On June 30, 1908, at about quarter after seven in the morning, a massive stone boloid gloriously self-destructed some six kilometers
over pre-revolutionary Tunguska, Siberia. It was a once-in-a-century event, equivalent in destructive power to 60 A-bombs like that detonated in
Hiroshima1 by the US at the end of World War II. Speculation about the true cause of this event has persisted to this day – it was even the subject
of an X-Files episode2 – but among the more intriguing theories linked it to maverick Serbian-born scientist Nikola Tesla, who invented
alternating current, sued Thomas Edison, died alone at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan – and was almost certainly the first in McHarvard’s
long line of ... instigators.
Tesla set the pattern: an unbalanced genius, ostensibly unrelated to Harvard or to McKinsey – this characteristic remained critical
until well into the 1990s – ostensibly unrelated, that is, developing a fringe technology and scorned by mainstream scientists; the technology
being so audacious as to seem all but comical, the stuff of science fiction and lewd comics. This is one strand, or theme, in our tapestry of truth:
an appetite not so much for destruction as for the power that travels with it. Another strand is mind control.
As you have said, Tesla was widely rumored have been involved in the Tunguska Event. Many thought the explosion was a test-firing
of a wireless power transmission technology, built upon Tesla’s brilliant work with alternating current and electro-magnetism. Tesla himself
admitted in the New York Times, some years later: “It is perfectly practical to transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive
effects at a distance. I have already constructed a wireless transmitter which makes this possible.” 3 Power-mad and publicity-starved, Tesla might
well have conceived of a world-shattering demonstration of his new technology – a demonstration that went awry.
Remember the historical context. 1908 also saw the first known successful voyage to the North Pole, headed by Admiral Richard
Peary. The North Pole lies on a geographic circle that connects Shoreham, Long Island with ... Tunguska, Siberia. (Seventy years later Shoreham
would house a nuclear power plant, the one closest to McKinsey’s world headquarters in New York City.) The thought was that Tesla had
intended to detonate the boloid closer to the Peary expedition but had a misfire. Peary’s expedition was relegated to the historical shelves until the
mid-1990s when a professor asserted that Peary’s black henchman, Matthew Henson, was the real hero of the voyage and had been systematically
robbed of credit by an unscrupulous Peary. Where did this muckraking professor with access to secret documents regarding the Peary expedition
teach? Harvard.
1908 also saw another world-changing event – one even more insidious in its consequences. Like Tesla’s electromagnetic ray, it was
conceived as a risky venture into a new field of knowledge. It was even called a “delicate experiment.” This event was the founding of Harvard
Business School. Here the new breed of managers – that is, controllers – would be indoctrinated and sent forth to captain US commerce and,
eventually ... but you are getting ahead of yourself.
Was Tunguska merely a 60-bomb warning shot fired across the bow of history?
The first dean of HBS was the economic historian Edwin Francis Gay, who in 1919 became the editor of a Manhattan-based
newspaper and co-owned the paper during the gold rush years of 1922-24, before returning to HBS. This newspaper was to become in time the
most vitriolic, war-mongering rag kowtowing to the moneyed class the city had ever seen. It represented a tentative first step toward
McHarvard’s apparent goal to acquire not only the assets but the minds of the populace. This newspaper was the New York Post.
Meanwhile, you have not forgotten poor Tesla. The Serbian’s tenuous grip on the real became suspect during the 1920’s. But he
maintained an aura of promise, and among his supporters was legendary financier J.P. Morgan. By the turn of the century, Morgan controlled
most of the country’s railway lines. Known for debt financing and cost cutting, he later founded a host of great companies such as General
Electric (with Tesla’s arch-nemesis, Edison) and National Tube Co. For a time, Morgan funded a first-rate laboratory for Tesla in Colorado
Springs.
Morgan received an honorary degree from a certain Northeastern university named ... Harvard. In its encomium, the university called
him a “prince among merchants” – offering up a sly wink to the original McKinsey-ist, Niccolo Machiavelli. And Morgan did bear another
marked similarity to the premier consulting firm: he was known for his large fees. Echoing generations of McKinsey partners to come, when
challenged on the size of his payouts Morgan responded: “I am not in Wall Street for my health.” How close was Morgan’s relationship with
Harvard? Biographies are strangely silent ...
In many ways, 1926 is the seminal year in this narrative – a time of real beginnings. Chastised by the failure of Tesla’s beam,
emboldened by the support of the world’s then-richest man, the McHarvard cabal was born. That year HBS opened the kimono on its grand
design by moving 750 students in five living halls in a site they called Soldier’s Field. (The military metaphor can only be seen as a slip, or a
cruel joke.) And in Chicago, a former accounting professor at the University fo Chicago named James “Mac” McKinsey founded his consulting
firm.
McKinsey’s designs were no less sweeping than those of HBS. The two institutions became explicitly intertwined when Marvin
Bower joined McKinsey in 1933. The man most often credited with inventing top-tier management consulting, Bower had a JD and an MBA
from Harvard Business School. And he was a blatant empire-builder, inspiring with a zealot’s soul. His mission was nothing less than to remake
the world: “The firm provides unusual opportunities ... for getting the satisfaction of leaving the world a better place than we found it.” Often the
infantry for this world-making expedition were recruited from the ranks bivouacked at Soldier’s Field.
Within 10 years, HBS had opened its first openly bellicose institution, the Advanced Management Training Program, specifically to
mold warfighters. Civilian instruction was suspended. “In the 1930s and ‘40s, a ‘management consultant’ was looked on as something slightly
nefarious,” admitted Ruth Neukom, wife of an LA-based McKinsey partner who joined in 1933. (Women weren’t admitted to HBS’ MBA
program until 1963.) As always, wartime was good to McHarvard – the consultancy thrived by helping defense contractors gear up production
and began to worm its way into the highest levels of the US government ...
While McKinsey thrived, Tesla ebbed. By the time HBS had suspended classes for civilians,4 Tesla had passed. Immediately upon his
death government agents were seen entering his hotel room, and all his papers were subsequently “lost” to history.
A monumental neat freak and sometime friend of Mark Twain, Tesla was also noted for his devotion to pigeons.
That’s right – pigeons. Woody Allen called them“rats with wings.” At the end of his life, Tesla did little other than feed them. Why?
Was there a connection to his work of 35 years previous?
The same year Tesla died, a gifted psychologist was trying frantically to develop a military application for the inventor’s favorite
animal. This psychologist was B.F. Skinner, and he was trained at – well, at Harvard. In the year after Tesla’s death, Skinner worked at his
Project Pigeon, trying to teach the birds to keep missiles on target by pecking at a sensor. Although the project was sidelined by the development
1
2
3
4
Keep this event in mind; it will recur in our narrative.
Episode #4:09 (“Tunguska”), first aired 11/24/96.
Tesla, Nikola. “Tesla’s New Device Like Bolts of Thor.” New York Times, December 8, 1915.
For the two years 1944-45.
of radar, Skinner’s association with Harvard bloomed. He joined the school’s psychology department in 1948 and spent the 1950s and ‘60s
there, during the heat of the Cold War.5
It is not without reason that McKinsey in the 1950s inaugurated its work with non-profits, including the American Red Cross. All
good strategists know the value of a diversionary tactic. Meanwhile, the firm’s assault on the corridors of power gained momentum as McKinsey
performed a staffing study for the White House during the presidential term of General Eisenhower.
“We began to see ourselves as architects of change,” said partner Dick Neuschel, who joined McKinsey’s New York office as the
bombs were falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The release of those bombs was due in part to the work of an Austrian physicist named Albert
Einstein, who famously co-signed a letter to President Roosevelt recommending that nuclear weaponry be developed. Encouraging the
construction of destructive devices would hardly estrange Einstein from McHarvard. The trouble was, Einstein later had a change of heart. Five
months before his death he called his endorsement of the Manhattan Project the “one great mistake in my life.”6
But the seeds of Einstein’s betrayal were evident as much as 11 years earlier. Around Christmas, 1944, he wrote a terrifyingly
prescient letter to his friend Niels Bohr: “When the war is over, then there will be in all countries a pursuit of secret war preparations with
technological means which will lead inevitably to preventative wars and to destruction even more terrible than the present destruction of life.” 7
[italics added] A US president would later use the word “preventative” unashamedly to justify his plans to occupy a hemisphere ... but you are
running ahead of yourself again.
Einstein questioned his own wisdom and by 1955 he was dead. Why did he die? Was his betrayal too much for McHarvard to
tolerate?
The atomic bomb was in many ways the culmination of the schema outlined by Tesla – a destructive wave of power from from an
invisible source, though the source turned out to be the atom itself and not the electron. So it is fitting that it is around this crowning achievement
of the commanding class we first see our two strands – weaponry, mind control – come together in the same lone genius. The man’s name was
Vannevar Bush.
Like two presidents in later years who shared his name, Bush made a career wedding mass destruction with the tools of coercion. An
engineer trained at MIT, Bush is known today as the man who “invented the internet” – at least in the sense that he was the first to plainly state
the concept of hypertext, or linked ideas.8 This notion was adopted by the military to great success. Bush was a visionary – and a military
technologist. It is not widely known that before he dreamed up hypertext, Bush supervised the creation of the atomic bomb. He oversaw the
building of the bomb as technical advisor to FDR and head the National Defense Resource Committee. “It was essential to get there first,” he
said. He defended the use of the bomb on civilians in Japan.
McKinsey would call that a first-mover advantage.
Bush is your crucial link to the present. For at a certain point in 2003, McHarvard made a slip. Previously so careful to cover its
tracks, the firm became brazen and sloppy. A confidential report was posted on the Houston Tech website 9, a report titled “Strategy to Accelerate
Technology Growth in Houston.” The report was apparently presented at the Houston Technology Center in April 4, 2000. It is a frightening
document. In it, McKinsey explicitly recommends Houston try to lure defense contractors. How? They lay out a three-phased approach. The first
and most critical of these is to “Seed point from natural strength” [sic] by fostering an environment where a “highly-visible person helps to create
an entrepreneurial culture.”
And who does McKinsey cite as a model of such a person? None other than Vannevar Bush.
As you know, Vannevar is only the first powerful Bush to be linked to the state of Texas. At the time the McKinsey report was
delivered, a certain Texan with degrees from two Northeastern establishment universities was deep into what would ultimately prove to be a
successful run on the White House. This Texan was a bumbling, affable party boy with a core respect for military action and a messianic streak.
His father had been President and head of the C.I.A. There could be no one more jacked in to the hidden networks of power. This man was, of
course, G. W. Bush.
This Bush – who of course denies any blood relationship to Vannevar – represents the ascension of McHarvard into real power, the
expression of its dreams for global domination. For when the master controllers were deciding where to indoctrinate young G.W., they decided
secrecy was less important than affiliation. They sent him to Harvard Business School.
Bush entered HBS the same the school established its Senior Managers Program in Switzerland. Ambitions became clearly global.
Within 15 years McKinsey had opened its McKinsey Global Institute, which some see as a barely concealed neocolonialist power cell. During
the 1990s, McKinsey opened 20 worldwide outposts, bringing to well over 100 the number of its global command centers. And Bush’s contested
ascent to the presidency in 1991 marked the culmination of a quest for power that McHarvard can only be seen to have decisively won. Bush’s
subsequent string of “preventative” wars and armed occupations were all too predictable.
That this statement seems absurd only demonstrates the degree to which this experiment has succeeded.
For it has succeeded and, ultimately, we all have lost.
Skinner would later become famous for his observation that sentient beings – a.k.a. people – can be trained
through the application of pleasure and pain to perform acts in response to a stimulus; a simple application of mind
control.
6
Clark, Ronald. Einstein: The Life and Times. (New York: publisherTK), p.752.
7
Clark, op.cit., p.698.
8
This concept appeared in an article Bush wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1945 titled “As We May Think.”
He envisioned a vast storehouse of linked information called a “Memex.” The article also proposes an analogue
computer, a calculator, microfilm and voice transcription.
9
At the time, the url was www.houstontech.org/uploads/McKinseyReport.ppt.
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