Before the Storm (29 page)

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 around 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.”

The argument raged in the editorial offices through 1961: Was the groundswell to their right an opportunity or a nightmare? “There now exists in this country a conservative anti-Communist apparat that we all have hoped for,” Marvin Liebman wrote to the
NR
circle despairingly. “It is controlled by Robert Welch.” Bill Rusher, esteemed among the staff for his political savvy, gravely worried that “as the scope and pace of the free world's collapse becomes apparent to the American people and desire for a scapegoat takes hold” Welch might find himself at the head of a literal fascist movement—a prospect that horrified these conservative pragmatists as much as it did their liberal enemies. Scotty Reston wrote in the
New York Times
that at the rate the far right was siphoning off its contributions, there wouldn't
be
a Republican Party to nominate Goldwater in 1964.