Edward H. Miller
A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021
A writer friend of mine, now long ensconced in the Condé Nast glossies, used to regale us with his mother’s nutty ideas on matters of politics and society. For example, when the kids were young and at the Safeway in Palo Alto, mom would loudly refuse to buy Welch’s grape juice or jelly — even the grape jelly that came in Flintstones glasses — because that would be giving money to the John Birch Society.
If memory serves, this mom was a nurse. In my experience, nurses tend to be gullible and incurious. (No special aspersion on the nursing profession; much the same can be said of schoolteachers.) So I imagined this was just some scuttlebutt she’d overheard one day at the nurses’ station. Mom never bothered to research the matter herself, or she would have discovered that there was absolutely no connection between John Birch Society founder Robert Welch and the grape-juice people. That Mr. Welch, and his brother James, were actually candy tycoons. The James O. Welch company made Junior Mints and Pom-Poms and Sugar Babies. The sort of stuff you found mostly in movie theaters, or at the bottom of your Halloween sack when all the Hershey bars and Milky Ways were gone. I would guess my friend and his siblings ironically ate their share of this geedunk growing up, even while being denied the sublime pleasure of collecting Flintstones jelly glasses.
The author of A Conspiratorial Life is guilty of the same wide-eyed naïveté and goofy commonplaces as my friend’s mother. His basic thesis, iterated over and over, is that a) modern conservatism is fueled by Conspiracy Theories and Conspiratorial thinking; and b) it all began with Robert Welch and the John Birch Society (JBS). And not just conservatives as we generally understand them. Donald Trump gets pulled into this lazy, facile argument as well, with author Miller accusing Trump of all sorts of false claims and imaginary outrages that Miller believes are in the tradition of Welch and the Birchers. There may be a parallel between Donald Trump and Robert Welch, but it lies mainly in the exaggerations and pure inventions thrown at them by the Leftist press and broadcast media.[1]
The facile comparison to Donald Trump is put there because without it, the book has no “hook.” It’s not 1964 anymore. Robert Welch and the Birch movement are so far off most people’s radar, no book on Birchers is going to get attention unless you stuff it full of sensationalism and Trump. (A 2022 book, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right by Matthew Dallek, offers a more focused and detailed history of the JBS. Yet even here, the book’s dust-jacket blurb is obliged to begin with: “Long before Donald Trump and QAnon spread far-right conspiracy theories, there was the John Birch Society.”)
More than anything else, Miller’s take on the Birchers reminded me of a strange piece that appeared in Mad magazine in mid-1965, in which somebody “interviews a John Birch Society policeman.” All the media clichés are here. The Birchers insist their aim is to fight Communism, yet fundamentally they’re sloganeering hoodlums who use that as a pretext for displaying racial prejudice, xenophobia, and suspicion of Jews. And of course they want to “Get US out…of the UN!” and impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren (not because of his Commission’s fake “investigation” of the Kennedy assassination, but because of that Brown v. Board of Education decision back in 1954).
A running joke in the Mad story has the thuggish cop repeatedly wondering what the interviewer’s last name, Ross, is short for. He keeps calling him “Rossenkrantz,” “Rossiwicz,” “Rossokovski.” The guy works for Mad, after all![2]
This is about the level of analysis we get in A Conspiratorial Life. Author Edward H. Miller, an “associate teaching professor at Northeastern University,” isn’t particularly interested in presenting tenure-track history about what motivated Robert Welch and the Birchers. He mainly wants to tell us how they appeared in pop culture. The result is the sort of thing you come up with when your basic modus operandi is doing Internet searches for incendiary opinion pieces. Which is perfectly okay with me, so long as no one mistakes this casual journalism as serious research.
Still, we end up with a presentation that seems too naïve by half. When I saw that Miller was trying to claim that “conspiracy theories” in politics began with Robert Welch and the JBS, I immediately went to the index to see if Miller had ever heard of Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter was a Columbia history professor who famously published an essay in Harper’s called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Robert Welch and the Birch Society are not mentioned in this November 1964 piece because they are not the essay’s main target. That would be Senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (also not named), who was at the time being smeared as “mentally ill” and “paranoid” in other publications.[3] But Hofstadter didn’t have to mention anyone by name. In the fall of 1964, he and the Harper’s editors had merely to mention paranoid politics to put across the innuendo that Goldwater and his supporters — Bircher-types, notably — were suffering from a mental malaise, a pathology that Hofstadter claimed was recurrent in American political history. Hofstadter took his “conspiracy” thesis all the way back to the 1700s: to theories about the Illuminati, and then fear of Freemasonry, the Jesuits, the Holy See, the Habsburgs, and finally the subversive networks of the Abolitionists. Often shallow and frivolous, the essay doesn’t directly discuss contemporary 1960s politics. Regardless, Hofstadter confutes Miller’s pinwheel notion that Conspiracy Politics were something new in the early 1960s, sprung from the loins of the John Birch Society.
On the other hand, true facts are often dull. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” As I say, it’s the cockeyed legend of the John Birch Society that Miller is really after. Sixty years ago the JBS was commonly portrayed in the media as a shadowy group of “extremists.” “Extremism” in fact became a sort of journalistic synonym for Bircherism. When Barry Goldwater gave his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention and said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” this was widely understood as giving the high-sign to the John Birch Society. In racial matters Birchers were mostly pro-segregation, or at least anti-integration, and they opposed the rash of civil rights legislation. And they put up “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards.
Birchers were said to be a lot else besides quirky and extreme. From the beginning there was believed to be an undercurrent of anti-Jewish policy in the Bircher movement. Welch was very chary of this rumor, because he knew it was a smear used against any nationalist movement, going back at least to the America First Committee of the early 1940s, to which Welch belonged. In the early 1960s Time magazine and even President Kennedy suggested that Welch’s movement was somehow akin to Hitler’s. (Who planted that suggestion, one wonders?) Nevertheless, you’d be very hard put to find any suggestion of anti-Jewish or pro-Nazi remarks in the lengthy, soporific essays published in American Opinion. Welch went to the trouble of issuing a pamphlet, “The Neutralizers,” offering the convoluted argument that anti-Semitism was actually part of a Communist plot to distract people and besmirch anti-Communist organizations such as the JBS. Welch was so nervous on the subject that he insisted his editorial staff vet any article written by Revilo Oliver or Westbook Pegler, the two likeliest offenders.
This chariness about the Jewish Question and other sensitive matters is what led to the eventual falling out between Oliver and Welch. In A Conspiratorial Life, Miller says that Welch “fired” Prof. Oliver. This is based on the sanitized memoranda that Robert Welch left behind, and to which Miller had access. But Revilo Oliver told a very different tale, denouncing Welch as a hypocrite, liar, and coward.
Bircher geopolitical analysis was obscurantist, like nothing you’d read in Foreign Affairs or the New York Times. It was dense, often quirky, reinventing usual assumptions about international relations. For many years the JBS magazine, American Opinion, published an annual “Scoreboard Map” of the world, showing the percentage of “Insider” subversion to which each country had thus far succumbed. It was hard to say what criteria were being used there. The Soviet Union and Red China were of course 100% enslaved, but then you had Western European countries with quasi-socialist economies, and they seemed to be halfway there. The International Communist Conspiracy seemed to be mainly a juggernaut aimed at economic freedom.
In this respect, JBS ideology of 50 or 60 years ago was very similar to what you’d find among militant libertarians. Questions of race, religion, ethnicity, in-group preference, and social cohesion were off the table as debate issues, as they were seen as distracting and anti-individualist. Birch writings would discuss such matters only in the most roundabout way, as when Citizens’ Councils spokesman Medford Evans (father of M. Stanton Evans) would write about Communist control of the Civil Rights Movement. The Big Conspiracy was really a war against the individual and in favor of groupthink and collectivism.
Libertarianism and Bircherism had much in common, but like most commentators Miller misses that completely. The main reason for their similarity, I submit, is that their ideology provided a protective “duckblind” for an anti-liberal political agenda. You were against integration and the Civil Rights Movement not because you were a prejudiced bigot, or because you were a race-realist bore with degrees in anthropology, but because you opposed intrusive federal legislation and believed in freedom of association, yada yada. Such talking points were very useful for someone selling JBS or the libertarian agenda to wishy-washy Republicans. It’s no accident that notable conservatives such as Phyllis Schlafly, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan were friendly to both camps.
The libertarian-Bircher overlap was illustrated succinctly in a Birch paperback called None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Prepared for mass distribution during the 1972 presidential campaign, it carries an Introduction by American Independent Party candidate (and JBS member) John Schmitz. In less than 100 pages, None Dare Call It Conspiracy offers a political primer touching on every conspiracy cliché you’ve ever heard, and some you haven’t (with the notable exception of The Protocols of Zion).[4] You get the Illuminati, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, Cecil Rhodes, Colonel House, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and that esteemed Georgetown professor Carroll Quigley, who spilled the beans on the Conspiracy “Insiders” in his monumental doorstop, Tragedy and Hope.
You also get a clear explanation of how you’ve been lied to all these years, with political models that pretend fascism and Communism are opposites, at outer extremes of the political spectrum. None Dare Call It Conspiracy sets the record straight, demonstrating that both types of dictatorships are really collectivist and socialist! Real extreme Right-wingers are actually anarchists! How’s about that? Look, we have charts here and everything . . .
The top bar chart is of course a rendition of the “horseshoe theory” of politics, which claims that political extremes are really very similar. “They meet at the ends,” as the saying goes. The second chart is how libertarians and Birchers prefer to see the world — or at least did in the early 1970s. There was a great deal of cross-fertilization among Rightist theorists in the 1960s. Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter and adviser Karl Hess eventually evolved into a libertarian near the anarchist range.
It’s not clear why the JBS did not take on a clear libertarian identity as time went on. Undoubtedly some Birchers did redefine themselves that way, taking on the protective coloration of the American Enterprise Institute, the Mises Institute, the American Institute for Economic Research, and other outfits that present themselves as free-enterprise think tanks that don’t mess around with such touchy subjects as culture, race, or nation.
Another aspect of the Robert Welch/JBS story that author Miller avoids is how and why Welch was at once a brilliant organizer yet a stubborn crank who was forever painting himself into a corner. Welch was a genius, undoubtedly; taught himself to read at two or three, graduated from college at 16, then went on to the United States Naval Academy and Harvard Law School, often supporting himself along the way by tutoring other students in mathematics and languages, in both of which he had great facility.
My impression is that, having been a child prodigy and being measurably brighter than nearly everyone else he ever met, Welch became a confirmed autodidact, untrusting of anyone’s opinion unless it conformed with his own. Most people were gullible, Welch could see that clearly; through his life he remained suspicious of popular beliefs and consensus opinion. If Welch did not discover a useful fact or come to a conclusion on his own, that information was probably wrong, or not worth knowing. This would be the case even if the argument came from another prodigious mind, such as Revilo Oliver’s.
With his personality and gifts, Robert Welch was doomed always to be at odds with the world; impetuous, obstinate, impatient. He sailed through Annapolis and Harvard Law — but then dropped out before graduating. He started a candy business because he could run it on his own, and was certain he could do better than anyone else. Self-assured and innovative, he invested too much too soon in expensive equipment just as the Depression came into sight. And then he went bankrupt, and was forced to go to work for his younger brother . . . selling Sugar Daddys and Pom-Poms for the next 25 years, for the James O. Welch candy company of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Notes
[1] The Introduction begins with a nice summary of the book’s confused thesis. Supposedly Donald Trump called for the death penalty for the 1989 “Central Park Five” gang-rapists, even after the five Urban Youth of Color were all exonerated by DNA testing. (Except of course they weren’t exonerated by their DNA, nor were their convictions based on DNA.) Author Miller says Trump propounded a “baseless” claim that Obama was born in Africa. (He didn’t.) He claims Trump said all Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug runners (no), and that Trump threatened to jail Hillary Clinton in 2016 for her illegal e-mail server. (Not quite . . . but you get the picture.) None of these resemble claims made by or against the John Birch Society.
[2] A very odd piece for Mad in those days, as the magazine generally specialized in lighthearted absurdity, not mean-tempered political smears. I did not recognize the writers of the piece, Ronald Axe and Sol Weinstein, as regular Mad contributors, so I darkly suspected that the article had been an Anti-Defamation League plant, perhaps as some trade-off to help the publisher, Bill Gaines, get wider circulation at newsstands. Whatever the true story behind it, Axe mainly wrote TV sitcoms (Get Smart, The Mothers-in-Law), while Weinstein did spy spoofs for Playboy about a Jewish James Bond. Meanwhile the artist selected to illustrate the comic strip was none other than Joe Orlando, of EC Comics, Classics Illustrated, and the long-running comic-book ads for Harold von Braunhut’s brine-shrimp “Sea Monkeys.” Usually a very precise draftsman, Orlando turned out the four pages of “JBS Policeman” in an unusually loose, slapdash manner. Was he drawing badly on purpose?
[3] Ralph Ginzburg’s Fact magazine was successfully sued for running a 1964 cover article asserting that over a thousand psychiatrists regarded Goldwater as mentally ill and unfit for office.
[4] The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) kept mum about the book, and the American Independent Party, at least until after the November 1972 election. Then the ADL put out the word that candidate John Schmitz and None Dare Call It Conspiracy were part of a new wave of Jew hatred: “The book is saturated with anti-semitism of the kind disseminated by anti-Jewish propagandists for more than 50 years,” said a spokesman, quoted in the New York Times (November 20, 1972). There was nothing at all in the book about Jews, nor had there been anything like that in the Schmitz campaign.
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18 comments
I’m still waiting on a fair piece here on Lyndon Larouche
I used to keep up with him. My take is that he’s pretty much all over the place. His positions are that patriotism is good, technology is good, and everything else he has to say is a bit of a chaotic jumble. On the economic front, he’s always saying it’s going to crash big – which of course he’s right sometimes, in the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day. He’s interesting, though not too remarkable.
I thought he croaked years ago?
Croaked in 2019, Wiki tells me. The parallels between LaRouche and Welch are scanty, though the two got lumped together by the more eccentric Mother Jones types in the Leftist press. Muddying the waters still further, by the 1980s Willis Carto’s operations were also said to be connected with Lyndon LaRouche. One would have to be very incurious and naive to believe this, like my friend’s mother who thought the John Birch Society was supported by Welch’s Grape Juice, but a dab of misinformation is usually enough for many people. LaRouche was an operator who first posed as a revisionist Marxist theorist named “Lyn Marcus,” hoping to siphon off some SDS-type mojo in the 1960s. Later he posed as a populist, quasi-Rightist economist whose notions about Trilateralism etc. were largely lifted from the Birchers.
Interestingly, Yockey biographer Kevin Coogan was an adherent of LaRouche I and later opponent of LaRouche II, while never really escaping LaRouche conspiracy-think. Coogan barely mentions LaRouche in his Yockey book, though he implies that a LaRouche organization was tied in with Carto and thereby what Coogan deems the “Postwar Fascist International.”
As for why he never mentioned Jews, despite their prominent role in Communism, the reason is that he became dependent on heavy Jewish financial backing with the condition that the subject stays off-limits. Members who discussed the obvious got expelled. The conflict of interest effectively turned JBS into a controlled opposition.
That was very good but ended abruptly. I put Margo’s writing into the writing to IQ converter and it came out 147, highly gifted!
Seems like JBS utilized a strategy that I’ve noticed a lot recently, which I call “abstract to the point of disinterest.” I noticed it in Modern Age. So little on the news rack is worth reading, but MA was okay. After the death of the editor Lawler, who was interesting and on point on immigration, etc., “one of us” under protective coloring, I believe, the articles took on an increasing wonkish aspect during the trump administration. Academic writers of a certain stripe filled it with material so abstract and removed from the enormities happening on the ground, like obscure principles in 18th century classical liberalism, or populists of the 19th century, that the publication became boring. I believe this is a subtle tactic of submarining an organization or publication. Abstracting it to death, to the point where it has no interest, usually manifest when the editor has become hostile for some reason.
Great essay, Margot.
When I hear the term “Fiscal Conservative – Social Liberal” I run for the hills.
This reminds me of Barry Goldwater, who I appreciate for voting aginst the 1954 Joe McCarthy censure in the Senate, and against the MLK Canonization Act signed by President Reagan in 1983, which Goldwater later came out in favor of. Goldwater was also known for promoting desegregation of the military and Gay rights.
When Goldwater was speaking earnestly at the GOP convention in 1980, his black-framed glasses kept sliding down his sweaty nose and he automatically pushed them back up with his finger only to immediately repeat the process. Soon it became hard to concentrate on the content of his speech, and I wondered, is “General Drygoods” deliberately trying to portray himself as a kook?
Senator Goldwater also had a tendency to call everybody else who was stridently opposing Liberal crapola as “Extremist,” like the Mormon Arizona Governor who vetoed the state’s recognition of the St. King holiday.
Barry Goldwater, Sr. ─ Amateur Radio callsign K7UGA ─ had a lot of interesting hobbies such as photography, movie film, electronics. He was sort of an early-adopter of technology and had dabbled with all kinds of media formats, many obscure and obsolescent. Around the early aughts, the University had completed archiving one of the Goldwater collections and they hosted a small celebration.
I could not have told you whether the affair was about his photo collection of Noble Savages or his Kachina doll menagerie, but one afternoon somebody grabbed me in the hallway on the way to my desk as a body to fill seats in the department soiree.
I went in for a big piece of cake completely unprepared for smalltalk. I then realized that I had plopped down right next to Barry Goldwater, Jr. It was a little bit disconcerting because Barry Jr. looked exactly like his Dad, only a little younger, a little bit more hair, and without the black-framed glasses.
Barry Goldwater, Sr. had often worked the Amateur Radio bands but I had never been able to catch him before he was shutting down or when there was not an inscrutable pileup. He used to have a very large Ham Radio antenna in the backyard at his hillside home in Paradise Valley ─ and as soon as he was in the grave, his wife, 32 years his junior, wasted no time sending it straight to the scrapyard.
Hoping not to get asked what my nonexistent role was in archiving the Sen. Goldwater media collection, I asked Barry Jr. if he was a Ham Radio operator too. Unfortunately, no. So that left a few moments of awkward silence while we ate our cake.
🙂
Evan Meacham! I went to the search engine, “arizona car dealer governor,” because I knew I’d draw a blank.
Barry’s softening on gays and desegregation in the military I always put down to a sort of heliotropism toward the warm and radiant Libertarian sun. If you have a thorny issue you can’t work out, just enter it into the LiberVac2000 and out comes your smug, smartalecky answer: “You don’t have be straight to shoot straight!” Libertarianism had been something harmless, maybe beneficial, during the Conscience of a Conservative era, when most crazy stuff was off the table, and even Civil Rights bills looked borderline-crazy.
My grandparents were big Goldwater supporters, though that was in Wynnewood, PA, not Phoenix. They were absolutely sure Goldwater would get the nomination and LBJ would win the election. How did they know? I hadn’t a clue.
Excellent article, Margot! As is the article you linked to in it about Dr. Oliver: Remembering Revilo Oliver (July 7, 1908–August 20, 1994) The Professor & the Carnival Barker | Counter-Currents You say there what summed up Dr. Oliver’s later view of the JBS
… [Oliver] urged a more frank and forthright treatment of such untouchable matters as race and the Jewish Question.
You mention there Oliver’s association with Dr. William Pierce in the 1960s. Douglas Mercer makes the connection that Oliver had even inspired Pierce to write his notorious novel, The Turner Diaries, here: The John Franklin Letters | National Vanguard
Acceptable American patriotic organizations were scant in the 1960s until George Lincoln Rockwell burst on the scene and brought honesty and a radical approach to the untouchable matters as race and the Jewish Question.
Readers may be surprised to learn that future pro-White leaders William Pierce and Ben Klassen had also joined JBS early on, then repudiated it later, like Oliver, and for the same reasons. Even Robert Mathews and Kevin Strom had joined JBS as teens for lack of anything else.
I agree with GL Rockwell in his “WP” about the John Burch Society and the waste of the Conservative, economic conservative sand box.
We’ll never get anywhere without appealing, getting the masses of poor, rough White working class European Americans, European Europeans. Economic Conservatism, Libertarianism only appeals to a small % of White intellectuals, college students and just really rich people. Everyone else likes government to try to help them, likes socialized medicine, likes a border patrol that works, likes laws, rules against child labor, sub minimum wage POC migrant labor.
National Socialism, Socialist Nationalism whether in Germany in the 1930s or now is what appeals to regular people, not trickle down economics.
GL Rockwell had very strong negative views on the John Burch Society. I agree.
I’ve read that one. Rockwell rocks!
Would one of yous guys please link this article. It seems to evade my weak google skills.
Sure,
I ll find the link – it’s from the chapter in GL Rockwell”s “White Power – 50 Years of Failure”
https://www.colchestercollection.com/titles/chunk/W/white-power/chapter12.html
Fielen dank oculus dexter!
Thanks for that link, jaye. On topic, GLR says there:
Yet we have the man who commands millions of dollars of funds contributed by desperate, decent Americans Robert Welch – telling Americans “Nazism and Communism are the SAME THING!” To understand just how insane and suicidal that is, let me report an experiment we used to make when I was studying psychology at Brown University…
_White Power_ was published posthumously after Rockwell’s assassination. This important title has been out of print for years, but word is that since it is so important and it’s in the public domain, Clemens & Blair will reintroduce it in book form later this year.
Rockwell’s prodigy, William Pierce, went on to define our cause as neither right-wing nor left-wing in the mid-70s, and was in need of a sound spiritual foundation — non-Semitic — here: Our Cause by Dr. William L. Pierce | National Vanguard.
Whereas Pierce’s early mentor did not address pernicious aspects of the CQ (Christianity), and held out hope that the Constitution and the mass democratic electoral system could still save our race, Pierce rejected all three of those to take our racial nationalist movement to the higher plateau of strict racial preservation and advancement. A fascinating piece by Pierce about his short stint with the JBS, prior to his meeting GLR, when he was still a young physics professor, in the early 1960s, here: Enemies on the Right: The John Birch Society and Individualism | National Vanguard
… The pamphlet, written by the founder and leader of the Birch Society himself, Robert Welch, was The Neutralizers. Its message was that the only enemy was “the Conspiracy,” against which all real Americans, regardless of race, color, or creed, should be united. Anyone who raised the race issue or the Jewish issue was probably a Communist agent trying to divide anti-Communist Americans along racial or ethnic lines and thereby “neutralize” them. Certainly, there had been Jews involved in the Conspiracy, he wrote, but there also had been many non-Jews. Furthermore, some Jews were anti-Communists. Therefore, it was wrong to associate Jews with Communism.
After reading The Neutralizers I wrote a long letter to Welch, pointing out that my own studies had convinced me that Jews had much more than an incidental involvement in Communism. In fact, I told him, I was convinced that the real enemy of our people was the Jew, and that Communism was merely one of the weapons that the Jew was using against us at this time. Welch was not impressed by my evidence or my arguments, and the John Birch Society and I parted company.
Those who follow Jared Taylor (who, admittedly, is good on matters of race) et al., who carefully avoid the JQ, will likely call followers of Pierce “Jew-obsessed” or even divisive neutralizers, and are no more helpful in naming the real enemy of our people than was Robert Welch. Fact!
For further background, see the above-linked article about R. P. Oliver:
https://counter-currents.com/2016/07/remembering-revilo-oliver-2/
At the end, in the long quoted material, he describes catching Welch with his hand in the Zionist cookie jar. It seems Rockwell reached similar conclusions about JBS.
The thing is that JBS was indeed correct that there really was a lot of Communist subversion going on back in the day – something else that Rockwell correctly sensed. The problem is that avoiding discussion of Zionist involvement in Communism is about like describing the Mafia while hiding the fact that it’s mainly Sicilian. So JBS went down some unproductive rabbit holes (the Illuminati and all that) to avoid pointing out the obvious.
Beau Albrecht – are you familiar with the writings and especially the YT videos of ex Colombo Mob made guy Michael Franzese? I think they are AMAZING!
He’s broken with the mob, but never turned informant or a snitch. I like when he openly stated that 100% the Italian Mafia knew J Edgar Hoover was a homo, they held “Gay” pajama parties for Hoover and other homos of influence, took compromising photos of them then blackmailed Hoover and others.
J Edgar Hooveer always insisted there was no Mafia organized crime. I knew there was when I was about 8 years old reading the God Father book.
Thank you Beau Albrecht.
The nested thread has petered out but perhaps J. Edgar Hoover thought the idea of “the Mafia” was overstated in part because it was.
Bobby Kennedy made a crusade against the Mob in the way that Richard Nixon had against Communist subversion, only now Democrats were trying to de-McCarthyize their legacy. RFK had been in the running along with (((Roy Cohn)) to be Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s (Democrat) legal whipper-snapper. I doubt RFK would have been any better than Cohn, but probably not any worse. McCarthy wanted somebody aggressive. The jury is out on whether Cohn deliberately sabotaged McCarthy. I tend to think so because Communism has an unmistakable Jewish aspect and the Rightwing lawyer and later New York political operative Cohn ended up dying of AIDS in 1986.
In any case, JFK was the only Democrat not to vote for McCarthy’s Senate censure by calling in sick.
There are shades of nuance here; both organized crime and Communist subversion are threats to the Nation, but overplaying one’s hand (with the “help” of the mercenary press) if you can’t actually prove it, really doesn’t improve matters. Neither McCarthy nor Hoover had access to the Venona decrypts in 1954 during the Senate Army-McCarthy Hearings.
J. Edgar Hoover’s critics can’t prove that he was an old sausage gladiator either. Cohn was once engaged to Barbara Walters and there is no indication that McCarthy suspected any such thing. Hoover never married and he roomed with fellow Bureau bachelor Clyde Tolson. That is the only evidence other than a photo of Hoover in drag wearing a costume like at a Frat party. One of the first things that historians have to learn is that past historical times were NOT our times and things did not mean for them what they might mean for us now.
Hoover was raised with a rather rigid Christianity and he was certainly a prude. If this were some modern time, maybe Hoover might have been Gay or so inclined. We just don’t know. There is zero proof of this, and only Hoover’s political enemies say so. The FBI was heavily involved in security clearances and investigating cases of subversion. Investigating compromising behavior is something that elite Leftists do NOT themselves appreciate, so they doth protest too much methinks. Hoover had to advise JFK about his playboy lifestyle, and he had no illusions about what kind of man Doctah King was.
George Lincoln Rockwell said in a radio interview that he “thought the world of J. Edgar Hoover” but that as a public servant operating at the pleasure of the President, Hoover had to say some unsavory things from time to time to placate himself with his bosses. Rockwell knew at least in part that the FBI was covering for MLK and the Freedom Rider assault on the segregated South.
Rockwell understood police psychology and how to handle it properly. I think that the aging Hoover was past his sell date in the 1960s and that the CoIntel program was increasingly targeting the Right and the Klan and ignoring Communists and the Left, but there was no reason to fall into any provocateur traps. Rockwell’s advice was that the best way not to be treated like a criminal is not to act like one. Whatever one thinks of Feds today, it remains good advice.
Since this article was about John Birchers, it is important to note that Bircher or adjacent W. Cleon Skousen always defended Hoover against his critics.
Skousen was a lawyer and FBI agent who had personally worked for J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, DC and later became the Police Chief of Salt Lake City. As a devout Mormon and latter BYU Bible professor, I don’t think Skousen would have defended Hoover or even worked for him if he thought that he were a sodomite.
Skousen wrote the books the Naked Communist (1958) and the Naked Capitalist (1971) and made the important point that Communist and Capitalist subversion were both intimately connected like two pincers of the same crab. In the late 1970s, my Dad and I took Skousen’s course on American Constitutional Law (mostly taught by adjuncts) but it was the best and the most insightful rendition of the subject that I have ever come across. Skousen knew his ConLaw.
I will temporize this with the important nuance that Skousen was indeed what I would call a Kosher Conservative. He, like many Christians and Biblical scholars, thought that Israel winning the 1967 Six-Day War, for example, was part of Biblical prophecy preparatory to the Second Coming of Christ.
And like Welch and Buckley and the others, Skousen poo-poohed the idea that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were genuine (itself a bit of a strawman argument since people on the Right say “they fit” not that the Protocols are real protocols). But the bloom came off that rose pretty quickly with revelations about the attack on the USS Liberty and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and IDF massacres, and so on. I think Rockwell was the first to figure it all out in an American context circa 1960, and that the most important part to the Nation’s subversion problem was the Jewish Question.
I intensely dislike Kosher Conservativism ─ at best they are misguided ─ but I would trust Skousen on a handshake with far more confidence than either “Rabbit” Welch or William F. Buckley.
Anyway, Director Hoover and FBI bachelor friend Clyde Tolson being the key to all of this is barking up the wrong tree. Let’s not confuse tabloid journalism with competent historical analysis.
🙂
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