Victor Lasky
 Victor Lasky     (journalist, propagandist) | ||||||||||||
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| Born | 7 January 1918 Liberty, New York, USA | |||||||||||
| Died | 22 February 1990 (Age 72) | |||||||||||
| Alma mater | Brooklyn College | |||||||||||
| Interests | • 1960 Presidential election • Operation Mockingbird • Alger Hiss • CREEP | |||||||||||
Important figure in the CIA's Operation Mockingbird. Lasky professed the greatest political "crime of the century" was not the Watergate scandal, but the "theft" of the 1960 Presidential election.
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Victor Lasky[1][2] was a conservative columnist in the United States who wrote several best-selling books. He was a public relations executive for Radio Liberty (1956-1960), one of the CIA's largest propaganda operations, and an important figure in the agency's Operation Mockingbird.
Background
On January 7, 1918, Victor Lasky was born in Liberty, New York. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1940.
Career
In 1942, Lasky joined the U.S. Army and served during World War two; during that time, he did correspondence work for the army's newspaper Stars and Stripes.[2]
After World War Two, Lasky joined the staff of the New York World-Telegram; while there, he assisted Frederick Woltman in writing a series of articles on Communist Party infiltration within the US, for which Woltman won a Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1947.[2]
Lasky first came to prominence with his 1950 book Seeds of Treason, co-authored with Ralph de Toledano, in which the authors argued against Alger Hiss and in favor of Whittaker Chambers, with regard to Chambers' accusations both he and Hiss had been spies for the Soviet Union.
Lasky was a public relations executive for Radio Liberty (1956-1960), one of the CIA's largest propaganda operations. He was also co-founder and first vice president of The Council Against Communist Aggression and the writer of the 1952 MGM documentary, The Hoaxters. Lasky was an important figure in the CIA's Operation Mockingbird.[3] He was syndicated by the North American Newspaper Alliance.
He was one of the first journalists to write a critical view of President John F. Kennedy. He expanded on this in his 1963 book JFK: The Man And The Myth, questioning Kennedy's wartime heroics on PT-109 and claimed he had a lackluster record as a congressman and senator. Lasky also wrote a similar negative book about Robert F. Kennedy.
Lasky's most important book was It Didn't Start With Watergate published in 1977. The author argued that the scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office was little more than a media event. He believed that the press disliked Nixon and subjected him to unfair scrutiny no other president had ever experienced. Lasky also showed that Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had used wiretaps on political opponents.
Lasky professed the greatest political "crime of the century" was not the Watergate scandal, but the "theft" of the 1960 Presidential election.
It was revealed during the Watergate scandal that Lasky was paid $20,000 by Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Lasky was also a close associate of CIA director, William Casey.[3]
In 1979, Lasky wrote another controversial work called Jimmy Carter: The Man And The Myth, asserting that Carter was one of the most inept presidents of all time.
Lasky's last work was Never Complain, Never Explain (1981), a biography of Henry Ford II.
