Getting It Right
Page 27
52
WOODROE’S PLANS HAVING CHANGED, he called Mr. Molitor to say that after all he would not be available to take the job for Governor Rockefeller, and thanked him for the trouble he had gone to. He was left with four weeks uncommitted, and volunteered for work at the Mormon library at Columbia University. It was there, while he was sorting books one afternoon, that the librarian passed him the message slip. He was to call Lee.
He reached her. She was doing homework for her graduate studies.
“General Walker wants you to call him. He called here when I was out. When I came in, there was a telegram for you from your mother saying the general had called Salt Lake—same message, he wants you to call him.”
“Well, that’s not a call I look forward to. I’ll be leaving here in an hour. I’ll call him from your place.”
“Our place.”
“Our place.”
“Is the work going okay?”
“Fine. I had forgotten what nice people the Mormons are.”
“Somebody taught you to be nice.”
“I’ll bring you a cake. My love.”
“Christine, this is Woodroe Raynor returning the general’s call.”
“I’ll put you through.”
He heard the general clearing his throat.
“Woodroe?”
“Hello, Ed.”
“This is General Walker.”
Woodroe was brought up short. Then, “This is Woodroe, General.”
“Yes. Well, I wanted to talk to you about the issue of National Review, taking the pro-Communist position on the John Birch Society.”
Woodroe thought, Just let it go? Or stand up to him? But General Walker did not draw breath. “There are several ways of looking at what the National Review magazine people are doing. You probably know—maybe you don’t know?—that a lot of the people who got together to start up that magazine were Communists. The Vietnamese fellow, I mean the Viennese fellow—Schlamm—is back in Germany. He was a Communist. So was their Frank Meyer, he was a Communist. So was James Burnham—”
“Actually, General, Burnham was a Trotskyist.”
“What in the hell’s the difference?”
Woodroe gave it a try. “The Communists assassinated Trotsky.”
“Lovers’ quarrel.”
Woodroe didn’t want to argue that point.
General Walker went on. “The Communists make a lot of mistakes, don’t get me wrong. It was a mistake, for instance, to have that feller shoot at me and then kill the president. But the Commies are good at one thing, and that’s taking aim at real enemies.”
“Like Kennedy?”
“No, goddammit. Like me. Killing Kennedy was a mistake. Trying to kill me wasn’t a mistake. I don’t mind telling you I’ve wondered about you being there that night.”
What was he getting at?
“You’ve tied up with the so-called anti-Communists in New York, the National Review crowd. Liebman—at least he didn’t change his name, the way Jack Ruby did—he’s part of that setup. And he was a Communist. Maybe you knew that.”
“I—”
“There’s a lot of them. And a lot of them who pretend to be ex-Communists. Why wouldn’t they? It’s an effective device. Did you ever know anybody in Hungary who pretended to be anti-Communist?”
Woodroe was startled. What could General Walker know about Andau?
“It’s a common thing, and now you’ve got to wonder, how they get out and influence people. You take Arthur Radford. I’ve served under Arthur Radford. He has been one fine American. But when President Truman kicked MacArthur out of Korea—because our government wasn’t going to take a chance on a victory over the Communists—”
Woodroe felt the blood rise to his head. Would the general also find something to question about Goldwater?
“—well, that whole National Review operation was hard to understand. After I read the issue on our Society—I guess I got to say, on my Society, since you dropped your membership—I put in a call to Revilo Oliver. I know you know Professor Oliver. You went up to see him the day after I got shot at. Turns out he remembers you very well.”
“He’s—”
“Yes, and he cleared things up for me. He’s got a very penetrating mind. I’ve always dealt with you frankly, the times we’ve been together. And I’m going to be frank with you now. Professor Oliver has the perspective of a true scholar, and he has a real strategic vision, we call it at the Academy, strategic vision, and he raised an interesting question: What was it that brought Oswald to my house that particular night, the night you were there? If I had been shot, some tidying up at my place would have been necessary—”
“General Walker, fuck you.”
He slammed the telephone down. One minute later, breathing heavily, he dialed the number back. Christine was on the phone. “This is Woodroe Raynor calling back. Tell the general not to call me again—”
He cooled down. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Tell him—to watch out for Professor Oliver. He’s a secret Communist agent. Christine, that’s confidential.”
He hung up again.
He’d better call his mother and say it was all right, nothing to worry about, it was just a routine call from General Walker.
53
WOODROE AND LEONORA arrived early at Paone’s for Marvin Liebman’s party. “Gosh!” Woody said, looking around the table at the ten place settings. “A party for me and Lee—and none of my old Birch associates here, and none of her Objectivist associates here.”
“They’re all Commies,” Marvin said, lifting his cigarette to his mouth in time to stifle the grin.
“Or anarchists,” Lee grinned. “But no, we won’t get into that. You know, I rather wish Barbara Branden were here, though it’s been a long time since I’ve seen her.”
“Where is she?” Marvin asked.
“She’s off in Los Angeles with Nathaniel, trying to start up an Objectivist organization without Rand.”
“An evening without Beatrice Lillie,” Marvin commented.
“What’s that mean, Marv?” Woodroe asked.
“Oh, you poor dears, you’re so young and ignorant. Beatrice Lillie, the actress, had a great Broadway one-man—I guess it was one-woman—show. Rave success, ran about six months. The show was called An Evening with Beatrice Lillie. A few years later another actress—I forget her name—tried to do the same thing, put on a one-woman show. The review by John Mason Brown the next day in the Herald Tribune was a single line: ‘An evening without Beatrice Lillie.’ Get it, Woodroe? Objectivism without Ayn?”
He laughed. “Yeah, I get it. But Nathaniel is persistent, and California will buy anything, so he and Barbara might make it even without Beatrice Lillie.”
Stan Evans came in with Dick Cowan and Carol Bauman and Lee Edwards. Leonora introduced her close friend Elsie Norman, who was at graduate school with her, studying psychology.
They all had drinks. They got on to radical movements in America in the 1930s and the big voices of the time. Dick Cowan mentioned the book he had just finished reading, Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
Stan Evans interrupted. He wore a grave countenance when telling amusing stories. “Hofstadter’s book,” he said, “spoke of three great demagogues back then, Huey Long—”
“FDR was genuinely afraid of Huey Long,” said Marvin. “He seemed unstoppable back there in 1935.”
Evans went on. “Then there was Father Coughlin—”
Again Marvin interrupted. “I heard Father Coughlin on the radio, maybe four or five times. He made my mother mad because he was always talking about the Jews, which made me mad too, but he was also always denouncing Wall Street and as a young Communist I thought that was great.”
Evans persisted: “And there was Gerald L. K. Smith. Gerald L. K. Smith had one great moment: He began that broadcast by quoting what Father Coughlin had said on his broadcast the day before.” Evans put on his grave voice and suddenly they were
all listening to the twangy, deep-voiced Gerald L. K. Smith.
“‘Father Coughlin was talking last night about Roosevelt. What he said was, “Roosevelt, that great betrayer. That in-famous scoundrel.”’ You could hear Gerald L. K. Smith sigh,” Evans said. “And then he said, ‘I wish I had said that!’”
They roared with laughter. Marvin turned the subject to contemporary experiences. He told of going to hear a lecture by Russell Kirk a year ago at a New York teachers’ council. “Some teacher got up and said, ‘Professor Kirk, what do you think should be done about the rise in juvenile delinquency?’ And dear Russell—looking very grave—said, ‘I th-think we should start a Birch John Society.’”
They laughed again, and over dinner spoke of the Young Americans for Freedom and its tribulations, of Richard Rovere’s and Teddy White’s books on the Goldwater campaign, of Buckley’s candidacy for mayor of New York. Lee told Elsie to imitate their psychology teacher’s morning invocation of God. Elsie said she couldn’t do the Polish accent but that the words were always the same: “‘Gott help us. I use—I yooss—the term Gott only because only Gott can stop President Johnson’s terrible war against Southvienamese interdependence.’”
They drank more wine, but Lee’s free arm didn’t leave Woodroe’s—arm, hand, thigh.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen”—Marvin tapped lightly for attention, holding down his voice to guard against disturbing other diners. “We’re here, as you know, for two reasons. The first is to congratulate Lee. Lee, hold up your ring.”
“That,” said Marvin solemnly, “looks to me like a genuine diamond. Or is it, Woody? It’s too small for me to tell from where I’m sitting.”
They all toasted Lee and Woody on their engagement.
“And, of course, the second reason we’re here is to tell Woody he will be in our thoughts and prayers—Woody’s a Mormon, you know, I’m a Jew—but I’m becoming a Catholic!” Several people clacked their spoons on their glasses lightly. “And, Woody, now that you’re a second lieutenant and shipping off tomorrow for Vietnam, I know... we all know”—Marvin paused, lowered his head slightly, and brushed his napkin across his eyes—“we all know that, well, that you know we’ll all be thinking of you.”
Notes
THE AUTHOR MET WITH the principal figures frequently (Goldwater, Welch, Liebman) and infrequently (Rand, Walker).
Chapters 1, 2, 3
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc, 1974).
National Review, November 10, 1956; December 1, 1956; December 29, 1956.
James Michener, The Bridge at Andau (New York: Random House, 1957).
Chapter 5
Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986).
Jeff Walker, The Ayn Rand Cult (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). The book has twelve chapters examining aspects of the cult, and an extensive (seventeen-page) bibliography.
Chapter 6
Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 62–66.
Fr. James Thorton, “Remembering Robert Welch,” available at the John Birch Society website, www.jbs.org.
Robert Welch, May God Forgive Us (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), 105.
Chapter 7
Schoenwald, 61–63.
Robert Welch, The Life of John Birch: In the Story of One American Boy, the Ordeal of His Age (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954).
Chapter 9
Barbara Branden, 185, 296—99.
Nathaniel Branden, My Years with Ayn Rand (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999), 152–71, 197–202.
Whittaker Chambers, “Big Sister Is Watching You,” National Review, December 28, 1957. Available at: www.potomac-inc.org/aynrand.html.
Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Dutton, 1995), 571—72.
Jerome Tuccille, Alan Shrugged: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, the World’s Most Powerful Banker (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2002), 69—86.
Jeff Walker, 26–28, 278.
Chapter 10
John A. Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 53—74, 221—31.
Schoenwald, 87–89.
Chapter 12
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 114–16.
Schoenwald, 62–66.
Thorton.
Chapter 13
Schoenwald, 61—64, 101—23.
Chapter 14
Facts on File 1962 [“Facts on File” hereinafter referred to as “FOF”].
Barbara Branden, 306–8.
Nathaniel Branden, 205–8, 213–16.
David Kelley, The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 81—85.
Jeff Walker, 31, 143.
Chapter 15
FOF 1961, 1962.
Andrew, 141–44.
Perlstein, 163–64.
Chapter 16
FOF 1961, 1962.
Perlstein, 147–48.
Schoenwald, 100–23.
Chapter 18
FOF 1962.
Schoenwald, 89–91, 106.
Chapter 19
FOF 1962.
Edwin Walker’s press statement: available at www.textfiles.com/conspiracy/walker.txt, reprinted from the New York Times, September 30, 1962.
Chapter 20
FOF 1962.
Ole Miss campus map: available at www.olemiss.edu.
Schoenwald, 89–91, 106.
Exchange between Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, September 30, 1962: “The John F. Kennedy Tapes: Federal Intervention in ‘Ole Miss’ Crisis Takes Shape in Phone Call,” Washington Post, June 24, 1983.
Chapter 21
FOF 1962.
“General Walker, Stage II,” National Review, October 23, 1962.
Schoenwald, 106.
“Walker Crazy?” National Review, October 16, 1962.
Chapters 23, 24, 25
Barbara Branden, 255–57.
Nathaniel Branden, 7–15, 33, 43, 121—25, 129—33.
Chapter 26, 27
FOF 1962.
Chapter 29
Barbara Branden, 258–64.
Nathaniel Branden, 145.
Chapter 31
FOF 1963.
Details of the Walker shooting from Edwin Walker’s testimony before the Warren Commission: Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, vol. XI (Washington,
D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1964), 404—28 [hereinafter referred to as “Warren Investigation”] .
Chapter 34
Barbara Branden, 258–64.
Nathaniel Branden, 129–45.
Chapter 35
FOF 1963.
Perlstein, 221.
Chapter 36
FOF 1963.
Chapter 37
FOF 1962.
Andrew, 151—57, 165—66.
Perlstein, 156–57.
Chapter 38
FOF 1964.
Edwin Walker’s testimony before the Warren Commission: Warren Investigation, vol. XI, 405, 423–25.
Chapter 39
Nathaniel Branden, 81.
Kelley, 52.
Chapter 40
FOF 1963, 1964.
Revilo Oliver, “Marxmanship in Dallas,” unedited version, February 1964, available at www.revilo-oliver.com.
Revilo Oliver’s testimony before the Warren Commission: Warren Investigation, vol. XV, 718.
Chapter 41
Barbara Branden, 412–14.
Nathaniel Branden, 229–31.
Ernest van den Haag, “Lib
ertarians and Conservatives,” National Review, June 8, 1979.
Jeff Walker, 33–35.
Chapter 42
FOF 1964.
Andrew, 192–93.
Chapter 43
FOF 1964.
Andrew, 194–96.
Perlstein, 377–78, 390–92.
Chapter 44
FOF 1964.
Andrew, 194–96.
Letters of Ayn Rand, 565—72, 627, 629.
Perlstein, 377–78, 390–92, 396–97.
Chapter 45
FOF 1964.
Chapter 47, 48
Barbara Branden, 334, 340–51.
Nathaniel Branden, 208, 219–20, 267, 286, 315—16, 323, 330—45, 350—51, 353, 362—63.
Jeff Walker, xv–xvi.
Chapter 50
Robert Welch, “Protest Neglect of Our Soldiers Captured in Vietnam,” American Opinion, August 1965.
Chapter 51
“The John Birch Society and the Conservative Movement,” National Review, October 19, 1965.
Acknowledgments
I AM INDEBTED FOREMOST for help in research to Robert Smiley, who traveled to Switzerland and gave invaluable help when off piste. Mr. Smiley is a young television writer, embarked, no one doubts, on a great career. Frances Bronson in my office provided syntactical and motherly help at every stage, and Tony Savage’s painstaking work is responsible for the fine final draft. Lois Wallace, my agent for many years, tossed the champagne bottle and got the book under way.