The Naked Capitalist

by W. Cleon Skousen

  As early as 1960, the U.S. Communist leader, Gus Hall, had announced that the Party was going to alienate and radicalize the American Youth. Within a short time, Castro beards, hippy clothes, filthy speech, Communist salutes, Communist songs, Communist peace symbols, drugs, pornography, nihilism and riots became the order of the day.

  In 1961 the American image dropped at least a thousand points with the Bay of Pigs debacle. When this writer lectured in South America, there was a constant demand for an explanation of the immoral decision to allow 1,400 Cuban freedom-fighters to walk into what could have been a virtual massacre without telling them of the decision by President Kennedy to withdraw the promised U.S. air cover.

  Afterwards, the world watched in amazement as the mighty United States allowed itself to be blackmailed into raising a ransom of millions of dollars worth of drugs and other goods in order to get the Bay of Pigs survivors back to the United States.

  1962 brought the Cuban missile crisis, because the Kennedy administration allowed the Soviet Union to mount their ICBM’s behind our defense lines and within target range of the entire United States. The warning speeches of Senator Keating of New York were almost contemptuously ignored until the President went on an election campaign tour and found his own party members booing when he mentioned Cuba. He cancelled the rest of his trip, raced back to Washington and immediately announced that a missile site had been photographed by a U-2 plane. This writer was serving on the Free Cuba Committee and knew that a map of known missile silos had been drawn up by Cubans working on the Soviet project and that this map had been furnished to the President and the Pentagon over a year earlier. The map even showed the number and location of Soviet troops, but knowledge of any such Soviet forces continued to be publicly denied in Washington.

  When the existence of the missiles was finally established there was a demonstration of profound concern. The President announced to Khrushchev that the missiles and military personnel must be removed immediately and that the United States would conduct an on-the-spot examination to make certain the stipulation was carried out. It was the kind of a speech Americans had been anxious to hear. But after the election was over, the most pathetic display of accommodation was exhibited by Washington as the Soviets went through the motions of pretending that the missiles had been removed. Not at any time was there any inspection, and the same Cuban informants who told Senator Keating about the missiles in the first place continued to insist that many of them were still there.

  In 1963 the Left-wing forces induced President Kennedy to recommend the passage of a whole series of hard-core socialist proposals and these were soon dumped into the hoppers of Congress. However, there were sufficient Americans awake at the grass-roots level to protest against these measures and demand that Congress reject them. That is what happened. Even under Presidential pressure the Democratic dominated Congress refused to pass these bills. The frustrated Establishment press turned the heat on Congress but to no avail. By September the prestige of President Kennedy had taken a serious drop in Establishment circles and there was some question as to what might happen if JFK decided to seek a second term. Then suddenly, on November 22, President Kennedy was assassinated by a Marxist revolutionary, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was connected with Castro’s main Communist front-organization here in the United States.

  Under the emotional shock of this tragic event, the Establishment realized the nation might react politically and demand that the whole Soviet-Communist apparatus be outlawed. Establishment spokesmen such as Earl Warren immediately blamed the President’s murder on the “Radical Right,” but when the arrest of Oswald revealed that it had been done by the Radical Left, the Left-wing machinery went into high gear to assure the American people that Oswald could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be part of an international Communist plot. He must be accepted as merely an isolated psychopathic individual who acted on his own initiative. To prevent any independent investigation by anti-Communist Democrats and Republicans, the Communist Daily Worker suggested that President Johnson appoint a special commission to do the investigating with Earl Warren as chairman. Four days later that was precisely what President Johnson did. The real story of the Kennedy assassination was soon buried beneath an Establishment-supervised white-wash designed to pacify the American people.

  When Congress convened in 1964, President Johnson obliged the Left-wing elements of his party by exploiting the emotional climate resulting from the President’s death and demanded that the Congress pass the Kennedy bills which they had rejected the previous spring. Almost blindly the Congress went to work and frequently, without any serious attempt to debate many important aspects of these bills, they began to be passed.

  At the grass-roots, observing citizens of both political parties became increasingly alarmed with what they could see happening. They began scouring the political field for a candidate who could rally the American people and re-direct the course of the nation before it was too late.

  Foremost among the conservative candidates, of course, was Barry Goldwater, the Senator from Arizona. For several years he had been saying that America was off the track and had to go back. History was catching up with the American people and what he had been saying began to make more and more sense. This was bound to reflect itself politically so it was not long before the Goldwater-for-President campaign started to roll. All across the country delegates to the Republican National Convention began announcing in advance that they had made an iron-clad commitment to support Goldwater and only Goldwater.

  Chapter Footnotes

  << 1. Reuther Memorandum, p. 8.

  << 2. Reuther Memorandum, pp. 10-11.

  << 3. Quigley, Tragedy And Hope, p. 1245.

  Chapter Twelve

  The 1964 Republican Convention and the Goldwater Campaign

  Senator Barry Goldwater

  The political climate of 1964 was such that a capable conservative candidate had an excellent chance of winning, and the Establishment knew it. Money and manpower was thrown into the primaries and individual state organizations to try to stop Goldwater before he ever got to San Francisco but the Goldwater bandwagon continued rolling along. The next step was to try to stop him at San Francisco.

  The Establishment forces at the Republican National Convention were represented by the Rockefeller-Scranton contingents. They used every political weapon in their well-furbished arsenal to embarrass or discredit Goldwater. To veteran political observers it was amazing how strong the locked-in Goldwater delegates stood up under the pressure. Goldwater was nominated.

  The Establishment then turned to its own locked-in sources of power. The media (press, radio and TV) were turned on Goldwater with a blazing vengeance. In retrospect it was an amazing demonstration of what a controlled press can do in a free republic. The tactic was to divert the attention of the people away from the real issues and use whatever circumstances became available to frighten the American people away from Goldwater.

  In Stephen Shadegg’s book, What Happened to Goldwater?1 there is a valuable summary of the factors which determined the ultimate outcome of the Goldwater campaign. Shedegg points out that it was impossible for Goldwater to be heard on the issues when the press, the magazines, the radio and TV were all pounding out a subtle (and sometimes blatant) message of “Extremist,” “Racist,” “Atomic-bomber,” “Trigger Happy,” “War-monger,” “Psychologically unfit,” and “He will scrap Social Security.”

  Television advertising against Goldwater was also shrewdly prepared along the same theme. It included two powerful little Madison Avenue gems, one showing an atomic explosion and the other showing a social security card being torn in two.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Shadegg writes: “A part of the answer to the question “What happened to Goldwater?” must be found in the violence of those who opposed him. The election did not hinge on the popularity or ability of Lyndon Johnson. He was a secondary figure, and the ‘great mandate’ became his inheritance. It
was not a testament to his wisdom or leadership, but rather an indication of the violent dislike for Goldwater generated largely by the hundreds of magazine articles, the derogatory remarks of the columnists, the unexplained errors (such as the UPI report of Goldwater’s statement on the Howard Smith ABC television appearance), and the scathing attacks of people such as William Stringfellow, Ralph Ginsberg, and Fred Cook.”

  Dean Burch said:

  “I think that most of the reporters, if they would ever let their defenses down, would agree that taken as a whole the press was so violently antagonistic to Goldwater that even if they had wanted to be honest about it, it was impossible for them to be honest because they were so busy looking for weaknesses. In other words, the press in this particular campaign performed the function of the opposition. They took a look at what Goldwater advocated and then they looked for whatever was the weakest link in that chain and that became the issue.

  “On the other hand, with Johnson, anything that was against him they ignored. For example, if Senator Goldwater during his twelve years in the U.S. Senate had accumulated $14 million as a personal fortune, I am sure that the press in a period of three months could have made his name synonymous with Benedict Arnold, whereas with Johnson it was just one of those ‘Well boys will be boys things and everyone is entitled to make a living.’

  “Secondly, if I or someone close to Senator Goldwater had been called before the Senate Rules Committee and then taken the Fifth Amendment, that subject would never have been dropped. At every press conference Goldwater would have been asked to explain in detail what my role was, what he planned to do about it, whereas the Bobby Baker case was stressed only by Goldwater. The press never discussed it with the President.

  “Thirdly, if I had been picked up in the men’s room of the YMCA, [like LBJ’s man, Jenkins] the stories that would have been written on it would have lasted for two or three months and the conclusion would have been that obviously Goldwater knew about it and obviously, possibly, he was a little bit peculiar.”2

  In assessing the Goldwater campaign, some criticism must rest on certain members of the Goldwater team. Unfortunately for the conservative cause he represented, Goldwater operated under the special handicap of having two or three men immediately around him who were extremely inept. If Stephen Shadegg, who had run all of Goldwater’s successful campaigns from 1952 to 1962, had been in charge, and Ronald Reagan had been presenting the Goldwater issues at regular intervals on coast-to-coast TV (as John Kilroy and his committee had the money and begged for permission to do), the propaganda of the Establishment-controlled media might have been overcome. As it was, a citizen had to be a strong independent thinker to survive the barrage of frightening headlines and slogans which the secret society and its power complex poured out against Goldwater.

  Nevertheless, some 27,000,000 stood up against the barrage.

  Huntley-Brinkley Admit Goldwater Could Have Won

  A few months after the election, Huntley-Brinkley came out with an astonishing report. They said that if the election had been run strictly on the issues, Goldwater could have won! The program was narrated by Brinkley and he referred to a political survey in which it had been discovered that a good majority of the people agreed with Goldwater in principle, but had been “influenced” into voting against him because of specific fears that he would do away with social security or get us involved in an atomic war. (In other words, the fright propaganda had robbed the people of their legitimate choice.)

  As this reviewer watched this Huntley-Brinkley Special Report, it was difficult to understand why these dedicated employees of the power-complex media would admit how popular Goldwater had been and how he would have won the election if their propaganda efforts had not been so effective. However, Brinkley explained toward the end of the program why it was important for the “liberal, progressive” element of the country to appreciate that even though they had won the election, they had not changed the “conservative mood” at the grass roots. He said President Johnson would therefore have an uphill pull to get many of his “progressive” bills passed through Congress (just as the Democratic Congress had initially bucked President Kennedy’s socialist legislation) unless all the liberal-progressive element firmly united to overcome the conservative, grass-roots resistance. This “Report” was obviously designed to keep the liberal minority from letting down as they usually do after a strenuous presidential campaign. It was essential that the Johnson administration be harnessed to the task which the central power-complex had in mind for it.

  Ironically, however, the new President was harnessed to a team which intended to exploit him to the hilt and then abandon him before the next election. For three solid years the powers behind the scenes pushed the President into policies and programs which were bound to be resisted and resented by the majority of the American people and were therefore political dynamite. The most serious time-bomb which they planted on LBJ was getting him to follow a commitment of peace-at-any-price and a soft-on-Communism policy. This allowed the global planners to escalate the Vietnam front into a full-scale war and have the President fight it on such an unrealistic, no-win basis that it became the primary factor in making Lyndon Johnson a one-term president.

  Added to this was the devastating political erosion of the TFX scandal, the problem of run-away inflation, the unprecedented skyrocketing in crime, the irrational policy of trying to get integration by a series of provocative confrontations between blacks and whites, the resulting riots, burning, looting and killing, the indifference of the administration and its Supreme Court toward the tidal backwash of pornography, filthy speech and flagrant obscenities, and last—but by no means least—the credibility gap which left both the press and the public wondering when the administration was telling the truth and when it was telling calculated falsehoods.

  As the time drew near for the 1968 election it became painfully clear what the master-planners had in mind for their erstwhile leader, LBJ. Suddenly, and without the slightest hint as to their motivation, the Left-wing swung their polemic clubs at President Johnson. He was politically ripped to shreds by the very people who had originally pushed him into power. They had used him to gain all the mileage possible from his good offices and then once he had destroyed himself politically (by doing exactly what they had told him to do), they prepared to toss him aside for a far more radical candidate.

  But the tragic ramifications of the Johnson story must wait to be told in detail on some other occasion. We must now get back to Dr. Quigley and see what he had to say about the Johnson-Goldwater election campaign.

  Dr. Quigley’s Amazing Reaction to the Goldwater Phenomenon

  It will be recalled how hysterically Dr. Carroll Quigley reacted to the McCarthy situation. Goldwater did the same thing to him. The possibility of the American people turning their backs on the trend toward socialism and actually longing again for the open fields and blue sky of a free society, practically sent Dr. Quigley into a psychological frenzy. It is rather astonishing to see him approach this type of problem as though he had received no training whatever as an objective historian. Suddenly he shuts his eyes and goes into imaginary flights of fanciful day-dreaming. Note how he feels compelled to explain Goldwater support only in terms of ignorance, stupidity and perfidy.

  Dr. Quigley’s Opinion of Those Seeking to Preserve Traditional Americanism

  “His [Goldwater’s] most ardent supporters were of the extremist petty bourgeois mentality driven to near hysteria by the disintegration of the middle classes and the steady rise in prominence of everything they considered anathema: Catholics, Negroes, immigrants, intellectuals, aristocrats (and near aristocrats), scientists, and educated men generally, people from big cities or from the East, cosmopolitans and internationalists and, above all, liberals who accept diversity as a virtue.”3

  Transliterated, Quigley is saying that the most ardent supporters of Barry Goldwater were fanatical, small-time businessmen or clerical mentalities who had re
ached a state of hysteria over the fact that “their” middle class society was “collapsing.” The glaring fact was that America’s middle class had not been collapsing but was its fastest growing segment! Nevertheless, in the best tradition of Marx and Lenin, Quigley insists that the small property owner is a roadblock to progress and must be eventually eliminated.4

  So Goldwater’s supporters were from the collapsing middle class who hated Catholics (this writer has a lot of Catholic friends who aren’t going to like being called anti-Catholic just because they voted for Goldwater!); against the Negroes (racists, you see); against the foreign born (actually these often make better conservatives and are more appreciative of America than some of the mixed-up heirs of wealthy U.S. bankers and industrialists); against the well-educated people from the big cities (because only ignorant country bumpkins could vote for a man like Goldwater, no doubt); against internationalists (on this point he is correct if he means international socialism and international Communism); and above all against those “liberals who accept diversity as a virtue.” It is not “diversity” to which Goldwater supporters objected but the Left-wing insistence that we allow room for downright “subversion and treason” within our ranks.

  So Goldwater’s supporters were petty bourgeoisie. (Note these key words in the first sentence of the above quotation.) It makes one think he might be reading Karl Marx or V.I. Lenin again. To make certain nobody misses the point, Dr. Quigley shares with us his personal definition of this non-American term which comes straight out of Marxist propaganda.

  Dr. Quigley Defines Petty Bourgeoisie

  “The second most numerous group in the United States is the petty bourgeoisie, including millions of persons who regard themselves as middle class and are under all the middle class anxieties and pressures, but often earn less money than unionized laborers. As a result of these things, they are often very insecure, envious, filled with hatreds, and are generally the chief recruits for any radical right, fascist, or hate campaigns against any group that is different or which refuses to conform to middle-class values. Made up of clerks, shopkeepers, and vast numbers of office workers in business, government, finance, and education, these tend to regard their white collar status as the chief value in life, and live in an atmosphere of envy, pettiness, insecurity, and frustration. They form the major portion of the Republican Party’s supporters in the towns of America, as they did for the Nazis in Germany thirty years ago.”5