When mainstream conservatism looks back at the legacy of William F. Buckley Jr., they often cite his making conservatism into something “respectable” and his excommunication of what are deemed “kooks” and “conspiracists.” Their most proud moment is Buckley’s purging of the John Birch Society, which is supposed to have made National Review and the conservative movement respectable. Further, the average apologist of the purge cites it as the moment that the conspiracy theorists were supposedly removed.
This story permeates the mainstream historiography of American history. It goes as follows: In 1962, Buckley and the fusionists of National Review prepared to launch the Goldwater campaign. Goldwater had emerged as the candidate of the magazine—a man who cited F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind as defining his personal canon and occupied a US Senate seat from Arizona.
While Buckley had founded Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) in 1960, it was rivaled in size by another organization founded in 1958 by a retired candy salesman. The John Birch Society (JBS) was an alliance of small businessmen and manufacturers organized by Robert Welch. Welch believed a communist conspiracy had overtaken the nation and even infiltrated the highest levels of government. While communist infiltration had indeed occurred (one might look at the cases of Alger Hiss or Harry Dexter White), Welch’s most famous claim that President Eisenhower was a conscious communist agent was a stretch to say the least.
Eisenhower was a liberal Republican, which libertarians may equate with socialism, but he was not a communist.
The Goldwater campaign knew it needed vital support from the John Birch Society, whose numbers in Western states would be vital to campaigning and fundraising for the presidential campaign. Buckley and the fusionists worried that the more absurd statements of Welch’s, featured in an unpublished book Welch had written titled The Politician, would give the left a vital weapon to smear the Goldwater campaign as extremists.
Goldwater met with Buckley, Russell Kirk, and William Baroody—founder of AEI—and spoke about current events. But eventually the Birchers were brought up. Kirk pushed that Robert Welch was disconnected from reality, to which Goldwater retorted that every other man in Phoenix was a Bircher, even the most influential powerbrokers.
They decided to try and drive a wedge between Welch and the Society. Buckley penned an article in the February 13, 1962 edition of National Review positing that the Birchers should distance themselves from their leader who had lost touch with reality. Kirk and Goldwater followed up in the next issue with letters to the magazine where they agreed with Buckley’s analysis––thus writing Robert Welch out of the movement.
Goldwater ultimately did not win. By the time 1964 had come around, Goldwater lost his enthusiasm for the presidential race. Kennedy had been assassinated the year before and Baroody had cornered Buckley and Brent Bozzell—who had ghost-written Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative—out of the campaign. The media labeled Goldwater an extremist anyways, Lyndon Johnson playing into Goldwater’s hawkishness with the famed “Daisy” ad.
But this was not the end of National Review’s fight with the John Birch Society. Without a presidential campaign in sight, Buckley went to war with the JBS. Sam Tanenhaus—the authorized biographer of Buckley—posits that he went to war as a jealous attempt to combat the popularity of the society. He argues that Buckley saw the JBS as a competitor to YAF and thus excommunicated the group to seize further control over the organizing of the right. More mainstream histories state that it was a final attempt to make conservatism respectable.
In truth, the reality is something far more Rothbardian.
In 1965, the John Birch Society was already well known for its “Get US out!” billboards that demanded the United States exit the United Nations. Soon those became synonymous with a call to exit Vietnam.
Beginning that year, Welch began to believe that the Vietnam War was a communist plot to destroy the United States in a quagmire, while ignoring the domestic communist plot. Welch began to voice these theories in the society’s chief organ American Opinion (a publication on which Ludwig von Mises served on the editorial committee). It was this that provoked Buckley to dedicate the October 19, 1965 edition of National Review to the issue of excommunicating the Birchers once and for all.
The shift in the stance of the Birchers towards Vietnam seems to have finally interested Senior Editor James Burnham to pen his own column on the issue. Burnham was an ex-CIA employee—the extent to which one can be an ex- member of the agency, one will never know—whose primary concern at National Review was confrontation with the Soviet Union being the party line of the conservative movement.
Frank S. Meyer—the most libertarian of the fusionists—would remark to his disciple and eventual ex-patriot from NR, Gary Wills, that the control Burnham exerted over the magazine gave it the appearance of being run by the CIA. Burnham did not care much for Goldwater during the 1964 campaign, always having been more of a Rockefeller Republican, and thus didn’t care for the issue of the John Birch Society. But once this group turned its gaze toward the Vietnam War rather than Earl Warren, Burnham struck.
Buckley began the excommunication, penning that, among the many issues that made it necessary to revisit the Bircher question,
…the President of the United States is engaged in anti-Communist action in Southeast Asia, and for that reason is under great pressure from the American Left. But he is also, astoundingly, under pressure from a segment of the American Right-which has been taught by Mr. Robert Welch that apparently anti-Communist action undertaken by the government of the United States cannot really be anti-Communist for the reason that our Government is controlled by Communists. Such reasoning, depriving us as it does of the benefit of public support by conservatives for anti-Communist action when it does occur, needs to be analyzed, and resisted.
Frank Meyer’s own column Principles & Heresies, argued that the conspiratorial mind of Welch was inhibitive to anti-Communist action, “the culmination of this. . .when the slogan, ‘Get US Out,’ was transformed from an anti-UN slogan to a Get US Out of Vietnam slogan, placing the Birch Society alongside of SNCC, Staughton Lynd, the sit-iners and the draft-card burners.”
Burnham himself laid the killing blow, writing in his aptly titled column Third World War: “Its stand on Vietnam confirms, not for the first time, that any American who seriously wants to contribute to his country’s security and well-being and to oppose Communism will have to stay clear of the JBS.”
According to the words of the excommunicators, it appears that the final straw for the JBS’s conspiracies was not the nature of them. Rather, the problem was when it concluded that the Vietnam War was worth opposing. The issue was the society’s stance on foreign policy––the most important issue to National Review.
Buckley did not excommunicate the “cranks and conspiracists,” he excommunicated those opposed to the reckless and dangerous Vietnam War. The Birchers may not have been quite right in their causal understanding, but the Vietnam War was indeed a quagmire. The actions of the Vietnam War would lead to a further spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. It would spread leftism in the United States by agitating war protestors. The war machine and the economic policy needed to sustain it, would, in effect, bring about the socialism that Welch warned of. He may have been wrong that policymakers in the United States intended it, but it was what they wrought. Maybe National Review should have heeded the warnings of American Opinion.
