Before the Storm (23 page)

Since McCarthy's day, liberals had been wondering why apparently intelligent people could believe that the wrong kind of politics in the United States would inexorably hasten its takeover by the USSR. It was concluded that these were people who feared for their status in a rapidly changing, complex urban society, who pined for a simpler past (they were for the “repeal of industrialism,” said Commentary, which was odd, since most Birch leaders were industrialists). The cognoscenti neglected the simplest answer: people were afraid of internal Communist takeover because the government had been telling them to be afraid—at least since 1947, when George F. Kennan argued in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the founding document of U.S. Cold War doctrine, excerpted in
Reader's Digest,
that “exhibitions of indecision, disunity, and internal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect on the whole Communist movement.” Through the 1960s, AFL-CIO president George Meany loved to flatter rank-and-file members that they were the first line of resistance against the Communists: in Czechoslovakia, he said, “they controlled the trade union movement, and within seven days they controlled the country.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy told a 1961 press conference, “Communist espionage here in this country is more active than it has ever been.” (There had been none to speak of since World War II.) Army recruits saw films like
Red Nightmare,
narrated by Jack Webb, which depicted an ersatz American town deep within the Soviet interior where spies were supposedly training in indigenous American arts like sipping sodas at drugstore fountains in order to infiltrate the United States. You could no less avoid breathing in a bit of paranoia in Cold War America, in fact, than you could soot in Charles Dickens's Manchester. Did Birchers and their ideological cognates claim that dangerous “fallout” from nuclear testing was a hoax? So did the
Atomic Energy Commission, all through the 1950s. And it was the “discoveries” of the CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, not Robert Welch, that a KGB “Master Plan” allowed no Soviet to defect to the United States except as a KGB double agent (thus bona fide Soviet defectors were often kept naked in isolation in a brightly lit room and had to submit to cruel three-year interrogations to force them to give up their KGB secrets); and that there was a second, secret Kremlin
inside
the official Kremlin whose existence could only be inferred because no one who had ever been inside it was ever allowed beyond its walls.

It shouldn't have been surprising that the John Birch Society was able to win a membership in the tens of thousands in an officially encouraged atmosphere of fear and suspicion. The John Birch Society was also a voice for conservatism—its motto was “Less government and more responsibility”—at a time when the Republican Party was turning more liberal. At a time when a housewife from suburban New York, Betty Friedan, was writing a book arguing that the alienation and boredom of housewives was America's “problem that has no name,” the Society gave housewives world-historic purpose to their lives. (“I just don't have time for anything,” one told a Time magazine interviewer. “I'm fighting Communism three nights a week.”) And last but not least, being a Bircher
was fun.
The fellowship was vouchsafed by the rule that when a chapter grew bigger than two dozen, it was split in half—the rationale being that unwieldy chapters were easier for the Communists to infiltrate. The groups' main activity was monthly meetings in members' living rooms (at which the main activity might be watching a film of a lecture given by Welch, who looked a bit like TV's Mr. McGoo and, eerily, recited his interminable talks from memory); and group members would carry out whatever suggestions they cared to that were handed down in Welch's monthly
Bulletin.
They might write the director of the Boy Scouts to ask why the president of the Communist-infiltrated National Council of Churches addressed the National Jamboree; or they might send postcards to congressmen showing the map the “Negro Soviet Republic” Communists proposed be carved out of the American South in 1928. They might be asked to attend meetings of “Communist fronts” like the ACLU to shout down “disloyal” speakers, or to urge their dentist and the airlines to display
National Review
and
Human
Events on their magazine racks, or to form a local chapter of a Birch front organization like Support Your Local Police. And, most of all, members were instructed to keep informed by reading books like
Tito: Moscow's Trojan Horse
and
I Saw Poland Betrayed.

Welch could have remained obscure forever if not for his success. Disillusionment with the GOP after Nixon's 1960 defeat swelled the membership rolls; by February of 1961 the John Birch Society was large enough that when
members read in the
Bulletin
that Welch wanted them to write their congressmen demanding the impeachment of Earl Warren for his decisions favoring civil libertarians over red-hunters, letters flooded in to Capitol Hill. Enterprising reporters took notice. And the story spread like wildfire.

By April I the Birchers made page I of the
New York Times;
by the twelfth Ohio's aging, acid-tongued Senator Stephen Young, labeling Welch a “Hitler,” commandeered a copy of Welch's notorious
The Politician
and entered into the
Congressional Record
its claim that Eisenhower “has been sympathetic to ultimate Communist aims, realistically willing to use Communist means to help them achieve their goals, knowingly accepting and abiding by Communist orders, and consciously serving the Communist conspiracy for all of his adult life.” Cries went up for congressional investigations; Welch proposed that the proceedings be carried out by Senate Internal Security Committee chair James Eastland of Mississippi, who praised the society as “patriotic.” Cardinal Cushing, three months after giving the benediction at the Kennedy inauguration, announced that he was a Welch admirer; two southern California congressmen, Edgar Hiestand and John Rousselot—Rousselot was chair of the congressional Republican freshmen caucus and a Nixon protege—announced that they were proud members (as did all Society members, they creepily referred to Welch as “The Founder”). Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower's agriculture secretary and a Mormon elder, was also a member. Barry Goldwater, reached in Los Angeles, volunteered that “a lot of people in my home town have been attracted to the society, and I am impressed by the type of people in it. They are the kind we need in politics.”

Welch devoted his April Bulletin to the uproar. “On February 25, 1961,” he explained,

Things intensified. On April 14 the
New York Times
splashed a sensational story on page 1: an officer stationed in Germany, General Edwin Walker, was indoctrinating his troops with Birch literature. Then the
Times
thundered against him on the editorial page. On April 17 Walker was removed from his post.

Then, on the eighteenth, the John Birch Society was knocked off the nation's front pages. A force of 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at Cuba's Bay of Pigs for an assault on Fidel Castro's government. Cuba's meager air force, which was supposed to have been wiped out in air strikes that President Kennedy scaled back at the last minute so he could plausibly deny American involvement, strafed the force's landing boats, and 1,000 survivors made a quick surrender. Kennedy's advisers saw him weep. The news came just six days after another crushing Cold War humiliation: the world's first space flight, by a Russian, Yuri Gagarin. And for a time, the right-wing scare seemed hardly worth the candle.

T
here was one place in the United States where there was no sudden alarm at a failed invasion of Cuba; there, alarm was a constant. Long before the Bay of Pigs, the signs graced Orange County, California, windows: “THEY'RE NOT JUST 90 MILES AWAY. THEY'RE HERE.” On April 18, 1961, at any rate, Orange County was paying more attention to the struggle against “their” attempts to subvert a local school board.

Joel Dvorman, a New York native and liberal Democrat, had been elected as a trustee of the Magnolia School District board the previous summer. That he was also the membership secretary of the Orange County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and had once belonged to American Youth for Democracy, was unknown or ignored at the time. In June of 1960 Dvorman invited an organizer of the protests at the San Francisco HUAC hearings to his home to speak at a meeting.

James Wallace, a production supervisor at a local aerospace firm who lived near Dvorman, got word of the meeting an hour before it started. A new report from the California state legislature's own local version of HUAC had just noted that the ACLU's southern California division “devoted an unusually large part of its time and energies to the protection and defense of Communist Party members.” Wallace decided to drop in to check out what his neighbor was up to. He reported what he saw in a letter to the Santa
Ana
Register: Joel Dvorman was entertaining traitors. “I wonder what we would have done in 1942 if Mr. Dvorman had a German-American Bund meeting at his home,” he wrote. At a subsequent school board meeting, Dvorman was asked if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. A committee was hastily gotten up to fight a “threat to our heritage, to expose it and to combat it with every weapon at our command.” The weapon of choice, a recall petition, warned that Dvorman might “subtly impose his beliefs upon students through selection of textbooks, establishment of curriculum, selection of teachers.”

James Wallace soon formed Anaheim's first chapter of the John Birch Society. (Robert Welch, he said, “awakened us out of our selfish apathy and indifference to what is happening in America.”) Soon there were five chapters in Anaheim, and thirty-eight in Orange County. In January of 1961 Orange County State College and Fullerton Evening Junior College announced a series of lectures, “Understanding the Goals and Techniques of World Communism.” The course was promptly oversubscribed, as was Santa Ana College political science instructor John G. Schmitz's course “Communist Aggression.” In March a coalition of civic leaders hosted a rally by the barnstorming Australian minister Fred C. Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (whose unique contribution to right-wing discourse was to draw on his background in disease pathology and to contend that the Communist Party held sway over the people of Russia via “the techniques of animal husbandry”). The publicity for Schwarz's event warned of “communist plans for a flag of the USSR flying over every American city by 1973.” Principals were urged to suspend school; seven thousand children were obligingly trooped off to attend the all-day affair. Soon the ninety thousand parents of the Garden Grove School District were sent flyers assuring them that their children recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, in schools where “any type of propaganda in conflict with county, state, and national laws is prohibited.”

And on April 18, 1961, residents of Orange County's six-thousand-pupil Magnolia School District recalled Joel Dvorman and two other liberals at the polls by a ratio of 3 to I. Even during the McCarthy years a public official had never been recalled from office for membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. But even during the McCarthy era there had never been a place quite like Orange County was in the 1960s.

 

Orange County had caught anticommunism fever. On any given weekend, interested citizens of Anaheim, Santa Ana, Fullerton, Costa Mesa, and half a dozen other Los Angeles-area suburbs could drop in on one, two, or five different showings of films like
Operation Abolition
or
Communism on the Map,
a geopolitical melodrama in which blood- or pink-colored ink leached over country after country, sparing only Spain, Switzerland, and the United States (which was covered by a big question mark). On any given night they could find a study group assiduously poring over the organizational structure of what J. Edgar Hoover called the “state within a state”—the American Communist Party.

Orange County's VFW halls and school auditoriums were Meccas for traveling lecturers like former double agent Herb Philbrick (whose claim to fame was announced in the title of his book,
I Led Three Lives);
Korean War
POW John Noble
(I Was a Slave in Russia);
and World War I fighting ace Eddie Rickenbacker
(The Socialistic Sixteenth—A National Cancer).
Another perennial was W. Cleon Skousen, who was so right-wing he had been fired as Salt Lake City police chief by Mayor J. Bracken Lee, the tax resister working to dissolve the federal government, for running his department “like a Gestapo.” Another favorite was Ronald Reagan. It was glamorous having a movie star talk to your Republican precinct club. And he preached anticommunist hellfire as well as anyone else on the circuit.

Reagan's showbiz fortunes had declined considerably since his peak after the war when he commanded a salary just below that of Errol Flynn. In 1954 he took a job as an MC in Vegas, an experience he likened to “going over Niagara Falls in a tub.” Partly it was the rise of television; partly it was fashion (he was no T-shirt-wearing method actor); partly it was that he spent so much time with politics. As a liberal who worshiped FDR, Reagan became president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947 just as a jurisdictional struggle with deceitful, violent craft unionists whom Reagan suspected of being Communists gave him very good reason to fear for the safety of himself and his family. It was a formative experience. In his mind, Communism became an everyday threat, looming just around the corner.