(Correction to Part 1: General Walker ran for governor in 1962, not for "president," as stated.) ____________________________________________________ The Early Days of the John Birch Society: Fascist Templars of the Corporate State Part 2 By Alex Constantine "I think it is a safe prophecy that the Hitlerite movement has passed its apogee, and that it is unlikely to retain much longer the appearance of solidity it had a few months ago." � H.J. Lasky, Daily Herald, November 19, 1932 Back in 1957, General Walker had made the cover of Time magazine, credited with furthering the cause of desegregation after he led federal troops integrating the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Actually, Gen. Walker led the troops only after President Dwight Eisenhower refused his resignation, historian Don E. Carleton, author of Red Scare, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1993. "He did not want to carry out that order," Mr. Carleton said. "He did not believe in racial integration" (General Walker obituary, AP release, November 2,1993). Walker flew the U.S. flag upside down to express his rage over the perceived communist leanings of Kennedy and other government officials, according to Darwin Payne, a former Dallas newspaper reporter. "He was not a good speaker. He was a poor campaigner and finished last in a field of six, which was a surprise because he had so many ardent followers in the right wing. So that tarnished his reputation," Mr. Payne recalls (Walker obituary). Walker, a Birch Society recruit, loudly declared himself a martyr in the war against creeping Marxism. At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1962, he testified that the "conspiracy" was, in the words of columnist Jack Anderson, "clearing the way for world communism by systematically slandering and discrediting its effective opponents. The cast of victims of this 'hidden policy ran to thousands ... and he undertook to name the brightest of the fallen: General Douglas MacArthur, Defense Secretary James Forrestal, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Senator Joseph McCarthy, General George Patton, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas. Walker's litany of martyrs was standard among the 'anti-communist' right; it could have been liften intact from the speeches of Senator Joseph McCarthy or Gerald L.K. Smith a decade earlier, just as it would be reproduced a decade later in the pamphlets on the fanatical fringe, except that in the latter case the roster of unheeded prophets would be updated by the addition of Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut and Representative Michael Feighan of Ohio (Jack Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker, Random House, 1979, pp. 100-101). Liberals, even within the Republican Pary, were targeted by the JBS for defeat. Thomas Kuchel, U.S. senator for 16 years and the last major Republican to hold office in California, was one of them. Senator Kuchel expressed particular pride in his support of civil rights bills for enfranchisement of blacks and desegregation of public facilities during the Johnson administration in the 1960s. In 1994, the Los Angeles Times reported that Kuchel "said with characteristic disdain, the main feature of 'right wing Republicans,' as he understood them, 'was militant anti-Communism. 'They seemed convinced we were about to be invaded by the Communists.' Mr. Kuchel always traced his trouble with the political right to his response to a surge of mail he got from members of the then-obscure John Birch Society shortly after John F. Kennedy became president. 'I got thousands of letters telling me that Chinese Communists were in Mexico preparing to invade California,' he recalled. After checking with military authorities, Mr. Kuchel wrote a short form letter in response: 'We have no evidence of Communists gathering in Mexico, Chinese or otherwise.' Shortly thereafter, Mr. Kuchel learned that he was being labeled a 'Comsymp,' a term he had not heard of until that time. 'I got a little teed off, and prepared a carefully researched speech critical of the John Birch Society and that kind of mentality,' he remembered. 'I kicked them around, and they never forgave me'" (Kuchel obituary, November 23, 1994, L.A. Times). An editorial writer for the Times Record News in Witchita Falls followed the political machinations of the Birch Society from an early age ("A Society of Hate," Oct. 25, 1998), observed that JBS founder Robert Welch "was not in government but despised most of those inside it, was never stopped, and his influence grew even as McCarthy�s bulb dimmed and died out." Birchers in Texas were politically hyperactive in those days, and gained a political foothold in local politics, "and that�s how I know they were an ornery bunch. The first person I actually came to know as a Bircher was a kid I�d gone through school with who showed up one day outside the schoolhouse with the trunk of his car loaded down with boxes of paperback books. He was standing there with the trunk lid up handing out free books to anybody who�d take one. I could kick myself now for not taking one then because it would be interesting to have it just to show my kids what mean times those were. If you think the Starr Report made President Clinton look bad, you should�ve seen this book. The name of the book was A Texan Looks at Lyndon. I came to know quite a number of Birchers in various contexts, some through church, some through groups my parents socialized with, some through my job as a journalist, but I didn�t know them as Birchers until I started connecting the dots. "They were a sneaky bunch, and mean, and at one time they ran the government in my hometown, and used their offices to preach against communism and socialism as though evil was right there at the city limits threatening to come in and take over. I never ran across a communist or socialist back then, so maybe the Birchers were successful � I dunno. A little later, they tried to take over the entire Republican Party in the county where I lived by putting stealth candidates on the ballot for every position at the last minute. I guess they knew so much about communist infiltration that they�d become experts at it. The ones I knew were a humorless bunch, sullen, suspicious and stiff-necked. They saw America going straight to hell right before their eyes, and they resented the fact that so few heeded their doomsday predictions." An exception to the general apathy that met Welch's cultic bund was William Kintner, a former CIA officer who castigated critics of the extreme right in the the May, 1962 issue of Reader's Digest. Kintner maintained that the "campaign" waged against rad-right havens like the John Birch Society began when "dossiers in Moscow's espionage headquarters were combed for the names of unsuspecting persons in the United States who might do the Kremlin's work." Anyone maligning the home corporate-military state was therefore a suspected Soviet agent hawking "disinformation." But the Birch Society's ambitions went far beyond control of local politics. One one occasion members of the JBS who took objection to Kennedy's Communist "appeasement" policies, plotted the overthrow of the government. In 1962, Dallas officials of the JBS attended a meeting with H.L Hunt, General Edwin Walker, Robert Morris, leader of the Defenders of American Liberty, president of Plato University in New Jersey and former chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (!), and Larrie Schmidt, a veteran of two tours of duty with the Army in Munich with a penchant for Hermann Goering. Back home, Schmidt, his head teeming with the Birch Society propaganda disseminated by General Walker back in Germany, took a position at United Press International. He had made plans while stationed in the Rhineland to start an organization he called CUSA, short for Conservatism U.S.A. By the summer of 1962, Schmidt organized a squad of zealots from the Military Police and Counter-Intelligence Corps. Look magazine (January 26, 1965) reported that Schmidt "trained a small, disciplined band of soldier-conspirators to follow him stateside and do, he hoped, 'whatever is necessary to accomplish our goal.'" Schmidt's coup plan called for infiltrating conservative organization around the country, and marshalling them to overthrow of the Kennedy government. The core of this seditious army was to be the first organization drawn into Schmidt's plan, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a Birch Society offshoot that boasted some 50,000 members by arrangement with Heidelberg-born Major General Charles Willoughby, born Weidenbach, a YAF founder, alleged by Dick Russell to be one of the central participants of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The coup plot was exposed when Warren Commission investigators happened upon Schmidt's role in the purchase of a newspaper ad � framed with a thick, black border � that ran in the Dallas Morning News the day Kennedy was shot, pronouncing the president guilty of treason for alleged diplomatic dalliances with the Russians (Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, pp. 320-24). The name Kennedy riled good Birchers everywhere. Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors' Guild and FBI snitch, under secret contract with MCA management, emerging political star in Hollywood, was closer to the mark. After the 1964 presidential election, Democratic Party officials crafted a plan to take on right-wing extremists in the public arena, including one of Reagan's support groups, Citizens for Constitutional Action � a conservative, grassroots organization that had backed Goldwater in his presidential run � and thereby splinter the Republicans. As it happened, both Goldwater and the John Birch Society received lavish support from J. Howard Pew, owner of the Sun Oil Company (see Colby and Dennett, The Will Be Done, HarperCollins, 1995, p. 453). The Republicans countered with measures tailored to ensure party unity. Reagan was cautioned not to allow himself to be defined as either a moderate or conservative. "During one secret strategy meeting," Curt Gentry (in The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California Putnam's, 1968) wrote, "John Rousselot, national public relations director of the John Birch Society, approached Stuart Spencer with a coldly pragmatic offer: the society would be glad to endorse Reagan or denounce him, whichever would help most" (p. 125). When Reagan was sworn in as governor of California on January 2, 1967, he was congratulated by Robert Welch himself. Welch proudly proclaimed that the Birch Society was, "in large part," deserving of credit for Reagan's electoral victory. "We had chosen California as a state in which to concentrate, practically since the beginning," Welch said. "As a rule, about fifteen percent of the total field staff we could afford, and hence at least fifteen percent of out total membership has been in California" (Gentry, p. 285). The ascent of Reagan occurred in the Society's halcyon period, before public opinion forced conservative politicians to distance themselves from Welch's hyper-vigilant Red hunters. But the Birch Society remained symbiotic with the very corporate-military elite it denounced. The Editorial Advisory Committee of Welch's American Opinion magazine claimed four past presidents of the National Association of Manufacturers. Other editorial advisors: General A.C. Wedemeyer from the Pentagon's War Plans Division under the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Colonel Laurence Bunker, formerly the ranking aide-de-camp to General Douglas MacArthur; and the Honorable Spruille Braden, a shoe-in for "Insider" as former undersecretary of state (Mike Newberry, The Yahoos, Marzani & Munsell, 1964, p. 21).
