Clendenin J. Ryan

Clendenin James Ryan, Jr. (1905 - September 12, 1957) was an American businessman best known as the publisher and owner of The American Mercury magazine, published in Baltimore, Maryland in the early 1950s when McCarthyism was at it strongest.

Ryan mingled with millionaires, politicians and military and intelligence operatives for most of his life and he knew how to wield power in order to get what he wanted done. He and Godfrey Stillman Rockefeller were stockholders in the Enterprise Development Corporation, a closed end investment trust for the heirs of William Rockefeller and Thomas Fortune Ryan, Clendenin's entrepreneurial grandfather, who invested heavily in Copper Mining and ore smelting. The Directors of EDC included Ryan, Frederic W. Lincoln, Jr., who married into the Rockefeller family, and Morehead Patterson of American Machine and Foundry (AMF).

Ryan, who was once characterized as a somewhat quixotic multi-millionaire once served as an assistant to Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York City, ran for the New York mayoralty himself on an independent ticket and later campaigned for New Jersey Governor. He often sent large sums abroad to break up communist-inspired strikes and influence voters in favor of anti-communist candidates for higher office in France and other countries.

Ryan served in the United States Navy during World War II under Admiral James Forrestal.

Ryan was deeply committed as a financial backer of numerous schemes involving foreign intrigue bordering on violating the Neutrality Act^{[citation needed]} with another spymaster and former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Colonel by the name of Ulius L. "Pete" Amoss who ran the Baltimore, MD based International Services of Information, Inc. (ISI) and GramTrade International which was later merged into the Boston Metals Processing Company of Baltimore, identified as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) commercial cover proprietary by Robert Maxwell of Iran-Contra fame. ISI which published INFORM, a private circulation subscription service which disseminated tidbits of intrigue, espionage and foreign intelligence starting just before the Joseph McCarthy era in the late 1940s. Ryan's relationships with these two intelligence agents and military men literally defined and characterized his own life which found him quite often emulating or imitating their lives of adventure, intrigue and espionage on a first hand basis as a self financed Soldier of Fortune and amateur spy of sorts. Ulius Amoss, once in the OSS, also delved into methods of programming paid assassins to do his bidding overseas and he worked very closely with Major Carleton S. Coon, an anthropologist, OSS member and an Egyptologist on this project which eventually was merged into the MK/ULTRA operations of James J. Angleton and Ray S. Cline of the CIA.

Ryan and Amoss organized several headline grabbing privately funded covert operations in the 1950s including the hijacking of a Russian MiG by a Polish pilot from behind the Iron Curtain (succeeded), an attempt to kidnap the son of Lenin (failed), and other comparable ventures.

Ryan was a self-styled exposer of political corruption in Tammany Hall and a staunch anti-Communist super patriot and McCarthy supporter who used his family's vast fortunes earned by his father, Thomas J. Ryan, in Chilean copper mining and smelting to carry out a personal vendetta against anyone he perceived to threaten his way of life or any of his vast investments in the Chilean Copper mines. He opposed unions, Communism and Soviet oppression with equal fervor during his career as a self-styled philosophical extension of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he idolized.

He even went so far as to lead a proxy fight against Sosthenes Benes, the founder of IT&T, in order to get a majority of the Board of Directors elected at IT&T who would support Ryan's efforts at preventing his family's Chilean Copper Mines from being nationalized if Chile ever came under Communist control. He used the excuse of trying to get Benes to pay a dividend on his family's ITT shares which had been skipped for 14 years as the justification for his proxy battle but in fact he had an ulterior motive behind his plans. And that was to assure that the use of ITT influence and control in Chile would prevent Chilean Communism from ever gaining a foothold.

The actual fight for voting interest domination and Board of Directors control of IT&T started as early as 1947. It was then that Manhattan multi-millionnaire Clendenin J. Ryan made an unfriendly takeover attempt launched against Behn's dictatorial rule. Ryan was able to get 7 of his directors onto IT&T's 23 man board of directors before he gave up the fight (Time magazine, January 5, 1948). The chief supporters of Ryan's group on the Board of ITT included Alleghany Corporation's President Allan Kirby whose family started F. W. Woolworth's who was a business partner of Robert "Railroad" Young. Young had majority positions in the Missouri Pacific, Penn Central and the Long Island Railroad, a New Mexico Publisher, Robert McKinney, the cousin of Robert Young and ex-Governor Charles Edison of New Jersey whose father was Thomas Alva Edison. Charles Edison funded the seed money for the arch conservative Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) begun by William F. Buckley, Jr. in Sharon, CT according to Douglas Cady, another YAF founder, who said that he was the college roommate of Ryan's son, Clendenin J. Ryan, Jr. at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service during the late 1950s. Also on the ITT Board as Ryan's supporters were Chairman Arthur Hill of Greyhound Corporation's executive committee and a conservative Houston Oilman, George Brown.

Ryan committed suicide at the age of 52 in 1957, as did his father before him after a series of disappointments rocked his life.

References

• December 8, 1952 Time magazine article titled Trouble for the Mercury

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Name	Ryan, Clendenin James
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Date of birth	1905
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Date of death	September 12, 1957
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