The Question of Robert Welch

Woe unto the man who disagrees with Mr. Welch. He is 1) an idiot, or 2) a Comsymp, or 3) an outright Communist.

Over the course of this year, the centenary of William F. Buckley’s birth, we will republish an article by him weekly. This week’s piece explores the then-growing rift between the Buckley and Bircher factions on the right.

I n the past few weeks a number of conservative spokesmen whose credentials and sincerity are unassailable have made public statements about Mr. Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, calling into question his qualifications to lead a national anti-Communist and anti-statist movement. Russell Kirk, replying to a letter addressed to him by an executive of the John Birch Society, writes that he knows Mr. Welch to be a “likeable, honest, courageous, energetic man” who nevertheless “by silliness and injustice of utterance” has become “the kiss of death” for any conservative enterprise. Congressman Walter Judd said in Minneapolis that he considers Mr. Welch’s judgment so flawed as to disqualify him from leadership of an effective anti-Communist movement. Senator Barry Goldwater said he feels Mr. Welch should resign; and, should he refuse to do so, the Society should disband and reorganize under different leadership. Fulton Lewis Jr., at the Human Events Conference in Washington, criticized Mr. Welch’s direction of the Society. And, it is widely known, some members of the National Council of the John Birch Society are at their wits’ end, and one or two have quietly resigned. Their dilemma is, reduced to the simplest terms: How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points, so critically different from their own, and, for that matter, so far removed from common sense?

That dilemma weighs on conservatives throughout America. It is not a dilemma imposed by the pressure of Liberal or Communist objections to Mr. Welch. If not a single criticism had been made of Mr. Welch, by the Liberal press, the dilemma would exist just the same, and conservatives sooner or later would have to face it. Months before the Liberals even heard of Mr. Welch, many of his associates and enthusiasts were urging Mr. Welch to reshape his views, and they proceeded on the assumption that in due course he would. The underlying problem is whether conservatives can continue to acquiesce tacitly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world which is false, and besides that, crucially different in practical emphasis from their own.

It is unlikely that Barry Goldwater, the political leader of the conservative and anti-Communist movement in America; that Walter Judd, one of anti-Communism’s most eloquent and unyielding spokesmen; that Fulton Lewis Jr., among the most obdurate opponents of Communism abroad and statism at home; that Russell Kirk, whose books have done more to reanimate a full-bodied conservatism than anyone else’s; or indeed that National Review, whose editors are lifetime students of Communism and Liberalism, could be stampeded by the Liberal juggernaut into unnecessary collisions with a man who is engaged in furthering conservative ends. These men have not bent under public pressure before and are not likely to. Yet their opinion — our opinion — is that Robert Welch is damaging the cause of anti-Communism.

Why? Because he persists in distorting reality and in refusing to make the crucial moral and political distinction. And unless that distinction is reckoned with, the mind freezes, and we become consumed in empty rages. The distinction is between 1) an active pro-Communist, and 2) an ineffectually anti-Communist Liberal.

It is widely known that Mr. Welch wrote a tract in which he declared that, among others, Mr. Eisenhower, his brother Milton, and the Dulles brothers were Communists. It is assumed by the overwhelming majority of the membership of the John Birch Society, who implicitly reject the accusation against Eisenhower et al. (just as the Council of the John Birch Society explicitly rejected the accusation when, a year ago, it was publicly brought to light), that Mr. Welch’s charges were merely personal political speculation, of no bearing whatever on the John Birch Society and its activities. That is a crucial misapprehension. Although the work on Mr. Eisenhower (sometimes it is called The Politician, sometimes The Black Book) was indeed written before the John Birch Society was founded, it was circulated right up until a year ago to select members of the Society as, by implication, the ultimate insight of the founder and leader of the John Birch Society. Mr. Welch has never disavowed the book, and for obvious reasons: it can be demonstrated, by quotations from his current writings, that the Black Book’s central thesis (that the government of the United States has been “under operational control of the Communist Party” — words he used publicly in the summer of 1960) continues to govern his thinking even today.

A member of the John Birch Society is entitled to observe, as so many of them, men and women of high character and purpose, have done: “But I don’t believe in any such nonsense — what has it all to do with the John Birch Society, of which I am a member?” It has this to do with it: the premises of the Eisenhower book are identical with the premises that underlie current statements by Mr. Welch on contemporary affairs and continue to guide his practical leadership of the Society.

For instance, a few weeks ago, Mr. Welch gave an interview to the Boston Herald in which he commented on the Cuban fiasco last spring. “The Cuban invasion,” said Mr. Welch, “was a plot by Fidel Castro and his friends in the U.S. Government. The invasion was planned by Castro and his friends in our government to make Castro stronger throughout Latin America [and to] reduce U.S. prestige.” But in fact, as everyone including Mr. Welch knows, the so-called invasion of Cuba was planned by the Eisenhower Administration, endorsed by Eisenhower himself, reaffirmed by the Kennedy Administration and by Kennedy himself, and executed by the Kennedy Administration. What went wrong is that John Kennedy’s will failed him at the crucial hour when he gave orders to deprive the invading force of the military support which alone could have brought liberation. “The responsibility I take for myself,” said Mr. Kennedy after the catastrophe. But if, as Mr. Welch alleges, the invasion was, in plan and execution, a Communist plot, how can it otherwise be deduced than that Eisenhower — and for that matter Kennedy — are pro-Communist?

Mr. Welch’s annual Scoreboard, published in a summer issue of American Opinion, Mr. Welch’s public journal, has for several years listed the United States as “40-60%” Communist-controlled. And this past summer, Mr. Welch raised the figure to “50-70+%”! That is to say, he is reaffirming his belief that, to quote again his own words, “the government of the United States is under operational control of the Communist Party.” That was the thesis of the Black Book.

What is more, Mr. Welch brooks no disagreement on his central thesis. He does not require of his members that they expressly accept it — they would leave his Society in droves if he did. But in his communications and editorials, he is constantly putting forward his thesis, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, and always excluding disagreement with it as non-rational or treasonable. “We wrote in 1951,” Mr. Welch says in the current (January) issue of American Opinion, “the truth concerning Tito. We said that he always had been, still was, and would remain a faithful Communist agent of the Kremlin. That his break with Stalin was completely stage-managed and phony. . . . And we outlined the facts and considerations which made such a conclusion inescapable to anybody who cared about the truth.”

Now, there are others than Mr. Welch who care for the truth, who are very anti-Communist indeed, and who have followed Tito’s career perhaps longer and more closely than Mr. Welch, but who would nevertheless reject these inflated sentences. National Review, for instance, has always believed that Tito is and remains a dedicated Communist and as such can never be a friend or ally of the West. But the relationship between Tito and Stalin, and between Tito and Khrushchev, has been very complex and not conceivably reducible to the simple dependence of puppet on puppet-master. Over the years, men as staunchly anti-Communist and as diligent in the pursuit of truth in international affairs as John Foster Dulles, Senator Robert A. Taft, Professor Gerhart Niemeyer, Frank Meyer, and James Burnham have seen that there were schismatical strains in Titoism of a kind that we should try to exploit — and at times, we have succeeded in exploiting, as we did in bringing the Greek civil war to a conclusion that would not have been possible if Tito’s break with Stalin had been a total fraud. The rupture between Tito and Moscow was by no means illusory in the sense of being artificially stage-managed, but illusory only if we deceive ourselves into thinking that because of this rupture within the Communist camp, Tito could be regarded as our ally.

But Mr. Welch will not tolerate such distinctions. He anathematizes all who disagree with him. “. . . terrific strong support [was] given to Tito, as [an alleged] defector to and friend of the West, by Life and Time; . . . not being readers of either magazine, we did not then realize the part being so frequently played by the Luce publications in spreading the Communist line.” In other words, Time and Life are not merely notoriously unreliable exegetes of a purposive anti-Communist position (on which proposition one might agree) but, by Mr. Welch’s innuendo, they are compliant, if not intentional, purveyors of a pro-Communist line.

Mr. Welch continues his survey: “Practically by the time American Opinion began publication . . . we pointed out that . . . Nehru of India and Nasser of Egypt were every bit as completely Communist agents of the Kremlin as . . . Mao Tse-tung . . . We supplied as many of the facts and as much of the history of each man as could be assembled in the space we had available to show that any other conclusion in each case was absurd.”

“The notion that Nasser is an agent of the Kremlin,” Russell Kirk recently wrote in his letter analyzing Mr. Welch’s “erratic intuitions,” is capricious. “One does not have to be a Communist to be a scoundrel. Anyone familiar with Arab nationalism will regard this allegation with contempt.” Nasser has certainly exposed himself to Communist opportunism (so, on several occasions, did Dulles): it does not follow he (or Dulles) has been a Communist agent.

Then . . .

“For the sake of honesty, however, I want to confess here my own conviction that Eisenhower’s motivation is more ideological than opportunistic. Or, to put it bluntly, I personally think that he 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… But my firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”
— From The Politician, by Robert Welch, 1958

“ . . . In the fall of 1956,” Mr. Welch continues, “we pointed out that both revolts in [Poland and Hungary] had been deliberately precipitated by the Kremlin for its own purpose.” Thus, stunned, we are expected to believe that the Polish and Hungarian uprisings were not spontaneous and heroic revolts against Communist tyranny, the results of an exploding human spirit, but mere Communist theater! And this we are expected to believe, notwithstanding the self-evident facts of the situation and the abundant testimony to the contrary of survivors of these uprisings against tyranny, which embarrassed Khrushchev more than any events in modern Communist history. We are, in sum, asked to believe that Khrushchev engineered his own embarrassment.

You name him; if he disagrees strongly, he’s most likely on the other side. Our CIA is pro-Communist, says Welch — and he doesn’t say it only in his Black Book, but in the current issue of American Opinion, and in the issue before. “You must realize,” he wrote in the December issue, “the CIA is on the [Communist] side.” In the current issue, he refers to “Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré, our CIA, and all of the other Communist and pro-Communist troublemakers.”

. . . and Now

“The whole canvas [deals]…with Washington’s visible will to win this Cold War for the Soviets. Perhaps the most alarming thing about current history in the making is the way Washington [has become a part] of the whole international conspiracy, of which it is now another Mecca second only to Moscow. And we have seen on every side, in a hundred different manifestations, the unceasing efforts of our government to carry out all programs and take all steps required to bring about the merger of the United States with Soviet Russia and all of its satellites into a one-world socialist government. These are all plain facts, incontrovertibly clear to anybody who will use the eyes, the intelligence, and the common sense God gave him.”

— From American Opinion, by Robert Welch, Jan 1962

Our State Department? “One whole year before the Communist-fomented and Communist-led revolt, supported in every practicable way by our State Department, succeeded in overthrowing Syngman Rhee in South Korea . . . ” i.e., our State Department (undoubtedly the world’s most maladroit) desires (for Mr. Welch implies that the character of the insurrectionary movement was translucent) to further pro-Communist ends. “(Actually, Syngman Rhee was overthrown by a military junta whose principal agent was a staunch anti-Communist.)

The press? ” . . . the Communist bosses themselves obviously felt that their control of the American government and of our media of mass communication was sufficiently complete to make even this drastic move [Castro’s takeover in Cuba] safe.” Control, mind you. And again, no disagreement is tolerable: “This article [written about Castro by Mr. Welch], we believe we can say with honest pride and also with accuracy, was devastating in showing the idiocy of any claim by anybody — who claimed to be informed — that Castro could possibly be anything but a one hundred percent Communist.”

Now, National Review in 1957 suggested Castro was probably a Communist. That is one thing; to say that anyone who disagreed was idiotic, i.e., that the businessmen, priests, journalists, politicians, scholars, and students (many of whom grew up with Castro and fought side by side with him, believing him to be non-Communist) who disagreed, were Communists or pro-Communists or morally and intellectually helpless, is to make categorical condemnations which miss the whole point of the human predicament, namely, that two different people, having surveyed the same datum, can recreate differently what they saw; that two anti-Communists, evaluating the same problem, can honestly advocate different approaches toward the same solution. The United States should have struck Castro down from the very beginning, but our failure to do so was, at the critical level, a failure of will, a failure of perspicacity, not a failure of loyalty. But Mr. Welch disagrees; for indeed, he believes the man primarily responsible for Castro, Dwight Eisenhower, is a Communist.

NATO? “With regard to that brainchild of Dean Acheson, godchild of Harry Truman, and eventual ward of Dwight Eisenhower, named NATO, we have repeatedly insisted for years that it was probably the biggest—and certainly the most expensive—hoax in all human history,” i.e., NATO affects to serve an anti-Communist purpose, but in fact does not, and never was intended to. Here we have, claims Mr. Welch, a hoax on anti-Communists that deceives Europe’s premier anti-Communist, Konrad Adenauer. And de Gaulle. And the entire anti-Communist community of Europe. And Fulton Lewis. And Walter Judd. And Barry Goldwater. And the editors of National Review. And the editors of Human Events. All of whom have backed NATO. Everyone is out of step…

Bolivia is controlled by Communists, says Mr. Welch. Well, let us assume for the moment that it is. But the question is, have our leaders desired that Bolivia should be pro-Communist? Certainly, says Mr. Welch. “… Bolivia has been made a satellite and kept one”—by the United States Government. Disagree? “… If you believe that there is anybody of any importance in either the last Administration or the present one who has not known this fact, then there is simply no reason for your reading any more of this article.”

Berlin? “We have seen the artificially created and completely phony Berlin ‘crisis’ used as a means of building up the prestige of that hypocritical Comsymp Willy Brandt.”

“In fact, the whole canvas of this compendium was designed as a background for these final brushstrokes, dealing with Washington’s visible will to win this Cold War—for the Soviets… Perhaps the most alarming thing about current history in the making is the way Washington [has become a part] of the whole international conspiracy of which it is now another Mecca second only to Moscow.”

And in domestic affairs? “. . . we have seen budgetary proposals urged by the Administration which are as clearly designed to debase and destroy our currency through inflation as if they had been prepared by Karl Marx himself…”

Note: the allegation is not that our inflationary policies will weaken us — which they most certainly will — but that our inflationary policies, which are (unfortunately) endorsed by a) the Administration, b) the majority of both houses of Congress, c) the majority of the nation’s academicians, d) many business, banking, and insurance interests, are designed to weaken us: i.e., that all these people in effect desire the triumph of Communism, or are totally manipulable by Communist agents.

Mr. Welch also wrote:
“In the fall of 1956, we pointed out that both revolts in [Poland and Hungary] had been deliberately precipitated by the Kremlin for its own purpose.” Thus, stunned, we are expected to believe that the Polish and Hungarian uprisings were not spontaneous and heroic revolts against Communist tyranny, the result of an exploding human spirit, but mere Communist theater! And this we are expected to believe, notwithstanding the self-evident facts of the situation and the abundant testimony to the contrary of survivors of these uprisings against tyranny, which embarrassed Khrushchev more than any events in modern Communist history.

And Mr. Welch’s summation:
“And we have seen on every side, in a hundred different manifestations, the unceasing efforts of our government to carry out all programs and take all steps required to bring about the merger of the United States with Soviet Russia and all of its satellites into a one-world socialist government.” Disagree? “These are all plain facts … incontrovertibly clear to anybody who will use the eyes, the intelligence, and the common sense God gave him.”

Woe unto the man who disagrees with Mr. Welch. He is 1) an idiot, or 2) a Comsymp, or 3) an outright Communist.

There are members of the John Birch Society, and they include, in our judgment, some of the most morally energetic, self-sacrificing, and dedicated anti-Communists in America, who ask: But what does it matter, if we and Mr. Welch disagree on a number of things? The answer — Senator Goldwater, Mr. Judd, Russell Kirk, and other critics of Mr. Welch would agree — is in two parts. The first is political: are these disagreements on trivial or on substantive matters? It is essential, if one would endorse Mr. Welch’s analysis, to believe that the Government of the United States is under the operational control of men who desire to betray this nation and cause us to become a satellite of the Soviet Union. That is a substantive premise, from which all political analysis, strategy, and tactics are derivative. Should one, disagreeing with Mr. Welch on so central a matter, nevertheless support him because he is also against federal aid to education, and fluoridated water?

Gerald L. K. Smith will not disagree with Goldwater on most domestic proposals. Should Goldwater then be pro-Gerald Smith? Nikita Khrushchev favors medical care for the aged.

Medical care for the aged. Should the Liberals be pro-Khrushchev? Robert Welch cannot be compared to these men, but the point is valid that there are bounds to the dictum: Anyone on my right is my ally, just as there are bounds (often unrecognized by the Liberals) to the complementary dictum, Anyone on my left is my ally.

And secondly, there is the moral consideration: Can one endorse the efforts of a man who, in one’s judgment, goes about bearing false witness? (Was Jehovah, who answered the question on Mount Sinai with the Eighth Commandment, a Comsymp?) We have no doubt Mr. Welch himself honestly believes that all those people are Communists — that mitigates his moral culpability. But those of us who disagree are not excused if, by our silence, we egg him on.

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Welch, by what Russell Kirk has called “an excess of zeal, intemperance, and imprudence,” promotes a split in the conservative movement by asking for the tacit support of men who cannot in good conscience give it, who, moreover, feel that to give it is to damage our chances of success. “Cry wolf often enough,” Mr. Kirk wrote to Mr. Welch, “and everyone takes you for an imbecile or a knave, when after all there are wolves in this world.”

If we are to win the war against Communism, we have no less a task before us than to change national policy. Nothing is clearer than that Mr. Welch is not succeeding in doing anything of the sort, precisely because, by the extravagance of his remarks, he repels rather than attracts a great following. The John Birch Society required for effective leverage, according to Mr. Welch’s own estimates, one million members (it might have had many millions if properly led!); it has, even after great national publicity and largely because of Mr. Welch’s “intemperance of utterance,” less than one-tenth that many members and is growing no faster than the movement to impeach Earl Warren, who remains as unimpeached today as when Mr. Welch first launched that ill-conceived campaign.

Mr. Welch, for all his good intentions, threatens to divert militant conservative action to irrelevance and ineffectuality. There are, as we say, great things that need doing — the winning of a national election, the reeducation of the governing class. John Birch chapters can do much to forward those aims, but only as they dissipate the fog of confusion that issues from Mr. Welch’s smoking typewriter. Mr. Welch has revived in many men the spirit of patriotism, and that same spirit calls now for rejecting, out of a love of truth and country, his false counsels.