Tenney Reports on World Zionism: Zion’s Fifth Column

Though Jack Breckenridge Tenney (b. 1898, d. 1970) is obscure today, he was moderately famous beginning in 1938, the year Bing Crosby made his composition Mexicali Rose a major Billboard hit. Tenney had written the tune 15 years earlier, when he was a bandleader in that disreputable Mexican border town. Meanwhile, he had moved on to discover his true calling, politics, first entering the California state legislature in 1936. It was during his career as a California State Senator, 1942 to ’54, that he distinguished himself as the fearless chairman of California’s Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities, a.k.a. ‘the Tenney Committee,’ proving himself a remarkable investigator and writer and, above all, a courageous, incorruptible patriot and civic leader. Though condemned to the Memory Hole as ‘red-baiters’ and worse, guardians against ‘un-American activities’ were usually concerned with any subversive / revolutionary shenanigans, including fascism, anarchism, and … Zionism, Tenney’s area of special expertise. Among American politicians of his day, Tenney was unsurpassed as an oracle of a truth now all too plain: Zionism was and is an extremely dangerous, virulent subversive political force in its own right. Senator Tenney produced several “Reports on World Zionism,” all of which were suppressed when new and are now very rare. Zion’s Fifth Column is particularly valuable because of the 25 pages (pp. 29-54) devoted to exposing the menace of the AntiDefamation League of B’nai B’rith, circa early 1950s, which Tenney does masterfully. To compare this section with the 1976 ‘Church Committee’ report concerning CIA media activities (Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence, part X, pp. 179-203) is to wonder if the “WASP” CIA is really so “WASP” after all…