THE FAR RIGHT REGROUPS

...It is reflected in the continued push—more aggressive than ever—to organize the forces of "silent conservatism" in the nation...

...A veteran employe of another company was summarily fired after he refused to sign a right-to-work petition...

...It is no coincidence that one of the chief promoters of the Conservative Union is a public relations man...

...The directors of ACU take a view of world affairs substantially at variance with that taken by Mr...

...There are many local communities," the Council pointed out, "in which the tactics of extremists have made life miserable for good citizens—through spying, nocturnal phone calls, economic and social pressure, stonings, even bombings and other tactics alien to the American way of working out political decisions...

...The airwaves, meanwhile, are being inundated with extremist radio and television broadcasts that the newly-formed and opposing National Council for Civic Responsibility numbers at more than 7,000 weekly...

...But in 1964, he concluded, "both of these barriers had been overcome to the extent that the Conservative position received over twenty-six million votes...

...A sample of Kershner: "We are driven to the conclusion that evil men in strategic positions, with the aid of their dupes, stooges, and fellow-travelers, have been able to mold public opinion in our country and shape governmental policy along lines that are hurrying us onward to destruction...

...The new strategy on the right, he suggested, will be to mold public opinion on an issue-by-issue basis...

...The setting was a closed meeting room in the Statler-Hilton Hotel, down the street from the White House...

...Seventy-five per cent of your twenty-six million-plus votes were for Barry Goldwater and his conservative principles...

...Some $10 million is being spent annually to bring the gospel to audiences in all fifty states, the Council reported...

...f Life Line, a fifteen-minute program broadcast daily on 325 radio and sixty-nine television stations, sponsored by Texas oilman H. L. Hunt...

...Despite numerous books and newspaper articles on the right wing, we still have few clear guidelines by which to distinguish the genuine conservatives from the hate and fright peddlers, the merely noisy from the truly dangerous...

...He is Marvin Liebman, a professional anti-Communist and nimble impressar-io of such causes as the China Lobby's Committee of One Million and the Katanga Lobby...

...The organization is amply financed and well staffed...

...They are not Republican votes and therefore they cannot in the future be 'delivered' to a liberal Republican candidate...

...It is doubtful that such a large group of respectables could have been recruited to engage the right wing without the stimulus of the Goldwater candidacy and the increasingly vicious tone of the 1964 election campaign...

...f Independent American Radio Edition, a fifteen-minute weekly program on thirty-nine stations in eighteen states, prepared by Kent and Phoebe Courtney...

...The press was barred, although ACU chairman, outgoing Representative Donald C. Bruce, Indiana Republican, later announced the group's objectives in a television interview: to increase public acceptance of "conservative ideas and principles based on thorough research...

...The virus was rampant but only the victims and the predators know how lethal it was...

...Its goal is the one that unites all segments of the far right: to reconstitute the two major parties on conservative-liberal lines...

...This note of exultation is echoed in the pages of The American Independent, published by segregationist ultra-conservatives Kent and Phoebe Courtney, early Goldwater backers...

...There are no hot-eyed evangelists, no old ladies in tennis shoes...

...All of this would seem to fly in the face of the national consensus, as expressed in the election returns...

...Well before the November election, the Birch Society embarked on a program to sanitize its public image with a slick Sunday supplement appearing in Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, Wichita, and other cities...

...f Dan Smoot Report, a fifteen-minute weekly commentary by Smoot, broadcast on seventy radio and forty television stations and sponsored by Birch Society endorser D. B. Lewis...

...I think this oversimplifies the picture...

...The National Council for Civic Responsibility was formed last September, early in the Presidential campaign, as a bipartisan response to the rising tide of right-wing virulence...

...The number of local coordinators has increased from twenty-five two years ago to a current fifty-five...

...Now—three months after the landslide and still flushed with defeat—the oracles of the right sound cockier than ever...

...And yet 1964 represented, in a major sense, a high water mark in extremist penetration of American politics...

...a candidate of the minority right had become the Presidential nominee of a major party...

...It is high time for the political leaders and statesmen, who are themselves Conservatives, to fight to maintain every inch of the position...

...This exhilaration glimmers through the pages of the ultra-conservative press (despite the initial "arrgh" of chagrin snarled by National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr., in his first editorial reaction to the great debacle...

...It portrayed the Society's numerous works through a veneer of civic normalcy: "Distribution of anti-Communist literature . . . Circulation of petitions on important action such as the impeachment of Earl Warren . . . Inform local merchants of Communist imports . . . Letter writing . . . Support your local police...

...Larson explained that those who joined decided to abandon their customary aloofness toward the strident voices on the right because "the sheer quantity and persistence of radical reactionary propaganda has reached the point where it is now going far beyond the function of merely reassuring the reactionary prejudices of a small fringe group...

...f Manion Forum, a weekly thirty minute commentary by Birch Society national council member Clarence Manion, broadcast on 240 radio and thirty television stations...

...This objective was embraced by Goldwater, too, during his post-election convalescence in Montego Bay...

...Courtney in an open letter to the defeated Republican nominee...

...The new battle cry of the ultras—"26 Million Americans Can't Be Wrong"—is now emblazoned on the bumpers of their automobiles over last year's faded campaign stickers...

...Some of the town's most sophisticated citizens were unaware of the existence of the Freedom Forum...

...The Far Right Regroups by LAURENCE STERN One of the most striking paradoxes ^ in the wake of the 1964 Presidential election is the way the extremists on the right have snatched euphoria from the jaws of defeat...

...Liebman, one of the cannier realists of the conservative movement, acknowledged to St...

...The number of American Opinion book stores has soared from 125 to 228 within one year...

...Larson's group views the most active segments of the extreme right as an interlocking directorate with Birch Society leaders controlling the entire apparatus...

...The most effective answer continues to be calm and intelligent exposure of its most poisonous manifestations...

...Welch's most publicized utterance, made in the first edition of his magnum opus, The Politician, was that former President Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy...

...Its chairman is former Eisenhower Administration adviser Arthur Larson, and its membership is drawn from the business, professional, and academic worlds...

...Washington will become a more active theater of operations for the Birch Society as well...

...5[ Church League of America, a weekly program on seventeen stations in eight states, whose sponsoring organization's board includes two Birch Society endorsers...

...The American ultra right is growing in complexity as it has grown in numbers, confidence, and financial backing...

...Furthermore, rightly or wrongly, the Birch Society and the rifle-toting Minutemen became associated in the eyes of the electorate with the Goldwater candidacy...

...Louis Post-Dispatch reporter William K. Wyant, Jr., that the election returns shattered the basic premise of the Goldwater crusade— that there is a majority of silent conservatives in the American electorate...

...Writing in the December issue of the John Birch Society's official organ, American Opinion, the Society's founder and high priest Robert Welch recalled that the last previous candidate of minority conservatism, T. Coleman Andrews, polled fewer than 200,000 votes in 1956...

...Robert Welch in his most publicized writings," said Bruce...

...It was the year to be certified by ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) rather than ACA (Americans for Constitutional Action...

...One of the least publicized but most vulnerable areas of impact by extremists on the right is their poisoning of community life at the local level...

...f America's Future, a fifteen-minute commentary broadcast on 365 stations in forty-eight states and sponsored by America's Future, whose board includes Birch Society council members Thomas Anderson and F. Gano Chance...

...Among the leaders of the new Conservative Union is one of the ultra-right's most fluent and disarming ideologists, National Review editor Buckley...

...If the generalissimos of the extremists have learned one lesson during the past year, it is that their doctrines are too harsh for mass acceptance ih undiluted form...

...There are photographs of Birch Society coordinators sitting around the conference table in a friendly, button-down manner and of Birch Society matrons gracefully arranged about paneled living rooms for anti-Communist study sessions...

...He won a George Polk Memorial Award in 1962 for distinguished reporting...

...It would be a mistake to overestimate the power and influence of the far right, but it would be equally foolhardy not to maintain the most relentless vigilance in meeting its challenge...

...For twenty years, wrote Welch, true conservatives had been denied self-expression at the polls because of the twin evils of American complacency and liberal conspiracy...

...It is further manifested in the renewed talk of reorganizing politics into a tidy array of conservatives against liberals...

...Make no mistake about it, Barry," wrote Mrs...

...New regional offices have been established in the fast-growing suburban areas of Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Washington, and New York...

...Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, a thirty-minute daily program on 546 radio stations in forty-five states, presenting the religious and political views of the Reverend Carl Mclntire...

...Then, while the conventional Republican leadership looked on impotently, the Goldwater revolution transformed the GOP from a second party into a reactionary third party, not yet severed from its moderate segment...

...to expand conservative strength "through unified leadership and action...

...Reed Benson, son of former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, will man the Birch battlements in the capital city...

...We have come a long way from the mood of the early 1950's when McCarthyism was not only rampant on the hustings but also enshrined in the Congress...

...f The Reverend Billy James Hargis, a thirty-minute daily broadcast on fifty-five radio and seven television stations, sponsored by Hargis' Christian Crusade...

...The time has come," Goldwater said, "to choose up two new teams and get going...

...I spoke to an oil company technician who began receiving anonymous threats after writing a letter to a newspaper criticizing the Birch Society...

...Frontal attacks on American Presidents as traitors and conscious agents of Communism, it is now realized, only incur public resentment...

...The election showed," he said, "that the whole conservative movement, in terms of votes, couldn't really deliver very much...

...sponsible political action on behalf of conservative candidates for offices at all levels...

...He considered himself a conservative Republican...

...Candidate Goldwater discovered that the voters were not ready for his pristine ideas about the United Nations, SocialN Security, nuclear weapons, and the Tennessee Valley Authority...

...By virtue of the saturation tactics used, radical reactionary propaganda is producing an impact even on large numbers of people who themselves are in no sense extremists or sympathetic to extremist views...

...to stimulate "reLAURENCE STERN is a staff writer for The Washington Post...

...A sample of the Reverend Billy Hargis: "We slapped Christ in the face at the setting up of the United Nations in San Francisco, in April, 1945, just as surely as the Jews slapped Him on the night of His betrayal 2,000 years ago...

...But the most ambitious venture in institutional public relations on the right was launched in Washington in December when the American Conservative Union made its formal debut...

...Significantly, Bruce and other ACU spokesmen stressed that there was "no relation" between their organization and the Birchers...

...Here is an inventory of the nine leading programs as compiled by the Council: f Howard Kershner, a fifteen-minute commentary broadcast weekly on 148 stations in forty-one states and financed by the Christian Freedom Foundation which in turn is heavily endowed by oilman J. Howard Pew, an adviser to American Opinion, the Birch magazine...

...The 1964 returns spelled out an overwhelming repudiation not only of the far right's man on horseback, Barry Goldwater, but also of his political minions on Capitol Hill...

...Last November, I visited a town in Oklahoma where the Sooner Freedom Forum, a group patterned closely on the Birch Society, had emerged as a potent right wing underground...

...Throughout the nation, according to a New York Times survey, there has been a spectacular expansion in Birch Society field positions...