Barbara had to tell somebody what had happened in these horrendous, earth-shattering days. She told Lee all of it. She said she was aghast at the “peremptory manner in which Ayn was abandoning the future of the Objectivist movement.”
Lee had no rejoinder.
49
IT WAS AFTER SEVEN THAT LEE opened the door to her apartment. Woodroe was anxious about her, and had the news about her mother to give her. Lee had told him several days ago that something explosive had happened at NBI and that the staff had expected to hear directly from Nathaniel with some explanation.
He saw her red face—was it the winter wind? After she removed the ski cap she favored in snowy winter, he could see that tears had swelled her eyes. And now, whatever the office news, he had the doleful message for her.
“Darling, you are to call this number. It’s a man who called. It’s about your mother.”
She walked quickly to the phone.
She spoke in Yiddish. After a minute, she put down the phone. “I have to go to my mother. She is in the hospital. That was my mother’s uncle, Samuel.”
“Shall I go with you?”
She shook her head. “That wouldn’t be a good idea.”
Silent, they went down in the elevator. Woodroe hailed a taxi.
“There’s something else going on, Lee—right?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you about it later.” She got into the cab.
At ten, she called to say she would stay the night with her great-uncle and her mother.
“It’s bad, Lee?”
She muffled out her words. “Very bad.”
The next day Woodroe, unemployed since two weeks after the election, was in Albany for his appointment with Graham Molitor, who did the political hiring for Governor Rockefeller. On the phone, Molitor had been very direct: The governor was looking for a young man with ties to the GOP right wing. Karl Hess, a schoolmate and old friend of Molitor, had recommended Woodroe Raynor.
“Karl said he was pretty sure you were unemployed. After all, Goldwater is unemployed.”
Returning from Albany, Woodroe took the subway at Grand Central to Fourteenth Street and walked to Beth Israel Medical Center. The clerk was busy with his crossword puzzle. Woodroe asked where Mrs. Leo Goldstein was.
The clerk looked down at a roster. “She’s . . . checked out.”
Woodroe was surprised.
“She’s been released?”
“She’s been released to the Weisser Funeral Center.”
“Where’s that?” Woodroe asked tersely.
“You can look it up, mister.”
He found Lee there. At the funeral chapel she was seated on the left. She wore white lace over her head and the muted blue suit he had last seen her in.
The rabbi was reciting a eulogy. Woodroe sat with three other men, on the right. They wore what seemed a scrap of clothing on their lapels. In the center was the coffin, a pine box draped with a plain black cloth, the Star of David knitted on top.
Moments after his arrival, a chant was begun. El Maleh Rachamim, the rabbi announced. Lee’s head was bowed.
Woodroe bowed his own head.
He found himself reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
50
WOODROE HAD CONTINUED TO READ diligently the publications of the John Birch Society. His resignation from the Society did not break the habit. He turned now to the latest issue of American Opinion.
In February, the United States had undertaken the heaviest air raid to date in Vietnam. This was the first U.S. military action not undertaken as retaliation for Vietcong guerrilla offensives. Six American planes had been shot down since the Tonkin exchange, bringing the total number of U.S. planes lost to forty-three. Three hundred twenty-five Americans had been killed in Vietnam since 1961. Woodroe focused on the stark figures.
President Johnson had testified to a congressional committee that 75,000 Vietcong had been killed in the same period. An additional 2,376 soldiers had arrived in South Vietnam in the new year, bringing U.S. forces there to 46,500. Henry Cabot Lodge, who had run as vice presidential nominee against the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, had been sworn in as ambassador to Vietnam. That told the story: bipartisan support for Johnson’s Vietnam policy was urgently desired.
It seemed indisputable to Woodroe that the United States was finally resolved to reaffirm the doctrine of containment against the Communist world.
He opened the magazine. He read it without enthusiasm and greeted with a trace of skepticism Welch’s report that the Society was continuing to grow, that it now had an incredible five thousand chapters and a membership in excess of 100,000.
He turned then to Welch’s report on Vietnam.
He could not believe it.
Only Robert Welch could have written what he was reading.
There were, as ever, the freighted sentences: Welch’s ongoing reliance on the mystique of the inherent treachery of American officials at every level.
Woodroe would not, he knew, bring himself to read all fifteen densely packed pages of Mr. Welch’s analysis of the Vietnam scene. But the hypnotism of the Founder required that he read—here and there even out loud to himself, to capture the actual sound of Welch singing his song—a few pages of Welch’s analysis:The greatest asset the Communists have anywhere in the world today is the willingness of the American people to be deceived. Even some reasonably informed anti-Communists find it so much easier and more pleasant simply to go along by accepting some action or development as bona fide which, if they would only make themselves stop and think hard about it, they would know was utterly absurd. The mushrooming war in Vietnam, and the predictable uses to be made of that war, form the most horrible current illustration. And, however much we too dislike the job, the truth must be faced.
Permit us again to repeat ourselves, this time from a bulletin of two or three years ago. When the press was suddenly allowed to obtain and publish “leaks” that the United States was going to initiate and support the invasion of Castro’s Cuba—which later came to be known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco—this writer was asked by a small but informed audience in California: “What’s taking place?” I had to reply that, having been on the road for a week, I knew none of the details, and could predict none. But that, just from the headlines alone, the Communist formula being used was unmistakably clear, and that consequently I could predict, with complete confidence, the ultimate general results. (1) The anti-Communist opposition in Cuba would have been lured out into the open, betrayed, and destroyed. (2) The United States would have lost tremendous prestige all over Latin America, both for having meddled in the affairs of a smaller nation, and also for having completely fumbled the operation. And (3), Castro would have come out of the whole affair with tremendously increased prestige, at home and throughout all of Latin America, as the Communist David who had decisively stood up and licked the gringo Goliath. I added that obviously the whole operation had been planned for these purposes, by Castro and the Communist influences in Washington. A day or two later the “invasion” got under way. The rest is history. And what on earth makes anybody think that the increased activity in Vietnam has purposes that are basically any different?
Or have we so soon forgotten Korea, where we know now that the Communists at the top, through their influence within our government and their control over the Red Chinese, were pulling the strings and determining the action on both sides? Where we could have won a decisive victory within three months from any time that our generals were given the green light to go ahead? Does anybody doubt that we could have wiped the North Vietnam Communists out of South Vietnam within three months, at any time during the past several years, and made them glad to stay out, if we had really wanted to do so? Or that right now we could make Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla cutthroats, and their Chinese Communist “volunteers” and allies, all put their tails between their legs and run for their lairs, while we set up a permanent and solidly anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam, all within three months if that were real
ly our purpose? If we could not, after our spending forty to fifty billion dollars per year (!!) on our armed forces since the memory of man hardly to the contrary, then treason and stupidity in Washington have been an even more successf ul combination than even we had suspected.
Why on earth should this Vietnam operation not turn into a larger and longer and more infamous Korea? Does anybody think that there has been any lessening of the power or ruthlessness of the Communist influences in Washington since 1953? Or that the Communists do not use so successfully a formula again and again? Or that any war carried on against the Communists by Robert Strange McNamara or Dean Rusk is going to be any different from the one they sponsored in the Congo—or more recently in the Dominican Republic—where the net result was the destruction or demoralization of as much as possible of the native anti-Communist strength? Can anybody who has studied the career of Henry Cabot Lodge have any doubt about the significances of his return to South Vietnam, as the chief wielder of American power in that area? Or need any clearer proof that any activities planned and presented there by Lodge as anti-Communist measures will be exactly on a par with his treatment of [dismissed anti-Communist] Bang Jensen, or with his treatment of the native anti-Communists in Algeria, while he was Ambassador to the United Nations?
What on earth is the matter with our compatriots in the American anti-Communist movement, anyway? The Communists, by exercising a minimum of discipline and of control by propaganda, over a relatively few thousand beatniks and half-baked collegiate brats, and by passing the word to a few of their highly placed agents, create a left-wing demand that the United States pull out of Vietnam! And this gambit fools the American people into thinking that we are serving some purpose, other than exactly what the Communists want, by what we are doing in Vietnam. Naturally the Communists have been doing everything they could to advance the theme that it is our patriotic and humanitarian duty to “stand firm” in Vietnam, and to keep on increasing our forces and our involvement there as the war is “escalated”—exactly according to their plans—into a greater Korea. What on earth would you expect? For twenty years we have been taken steadily down the road to Communism by steps supposedly designed, and always sold to the American people, as a means of opposing Communism. Will we never learn anything from experience?
Woodroe Raynor thought, Now is the time for the final renunciation of the John Birch Society under Robert Welch.
Others on the Right had come to the same conclusion. It came in the next issue of National Review.
51
ON THE MAGAZINE’S COVER, the headline read, “THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY AND THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT.” It announced articles and statements by editor William Buckley; senior editors James Burnham and Frank Meyer; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Arthur Radford; and Senators John Tower and Barry Goldwater.
The editorial tone of the lead article was severe. The editors condensed the swelling case against the Society and its leader. The succeeding issue of the magazine, stressing questions of intelligence, taste, and judgment, in Woodroe’s opinion proved the more deadly.
“In the opinion of the editors [the lead piece had begun] the time has come to look once again at the John Birch Society and evaluate its role in the current American political scene.”
The magazine cited the Society’s attack on U.S. Vietnam policy as undermining the strategic thinking of the “conservative, anti-Communist community.” Moreover, “the Society has reached a new virulence, a new level of panic. The current issue of American Opinion asserts that the United States is now ‘60–80 percent Communist-dominated.’”
The magazine demonstrated that every public policy question of the day, when analyzed by the Society, was framed in a single superintending perspective: the subversive motives of the officials, named and unnamed, who thought up the policies and sought to execute them.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964? “[It was all] part of the pattern for the Communist takeover of America. The whole racial agitation was designed and is directed by the international Communist conspiracy.”
The economy? “The conspiracy can now produce a total economic collapse any time that it decides to pull the chain.”
The lower courts? “Do not overlook the fine contributions made by the criminals whom the conspiracy has slipped into lower courts.”
The Supreme Court? “The theory that the Warren Court is working for a domestic, as distinct from a foreign dictatorship, becomes less tenable every day.”
The federal government? “Communist domination of many of the departments of the Federal Government is too obvious to require much comment.”
Foreign policy? “As for Vietnam, one thing is certain: no action really detrimental to the Communists is conceivable or even possible, so long as [Secretary of State] Rusk, [Defense Secretary] McNamara, and [Attorney General] Katzenbach remain in power.”
Summary? “The important point is that Americans can expect only defeat so long as they are commanded by their enemies.”
The NR spread went on with brief statements from conservative icons.
Admiral Arthur Radford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wrote of Robert Welch, “It is disturbing that a man with such ideas could gain such a following in the United States.” From the academy, Russell Kirk wrote, “As several conservatively inclined gentlemen have remarked to me, were it not that they feared they might fall victim to the conspiratorial obsession of Robert Welch, they would be sorely tempted to believe that the leaders of the Birch Society are agents of the Kremlin, subtly working to discredit all opposition to Communism by reducing anti-Communism to absurdity.” Senator John Tower said that “National Review’s research graphically illustrates the gulf between responsible conservatism and unreasoning radicalism.”
And from Senator Goldwater: “I don’t for one moment agree with some Republican leaders that this organization is about to take over the Republican Party, but I do believe that the type of people generally whom I know as members of the group could add effective weight and work to the Republican Party if they cared to, but they should resign from the Society, since Mr. Welch has declined to do so.”
In Belmont, there was consternation.
Welch presided over a meeting with three of his principal aides. They went over the National Review text paragraph by paragraph.
Jesse Andrews thought such textual exercises ill-advised. He didn’t say exactly that to Welch, but in the men’s room he spoke nervously to one of his coadjutors. “It’s harder to resist the National Review thing when it’s all put together this way. I mean, Bob would be better off just being—just making the broad case for anti-Communism.”
In the end, after a tortured two days spent attempting to devise a written salvo, Welch decided that Andrews’s advice—settle for the reiteration of the Society’s anti-Communist mandate—should be taken.
“What we have working for us is the loyalty of our members. Let’s get the word out to them, the best we can.”
The next issue of National Review published a counterpunch by JBS loyalists who had written in their protests. The magazine ran a dozen letters.
“So, The Establishment has finally gotten to you! The word is Comply—or else! Or else what? Your magazine will not be distributed by ‘accepted’ distributors! Cancel My Subscription [hereinafter abbreviated, the editor advised, as ‘[CMS]’].”
“What Robert Welch wrote in The Politician [imputing pro-Communism to President Eisenhower] is mild.”
“Did you just have to do it? Couldn’t you have left it to the Over-streets [Harry and Bonaro, authors of The Strange Tactics of Extremism ], [Communist Party head] Gus Hall, and perhaps [NBC commentator] Chet Huntley? [CMS].”
“The same old smear method employed by the Liberals is used, namely, condemn the man and what he stands for but don’t dare try to refute his facts.”
“Since I have just so much hate in me I must parcel it out rather sparingly, and as I understand you I am now to love Russia and hate
the John Birch Society.”
Some letters were personal. “I am unable to understand whether in this latest attack, you [Buckley, the editor] are just being officious, or whether you periodically suffer from hot flashes, in some form of male menopause. [CMS].”
“I believe I heard that there was some $95,000 involved in your last smear of the John Birch Society. How much did you get paid this time? And by the way, whose side are you on, anyway? [CMS].”
One or two were amusing. “I have heard a rumor that John Kenneth Galbraith is a majority stockholder in National Review.”
Most were summed up by the one-word charge from a reader in Willimantic, Connecticut, scrawled in large red crayon across his stationery, “Judas!”
Woodroe Raynor put the two well-thumbed issues away in the special file he kept, which included his membership card in the John Birch Society, dated February 16, 1960. Later he added to the folder the handwritten note from Professor Romney. “Woodroe: I welcome these two issues of NR. The job at hand is to encourage an anti-Communist, conservative political party—the Republican Party, as history has worked it out—that is unburdened by mind-clogging distractions. The GOP can do better by repelling impurities. A successor to Barry Goldwater as presidential candidate in years ahead will have less to worry about, the horizon will be brighter, our cause more compelling.”
Less than ten years had gone by since Woodroe had seen the Hungarians groping their way to another world over the bridge at Andau. He had promised himself, when he saw the bridge go down and felt the bullet in his hip, to do what he could to stand athwart history.
What a huge effort expended, since 1956. And how much he had learned. He resolved to commit himself anew to the struggle, but this time on the front line.
Getting It Right Page 26
