born into a prominent political family, Abe served as a secretary for his father, former Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe, before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1993.

He had a short stint as prime minister between 2006 and 2007 before assuming the post again in 2012. He stepped down due to health problems after nearly eight years.

During his second term as leader, he pursued economic policies dubbed “Abenomics” marked by massive monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reforms aimed at beating deflation and turning the nation’s stagnant economy around.

Abe made efforts to bolster Japan’s security alliance with the United States and raise Japan’s profile overseas, while seeking to promote reform of Japan’s U.S.-drafted pacifist Constitution.

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said he is “saddened and shocked” by the shooting.

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Publication Spotlight: Scorpions’ Dance — The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate

For the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in: The untold story of President Richard Nixon, CIA Director Richard Helms, and their volatile shared secrets that ended a presidency.

Scorpions’ Dance by intelligence expert and investigative journalist Jefferson Morley reveals the Watergate scandal in a completely new light: as the culmination of a concealed, deadly power struggle between President Richard Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms.

Nixon and Helms went back decades; both were 1950s Cold Warriors, and both knew secrets about the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba as well as off-the-books American government and CIA plots to remove Fidel Castro and other leaders in Latin America. Both had enough information on each other to ruin their careers.

After the Watergate burglary on June 17, 1972, Nixon was desperate to shut down the FBI’s investigation. He sought Helms’ support and asked that the CIA intervene―knowing that most of the Watergate burglars were retired CIA agents, contractors, or long-term assets with deep knowledge of the Agency’s most sensitive secrets. The two now circled each other like scorpions, defending themselves with the threat of lethal attack. The loser would resign his office in disgrace; the winner, however, would face consequences for the secrets he had kept.

Rigorously researched and dramatically told, Scorpions’ Dance uses long-neglected evidence to reveal a new perspective on one of America’s most notorious presidential scandals.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“In this, his third biography of a senior CIA official, Jefferson Morley’s pen is sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, his prose honed by years of sifting through information citizens were never meant to see. He gives us hidden history.”
—Anthony Summers, author of The Arrogance of Power and Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Eleventh Day

“Just when you think you’ve read everything there is to read about Watergate, along comes another analysis seen through a different lens. This is particularly true of Jefferson Morley’s new book Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate. Mr. Morley’s lens is the relationship between President Nixon and Richard Helms, CIA Director through all but a few months of the Nixon presidency and it reveals a number of unexploded hand grenades previously undiscovered. The central issue is whether these two men enabled each other. No doubt, there is still more to be learned.”
–Gary Hart, United States Senator (Ret.)

“No historian today understands the Cold War White House better than Jefferson Morley. His decades of research into the Kennedy assassination, the intelligence agencies, and national security policy-making in the Vietnam era make him especially well equipped to untangle the complex of narratives, overlapping and conflicting, that comprise the Watergate scandal. Plumbing archival documents and other new evidence, Morley brings sensitivity and probity to his examination of the ill-fated Nixon-Helms relationship, and thereby makes Scorpions’ Dance a must read for students of those tumultuous times.”
–James Rosen, Newsmax chief White House correspondent and author of The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

“Jefferson Morley has written a fascinating account of the relationship between President Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms. The book enriches our perspectives on Watergate while explaining how these two towering American Machiavelli’s aided each other’s corrupt ventures, to their own downfall and the disgrace of the high offices they held. It’s a warning to the governing elite in any era.”
–Larry J. Sabato, author of The Kennedy Half-Century and A More Perfect Constitution

“Jefferson Morley’s taut, descriptive prose transports us back in time to relive the momentous events of the 1960s and 1970s, entering the minds of the colorful characters who shaped history to feel what they felt and to reimagine for ourselves the decisions they made and why. His purpose is evident in his open-minded yet relentless pursuit of the truth about the corrosive impact of intelligence covert action on individuals and organizations, and on democracy itself―and to reflect on the consequences of sacrificing truth for the sake of power.”
–Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former CIA operations officer and senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

“Jefferson Morley has captured, in all its surreal conspiratorial glory, the last sinister tango of a pair of wicked Richards. A riveting story that will make you chuckle and shiver.”
— John Aloysius Farrell, author of Richard Nixon: The Life

“A work that sheds new light on Watergate half a century after the fact.”
— Kirkus

“Eye-opening…Packed with lucid analyses of complex geopolitical events, this is a vital reconsideration of recent American history.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Thoroughly researched…With a complex cast of characters, Cold War espionage, and tense courtroom drama, Morley’s timely book will appeal to readers seeking an in-depth understanding of both Watergate and CIA history.”
—Library Journal

“Morley (The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, 2017) shares more of his insights into the role of the CIA in America’s recent history….The centrality of Nixon and Helms to so many pivotal moments in history makes Morley’s revelations about their sparring even more intriguing.” ―Booklist

“Morley adds rich context to Helms’s half-truth, offering new and fascinating details to what he calls a decades-long ‘clandestine collaborative’ relationship between [Helms and Nixon] … Scorpions’ Dance thoughtfully explores the relationship of the presidency to the intelligence community.” —SpyTalk

About the Author

JEFFERSON MORLEY is a journalist and editor who has worked in Washington journalism for over thirty years, fifteen of which were spent as an editor and reporter at The Washington Post. The author of Our Man in Mexico, a biography of the CIA’s Mexico City station chief Winston Scott, Morley has written about intelligence, military, and political subjects for Salon, The Atlantic, and The Intercept, among others. He is the editor of JFK Facts, a blog. He lives in Washington, DC.