Overview
Robert Welch was a retired candy manufacturer — his brother's company made the Sugar Daddy — with an unusual gift for organisation and an absolute conviction about what was happening to his country. In December 1958 he gathered eleven men in Indianapolis for a two-day presentation and founded the John Birch Society, named for a Baptist missionary and army intelligence officer killed by Chinese communists in 1945, whom Welch regarded as the Cold War's first casualty.
The Society's premise was not that communism threatened the United States from outside. It was that the takeover was already well advanced from within, through the government, the schools, the churches and the press, and that the people running it were not dupes but participants.
The Manuscript
Welch had been working since the mid-1950s on a long letter about Dwight Eisenhower. It circulated privately among supporters from 1958 and was published in 1963 as The Politician.
The sentence that defined it, and that would be quoted at the American right for the next sixty years, described the sitting Republican president as a dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy. Welch's method was to assemble Eisenhower's decisions — the conduct of the war in Europe, the halt at the Elbe, the postwar settlement, the failure to press in Korea, the tolerance of the United Nations — and to argue that the pattern of outcomes was too consistent to be error.
The charge did not stop at the president. Welch identified Eisenhower's brother Milton as a likely superior in the arrangement, named Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA director Allen Dulles as communist agents, and included Chief Justice Earl Warren. The apparatus described was not an infiltration of the American government; it was the American government.
The Method
What makes the document a landmark in the literature is less the accusation than the structure of the argument. Welch worked entirely from public information — speeches, votes, appointments, treaty positions — and required no secret documents, no defector, no informant.
The interpretive move is that failure and coincidence are excluded in advance. Any decision that advantaged the Soviet Union was evidence of intent, and any decision that did not was evidence of cover. A system built this way cannot return a negative result, which is precisely why it was so persuasive to people already inclined to think the postwar settlement had gone badly wrong, and why it could not be argued with.
The Expulsion
The Society grew quickly, reaching a membership in the tens of thousands and a far larger readership. It also became a serious problem for a conservative movement trying to establish itself as respectable.
William F. Buckley Jr., who had received a copy of the manuscript in November 1958, moved carefully rather than quickly. National Review and the Society shared subscribers, donors and writers, and Buckley spent several years trying to keep the members while shedding the leader. In April 1961 he published an editorial characterising Welch as reasoning from false premises, the central one being that Eisenhower was a communist. A longer treatment followed in February 1962, arguing that the Society should separate itself from a founder who had lost touch with reality.
Barry Goldwater and Russell Kirk took similar positions. The manoeuvre is often remembered as a clean excommunication, which flatters it; it was slow, commercially awkward, and incomplete. But by the middle of the decade the Society was outside the movement's respectable boundary, and Welch's document was the reason.
What It Established
The John Birch Society did not invent the idea that the American government was controlled by its enemies, but it built the template that later material has reused with the nouns changed. The essential components — that the institutions are captured rather than mistaken, that the evidence is hiding in public statements, that the absence of proof demonstrates the effectiveness of the concealment, and that the highest officials are participants rather than victims — are all present in The Politician in 1958, complete.
The Society still exists. Welch died in 1985. His central claim about Eisenhower is not defended by many people now, including within the organisation he founded, but the shape of the argument he used to reach it has proved considerably more durable than its conclusion.