WFB: Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me

LGF tipped me off to this great look at the way the consummate conservatives of the 1960’s marginalized the most dangerous foes to the modern conservative movement; the John Birch Society. 

At a time when it was necessary to want to control the growing power of the Soviets, some kooks took it a bit too far.  The JBS under leader Robert Welch went beyond the deep end and way out of the pool.  WFB recalls how he and other conservatives felt the need to marginalize these crackpots.  Speaking of Welch he wrote:

His influence was near-hypnotic, and his ideas wild. He said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and that the government of the United States was “under operational control of the Communist party.” It was, he said in the summer of 1961, “50-70 percent” Communist-controlled.

So how did Buckley and Goldwater purge the G.O.P. of these lunatics?  The story shows just how masterful and important he was to the conservative cause:

Time was given to the John Birch Society lasting through lunch, and the subject came up again the next morning. We resolved that conservative leaders should do something about the John Birch Society. An allocation of responsibilities crystallized.

Goldwater would seek out an opportunity to dissociate himself from the “findings” of the Society’s leader, without, however, casting any aspersions on the Society itself. I, in National Review and in my other writing, would continue to expose Welch and his thinking to scorn and derision. “You know how to do that,” said Jay Hall.

I volunteered to go further. Unless Welch himself disowned his operative fallacy, National Review would oppose any support for the society.

“How would you define the Birch fallacy?” Jay Hall asked.

“The fallacy,” I said, “is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists.”

“I like that,” Goldwater said.

What would Russell Kirk do? He was straightforward. “Me? I’ll just say, if anybody gets around to asking me, that the guy is loony and should be put away.”

“Put away in Alaska?” I asked, mock-seriously. The wisecrack traced to Robert Welch’s expressed conviction, a year or so earlier, that the state of Alaska was being prepared to house anyone who doubted his doctrine that fluoridated water was a Communist-backed plot to weaken the minds of the American public.

I’m sure there are hundreds of such instances of where Buckley helped to guide the G.O.P. to the ideology she has become today.  I encourage you to read the entire link.