Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  In June 1961, the Army released a report as thick as a telephone directory documenting how Walker had been lecturing his troops about the suspicious loyalties of Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, Walter Lippmann, and Edward R. Murrow. Before the 1960 elections Walker had distributed the Americans for Constitutional Action voting index. ACA had been founded by former admiral Ben Morreel in 1958 upon his retirement as chairman of the board of Jones & Laughlin, a steel manufacturer so brutish that its workers once dubbed its works “Little Siberia.” ACA’s goal of “repeal of the socialistic laws now on our books” was abetted by its famous index, which rated congressmen from I to 100 in categories such as “FOR Sound Money and AGAINST Inflation” and “FOR Individual Liberty and AGAINST Coercion.” Senator Kennedy scored zero on “FOR Private Ownership and AGAINST Government Ownership and Control of the Means of Production”; even Barry Goldwater was two points short of a perfect score. Walker also prescribed what he called a “Pro-Blue” reading program—consisting largely of the publications of the John Birch Society and like groups.

  The Army feared if it punished Walker he would become a right-wing martyr. So he was given the lightest sanction possible. It didn’t work. Instead Strom Thurmond held hearings on this “dastardly attempt to intimidate the commanders of the U.S. Armed Forces.” Robert McNamara was jeered from the gallery when he testified. From California, eleven-year-old James Quinlan wrote the President: “I heard that you pulled out a general for teaching Americanism. Would you rather for him to teach communism to all those men?” Editorialized the New York Mirror, “No matter how it is sliced, General Walker seems to have committed the crime of being excessively patriotic, of preferring his own country to Soviet Russia.” The Texas state senate pledged its “unqualified support”; the newspaper columnist Paul Harvey lamented, “Today, the loyal American is being defamed, demoted, discharged, destroyed if he militantly defends the American ‘ism’ against all its enemies, foreign and domestic.” Barry Goldwater declared: “When we reach the point where we have a bunch of namby-pambies as our generals, men who cannot use a little strong language once in a while, particularly as it concerns enemies who say, ‘We will bury you’ and ‘Your children will live under socialism’ ... I think we are farther down the road than we realize.”

  The centrist press panicked too; it tended to imply that the nation was on the verge of having a military putsch. Look magazine reporter Fletcher Knebel began drafting a novel called Seven Days in May in which military leaders plot to overthrow a President after he signs a nuclear disarmament treaty—of the sort Kennedy had dreamed of, eloquently, in a September 25 speech at the United Nations before signing a bill establishing the United States Arms Control Agency.

  On October 16 the spectacle in Washington was joined by Dr. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade at the Hollywood Bowl, which was broadcast across the state—then, a few weeks later, shown again in New York City. This required monumental sums of money. It came from two of southern California’s most prominent businesses: Richfield Oil, whose filling stations dotted the West Coast; and Coast Federal Savings & Loan, the third largest S&L in the country. Coast dedicated 4 percent of its net revenue to far-right propaganda, distributing two million pieces of literature in 1961 alone. In a typical blitz, account holders received a red postcard bearing a spurious quote from Khrushchev: “We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism, until they suddenly awake to find they have communism.”

  The Schwarz crusade made President Kennedy jump out of his skin. The podium at the Hollywood Bowl was graced with stars like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Roy Rogers. But the most remarkable presence was that of C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Life. He was there to proffer a groveling apology for running an article critical of Dr. Schwarz. “It is a great privilege to be with you tonight,” he said, “because it affords me an opportunity to align Life in a very personal way with a number of stalwart fighters.” Then it was back to the program, Walter Judd proclaiming that Khrushchev possessed a “well-disciplined” apparatus to “start a riot or a strike in any major city any time he wants to.” The extremist fringe had humbled the mighty Luce empire. Kennedy had a legislative agenda to pass, a foreign policy to manage—tasks complicated when the most powerful media institution in the country was joining forces with those who would declare both treasonous. The day after the news, Bobby Kennedy breakfasted with Walter Reuther and his brother Victor, and lawyer Joseph Rauh, to begin plotting a counterstrategy.

  The temperature rose. Four days later the AP printed a dispatch from a tiny Illinois hamlet where police had seized an arsenal of machine guns and 81-mm mortars belonging to a shadowy group dedicated to training civilians in anticommunist guerrilla warfare. They called themselves the “Minutemen,” and soon they had worked their way to the front page of the New York Times. No one knew how many of them there were (they had no organizational structure so as to minimize the chance of Communist infiltration). Their ideology was Birchite. Their founder, Robert DePugh, a manufacturer of veterinary pharmaceuticals in Missouri, told the press that while waiting for the final showdown on American soil, his men would monitor and check subversive activities in their hometowns. “On a local basis we feel we’re in a better position to know our friends and neighbors” than the FBI, he explained. He claimed that his inspiration had been a speech Kennedy had delivered in January: “We need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life.”

  Kennedy spoke often in these absolutist, apocalyptic terms; he had done so in his inaugural when he asked Americans to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,” and all the rest. Vigilantism of some sort was perhaps an understandable result. Kennedy’s rhetoric now haunted him. Eisenhower’s farewell address had been prophetic: a permanent sense of Cold War emergency was indeed giving birth to “a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties” to a citizenry wracked with “imbalance and frustration.” There had been scores of threats on Kennedy’s life already. Thirty-four had come from Texas. And when the next disturbing right-wing rally was held in Dallas, Kennedy chose to act.

  Dallas was second only to Orange County as a right-wing redoubt. Like Orange County, it owed its good fortune to government; it had been desolate until local boosters persuaded the state legislature to route the Texas & Pacific Railroad through it. Its population had doubled since 1940—rising out of the thankless desert, according to the latest generation of boosters, by the sheer force of will of men on horseback, proud of their ability to thrive without outsiders’ help. Once again the chief propagandist was a newspaper publisher—E. M. Dealey, he of the “Caroline’s bicycle” crack, whose Dallas Morning News saw Reds beneath, beside, and on top of every bed.

  Dallas was also less than ashamed of its reputation for outlaw violence. Shortly before Election Day in 1960, Lyndon Johnson and his wife were on their way to a campaign luncheon when they were set upon by a hissing mob. A gob of spit found Lady Bird. One of the men holding a placard was Republican U.S. Congressman Bruce Alger, who told the press he wanted “to show Johnson that he was not wanted in Dallas” and who defended the disturbance as merely the “hubbub of a large gathering fighting for a society free from federal control.” Four days later, Dallas resoundingly sent Alger back to Congress. It was a place that made its resident psychologists, social workers, and sociology professors nervous.

  In early November a local insurance man published a letter in the Dallas Morning News reporting that Yugoslav pilots—Communists!—were training at a nearby Air Force base. When further investigation revealed that America was also selling mothballed fighters to Yugoslavia, it took a young Bircher named Frank McGhee only thirty-six hours to mobilize an auto caravan to parade aroun
d the base in protest. To the foreign policy establishment, Yugoslavia was a complicated piece in the Cold War puzzle: Tito, although a socialist, had broken with Moscow, and winning a friend on the Eastern frontier was an unmatched strategic opportunity. To Dallas, Yugoslavia was the enemy, and dealing with her was treason. McGhee called a rally, and two hundred people showed up. He held one the next night, and a thousand people came. Fifteen hundred appeared on the third night, and McGhee decided to make the protest a movement.

  Seven weeks later two thousand delegates from ninety cities across the country packed Dallas’s cavernous new Memorial Auditorium for McGhee’s “National Indignation Convention.” The featured speaker was rancher J. Evetts Haley, head of For America’s Texas branch. Haley, a local celebrity as the writer of books on Lone Star history, had appealed a suit in the 1950s to nullify all federal agricultural programs all the way up to the Supreme Court. He then led a successful campaign in 1960 to have several textbooks that spoke favorably of the UN, integration, Social Security, and the income tax scotched from the state curriculum. That fall Texans for America won a hand in approving every history and geography textbook up for adoption. Haley won even more local fame when he pummeled a history professor who said that Operation Abolition was slanted. At the Memorial Auditorium, decked out in black boots, cowboy plaid, and a white ten-gallon Stetson, Haley looked for all the world like Gary Cooper. The MC, an itinerant lecturer for the John Birch Society, introduced him, and Haley turned to him to remark, “Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach Warren. I’m for hanging him!” The audience roared. Kennedy ordered an aide to begin preparing monthly reports on the right, he asked the director of audits at the IRS to gather intelligence on organizations receiving tax exemptions, and he told his speechwriters to whip up addresses to educate the people on the menace of right-wing extremism for his upcoming Western tour.

  Kennedy’s first speech was in Seattle. He echoed Eisenhower’s farewell address. The radical rightists, he explained, “lack confidence in our long-run capacity to survive and succeed; hating Communists, yet they see Communism in the long run, perhaps, as the wave of the future. And they want some quick and easy and final and cheap solution—now.” Two nights later he was in Los Angeles for a $100-a-plate fund-raiser for Governor Brown at the Los Angeles Palladium. Nat King Cole sang; at the head table, Mayor Sam Yorty was joined by Frank Sinatra and Vic Damone. The L.A. metropolitan area was now home to a quarter of the John Birch Society’s membership, and a good portion of them were outside the Palladium that night—having marched four abreast to the site, roughly shunting aside the disarmament activists led by Rita Moreno (star of the year’s hit film West Side Story), chanting “No Aid to Tito!” and carrying signs reading “MUZZLES FOR DOGS NOT FOR THE MILITARY,” “DISARMAMENT IS SUICIDE,” “GENERAL WALKER FOR PRESIDENT,” and “COMMUNISM IS OUR ENEMY.”

  Inside, Kennedy reminded the glittering audience that strident peddlers of panaceas have always arisen in America in times of trial. “Now we are face to face once again with a period of peril,” he said. “The discordant voices of extremism are heard once again in the land. Men who are unwilling to face up to the danger from without are convinced that the real danger comes from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for ‘a man on horseback’ ”—a jab at the Dallas Morning News’s Dealey—“because they do not trust the people.” He told the audience that America’s military might was enough to assure she would prevail against Communism, that there was no need for the corrosive suspicion of enemies within. He didn’t realize he was playing into the protesters’ hands. If America possessed all this power, how did one explain any defeat but by pointing to the presence of subversives in high places?

  Time put the issue on its next cover. The New York Times gave the speeches its front page. The brown scare was on. The annual meetings of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations resolved that right-wing extremists were “unwittingly aiding the Communist cause by dividing and confusing Americans” and were “stirring division and hysteria.” Dwight D. Eisenhower clucked to Walter Cronkite, “Those who take the extreme positions in American political and economic life are always wrong.” On Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran an article entitled “Report on the Rampageous Right,” which explained, “Frustration, which produces tantrums in babies, can lead to equally irrational fits of rage in adults.” Henry Luce’s next Life editorial parroted the President’s Seattle speech.

  At the end of 1961, report after report probed the storms suddenly revealed beneath the placid surface of consensus America. Communism on the Map’s producer, tiny Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas, had an eleven-building factory of right-wing propaganda that lent out a hundred prints of its films each day to schools around the country. Children were being subjected to jarring mock Communist “takeovers” of their schools. Municipal officials who dutifully followed the advice of public health experts to fluoridate their water supplies found themselves the target of late-night threatening phone calls denouncing fluoridation as a Communist plot. The lunatic Dallas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, reputedly the richest man in the world (and the author of a utopian novel called Alpaca in which the richer you were, the more votes you could cast, but you couldn’t cast any if you took government aid), was beaming his radio show over three hundred stations in forty-two states. Its host, an ex-FBI man named Dan Smoot, reported discovering plans, under cover of a congressional act supposedly designed to provide community mental health services in Alaska, which he claimed actually constituted “the beginning of the American Siberia,” where those who exposed subversion in American government would be herded. More recently he had published a book arguing that the Council on Foreign Relations, a benign educational enterprise whose small, exclusive membership unfortunately consisted of hundreds of the most powerful people in the country, was the center of an “Invisible Government” determined “to convert America into a socialist state and then make it a unit in a one-world socialist system.”

  “Communist subversion” was becoming the channel through which a hundred ordinary political grievances were now sluiced. When the Housing Act of 1961 passed Congress on June 28, increasing the funding authorized for urban renewal from $2 million to $4.5 million, and then Kennedy announced he would propose a new cabinet-level urban affairs department, the panic came in a torrent. Urban renewal meant seizure of property—from Administration critics? for secret government projects? Kent Courtney published a pamphlet, Kennedy’s Power Grab: The Department of Urban Affairs, calling Kennedy’s plan “a blueprint for the destruction of private property in the United States.” A Memphis bank sent out a copy with every customer’s monthly statement. A Los Angeles landowner threatened with seizure of his home to make way for the new Dodger Stadium at Chavez Ravine set up a “Committee for Public Morality”: “Could a foreign enemy propose more brutal treatment? How much more brazen a declaration of war do you need?” In Phoenix a group called “Stay American” put up a slate of municipal candidates to oppose the city manager system as a Moscow-inspired monstrosity: after Communists gained their municipal toehold, one of their candidates declared, they would “blow up state capitols at a certain signal.”

  Discerning observers were beginning to notice that the American right was coming to comprise two circles. Each was of roughly the same size, expanding at about the same rate; each intersected the other. And each, somehow, defined Barry Goldwater as its center. It was becoming increasingly clear to National Review that such a situation was no more viable in politics than it was in geometry. Buckley and Company set out to claim the Goldwater movement for themselves—and wrench it away from those who believed that the Communists were ready to blow up state capitols.

  This storm had been gathering for years. Bill Buckley and Robert Welch were friends, introduced in 1954 by their common publisher, Henry Regnery. In 1955 and again in 1957 Welch wrote $1,000 checks to
buoy Buckley’s struggling magazine (although the second was accompanied with a note chiding Buckley for his naivete in not realizing that Eisenhower was “on the other side”). The next year, Welch circulated a few score of The Politician, his letter about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Communist proclivities, bound in individually numbered black binders, to select friends. Buckley got copy number 58. The letter he sent back to Welch was gently chiding. Goldwater, blunter, said what Buckley was really thinking: “If you were smart,” he wrote Welch, “you’d burn every copy you have. It will do great damage to the conservative cause.”

  National Review’s first steps toward a break with Welch were gingerly. Some of the publication’s most important benefactors—Spruille Braden, Adolphe Menjou, Manion, and, most of all, Roger Milliken—were Birchers. After Welch made the incredible declaration in his magazine American Opinion that Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, was a Communist agent, Eugene Lyons, editor of Reader’s Digest, submitted an article to Buckley criticizing American Opinion. Buckley wrote Welch a letter of warning before he published Lyons’s article: “Probably a little friendly controversy among ourselves every now and then is not too bad an idea!” Welch wrote back, to Buckley’s relief, that he agreed. Other readers proved less generous. “I was about to repeat my last year’s $100 contribution when I picked up your April 11th issue,” read one angry letter. “I will send my money to Robert Welch.”