Kind of like, in that textbook adopted by the Kanawha County School Board, the invitation for children to compare the Greek myth of Androcles and the Lion with the scriptural story of Daniel in the lions’ den. And at that, Bruner soon found himself in the lions’ den.
The first fires were local. In Quincy, Massachusetts, the protest came from the parent-organizers of South Shore Citizens Against Forced Busing, who alleged their children were being indoctrinated in “unsavory and barbaric Eskimo practices.” A Houston parent announced that these included “cannibalism, infanticide, genocide, senilicide . . . stabbing, wife-swapping, animal beating, bloodletting, and mating with all kinds of animals.” MACOS defenders pointed out these practices were either from a time before the Netsilik made first contact with the outside world in the 1920s, or from plots in Netsilik myths. Course materials made it perfectly clear that present-day Inuit deplored them—just as present-day Jews and Christians deplored, say, all the smiting depicted in the Bible. The point, they said, was to shake students from their complacent notion that theirs was the only legitimate way to view the world—a response heard on the right as but more evidence of the moral turpitude of their secular humanist foes. Then the conflagration became national—as cries were once more heard at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, which found in MACOS another convenient exhibit of the wicked federal bureaucracy’s conspiracy to undermine the traditional family.
Quotations from a new volume in Heritage’s “Public Policy Studies” series, Man: A Course of Study—Prototype for Federalized Textbooks? by Connie Marshner’s sister-in-law Susan Marshner, soon began showing up on newspaper editorial pages: that MACOS was “an invasion of privacy of children and their parents”; that students were being manipulated, not into open-ended inquiry, but into the heresy “that there are no moral absolutes.” “What this means in practice,” interpreted an inventive conservative columnist in the newspaper Southeast Missourian, “is that a teacher, for example, may not speak out against cheating if cheating is taking place as a result of an individual ‘discovery’ process.”
The fire spread to Capitol Hill—and threatened to engulf the very concept of federal funding for scientific pedagogy itself. John Conlan, a second-term Republican congressman from Arizona who some evangelicals wanted to run for president, and Olin Teague, the conservative Texas Democrat who chaired the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, opened hearings on April 9 to “reassert congressional authority over NSF curriculum activities to stop what is shaping up as an insidious attempt to impose particular school courses and approaches to learning on local school districts—using the power and financial resources of the Federal Government to set up a network of educator-lobbyists to control education throughout America.” Conlan’s constituents, apparently, disagreed: a poll of Phoenix parents found only 8 percent opposed the curriculum. But then maybe they just didn’t appreciate, as Conlan thundered from the hearing room dais, that MACOS deployed “cultural shock techniques” to cause kids “to reject the values, beliefs, religions, and national loyalties of their parents and American society generally.”
He won. That August, Congress scrapped $9 million from the National Science Foundation budget earmarked for summer workshops for a “variety of recently developed courses for elementary and secondary schools.” The following January, Conlan introduced an amendment requiring direct review of all NSF curriculum projects. Congressmen didn’t know why their phones were ringing off the hook concerning this obscure measure. They didn’t know that thousands upon thousands of people whose names happened to repose in a computer data bank, because once upon a time they had donated to Barry Goldwater, or because they had responded to an appeal to send Bibles to Africa or had once subscribed to a conservative magazine, were receiving letters signed by Senator Jesse Helms reading, “Your taxes are being used to pay for grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.” They just knew that their constituents were concerned. Conlan’s radical measure narrowly missed passing the House, by a vote of 196 to 215. A new wellspring of political power had announced itself in Washington.
THE EMERGING CONSERVATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE BEGAN with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, which ingathered an army—an army that could lose a battle, suck it up, and then regroup to fight a thousand battles more. The failed Goldwater crusade spawned combat divisions in its wake like the American Conservative Union, a lobbying group that was founded a month after Goldwater’s defeat, and now was thriving; it put on the massive CPAC convention each year, alongside the conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom—which was founded in the wake of the first effort to run Barry Goldwater for president, in 1960. These were just two spearheads. Eleven years later, their progeny were rich and variegated.
These progeny included an expanding technology of fund-raising and grassroots communication. In 1961 a young man from Houston named Richard Viguerie, who told reporters his heroes were “the two Macs”—Joe McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur—took a job as executive director of Young Americans for Freedom. That organization itself began as a bit of a con, something of a front for the ideological ambitions of the grown-ups running National Review. The middle-aged man who ran the operation from behind the scenes, Marvin Liebman, was an ideological P. T. Barnum figure, famous on the right for selling the claim that he had amassed a million signatures on petitions opposing the People’s Republic of China’s entry into the United Nations. (He said they were in a warehouse in New Jersey. No one ever saw the warehouse.) The first thing Liebman told Viguerie was that YAF had two thousand paid members but that in public, he should always claim there were twenty-five thousand. And the first thing that Liebman showed Viguerie was the automated “Robotype” machine used to send out automated fund-raising pitches. Viguerie’s eyes widened; he had found his life’s calling.
Following Goldwater’s defeat, Viguerie went into business for himself. He visited the clerk of the House of Representatives, where the identities of those who donated fifty dollars or more to a presidential campaign were filed. First alone, then with a small army of female temp workers, he started copying down names and addresses in longhand—until a nervous civil servant told him to cease and desist, by which point he had captured thousands of names of the most ardent right-wingers in the nation. Soon, so many unsolicited form letters were being sent over Ronald Reagan’s signature that the former governor had to write personal letters to friends apologizing for them. In 1968, Viguerie raised by mail an unheard-of $6 million for George Wallace’s presidential run, 76 percent of the campaign’s income; in 1970 and 1971 he raised $2.3 million for the antismut group Citizens for Decent Literature (some 84 percent of the money went back into Viguerie’s company, though a conservative group that decided to do the same work in-house discovered it could raise funds for fifty cents on the dollar). Then he pulled in $7 million to retire George Wallace’s 1972 campaign debt—and his client list grew and grew.
And in May 1975, after trying and failing to buy Human Events, Viguerie began publishing Conservative Digest: A Magazine for the New Majority, sending out as a subscription premium five thousand copies of William Rusher’s third-party manifesto The Making of a New Majority Party. The appeal put the presidency in its sights: “Our country, which badly needs a strong Winston Churchill, is stuck with a weak Gerald Ford.” The New Right now had the germ of its own media.
Conservatives also enjoyed an expanding cadre of national newspaper columnists. The latest was Patrick J. Buchanan—appropriately, since one of his jobs in the Nixon White House had been to shame media executives into spasms of contrition for tilting their organs to the left. He had returned to the news briefly the day before Nixon’s resignation when it was reported he had written a memo advising the president to burn the White House tapes. A few weeks after that, Alexander Haig begged the new president to honor Buchanan’s dear wish to become America’s ambassador to So
uth Africa. (Ford did not find that a wise idea.) Instead, in the spring of 1975, his column debuted, syndicated, ironically enough, by the New York Times Company, with a piece on a tax bill just passed by the House. “The redistribution of wealth, downward, is what much of this $21.3 billion worth of ‘tax relief’ is about,” he wrote, complaining that the 4.6 million Americans it dropped from the tax rolls would be “reassigned to that expanding army of citizens who pay nothing in federal income taxes for the broad and widening array of social benefits they enjoy,” contributing to “a new class in America, a vast constituency of millions with no interest whatsoever in reducing the power of government, and every incentive to support its continued growth.”
That particular argument of Buchanan’s was amplified in an unlikely quarter: by a former Trotskyite, more recently an enthusiastic liberal, now writing a column in the Wall Street Journal as the public face of a new rightward intellectual tendency. Like many prominent right-leaning intellectuals, Irving Kristol was a Jewish veteran of ideological combat in the lunchroom alcoves at the Depression-era City College of New York, where Stalinists did battle with Trotsykists and honed an ideological fierceness resembling that of public intellectuals in Europe. Bouncing around from publication to publication, he became a liberal increasingly adept at lacerating liberal pieties—for instance, writing in an essay titled “Civil Liberties 1952—A Study in Confusion,” that “there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.” By 1965 he was editing a new magazine, the Public Interest, inaugurated in 1965 and financed by a former CIA agent who was now a stockbroker. It specialized in social-science debunkings of Great Society social programs. Its editor was soon on his way to what the democratic socialist Michael Harrington dubbed in 1973 “neoconservatism.” And in his May 19, 1975, Wall Street Journal column, Kristol published one of neoconservatism’s most influential texts. In capital letters, it named, and shamed, what he called capitalism’s “New Class”: the self-aggrandizing stewards of the welfare state. They were really not much interested in helping people, “but keenly interested in power. Power for what? Well, the power to shape our civilization—a power which, in a capitalist society, is supposed to reside in the free market. This ‘new class’ wants to see much of the power redistributed to the government, where they will then have a major say in how it is exercised.” Then, niftily reversing the traditional understanding that it was rich capitalists whose democratic loyalties were suspicious, Kristol concluded that this “elitist new class” was “hostile to the market precisely because the market is so vulgarly democratic—one dollar, one vote.”
Another figure who seemed on his way to becoming a neoconservative was in the news. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a former Harvard professor who as a Labor Department official under Lyndon Johnson became a lightning rod for criticism by proposing that “the fundamental source of weakness in the Negro community at the present time” was the “tangle of pathologies” inherent in the black family—not, say, a lack of jobs. He became the focus of controversy again as a special assistant in the White House when a 1970 memo he wrote leaked. It argued that a period of “benign neglect” was the best response to racial problems. A blunt, outspoken man, an intellectual: rare in politics. He nonetheless kept rising in the Washington firmament. On May 21, President Ford announced his intention to nominate Moynihan as ambassador to the United Nations—even as a Moynihan essay in a recent issue of Commentary, the flagship neoconservative magazine, argued that radical, malevolent Third World elements, resource-rich and puffed up by OPEC’s example, were taking over the world body, telling the First World what to do, and that it was “time that the American spokesman came to be feared.” A UPI profile explained the stakes: “Moynihan’s policy prescription could throw him into direct confrontation with Third World leaders when the UN General Assembly holds a special session next September to consider organizational changes and demand improved economic relationships between rich and poor nations.”
On the broader right, more and more “think tanks” emerged to provide intellectual ballast, or in some cases just the appearance of intellectual ballast, to the conservatives on the editorial pages—and on the radio, where Ronald Reagan, who for instance got raw material for his rant about “Polish bisexual frogs” from an outfit called the National Taxpayers Union. Sometimes Reagan promoted the new groups outright—for instance, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a corporate-funded outfit he described to his listeners in June as “a young public interest legal group that has some powerful ax-grinders on the run . . . defending government in one case, and protesting it in another . . . wherever the broader public interest might lie.” The bad guys said to be fighting the public interest included “hyper environmental groups” opposing the building of a Trident submarine base on Puget Sound, who “seem to conveniently forget that freedom is every bit as fragile and irreplaceable as any given ecological system”; and the EPA bureaucrats he said were trying to create deliberate traffic jams to keep people from using cars; and, naturally, the “so-called ‘welfare rights’ groups,” which served the interests only of grifters like one “Linda Taylor, the champion welfare cheat of all time. She used eighty aliases and fifty addresses to defraud thirteen states of more than half a million dollars.”
“It’s good to know that you and I are not entirely at the mercy of those special interests who seek to spend our tax money and bend and interpret the laws to their own special points of view!”
The corporate-funded organizations fighting alleged special interests were housed mostly in and around Washington—but also in places like the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The institution was founded in 1959 by the namesake former president widely considered responsible for the Great Depression with a statement asserting, “The purpose of this institution must be, by its research and publications, to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx.” The institution was featured in a spread in the summer of 1975 in the Los Angeles Times noting its $3.5 million annual budget, its handsome new underground building, and that “[i]n recent months the work of Hoover scholars in several domestic fields, among them taxation, government regulation, and healthcare, has been favorably mentioned by Ford administration officials.” Its fellows were busy “shuttling back and forth to Washington, testifying before congressional committees and serving as advisors to various federal agencies.” Its director, W. Glenn Campbell, was asked about the Stanford faculty members who had tried to shut it down as inconsistent with academic canons of free inquiry. He responded, “If you are asking me if we consider ourselves to be in the liberal academic mainstream, my answer is, ‘I hope not because that’s disastrous for the country.’ ”
They were forging new engines for electoral organizing, too. In suburban Rosslyn, Virginia, the four full-time and forty part-time organizers of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) were hard at work raising what would add up to $3 million from conservative donors to build off-the-shelf campaign apparatus for conservative candidates in 1976: press agentry, TV and print ads, campaign consultants, and even campaign managers. The direct mail pitches to raise the funds came from Richard Viguerie’s shop. The one on “grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism,” signed by Jesse Helms, the former boss of NCPAC principal Charlie Black, was one of its solicitations; explained executive director Terry Dolan, a former Young Republicans activist, “The shriller you are, the better it is to raise money.” Another principle, Roger Stone, former head of the District of Columbia Young Republicans, had been a dirty tricks specialist: he had shown up in the Ervin Committee investigations for hiring a spy who infiltrated the McGovern campaign and reported to Stone; and for sending a two-hundred-dollar donation to the campaign of a liberal Republican running against Nixon in the 1972 New Hampshire primary in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance (he then sent the receipt
to Manchester’s Union Leader so it would report that Nixon’s rival was a Red). Dolan later explained to a reporter one of NCPAC’s raisons d’être: “We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn’t have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.”
Then there was the “Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress,” assembled by a Heritage Foundation cofounder from Wisconsin named Paul Weyrich, who from a renovated Capitol Hill carriage house was about to send one hundred thousand letters over Senator James McClure’s signature, using Viguerie’s mighty mailing lists, appealing for $2 million to defeat a hundred “of the most liberal, anti-business and pro-welfare congressmen,” with Bella Abzug and Berkeley’s black socialist Ron Dellums topping the list. (“Although the fund-raising letter was written on McClure’s U.S. Senate stationery,” the AP reported in a June profile on Weyrich’s new group, “the senator claimed little knowledge of who the targeted congressmen are or why they were selected.”)
Weyrich’s money came primarily from a single source: the Coors brewing family of California, whose youngest scion, Joseph, the Washington Post reported in a profile, “has been pumping millions of dollars a year into new national organizations with headquarters in the East, designed to push the United States politically to the right.” These included Weyrich’s Committee for a Free Congress, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing business groups the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and conservative cells in both chambers of Congress, the House Republican Study Committee, and the Committee of Nine in the Senate—whose “only contributions last year came from the Coors family.” (Reagan, for his part, did a favor for Coors with a radio broadcast deploring a federal judicial ruling against one of the company’s business practices; one of his political aides in Sacramento, Robert Walker, was now a Coors vice president.) Coors, Weyrich told the Post, “Is a man who believes more deeply than anybody I have ever met, except religious monks. When things go wrong that he feels deeply about, he’s like a child . . . in sorrow and grief over what’s going on, and a frustration over his inability to do anything about it.” So he started doing something about it.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 63