Barry Bingham
 Barry Bingham    (businessman) | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| Born | February 10, 1906 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Died | August 15, 1988 (Age 82) | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Nationality | US | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Alma mater | Harvard University | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Member of | Committee on the Present Danger/Members | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Party | Democratic Party (United States) | ||||||||||||||||||||
Kentucky media owner who collaborated with British Security Coordination. Attended 3 Bilderbergs in the 1950s. Ran the Marshall Plan in France in 1949.
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George Barry Bingham Sr. was the patriarch of a family that dominated local media in Louisville, Kentucky for several decades in the 20th century. He was proprietor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, where he paid the salaries of journalists Ulric Bell and Herbert Agar while they helped run the Fight for Freedom Committee in the early 1940s. Thomas E. Mahl suggests Bingham may have been working directly with British Security Coordination.
In 1949 he began a year as chief of the Marshall Plan in France[1], and chairman of the International Press Institute 1964-1966, and director Asia Foundation[2]. Both IPI and the Asia Foundation are known CIA fronts, the latter infamous.[3]
He was a trustee at the Rockefeller Foundation.[4] He attended the 1954, 1955 and 1956 Bilderberg meetings.
Family and career
Bingham's family owned a cluster of influential media properties – The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times newspapers, plus WHAS Radio and WHAS Television. The papers had been purchased by his father, Col. Robert Worth Bingham, using proceeds from an inheritance left by his second wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, herself the widow of railroad magnate Henry Flagler.[5]
Bingham attended Harvard University, then went into the family businesses. In 1931, he married Mary Caperton, a Radcliffe graduate. Bingham Sr. took the reins of the company in 1937; his elder brother Robert Worth Bingham Jr was considered incapable of taking control of the family business because of his alcoholism, and settled in England, where he married.[6] At the time, "The C-J" was little more than a Democratic Party organ, but Bingham built it into national prominence, thanks to reporting that was ambitious in scope for a newspaper in a city of Louisville's size.[7]
Throughout Bingham's tenure, the editorial voices of the C-J & Times was forthrightly liberal, especially for a fairly conservative (though predominantly Democratic at the time) state like Kentucky. The newspapers were recipients of six Pulitzer Prizes, including one for public service in 1967, plus multiple other awards during the Bingham years. The Courier-Journal became Kentucky's dominant newspaper, a position it retains to this day. He also founded WHAS-TV, the city's second television station.
In World War II, Bingham was an officer in the United States Navy, and was twice awarded the Bronze Star. Bingham Sr. was given the rank of Commandeur, Légion d'honneur, by France. In 1949 he began a year as chief of the Marshall Plan in France. In 1950, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[8]. He was a Fulbright lecturer at Oxford University in 1955.
He was an aristocratic intimate of British royalty and political luminaries such as Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy.[1]
In 1971, Bingham stepped down from day-to-day operations and handed over the operations of the company to his remaining son, Barry Bingham Jr. Bingham Sr. died on August 15, 1988, at age 82. Bingham Jr. died on April 3, 2006.
Further reading
- Chandler, David Leon with Mary Voelz Chandler (1987). The Binghams of Louisville: The Dark History Behind One of America's Great Fortunes. Crown. ISBN 0-517-56895-0.
- Brenner, Marie (1988). House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville. Random House. ISBN 0-394-55831-6.
- Bingham, Sallie (1989). Passion and Prejudice: A Family Memoir. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-55851-0.
- Tifft, Susan E. and Alex S. Jones (1991). The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. Summit Books. ISBN 0-671-79707-7.
Events Participated in
| Event | Start | End | Location(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilderberg/1954 | 29 May 1954 | 31 May 1954 | Netherlands Hotel Bilderberg Oosterbeek | The first Bilderberg meeting, attended by 68 men from Europe and the US, including 20 businessmen, 25 politicians, 5 financiers & 4 academics. |
| Bilderberg/1955 September | 23 September 1955 | 25 September 1955 | Germany Bavaria Garmisch-Partenkirchen | The third Bilderberg, in West Germany. The subject of a report by Der Spiegel which inspired a heavy blackout of subsequent meetings. |
| Bilderberg/1956 | 11 May 1956 | 13 May 1956 | Denmark Fredensborg | The 4th Bilderberg meeting, with 147 guests, in contrast to the generally smaller meetings of the 1950s. Has two Bilderberg meetings in the years before and after |
References
- ↑ a b https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-08-15-mn-454-story.html
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20061003025649/https://www.wcml.org.uk/internat/euromove.htm/
- ↑ Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception, Brassey's 1999, p.32.
- ↑ http://powerbase.info/index.php/Rockefeller_Foundation,_extract_from_Who_Rules_America
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20070405070436/http://archives.cjr.org/year/91/4/bingham.asp
- ↑ Robert Worth Bingham and the Southern Mystique, William Elliot Ellis, The Kent State University Press, 1997, pg 101
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20070323071459/http://www.uky.edu/CommInfoStudies/JAT/HallofFame/halloffame/bingham1981.htm
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20110725002054/http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterB.pdf
