An Anonymous Comment on LRH

I'm still playing catchup on comments left on this blog. I have two more to go.

First is a comment on Joseph A. Winter, onetime associate of L. Ron Hubbard and John W. Campbell, Jr., in their development of Dianetics in 1949-1950. Sometime during 1950, Winter and Hubbard had a falling out. Winter died suddenly four years later of a coronary thrombosis. He was just forty-four years old.

On Saturday, May 28, 2022, I published an entry called "Joseph A. Winter (1911-1955)-Part One." I completed my series on Winter and his sister, Margaret Winter Kearney Campbell (1907-1979), several days later, on June 5, 2022. Winter's sister, better known as Peg Campbell, was the second wife of John W. Campbell, Jr., and the one who was with him to the end.

On Sunday, June 19, 2022 (Father's Day), Anonymous left this comment on my entry on Dr. Winter:

Readers should remember that Joe Winter was related through marriage to John W Campell's wife, Joe's sister. They all socialised with the Hubbard group and Street & Smith and the Saint Elizabeth's Hospital staffers in the heady days of the Bay Head Group, HDRF and the Elizabeth Foundation. Hubbard later said that he had to distance himself from almost all of those people due to the alleged dubious communist party loose associations. Maybe Winter and the others did get the wrong end of the stick. They were not aware (I think) of Hubbard's proven intelligence officer connections under Ian MacBean and Joseph Thompson since 1927 China. I personally think Ledora-May Waterbury de Wolfe or her Husband Harry Ross Hubbard were more than just casual civilians in that respect. Hubbard had a good home education before George Washington and later Princeton University schools. I wonder just why Joseph Winter parted ways so suddenly with LRH. The CIA connection had not been establish in public at that time. Only after 1985 were the CIA connections proven. It all centred around using psychological methods to achieve workable solutions for the US and UK players. Hubbard had to keep his silence on his role for all his life. Only in the taped lectures would he offer thin anecdotal evidence. What if Winter reincarnated and remembered a lot?

There's a lot of information in that comment, some of it probably arcane to the non-Scientologists among us. For your information and mine, I'll write about some of it.

• Joseph A. Winter, M.D. (1911-1955) was a physician, originally from Michigan but who moved to New Jersey in January 1950 in order to assist Hubbard and Campbell in their "research" into Dianetics. A newspaper article on his move was the first mention in print that I have found of "Dianetics" as a noun specifically in reference to Hubbard's brainchild. As I have mentioned, Winter's sister, nicknamed Peg, was the soon-to-be wife of Campbell. Presumably, Dr. Winter introduced them sometime in 1949 or 1950.

• Street & Smith were the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction, edited by Campbell.

• St. Elizabeth Hospital presumably refers to a hospital in Elizabeth, New Jersey, now called Trinitas Regional Medical Center (or possibly a hospital in Manhattan), but there is another St. Elizabeth Hospital that figures in the history of Dianetics/Scientology. That one is a place where Hubbard is supposed to have studied psychiatry.

• The Bay Head Group were the earliest developers of Dianetics, including not only Hubbard, Campbell, and Winter, but also electrical engineer Don Rogers and publisher Arthur Ceppos. The group was based in Bay Head, New Jersey, where Hubbard made his temporary home. (Most of his homes appear to have been temporary.)

• The HDRF was the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, incorporated in April 1950. Its members were Hubbard, Campbell, Winter, Rogers, Ceppos, lawyer C. Parker Morgan, and Hubbard's second wife, Sara Northrup Hubbard, you know, the one who didn't exist.

• Ian MacBean was Ian Gordon Macbean or MacBean, presumably a British military man born on February 24, 1892, and who died on June 29, 1944. To say that Hubbard had "proven intelligence officer connections" is to repeat, I think, a bit of fancy dreamed up by Hubbard and his followers in Scientology. In 1927, Hubbard was sixteen years old and on a trip with his mother to visit China. Can we even imagine him making "intelligence officer connections" on such a trip?

• Joseph Thompson was Joseph Cheesman Thompson (1874-1943), a wacky kind of character who served in the U.S. Navy, spied on Japan, studied herpetology, and bred Burmese cats, among other things. He is supposed to have known Hubbard, dating from early 1923 when Hubbard was eleven years old. Thompson was also a psychoanalyst and studied the insane at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D.C. Thompson had his own ideas about the mind, insanity, mental illness, and psychological trauma. One of his nicknames was "Crazy Thompson," and at least one of his fellow psychoanalysts considered him mentally ill or insane. In 1929, while in Hawaii, he was relieved of duty with the Navy and went into retirement. Whether or not Hubbard was actually one of his associates, he appears to have fit the mold. After all, Hubbard, too, served in the Navy--without any distinction I should add--and was almost certainly mentally ill, if not insane at one time or another in his life. And like Thompson, Hubbard was influenced by the works and ideas of Sigmund Freud.

• Ledora-May Waterbury de Wolfe (1885-1959) and Harry Ross Hubbard (1886-1975) were L. Ron Hubbard's parents. According to public records, her name was actually Ledora May Waterbury. The DeWolf part comes from her mother, Ida Corinna DeWolf Waterbury (1863-1944). L. Ron Hubbard's son, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (1934-1991), changed his name to Ronald DeWolf. Known as "Nibs" or "Ron," DeWolf cowrote the book L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman? (1987) with Bent Corydon.

As for everything that comes after in the comment above made by Anonymous, those are his or her thoughts and opinions, seemingly informed by Scientology. Joseph A. Winter may have explained or implied his reasons for breaking with Hubbard in his book A Doctor's Report on Dianetics: Theory and Therapy (1950), but I don't have a copy of that book, so I can't say. I also can't say whether Winter was ever reincarnated.

Anyway, I would like to thank Anonymous for writing. His or her comment has led me to learn a little more about Hubbard, Dianetics, and Scientology.

Further Reading

• Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee (2018, 2019).
• "The Spy Who Never Was? L. Ron Hubbard and 'Maj. Ian Macbean of the British Secret Service'" by Chris Owen on the website The Underground Bunker, July 29, 2022, here.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The comment left by Anonymous is his or her own original work and should be considered his or her intellectual property and so protected under copyright. I have reproduced it here for informational purposes.