When I contacted Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Peter Ward, and Edward S. Herman, I did not know when I would hear back, or even if I would hear back. Each one of them was immediately responsive and gracious, which confirmed the opinion of them that I got from their work. They are/were all great humans. When I first contacted Ed, I noted that I thought of him as “Uncle Ed.” I often addressed him as Uncle Ed in those early days, and over the years since that first email in 2001, at least once, Ed signed off an email to me with “Uncle Ed.” I smile and chuckle every time that I think of that. I have all of my emails from Ed.
Ed is the only one of the four above that I began a relationship with, at his encouragement. It was only an email relationship, but it was a great one. After the catastrophe of my free-energy revolutionary days, I hid out in corporate America, making decent money, digging out of my financial abyss, and I donated to organizations such as Z Magazine and Amnesty International.
Early in my relationship with Ed, I began getting letters from Amnesty International, which asked me to join their campaign to have Slobodan Milošević arrested and delivered to that kangaroo court tribunal that the USA set up and ran. I still had some naïveté to lose. I was shocked, and I asked Ed about it. He agreed that it was scandalous that Amnesty International was doing that, and he wrote that he only supported a few local human-rights organizations. The international ones were all corrupted. Since Milošević died in custody, killed by the tribunal, I consider Amnesty International an accessory to murder.
After Ed co-wrote an article in 2007, exposing the sham that is Human Rights Watch, I asked him if he would do one on Amnesty International, and he did not plan to. Amnesty International was not as bad as Human Rights Watch, in his opinion. In the decade after that exchange, Ed repeatedly wrote about “human rights” scams, and he included Amnesty International in his critiques (1, 2), which I was happy to see. Those organizations became parodies of human-rights organizations as they played imperial lapdogs.
Ed was an economist by profession. I do not have a high opinion of economists in general, as they rarely deal with the real world, with their fancy math and other problems. I generally see them as intellectual warriors for capitalism. They are particularly deficient in understanding the relationship of energy and economic activity, such as understanding the benefit to humanity that a barrel of oil delivers.
Ed specialized in financial institutions and conflicts of interest, so energy was off of his radar, too, unfortunately. I once wrote him on the energy/economy issue, and he admitted that he neglected the issue. During my New Energy Movement days with Brian O’Leary, I tried to introduce Ed to Brian three or four times, but Ed was never interested. I never held it against Ed, as he was plenty busy as arguably Earth’s foremost media analyst, and I never found anybody from the “left” that was interested in free energy. After those attempts, I never brought up energy again with Ed.
Early in our relationship, I mentioned Gary Wean’s JFK tale, and Ed was intrigued by it. Ed was one of the few on the left who was onboard with the idea that JFK was murdered in a conspiracy.
Ed was never very disclosing of his personal life in his writings, and I did not know his marital status. One New Age activist that I introduced Ed to, around the Iraq War days, got the hots for Ed, which was kind of embarrassing for me, and I would have been doubly embarrassed if I knew that Ed had been married for over 50 years at the time.
On Ed’s 90th birthday, I marveled at how active he still was, with his monthly Z articles, among his other work. Ed replied that he still had pretty good health, and hoped to encourage people like me about how active we could still be late in our lives. On his 92nd birthday, I noted how terrible his Wikipedia bio was and I offered to improve it, as I had done with Brian’s Wikipedia bio. Ed took me up on it, but insisted, with his characteristic integrity, that I was under no obligation to. Ed admitted how disgusting his Wikipedia bio was, but that he never suffered any repercussions from it. That was all the encouragement that I needed, which began my bio project for Ed.
Those 92nd-birthday emails were my last exchanges with Ed, and his writing output largely halted as he slowly died from bladder cancer that was not diagnosed until after he died later that year. The last email that I got from Ed copied in some of his pals, which is how I met Sam Husseini and Chris Black, who remain my friends to this day. A couple of months after that last email, Ed died. He never saw my biography work on his life. Oh, how I miss my monthly dose of Ed’s writings. Ed was a great one, in my pantheon. It was an honor to interact with him, and one of my life’s greatest honors is being his first and so far only biographer. As I have written, I hope that I live to see a professional biography of his life. Ed’s life more than merits one.