John Clements was Rem’s friend and patron. She was his sometime assistant and often his beard. Together they would not attract notice, if drinking at the NYAC Tap Room or eating at the Four Seasons (or someplace of that level). John died in the St. Moritz, a block or so from here, at the end of 1974. Rem remembers it as 1973, but it was 1974. Rem remembers him as being born in Walnut, Kansas, and that may be, but he seems to be the same as a guy who was born in Kentucky; someone known well enough by a relative or nosy parker to figure in an existing family tree on Ancestry-dot-com.
In some records he is John Joseph Aloysius Clements, in others he is John Joseph Clements, and in one he seems to be listed as Joe AL Clements. He joined the Marines when he was underage about 1916, and saved 100 or 140 of his fellows by tossing back a grenade that came into the trench. This was at Chateau-Thierry or thereabouts. Would that be 1917 or 1918? I cannot find him listed among the Marines, though as a decorated leatherneck he certainly has citation and some rank. On passenger manifests (so far I see them only for LGA and a Canadian airport) he lists his nationality once as Irish, and another time as English.
He had a big spread down in Hunterdon County, NJ. In one of the rare news stories in which he appears, we have him hosting Senator and Mrs. Joseph R. McCarthy in 1954. The Senator has recently been censured, and is recovering from an arm injury. It is around this time that John leaves the American Mercury where he is an owner and (unpaid) editor, or so I read. This was occasioned by the magazine’s purchase by Russell Maguire, who evidently ran some anti-Jewish articles. I haven’t seen them, though in early 1955, I noticed, while browsing through some issues on Unz, there is an article by George Lincoln Rockwell.
John left the Mercury in 1954 or 1955, and so did a number of staffers and writers, according to a Wisconsin Jewish newspaper that keeps its ear to the ground, over the “anti-Semitic” slant of its new owner, Maguire. The Mercury had an interesting recent history. Before G. L. Rockwell wrote for it, Bill Buckley was a contributor. Rockwell and Buckley would team up again, very briefly, as National Review was launching. Before Maguire bought it, the Mercury was owned by John Clements (perhaps) and William Bradford Huie. Huie was a successful general-interest journalist (the LOOK cover story about the killing of Emmett Till) and novelist (The Americanization of Emily). He showed up on television as a panelist on the Longines Chronograph, a news-panel show similar to Meet the Press, and he may have been a panelist on MtP as well. Meet the Press, on radio and TV, was the creation of Lawrence E. Spivak, who had been the Mercury’s editor in the 1940s. In fact, on its initial launch, the radio version was called American Mercury’s Meet the Press.
John owned and ran a number of small-town papers in New Jersey, but his main job, his big career job for over 30 years, was head of Public Relations for the Hearst Corporation. Before that he worked on some Hearst papers, beginning with the New York Journal. (Later Journal-American.) This piqued my curiosity, as my father-in-law was outside counsel for a while, for Mr. Hearst himself, and then for Hearst Publications when it was being run by Richard Berlin. I found a book listed, called The Hearst Corporation, published 1960, authored by one John A. Clements.
You’d think John would be a big deal, mentioned everywhere. But instead he kept a low profile, and if my intuitions are right he mainly used the Hearst job as a cover while he did spook work. According to Rem he worked as an intelligence operative or asset for people in the Pentagon, possibly at the NSA and maybe the CIA as well. I forget what his code name was (per Rem) but her code name was Jack Daniels, as she drank a lot of that Kentucky bourbon. Doesn’t drink now, hasn’t touched alcohol in two years, but there’s a lot of JD and JD memorabilia around her apartment.
These are just running notes I’m collecting and recalling about Clements. Who was he really and what did he do? He was married three times, twice divorced, but Rem knows nothing about the first two. (Third marriage happened in the late 40s. A Pole or Austrian from a DP camp.)
Will pick up later.
Kristin wrote to tell me that J.D. King had died, with some colorful, deep coverage in The Comics Journal. Tomorrow night on Forsyth Street in the LES there’s a tribute to him. John Holmstrom will be there.
