Richard Allen Quotes

The study of human institutions is always a search for the most tolerable imperfections.

In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).

Rosa Parks drew solace & sustenance from the long history of Black resistance before her time, placing her action & the Montgomery bus boycott in the continuum of Black protest. Her speech notes during the boycott read: 'Reading histories of others--Crispus Attucks through all wars--Richard Allen--Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. & Jr. Women Phyllis Wheatley--Sojourner Truth--Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune. For Parks, the ability to keep going, to know that the struggle for justice was possible amidst all the setbacks they encountered, was partly possible through reading & referencing the long Black struggle before her.

The Hollywood comedienne Gracie Allen was so secretive about her age that even her husband, the fellow performer George Burns, didn't know her real date of birth. Various sources claim that Allen was born on July 26 in 1894, 1895, 1897, 1902, or 1906. Throughout her life, Allen claimed that her birth certificate was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, even though the earthquake occurred a few months before her alleged birthday. When asked about the discrepancy, Allen allegedly remarked, 'Well, it was an awfully big earthquake.

Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story in 1838 about a shipwreck and how three survivors killed and ate the third man, Richard Parker; in 1884, in real life, this actually happened to a man called Richard Parker.

Sie hatte die merkwürdigste Empfindung selbst unsichtbar zu sein, ungesehen, unbekannt, es würde jetzt keine Heirat, kein Kindergebären mehr geben, sondern nur dieses erstaunliche und ziemlich feierliche Voranschreiten mit allen anderen, die Bond Street hinauf, als Mrs. Dalloway, nicht mehr als Clarissa, dieses Mrs. Richard Dalloway-Sein.

Alan Ladd as Neale Jordan Veronica Lake as Ellen Hillman Mike Mazurki as Paul Fontana Elisha Cook Jr. as Ciro Ricci Gloria Graham as May Martell Frank Lovejoy as Randolph McGraw Hugh Beaumont as Charlie Gray Lloyd Nolan as Victor Haskell June Lockhart as Janet Haskell James Craig as Eddie Lomax Laird Cregar as Frank Perkins William Bendix as Art Barker Richard Denning as Jerry Markle James Gleason as Sam Menard Tom Drake as Roy Douglas Dick as Tommy Barrow Virginia Grey as Claire Allen Farley Granger as Andy Hillman Edward Ryan as Gerald

Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.

Violent anti-communist fears by the military and munition makers justified the transformation of a once democratic nation into the fascist state we have today. Members of the Nazi Party now hold key positions in our universities, factories, aircraft and aerospace programs.14 When the Nazi empire collapsed in 1945, General Reinhard Gehlen joined forces with our OSS. Gehlen was placed in charge of wartime intelligence for Foreign Armies East. “It was not long before Gehlen was back in business, this time for the United States. Gehlen named his price and terms.”15 A series of meetings was arranged at the Pentagon with Nazi Gehlen, Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover and others.16 The Gehlen organization combined forces and agents with the OSS, which was soon to become known as the CIA. Experts in clandestine and illegal control of Germany through political assassinations and reversal of judicial processes became the teachers of Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. They helped form the new CIA in 1947, based upon clandestine activities in Nazi Germany.17

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

While David runs the financial end of the Rockefeller dynasty, Nelson runs the political. Nelson would like to be President of the United States. But, unfortunately for him, he is unacceptable to the vast majority of the grass roots of his own party. The next best thing to being President is controlling a President. Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon are supposed to be bitter political competitors. In a sense they are, but that still does not preclude Rockefeller from asserting dominion over Mr. Nixon. When Mr. Nixon and Mr. Rockefeller competed for the Republican nomination in 1968, Rockefeller naturally would have preferred to win the prize, but regardless of who won, he would control the highest office in the land. You will recall that right in the middle of drawing up the Republican platform in 1960, Mr. Nixon suddenly left Chicago and flew to New York to meet with Nelson Rockefeller in what Barry Goldwater described as the "Munich of the Republican Party." There was no political reason why Mr. Nixon needed to crawl to Mr. Rockefeller. He had the convention all sewed up. The Chicago Tribune cracked that it was like Grant surrendering to Lee. In The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore White noted that Nixon accepted all the Rockefeller terms for this meeting, including provisions "that Nixon telephone Rockefeller personally with his request for a meeting; that they meet at the Rockefeller apartment…that their meeting be secret and later be announced in a press release from the Governor, not Nixon; that the meeting be clearly announced as taking place at the Vice President's request; that the statement of policy issuing from it be long, detailed, inclusive, not a summary communiqué." The meeting produced the infamous "Compact of Fifth Avenue" in which the Republican Platform was scrapped and replaced by Rockefeller's socialist plans. The Wall Street Journal of July 25, 1960, commented: "…a little band of conservatives within the party…are shoved to the sidelines… [T]he fourteen points are very liberal indeed; they comprise a platform akin in many ways to the Democratic platform and they are a far cry from the things that conservative men think the Republican Party ought to stand for…" As Theodore White put it: "Never had the quadrennial liberal swoop of the regulars been more nakedly dramatized than by the open compact of Fifth Avenue. Whatever honor they might have been able to carry from their services on the platform committee had been wiped out. A single night's meeting of the two men in a millionaire's triplex apartment in Babylon-by-the-Hudson, eight hundred and thirty miles away, was about to overrule them; they were exposed as clowns for all the world to see." The whole story behind what happened in Rockefeller's apartment will doubtless never be known. We can only make an educated guess in light of subsequent events. But it is obvious that since that time Mr. Nixon has been in the Rockefeller orbit.

And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.”  “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.”     48   Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.

President Lyndon Johnson was forced to select a commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. Texas authorities were called upon to conduct the original investigation. There were too many suspicious people around the world who believed a conspiracy existed. Those rumors had to be squelched. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI never budged from its position that Lee Harvey acted alone. Any evidence that didn’t conform to this conclusion was ignored. Twenty-six volumes of witness testimony and exhibits were published, and only 8,000 copies were sold. No more reprints. The contradiction between the conclusions of the Warren Report, and the abundance of discrepancies in the other volumes, makes fascinating reading. Chief Justice Earl Warren, John J. McCloy and Allen Dulles were LBJ’s logical choices. President Kennedy didn’t trust CIA Director Dulles. Now JFK was dead and Dulles would be in charge of all possible “conspiracy” investigations. Richard Nixon, temporarily retired from politics for the first time since 1946, selected Rep. Gerald Ford to sit on this commission. Nixon selected Ford a second time when he ran home to escape impeachment during the Watergate hearings.

Alan Ladd as Neale Jordan Veronica Lake as Ellen Hillman Mike Mazurki as Paul Fontana Elisha Cook Jr. as Ciro Ricci Gloria Graham as May Martell Frank Lovejoy as Randolph McGraw Hugh Beaumont as Charlie Gray Lloyd Nolan as Victor Haskell June Lockhart as Janet Haskell James Craig as Eddie Lomax Laird Cregar as Frank Perkins William Bendix as Art Barker Richard Denning as Jerry Markle James Gleason as Sam Menard Tom Drake as Roy Douglas Dick as Tommy Barrow Virginia Grey as Claire Allen

The Easy Aces was billed as “radio’s laugh novelty,” and Jane Ace was Mrs. Malaprop of the air. Jane had a twangy midwestern voice, slightly softer in natural conversation, that reminded a listener of Bernardine Flynn’s Sade Gook (Vic and Sade). She was one of radio’s enduring female screwballs, Gracie Allen and Marie Wilson being the others. Under the guidance of her husband and writer, Goodman Ace, she defined the term “malapropism” to a generation that had never heard of it or its creator. Mrs. Malaprop was a character in an 18th century play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Her sentences were filled with wrong words that vaguely resembled proper speech and had a great comedic effect on audiences of that time. In the early 1930s, the Aces were effectively combining malapropisms with general “dumb blonde” humor.

Many of the ministers were set apart in holy orders at this Conference, and were said to be entitled to the gown; and I have thought religion has been declining in the church ever since.

when the Methodists were no people, then they were a people; and now they have become a people, they were no people,

while avoiding any legal issues, the case of Matrix Churchill and the enormous pipes sent to Iraq, supposedly to be put together to form a giant gun.

I shoved Richard ahead of me as a shield. Don’t bother resisting; it’s my belief that hardships should be shared. Now stop struggling and let’s go die—ahem, try to sort this out. “S-Stop it, Allen! Th-Think of my lovely, lovely fiancée!” Richard begged.

And President Janney made sure this was a request they couldn’t refuse. So lucky us. We now have a polygraph system that is unbeatable. Today we get to find out, once and for all, who is ready to stab us in the back. Who is ready to drink the Kool-Aid that Edgar Knight is serving. Who wants to sabotage us and help this madman build a global government and take the helm.” “Assuming the mole is in our Inner Circle, of course,” added Joe Allen from beside him. “Right,” said Cargill. “Which I hope like hell isn’t the case. But either way, we’ll finally be confident we can trust each other, and we can move forward on that basis.” Cargill’s face hardened. “So none of you are leaving this room until all of you are tested. You should be honored to know that this will be the first use of the new test under field conditions.

Look at me, Meg,” he said in that deep voice. “Who do you see?” “What?” She frowned, unsure of what he was doing and wondering at the sorrow reflected in his eyes. “Who do you see standing here?” What did he want from her? she wondered in confusion. “I see you,” she said at last. “Ace Allen.” “Exactly. You see the mixed-breed ex-convict who killed two men. I’ll always be sorry for that, but if you never believe anything else about me, you can believe that I would never deliberately harm a hair on your head.

Allen once recalled that even local blacks doubted the efficacy of an independent black church in Philadelphia, so fearful were they of a white backlash. But after segregated seating policies were instituted at white churches, Allen appeared to be a visionary, and many blacks soon joined his exodus from segregated Northern pews and galleries for independent black churches. For subsequent generations, Allen’s act of defiance had all the meaning and power of Rosa Parks’s sit-in during the mid-twentieth century. The comparison is not superficial. For while both events—Parks’s sit-in and Allen’s walkout of segregated pews—were courageous nonviolent acts in and of themselves, they also set the stage for new black freedom struggles.

I’m the son of Yancy and Nita Allen, but more importantly, I’m a child of God. I realized that none of the rest of it was that important. Most days, that’s enough. Sometimes I still fall into that trap of feeling sorry for myself, but it doesn’t last long.

Secrets learned are nothing more than information the dedicated have uncovered with time.

Everything was beautiful until the insanity began. The CIA got into the business of altering human behavior in 1947. Project Paperclip, an arrangement made by CIA Director Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, brought 1,000 Nazi specialists and their families to the United States. They were employed by military and civilian institutions. Some Nazi doctors were brought to our hospitals and colleges to continue further experimentation on the brain. American and German scientists, working with the CIA, then the military, started developing every possible method of controlling the mind. Lysergic Acid Diethylmide, LSD, was discovered at the Sandoz Laboratories, Basel, Switzerland, in 1939 by Albert Hoffman. This LSD was pure. No other ingredients were added. The U.S. Army became interested in LSD for interrogation purposes in 1950. After May 1956 until 1975, the U.S. Army Intelligence and the U.S. Chemical Corps experimented with hallucinogenic drugs. The CIA and Army spent $26,501,446 “testing” LSD, code-named EA 1729, and other chemical agents. Contracts went out to 48 different institutions for testing. The CIA was part of these projects. They concealed their participation by contracting to various colleges, hospitals, prisons, mental hospitals and private foundations. The LSD I will refer to is the same type that the CIA tested. We shall be speaking of CIA-LSD, not pure LSD. Government agents had the ability to induce permanent insanity, identical to schizophrenia, without physician or family knowing what happened to the victim.

The entire death squad Operation 40, a strict secret team founded by George Bush, Richard Nixon and Allen Dulles initially formed to eliminate Fidel Castro, was present at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.[87] Members of this death squad are also responsible for killing Che Guevara, Salvador Allende (President of Chile), Jaime Roldós (President of Ecuador) and Omar Torrijos (President of Panama). Later on, this death squad was also responsible for Operation Phoenix, the greatest murder scheme in Vietnam. Kennedy’s death was welcomed with relief by the FBI and CIA. Both organizations have always been an instrument of the global elite.

What I find the most insidious about this,” said Joe Allen, “is how fervent, how zealous, his followers seem to be. Even if they don’t always like his personality, they believe in his cause.” “His cause?” said Jenna in disgust. “Ruling the world is a cause?

Lo que la oruga llama el fin del mundo, el maestro lo llama una mariposa. RICHARD BACH, ESCRITOR

June 11, 1950. U.S. Open, Fourth Round, Ben Hogan, One Iron.

Allen Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything. It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing a concertina badly and making ommm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.

So the basic flavor of it is that Allen Klein made us and screwed us at the same time.

A democracy that concerns itself only with protecting and advancing individual rights will find itself in jeopardy, as rights will come into conflict with one another. When they inevitably do, it is essential that there is a path for citizens to compromise or a willingness to coexist peacefully and work with those with whom they disagree. Beyond rights, obligations are the other cornerstone of a successful democracy—obligations between individual citizens as well as between citizens and their government. Obligations—akin to what Danielle Allen calls “habits of citizenship”—are things that should happen but that the law cannot require.

My own list includes Allen Drury, Advise and Consent; Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men; Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird; George Orwell, 1984; Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C.; Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here. I am also a big fan of the books and short stories of Ward Just. My son came of age watching The West Wing, and I loved both the riotously funny if cynical book and British TV series Yes, Minister. And, even if it is not a substitute for reading The Federalist Papers, you would be hard pressed to spend a more enjoyable evening than watching the musical Hamilton.

Here I would mention Samuel P. Huntington’s American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan, and almost any book by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (in particular his The Cycles of American History). I would also recommend Gordon Wood, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution; Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics; Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840; Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture; and the personal book by Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education.

The Blasters proved to be the most prominent and popular of these acts by far. Originally a quartet, the band was bred in Downey, just down the freeway from East L.A. In their teens, brothers Phil and Dave Alvin were bitten by the blues bug; they became habitués of the L.A. club the Ash Grove, where many of the best-known folk and electric blues performers played, and they sought out the local musicians who could teach them their craft, learning firsthand from such icons as Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, and Little Richard’s saxophonist Lee Allen (who would ultimately join the band in the ’80s). But the Blasters’ style was multidimensional: they could play R&B, they loved country music, and they were also dyed-in-the-wool rockabilly fans who were initially embraced by the music’s fervent L.A. cultists. Their debut album, 1980’s American Music, was recorded in a Van Nuys garage by the Milan, Italy–born rockabilly fanatic Rockin’ Ronnie Weiser, and released on his indie label Rollin’ Rock Records, which also issued LPs by such first-generation rockabilly elders as Gene Vincent, Mac Curtis, Jackie Waukeen Cochran, and Ray Campi. By virtue of Phil Alvin’s powerful, unmannered singing and Dave Alvin’s adept guitar playing and original songwriting, the Blasters swiftly rose to the top of a pack of greasy local bands that also included Levi and the Rockats (a unit fronted by English singer Levi Dexter) and the Rockabilly Rebels (who frequently backed Ray Campi). Los Lobos were early Blasters fans, and often listened to American Music in their van on the way to their own (still acoustic) gigs. Rosas says, “We loved their first record, man. We used to play the shit out of that record. Dave [Hidalgo] was the one who got a copy of it, and he put it on cassette.

The founding of the first black denomination came from a refusal to accept black people in the church as equal in every respect. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, former slaves, were attendees at the St. George’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1787.

48. There is a fear for nearly everything. Sure, there is acrophobia (fear of high places), agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), claustrophobia (fear of closed spaces), as well as homophobia and xenophobia (both essentially meaning “being a bad person”, rather than some actual fear). However, did you know that George Washington suffered from taphephobia (fear of being buried alive)? Richard Nixon, on the other hand, had nosocomephobia (he was afraid of hospitals), while Napoleon Bonaparte suffered from ailurophobia (irrational fear of cats). Comedian Woody Allen might be the most peculiar of all – he suffers from panophobia, which is fear of virtually everything. Heights, bright colors, insects, elevators, closed spaces… you name it, mr. Allen is afraid of it – or at least was at one time. He is under psychoanalysis since 1970s. And since we're talking about psychoanalysis, none other than Sigmund Freud was supposedly afraid of ferns.

Dad had bought a stack of these biographies, towering over one hundred now. Martin Luther King Jr. Frederick Douglass. Mary McLeod Bethune. Richard Allen. Ida B. Wells. Dad kept urging me to pull from the tower for every writing project.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (shown here with President Richard Nixon), skeptical that there were any actual Nazis in the United States, secretly designated Allen a national security threat and had agents trailing him for years.

One of the more effective regimens is a diet strategy from Dr. Allen Fay, a psychiatrist in New York. It works like this: You pick an amount of weight you want to lose in the next week; you can pick zero but, of course, you can’t go up. You write a check for $2, 000 to the Republican National Committee (in my case) and give it to Dr. Fay. If, at the end of the week, you haven’t hit the target, he mails the check.