Krishnamurti Publications

THE RELIGIOUS MAN STAYS VERY MUCH ALONE: The End of a Seventy Year Story

The year was 1940. J. Krishnamurti had travelled to the United States from India in 1939 via Australia on the eve of World War II. Patwardhan was ill but travelled with him and died soon after reaching California. Krishnaji stayed in Arya Vihara, Ojai, California for seven years from 1940 to 1947 with D. Rajagopal, Rosalind and their daughter Radha then barely eight years old.

The US Immigration authorities offered Rajagopal American citizenship, which he accepted. In any case he was entitled to it, having been married to an American citizen. As an eminent personality, they offered Krishnamurti also American citizenship, but he preferred to keep his Indian nationality so declined their offer. The US authorities regarded him a pacifist and were not sure if he should be allowed to stay when the US actually entered war in 1941.

Krishnamurti wrote to Sydney Fields who had just become the Costa Rican Ambassador to USA for a suitable letter to enable him to stay in the USA. Fields wrote a letter to the State Department saying how honored he was to recommend that Krishnamurti be permitted to stay. Those two letters have been published in Fields’ book of 1990 entitled “The Reluctant Messiah.”

Never the less, an FBI agent visited Krishnamurti in Ojai to investigate his background and to ascertain what kind of person he was and to determine if it was safe to permit him to stay. At their first meeting the man was tough and asked many questions, among them an insistent one: “Do you spend a great deal of time alone?”

The FBI agent eventually softened by Krishnamurti’s affectionate presence and sent off a favorable report to Washington D.C. Sometime later he came back to meet Krishnamurti informally. Krishnamurti remembered what he had asked in his earlier visit and said, “I am curious, why did you ask if I spent a lot of time alone?” The agent replied, “Because, we have invariably found that revolutionaries stay a great deal by themselves, even though they have a large following.” Krishnamurti’s comment at that point was, “The religious man too stays very much alone.”

In the 1980s the eminent White House speech writer Milton Friedman was a Krishnamurti Foundation of America trustee. He had arranged for Krishnamurti to speak at the US Senate and at the Kennedy Center in Washington. At that time Krishnamurti had interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy, Senator Clairborn Pell, and Sir

After Krishnamurti had died in 1986, working at the White House, Friedman logged onto the security websites there and discovered that J. Krishnamurti was labeled UNDESIRABLE ALIEN in the FBI and CIA records. He alerted the KFA and immediately and Executive Director R.E. Mark Lee contacted the two agencies. After a trip to the FBI, under the Freedom of Information Act, and with the help of Senator Diane Feinstein KFA received the redacted records of Krishnamurti dating back to 1940. The documents revealed no compelling information that would have justified the UNDESIRABLE ALIEN label except for some information that a member of the Star Publishing Trust in South America may have had some association with a Nazi organization before the war. 

Mark Lee began a campaign in the 1990s to clear Krishnamurti’s records that would allow the KFA to apply for Federal funds for the Oak Grove School. Years turned into decades and finally, in Spring 2010, with help from Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer the saga has ended. Both Senators notified the KFA that there was really nothing more to be done regarding Krishnamurti records because; first, the CIA and FBI do not change the records of deceased persons; second, because Krishnamurti had a US Green Card issued in the 1980s he would have been cleared of any serious, certainly any Federal, offenses, in-fact or by innuendo or association.

The story ends and as Krishnamurti said, ‘the religious man stays very much alone.’