Foreword to 2002 Edition of The Politician The History of The Politician In December, 1954, I wrote a long letter to a friend, in which I expressed very severe opinions concerning the purposes of some of the top men in Washington. — Robert Welch, The John Birch Society Bulletin, August 1960 Those who remember personally the founder of The John Birch Society and his tendency towards verbal thoroughness will appreciate the understatement in his reference to “a long letter to a friend.” Though he could be brief when brevity was called for, Robert Welch did not place limits on expanding his thoughts to whatever degree he deemed necessary to prove his case. In the days before e-mail and other high-speed electronic communications, letter writing was a prime means of sharing ideas. Few had mastered the art like Robert Welch, and he frequently used that ability to maximum advantage. His position as a leader in the business community — serving seven years as a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers and two and one-half years as the chairman of NAM’s Education Committee — afforded him a natural forum for the exchange of ideas concerning the state of our nation. As his circle of personal acquaintances expanded, Mr. Welch became a close confidant of and campaigner for Robert Taft during the senator’s 1952 presidential campaign. He met personally with such world leaders as President Syngman Rhee of Korea, President Chiang Kai-shek of China, and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of Germany. Gregarious by nature, Robert Welch could be a witty conversationalist. He was never at a loss for words or hesitant to express his opinion. But he favored the written word to convey more complex ideas. Therefore, he relied heavily on letter writing to seek the advice of experienced national and world leaders, such as those we’ve mentioned, and to share his own observations in return. The Politician began as just such an observation. Robert Welch was rarely satisfied with anything he wrote. He constantly edited, rewrote, and updated his work. Such was the case with his letter about “some of the top men in Washington.” As he tells the story: Carbon copies of my letter were sent to a few other friends, who in turn asked for copies for their friends. So that by 1956 the letter had grown, through revisions and additions at the time of each new typing, to sixty thousand words. And we had begun to refer to it as the manuscript of The Politician. But it was still available in carbon copies only. In 1958, however, when the letter had now become eighty thousand words, and when I had decided not to make any more additions or revisions, I had this final version typed carefully in my own office, ran off a limited number of copies of each page by offset printing, and put those pages together in a punch-hole binding from the convenience of any other readers to whom it would be send — as well as to save our retyping so long a document. During the summer and early fall of 1958, Robert Welch continued to mail out five to 15 copies of his printed manuscript each month. Each bore a message of its introductory page explaining that the work was not a book, was never intended for publication, and was still of the nature of “a long letter to a friend.” The writer mailed the manuscripts on loan and in confidence to individuals he regarded as friends, with each copy being numbered and the name of its intended recipient recorded. Though many who read the work urged Mr. Welch to publish the document in book form, he adamantly resisted their suggestions. Subsequently he recalled: “[B]ecause of new forces and new leaders now appearing on the scene, we were allowing this whole ‘letter’ to fade out of the picture.” And fade out of the picture it might have — were it not for a new project of its author. Soon after completing the last major revision of his “long letter,” Robert Welch set aside most of his other interests — including a very successful career in candy manufacturing — and spent the months of October and November of 1958 preparing for a two-day presentation that began on December 8th of that year. The purpose of that meeting, to which Welch had invited a handful of (in his words) “influential and very busy men,” was to found an organization that, in its goals and methodology, would have no precedent in recorded history. The organization, of course, was The John Birch Society, and the complete transcript of Mr. Welch’s two-day presentation has been compiled as The Blue Book of The John Birch Society. The founding of The John Birch Society did nothing to change the status of The Politician. Robert Welch still regarded the work as his private opinions expressed in an unpublished, confidential manuscript. He did not quote from The Poltician publicly or recommend it to members of the Society. In July 1960, however, The Politician suddenly and unexpectedly became news. Jack Mabley, a columnist with the Chicago Daily News, unleashed a vicious attack on Robert Welch and The John Birch Society. Mabley’s two consecutive daily columns were timed to coincide with that year’s Republican National Convention, which drew political activists from all over the nation to Chicago. As Mr. Welch recounted the story: This columnist based his attack on direct quotations from The Blue Book of the Society, and from The Politician. (From the intrinsic evidence 2 of his column we can tell that the copy of the latter document, which he had got hold of through some violation of confidence, was mailed out by us to some friend in the fall of 1958 — because certain pages had been removed from copies mailed after that time.) Naturally he selected for quotation the most extreme statements he could find, without the benefit of any of the explanation or modifying import of the context around them. That we would have to expect. What was categorically unfair was that this column quoted me as stating as fact in a book sentences which the whole document clearly revealed were expressions of opinion in an unpublished confidential manuscript of the nature of a letter. Also, he referred to it as “a book written by Welch intended for secret distribution only to the leaders of the Society.” In view of the history of the document, given above, and since at least two-thirds of our Chapter Leaders had never even heard of The Politician, this attempted tying of the Society to the manuscript, or vice versa, is entirely unsupported by the facts. [Emphasis in original.] Questions concerning Jack Mabley’s journalistic impartiality towards The John Birch Society were raised the year after his scathing columns — when the May 28, 1961 midwest edition of The Worker, an official Communist newspaper, praised Jack Mabley for extending the hospitality of his home to a group of visiting Soviet journalists. (Remember that in 1961, the only “journalists” permitted in the Soviet Union were those approved by the Communist government.) Immediately following the publication of an article, “Enter (from stage right) THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY,” in the February 25, 1961 issue of the People’s World — the official Communist paper on the West Coast — the attack on The John Birch Society escalated. A “copycat” article, repeating several mistakes found in the People’s World diatribe, appeared in the March 10, 1961 issue of Time magazine. Many of the articles smearing Robert Welch and the Society took statements from The Politician out of context, even though the work was yet to be published and was largely unknown to JBS members. One “quote” often repeated in the press was that Robert Welch had labeled Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communists,” In fact, the only place in The Politician where the phrase appears it is directed not at Eisenhower, but at General George C. Marshall: “I defy anybody, who is not actually a Communist himself, to read all of the known facts about his career and not decide that since at least sometime in the 1930’s George Catlett Marshall has been a conscious, deliberate, dedicated agent of the Soviet conspiracy.” While Mr. Welch presented a stinging indictment of Eisenhower in The Politician [e.g., “It is the province of this treatise to show the part played in these treasonous developments, however unwittingly or unwillingly, by Dwight Eisenhower; and how, as the most completely opportunistic and unprincipled politician America has ever raised to high office, he was so supremely fitted for the part.”], he provided carefully researched documentation for his allegations. But when removed from the supporting documentation, some of the statements appeared to be rash and excessive. It was largely 3 for this reason that Mr. Welch originally shared his letter only with personal associates who could be trusted to evaluate his work privately, and in its full context. In the months that followed, when JBS members attempted to discuss the Society with prospects, they found that what the prospects knew about the JBS was third-hand information based on inaccurate reports in the press. Many such reports had been culled from deliberate smears planted by the likes of Jack Mabley and editors of openly Communist-controlled papers such as the People’s World. Since many of the smears referred to The Politician, Society members — most of whom had never read the work — faced a dilemma: How could the defend the Society against charges that its founder had made “inaccurate and wild statements” in The Politician, when the manuscript had never been published? It was to help the members of the Society overcome this difficulty that Robert Welch finally relented and agreed to publish The Politician.