Before the Storm (21 page)

The Saturday of the Sharon Conference broke warm and sunny. A knot of students gathered in parliamentary session under the spreading bows of the Great Elm itself. Someone moved that the maximum age of group members be set at twenty-seven; in a close vote, the age was set at thirty-five—that way they could recruit some congressmen. At dinner in the Mexican patio, Buckley, Liebman, Edison, John Dos Passos, and NR editor Frank Meyer struggled mightily not to dominate the conversation as the group debated the manifesto that M. Stanton Evans, the twenty-six-year-old boy-wonder editor of Gene Pulliam's
Indianapolis News,
had drafted on the plane on the way in. (The document had been edited the night before the conference with the help of Caddy and Carol Dawson, a star student journalist and Youth for Nixon leader from Washington, D.C., then mimeographed for distribution on a machine they found in a local theater shortly before midnight.)

The short text was a distillation of Buckley-and-Bozell-style conservatism: insisting that government be limited to the administration of justice and the preservation of order to maximize “the individual's use of his God-given free will”; urging “victory over, rather than co-existence with” Communism; and pledging—closely paraphrasing
Conscience of a Conservative
—to evaluate foreign policy by a single criterion: “Does it serve the just interests of the United States?” The only dispute was over the mention of God. A cadre of agnostics and atheists opened debate to strike it. They were defeated 44 to 40. The next item on the agenda was choosing the name of the organization. Suggestions containing the word “conservative” were avoided; it was public relations poison. The members settled on Young Americans for Freedom—following the precedent of American Youth for Democracy, which had once been the Young Communist League.

On Sunday morning the insurgents trundled off to church. In the afternoon they elected officers. Caddy had appointed himself president. He urged a young Yale law student, Bob Schuchman, as chairman. Schuchman had been a member of a tiny weekend conservative study group at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science (their clubhouse was the NYU economics department, where the Austrian free-market absolutist Ludwig von Mises let them sit in on his weekly seminar). Schuchman was Jewish—an advantage, making it harder for opponents to smear the group as fascist. A board was chosen and vested with broad powers; regional chairs were named. The Sharon Conference adjourned, and Buckley could not believe what he had just seen. “What was so striking in the students who met at Sharon is their appetite for power,” he wrote in
NR.
“Ten years ago the struggle seemed so long, so endless, even, that we did not dream of victory.... The difference in psychological attitude is tremendous.
They talk about
affecting
history; we have talked about educating people to want to affect history.”

Young Americans for Freedom set up to affect history in an unused corner of Liebman's offices, piled high with books and periodicals, presided over by a gargantuan poster of Barry Goldwater that “smiled down at visitors,” observed a rare liberal guest, “as Nikita Khrushchev does in the foyer of the Soviet Union's United Nations delegation headquarters.” They started counting members at 10,000, the combined rolls of existing groups voting to affiliate with YAF; Manion financed the distribution of a copy of Conscience of a
Conservative
to each new member. They began planning a public rally for March, when they would also debut their magazine,
New Guard
(the opposite of “Old Guard,” the nickname for conservative congressmen in the 1940s and 1950s). The publication was edited by Lee Edwards, the son of a
Chicago Tribune
Washington correspondent who had also been a McCarthy speechwriter. On November 19 there was the first YAF wedding, between Carol Dawson and Republican House cloakroom staffer Bob Bauman. When Bauman had gone shopping for a tux, the clerk explained that the choice of tie was very important. The ascot was more proper “since President-elect Kennedy and his bride chose them when they were married.”

Bauman instantly cut off the clerk and chose the four-in-hand.

 

In front of the White House gates on January 2, 1961, YAFers outnumbered anti-HUAC pickets two to one. But the
New York Times
dispatch didn't even mention their presence.

The young conservatives would not be ignored for long. The February 10 Time reported that the Republicans had won mock presidential elections at Michigan, Indiana, Northwestern, and Ohio; that students were picketing movies written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and reading the hyperindividualist novelist Ayn Rand; that a conservative had been elected student council president at Harvard.
Time
didn't notice that Howard Phillips won the post for his success chairing the Harvard Combined Charities Drive, despite his conservatism, not because of it. Or perhaps
Time
knew and didn't mention it; the man-bites-dog angle of what Scotty Reston of the
New York Times
called the “young fogies” made fantastic copy. Yale conservatives got five hundred signatures in two hours on a petition urging the President “to expel Communist imperialism from its beach-head in the Americas represented by the Communist regime of Fidel Castro.” Their manifesto declared: “The American student lives in a dream world. His life is comfortable, and it would seem that his future is secure. But the realities of today dash these pleasing assumptions
upon the rocks of war, massacre, and revolution.” A dozen Yalies hiked 55 miles from New Haven to the Groton shipyards to defend the honor of the Polaris missile.

YAF soon reported 24,000 members at 115 schools. “You walk around with your Goldwater button and you feel the thrill of treason,” a University of Wisconsin student told
Time.
Madison was one of the few places in America besides Berkeley where one could actually find living, breathing Marxists. Every year left-wing radicals put on an “Anti-military Ball” to spoof the annual ROTC dance. The gung ho Conservative Club countered with an annual McCarthy-Evjue lecture series—William Evjue being the editor of the
Capital
Times, the left-leaning sheet Bill Buckley labeled
Prairie Pravda.
In case anyone missed the joke, the publicity for the lectures went out on pink paper.

The pages of the Conservative Club's handsomely produced magazine
Insight and Outlook (Hindsight and Outhouse,
according to the campus humor magazine) revealed a secret of their success. College students in the market for 12,000-horsepower engines, iron castings, weldments, or “the new line of motor starters everyone's talking about” could shop among the advertisements taken out by Manionite manufacturing companies in Wisconsin like Nordberg, Grede Foundries, Falk, and Allen-Bradley. There was no generation gap here: the Manionites didn't go away. Now they were just one more force in the conservative wave.

In February YAF published a directory of ninety-seven campus conservative clubs in twenty-five states. “A flock of little Buckleys now torment social scientists in colleges large and small,” wrote an observer. They read twice as much as anyone else, the enemy's ideas and their own, delighting in dangling bait before unsuspecting peers who didn't know their assumptions required arguments, then slaughtering them in debate. (A favorite debating trick against the progressive income tax was to point out that the
Communist Manifesto
called it one of the “inroads on the rights of property that will inevitably bring on the centralization of all instruments of production in the hands of the State.”) The
Michigan
Daily compared the school's new conservative club to the Hitler Youth. This did not keep the
Daily's
editor, Tom Hayden, from giving conservatives the most space in an article he wrote for the annual college issue of
Mademoiselle,
“Who Are the Student Boat Rockers?” When it came to student activism, conservatism was practically the only thing around. Hayden had recently been recruited to join a new group called Students for a Democratic Society. It had about 250 members.

YAF's Greater New York Council, which had nearly ten times that number, made the best copy of all. The Hunter College chapter was started by a black woman; the Greenwich Village one debuted with a showing of Operation
Abolition
at a hip downtown theater. Its members—civil libertarians, anarchists, Ayn Randites, longshoremen, a Teamster—drank at the legendary White Horse Tavern, joining members of the Young People's Socialist League in rousing choruses of radical songs. “We had more common ground of conversation and interest with one another than with all those people who didn't give a hoot about politics, the great yawning masses of the middle,” said a socialist. One spring day New York YAFers picketed blacklisted singer Pete Seeger on the West Side, then dashed across Central Park to join a demonstration of anti-Castro Cuban exiles at the Soviet UN mission headquarters. (“We still feel sheepish on the line,” the picket captain told liberal journalist Marvin Kitman. “I mean, it isn't natural for a conservative.”)

On March 3, over three thousand young conservatives packed the Manhattan Center for YAF's first rally. The three thousand turned away at the door glared across Ninth Avenue at the 150 pickets from the New York Youth Council to Abolish HUAC. Now the Times noticed—reporting the rally on page 1. When Goldwater took the stage there was an eruption: placards emblazoned with his visage waved above thousands of heads, roving spots picked up the yellows, pinks, and blues from the flock of balloons released from the rafters, and white noise bathed the arena. It was all so thrilling that few in the crowd noticed that Goldwater's speech was calibrated to dampen their enthusiasm. “Sometimes,” he said, “the objectives we work toward can't be realized overnight and we must train ourselves to understand that there is such a thing as timing and patience in the conduct of political affairs.”

They didn't need the lecture. They knew how to do politics. At his first State of the Union address President Kennedy had announced plans for something called a Peace Corps. Later that spring, the National Student Association convened three hundred delegates in Washington for a “Youth Service Abroad” conference inspired by the idea. The NSA was constitutionally nonpartisan, de facto liberal. Student governments, four hundred of them by the early 1960s, generally decided to affiliate their student bodies with the NSA as a matter of course. The NSA thus ostensibly placed the voice of 1.3 million American college students behind its annual resolutions against nuclear testing, in favor of the Southern sit-ins and the immediate decolonization in the Third World, and for the abolition of HUAC. And this was unacceptable.

Eight operatives led by Schuchman set up camp near the NSA conference with a mimeograph machine and created a simulacrum of a popular groundswell for proposals that the Peace Corps's name be changed to the Anti-Communist Freedom Corps and that all volunteers be screened to make sure they were strong enough anticommunists. At parliamentary sessions YAFers monopolized the microphones, then group members would move out across
the room in diamond formation, an old Communist trick to give the appearance of greater number to manufacture acclaim for their speakers. The next day, the surprising degree of conservatism among college students was widely noted in newspapers around the country. Murray Kempton would write in The Progressive, “We must assume that the conservative revival is the youth movement of the '60s.” And another wave of disaffected young collegians read the reports and signed on with the battalions Barry Goldwater was not sure he wanted to lead.

 

The day Young Americans for Freedom rallied in New York, an issue of Time reporting on a group that made YAF look tame found its way to mailboxes.

The John Birch Society, apparently, believed General Dwight David Eisenhower to be a secret agent of the International Communist Conspiracy. The group's absolute leader was a man named Robert Welch; there was a governing council (including Manion and several of his Americans for Goldwater stalwarts, and three past presidents of the National Association of Manufacturers), but it was said that its main purpose was to choose a successor should Welch be assassinated by Communists. Every year the Society published a “scoreboard” of how far down the road to complete Communist subversion each country was; the United States was 50 to 60 percent, Iceland 80 to 100 percent. According to
Time,
the John Birch Society was “a goose step away from the formation of goon squads.”

To congressmen, the eerily uniform flood of letters they had been receiving calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren finally made sense: that was one of the Society's four goals—along with saving HUAC, abolishing the income tax, and banning the sale of goods manufactured in Communist countries. The media coverage opened the eyes of community groups whose meetings were being disrupted by unfamiliar faces shouting “republic!” every time someone called America a “democracy” (it was Society doctrine that “democracy” meant rule by mob, and Society tactics to press the case through heckling) and the eyes of PTA leaders who had learned to rue sudden spikes in membership: Welch urged members to join the local PTA and “go to work to take it over.”

By April of 1961 you had to have been living in a cave not to know about Robert Welch and his John Birch Society. The daily barrage of reports left Americans baffled and scared at this freakish power suddenly revealed in their midst. It also left some eager to learn where they could sign up.

 

Robert Harold Winborne Welch was born in 1899 on a farm in Chowan County, North Carolina. His people were simple farmers and Southern Baptist
ministers. Young Robert was a genius. He left home to enroll at the state university at twelve, then earned a commission to the Naval Academy when he was seventeen. He decided he wanted to be a writer. The Navy being overstocked with officers at the close of the Great War, he was let go. But his nerve failed him. He enrolled at the Harvard Law School instead—then quit to quickly raise the means to win the hand of the daughter of a wealthy Akron, Ohio, businessman. His brother had a candy business outside Boston. So candy it would be.