He had spoken twenty-one minutes on the shortcomings of public education when, slightly lowering her head to minimize disruption, Miss Greer gathered her notes, rose, and edged out of the room, leaving Welch talking to a dozen members of the staff of the NAM and the single remaining reporter.
He stressed his belief that education was the key to the success of the whole American proposition, that students needed not only to learn to read and write but to understand the historical basis of American ideals.
Robert Welch didn’t reveal to the press that day, decades ago, the dark thoughts and premonitions that fermented in his mind. Although many businessmen affiliated with the National Association of Manufacturers were blunt in their privately expressed disapproval of the policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the rule at the NAM was that no official should take a partisan position at any public gathering. On legislation, yes, they were free to question, even to denounce, legislative initiatives or bills, but no adverse comments were to be made about government officials. The taboo on criticizing the president himself was especially stressed, with war in Europe threatening.
So Welch mostly kept it to himself, but what he didn’t say to his education-minded audiences was written out on his typewriter vociferously, as he stayed home in Belmont, by Boston, with his wife and two children. He gave time to the pursuit of mathematics and the appreciation of poetry, and he persevered with his intensive general reading. He would, one day, have accumulated a personal library of five thousand books, every one of which he had read.
When war came, he went to an intelligence military unit in the U.S. theater. Soon after his discharge he traveled to Great Britain, specifically intending to survey the effects of two years of socialism under the postwar government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee. As he toured Britain his determination hardened: he would devote more of his time to antisocialist activity, now brilliantly menacing as the Communists tightened their grip on Eastern Europe. It was perhaps his addiction to mathematics and logic that prompted him, with increasing insistence, to search out the causes of current problems. If A, then B was a logical sequence. It meant that if Situation A exists, then derivative Situation B must also exist. If all men die, then Jones will one day die. Well then, if America is the land of the brave and the free, why doesn’t America pursue policies that enhance freedom and reward bravery? How was it possible to account for the world he observed, in 1946? We had fought a great war to ensure sovereignty for Poland, and Poland was now a Soviet satellite. How was it possible that with the military advantages we enjoyed, the Soviet army should have been the first to reach Berlin? And having reached Berlin, the Soviet Union would, of course, make yet another satellite of the part of Germany over which its armies held sway.
His curiosity in the search of a cause-for-it-all continued, and his indignation and frustration increased. And then one day in June 1950, President Truman led us into war in Korea. A war, as Welch saw it, precipitated by the disastrous policies of Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Gooderham Acheson. We engaged in the military contest against a Communist force under the command of an American general whose skills and tenacity were unequaled. So? President Truman proceeded to win the war? No. He proceeded to fire General MacArthur.
The cordite in Robert Welch’s mind burst into flames. He collected his thoughts into a massive letter, which he distributed to friends. A copy of it was spotted by Henry Regnery, whose publishing firm in Chicago brought the letter out as a book in 1952, with the title May God Forgive Us. The closing paragraph was 200-proof Welch, the toughness, the unsparing postulation of cause and effect, the fire and the thunder of exhortation. People read the words, and now the little group in Indianapolis would hear him pronounce them:For the pusillanimous part that we have played in all this spreading horror; for our indifference to the grief of others; for our apathy to the crimes we saw and our blindness to those we should have seen; for our gullibility in the acceptance of veneered treason and our easy forgetfulness even when the veneer has been rubbed off; for all our witting and unwitting help to the vicious savages of the Kremlin and to their subordinate savages everywhere, may God—and our fellow men—some day forgive us!
7
WELCH CAME ACROSS THE NAME in what became a near-exhaustive study of documents pertaining to the broad question of Communist activity at home and abroad. It was in the Senate Office Building that he read the typed report on a singular episode. It recorded a murder in Anhwei Province in China, near Hsuwai, on August 25, 1945, ten days after the Japanese surrender. The Senate committee report had been prompted by protests against the relatively listless investigation of the death of a young army captain. The report recorded the last words heard spoken by the twenty-seven-year-old commander of the besieged U.S. Army unit.
The report told of the small detachment (four American officers, one Chinese liaison officer, five Chinese aides, and two Korean noncoms) superintending a transfer of equipment dispatched by an American army base. The mission had begun at an American airfield near Fowyang, in northern Anhwei Province. It had been headed for Tsingtao on the Shantung Peninsula and moved by a railroad car. What exactly was in that car, and what exactly was the mission’s purpose, Welch couldn’t find out. He probed the report and then used his own resources, unsuccessfully: the U.S. Army kept the relevant orders sealed. Welch was tipped off, confidentially, by his friend Jack McIntyre, who worked in the Pentagon and had personally examined the document, that its classification as “Secret” was unnecessary, inasmuch as there was nothing there the disclosure of which could in any way damage American military or diplomatic interests. Welch was left to brood about it.
Although the war with Japan had officially ended ten days earlier, there were still three million Japanese in China. They were mostly disciplined soldiers and service personnel, a significant foreign presence whose peaceable repatriation was one of the huge postwar problems at hand. What proved especially threatening were scattered Chinese Communist guerrillas who had been mobilized to fight the Japanese under the Communist command of Yenan. They were undisciplined . . . or were they entirely undisciplined? Welch wondered about that.
There had been a break in the railroad line, so the U.S. mission had to settle for a self-propelled handrail, assembled at the near end of the break, in order to resume the tedious trek to Tsingtao. It was soon after they were under way that they were stopped. Armed Communist soldiers detached most members of the American complement to a village fifty yards away from the rail line, leaving only one U.S. captain and one Chinese liaison officer with the handrail. Lieutenant Tung had stepped forward to converse with the Communist commander, whose riflemen had trained their weapons on the U.S. convoy. After the conversation, Tung walked back to warn Captain John Birch that he sensed danger ahead. He advised Birch to make his way back to the village to which his men had retreated. The words later quoted by Tung as having been spoken by Captain Birch minutes before the guerrillas opened fire on him (and on Tung) were, “It doesn’t make much difference what happens to me, but it is of utmost importance that my country learn now whether these people are friend or foe.”
Robert Welch permitted himself to wonder why Captain John Birch had been left with any doubt, in 1945, that the Communist soldiers who had stopped him were foe, not friend. Yet what, exactly, had motivated the executioners to do what they did on August 25? Captain Birch was felled by a bullet to the leg. When his corpse was recovered the next day, a physical examination showed that he had been stabbed repeatedly by a bayonet, his body shoved into a ditch, left either dead or dying. Lieutenant Tung had been found alongside, barely alive.
Welch wondered: Why did these Communist soldiers kill an American soldier, an ally against Japan? He turned his dogged energies to the inquiry and eventually learned that complaints from comrade military officers and from Captain Birch’s family had been insistent enough to reach, finally, the desk of Mao Tse-tung himself. Chairman Mao sent out the explanation that, regrettably, one of his
soldiers—who, exactly, he did not know—had evidently mistaken John Birch for a militant Japanese soldier ignorant of the week-old surrender. Welch knew that this explanation was preposterous. For one thing, John Birch looked about as Asiatic as Jimmy Stewart.
What a remarkable man, John Birch, Welch thought. He was born in India, where his father served as a Protestant missionary. The family returned to Georgia when John was still a boy, and he later attended Mercer University in Macon. In 1940, at age twenty-two, Birch went to China to continue the missionary work of his father. When, in 1942, he left the mission to join the American army, he was placed in a special intelligence unit, where his knowledge of the Chinese language and culture proved especially useful. He was greatly valuable to General Claire Chennault, commander of the Flying Tigers, whose assignment it was to provision anti-Japanese resistance units in diverse areas of China. Welch could discern, from reports, letters, and interviews with Chinese and Americans who had worked with him, that Captain Birch was a magnetic presence, a young man who deeply affected those he worked with.
Surely it was no accident, then, that John Birch should have been singled out for special treatment by a Chinese Communist military unit? Those Communist soldiers were probably not as footloose as American diplomats and army chiefs found it convenient to suppose, pursuing as they were doing everywhere in the world (Robert Welch underlined the words in his letter) coexistence with Communists. That amounted to giving in to them at every juncture—today that little village in Anhwei Province, yesterday Yalta and Potsdam, the capital cities of Western retreat.
Robert Welch made his decision.
He would write a book. The Life of John Birch, he would call it. It was only after the publisher, Henry Regnery, had the manuscript in hand that Welch thought to give it the subtitle In the Story of One American Boy, the Ordeal of His Age. Welch would tell the story and express his suspicions. He would not identify himself completely with John Birch, Christian. “Many of us today cannot share the simple and fundamental faith which moved John Birch to such a self-sacrificing life of service to his fellow men, but with his cause.”
Welch, once the book was in print, would wait four years before promulgating the final, great memorial to the young Christian American martyr: the John Birch Society, a national society consecrated to mobilization against the worldwide Communist threat. That was four years off, but in the book, the necessary thinking and analysis were done.
In his book on Birch, Robert Welch reached back and told of the Communist infiltration of the New Deal. (“The time has certainly come to stop pussyfooting around with ambiguous language about important truths of our recent history.”) He told it all. He wrote of Communist agents Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss and David Niles, Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs. He wrote of labor union chief Sidney Hillman and analyzed why President Roosevelt had solicited from Hillman approval of Harry Truman as vice president.
That was the politics of the accommodationists and the capitu-lators. And it was not therefore surprising that John Birch should be singled out as the first martyr of the Cold War. “Although determined on a career of ascetic dedication for himself, [Birch] had a fundamental American respect for the desire to own property” (the young John Birch had intended to acquire some farmland). Thus he was explained by Welch not only as a Christian missionary, but as a nascent capitalist. Birch’s faith “was a dynamic faith, which pointed the way, through humility, brotherhood, and righteousness, to a better world composed of more noble human beings.”
At his desk in Belmont, surrounded by his books and papers, Welch worked into the night devising a suitable peroration for his book. It was appropriate, he reflected, that the rest of the people in his house were asleep. The whole world was asleep. But now the memory of John Birch would no longer sleep.
He bent over his typewriter.
As John lay dying during that last hour or two of agony, after he had been shot and bayoneted and his body tossed aside, he must have realized that the rise of the anti-Christ, which he had foreseen, was already upon us. There is no way in which we can reach back, across the nine-year interval, and let him know that his death was not in vain. What really matters is whether his sacrifice does in fact help to awaken his countrymen to their danger and their duty. If we rediscover some of our sounder spiritual values in the example of his life, recharge our determination from the spark of his courage, and learn essential truths about our enemy from the lesson of his murder, then his death at twenty-seven ceases to be a tragedy, for in a full lifetime he could not have accomplished more.
8
ROBERT WELCH GAVE CONSIDERABLE thought to how to structure what he thought of as the high command of his prospective society. “High command” in terms of public recognition—in no other sense, commanders. His society would require central direction. He had learned from the Objectivist model and the Nathaniel Branden Institute. He had read and admired both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. The Ayn Rand movement implicitly acknowledged that she—Miss Rand—could not share with anyone authority for the development of objectivist thought, however complete her confidence in Nathaniel Branden. So Welch would not encourage any illusion of democratic leadership in a society whose animating epiphanies were, singularly, his own. A lot of people knew a lot of things about the Soviet conspiracy and the strength of its arm in the United States, but Robert Welch was the final interpreter of the scene. However modest the language he would use, he would in fact serve as sole director of the John Birch Society. He would give himself a title that sounded, well, paternalistic. As the founder of the John Birch Society he would call himself . . . The Founder.
Welch had crisscrossed the country many times for the Welch Candy Company, for the National Association of Manufacturers, and as author of the two Regnery books. He settled on Indianapolis to launch his society. Indianapolis was manifestly midwestern America, a center of industrial America, east of Chicago and Minneapolis, north of Cincinnati and Dallas.
He had a good sense of whom he might plausibly approach for his historic meeting. The invitees would be conservatives, wealthy, resourceful, and restive under the uncertain leadership of President Eisenhower.
Soviet advances worldwide had seemed relentless in the years of Eisenhower’s presidency, as they had been under Truman. Welch knew why we were losing under Eisenhower—he had answered the key question for himself. But he did not propose to divulge this insight in Indianapolis. All that he needed to do to alert this group of people was to point out what had happened to U.S. interests when confronting Soviet interests.
What was there to point to, postwar? The Communist takeover of China; the atom bomb and then the hydrogen bomb tested in Russia; the heart-aching suppression of the Budapest revolution in 1956, just two years ago; Moscow’s launch of the first satellite, in October of last year. At home, you could almost feel the listlessness of our foreign policy. The new president had authorized the surrender in Korea. He seemed helpless up against Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s repeated threat to make a separate alliance with East Germany, thus threatening the independence of Berlin.
And all of that, yes, under a Republican administration! An administration which—Welch would repeat and repeat—didn’t even begin to think of repealing the New Deal’s incursions on human freedom. Quite the contrary. Federal welfare continued to grow even as inflation ate away at the savings of the American people. And there, critically situated as chief justice, was Earl Warren. Appointed chief justice by. . . Dwight Eisenhower. Warren, the man in charge of the Supreme Court, quick to approve federal measures that curtailed freedom and to disallow as unconstitutional programs to bolster internal security.
Welch wrote out his historic letter.
Would you be able and willing to meet with about fifteen other men, all from different parts of the nation, in Indianapolis on Monday, December 8, and Tuesday, December 9?
Except for myself they are all men of well-recognized stature, unshakable integrity, pr
oved ability, and fervent patriotism. The meeting will be completely “off the record.” And since there is no way I can tell you of the idea which I hope to see thoroughly discussed there without writing volumes, you will have to take for granted that I would not ask such busy men to give up two whole days in this way unless I thought it would be worthwhile.
The letter was delivered to seventeen people. An astonishing eleven of them reported on December 8, so to speak, for duty. They had been given in Indianapolis the home address of a friend of Welch, a widow called Marguerite Dice, who lived in a substantial Tudor house in a suburb. One by one they came in, soon after eight in the morning. They were led to the living room, where comfortable chairs had been set up in a semicircle.
When the last of them was seated, Robert Welch, age fifty-eight (in 1958!), tall, conservatively dressed in a gray suit and dark blue tie, entered the room. He shook hands with his guests, one after another. He already knew the three guests who had served as presidents of the National Association of Manufacturers and one or two others. He hadn’t before encountered Harry Bradley, the president of Allen-Bradley; or T. Coleman Andrews, President Eisenhower’s commissioner of Internal Revenue in the first term; or Robert Stoddard, the world’s largest manufacturer of metal forgings, and owner of two newspapers in Worcester, Massachusetts, and of the city’s radio station.
Welch spoke without once referring to his sheaf of notes; spoke, in the two days, for a total of thirteen hours. His effect on these hugely successful men was catalytic. Ten of them agreed to serve on the national council of the John Birch Society.
By 1961, the Society would have thirty thousand members and forty-one full-time employees. Recruitment went on nationwide. Key Republicans felt the force of the burgeoning concern of a body of Americans awaking to the need to give special attention to the wayward drift of national affairs. At the GOP convention in July of 1960, the delegates in Chicago, after nominating Nixon for president, rejected first Barry Goldwater for vice president, then Walter Judd. Those rejections of conservative figures were the successor blow to the rejection of conservative icon Senator Robert A. Taft on that other fateful day in Chicago eight years earlier.
Getting It Right Page 5
