Opinion: The Real Poop

In a twelve-page editorial, titled "If You Want It Straight," in his own American Opinion magazine, the John Birch Society's founder and presiding genius, Robert Welch, last week managed to blame everyone but himself and his organization for Barry Goldwater's overwhelming electoral defeat.

In Welch's view, the 42-million-plus who cast ballots for Lyndon Johnson "actually voted, of course, for repeal of the Declaration of Independence," for "scrapping the U.S. Constitution entirely as an absurd and useless antique," for "completely disarming the U.S., for doing away with our Army, Navy and Air Force," for continuing programs that will "wipe out the value of all their savings, their life insurance policies, their bonds and mortgages, and will redistribute wealth from the industrious and frugal into the hands of the shiftless," and for "more riots to be instigated by racial agitators, for more racial bitterness, and for greater use of all these fomented troubles to forward Communist purposes."

How could so many people possibly have been so deluded? "Nobody on the Republican side told them otherwise," said Welch. "'There were very few campaigners, even among the Conservatives, who took the trouble and had the courage to tell the people even a fraction of the truth."

Welch was willing to credit Goldwater with "plenty of lion-like courage," and to observe that "much of the criticism of the Senator overlooks or the critics fail to understand, the incredible array of hidden forces that were organized against him." Goldwater's disaster came, in part, because of his "committee-like" campaign operation, "which may even have included some enemies posing as friends," said Welch, and because he ran "an old-fashioned political campaign which was as unrealistic in our present circumstances as using horse-drawn watercarts to put out a forest fire." If Goldwater had campaigned along lines adhering more closely to the John Birch Society's tenets, said Welch, he might have lost anyhow, but at least he would have contributed a little something to the "continuous, massive educational program that simply has to be carried out as the only chance of saving our own country from the great danger of Communist enslavement."