Unqualified Offerings

On the Eisenhower: Traitor line that Mona’s been examining, it’s worth recognizing its ancient roots. Eisenhower’s perfidy was a central tenet of the John Birch Society. JBS founder Robert Welch officially considered it undecideable whether Ike was a “stooge” of the Communist movement or a witting agent. Wikipedia carries a couple of excerpts from Welch’s letter/book on Eisenhower, The Politician:

On page 278 of The Politician, Welch summarized, from his perspective, the only two possible interpretations of President Eisenhower’s motives: “The role he has played, as described in all the pages above, would fit just as well into one theory as the other; that he is a mere stooge or that he is a Communist assigned the specific job of being a political front man.”

and

Then, with respect to Ike, from page 279 of the 1963 published edition of The Politician: “In the third stage the Communists have installed in the Presidency a man who, for whatever reasons, appears intentionally to be carrying forward Communist aims… With regard to this third man, Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason.”

Wikipedia also includes copious quotes from the less hedged private version of Politician, which clearly refer to Eisenhower as a witting Communist agent.

Interestingly, the excerpts I’ve found don’t focus on Eisenhower’s conduct in Korea. But the Birchist New American reports that Welch’s 1952 book, May God Forgive Us, “made clear his belief that the only reasonable explanation for the otherwise inexplicable series of Communist victories throughout the world [including Korea] was treachery and treason in our own government.” Korea was, from the right-nationalist view, the first war “we weren’t allowed to win.” Truman’s firing of the “victory-minded” Douglas MacArthur was the seminal American doltchstosslegende. As one right-nationalist site reminds us, Air Force commander General George Stratemeyer complained to Congress that

“We had sufficient air bombardment, fighters, reconnaissance so that I could have taken out all those supplies, those airdromes on the other side of the Yalu; I could have bombed the devils between there and Mukden, stopped the railroad operating and the people of China that were fighting could not have been supplied … But we weren’t permitted to do it. As a result, a lot of American blood was spilled over there in Korea.”

It’s not hard to interpolate what this group’s view of Eisenhower’s negotiation of an armistice must have been.

In putting this item together, the single funniest thing I stumbled on was Joshua Trevino’s summer 2006 retrospective on the Birch Society, in which he wrote of National Review’s excommunication of the Birchers in 1962:

Considering the probable resulting alternatives in the modern day — a conservative movement twisted by a dark vision of paranoia and loathing, or no conservative movement at all — we owe a debt of gratitude for this simple essay in winter 1962.

In the real world, neo-Birchism is the dominant tendency on the right. Not only is an endless parade of “traitors” like Jim Webb and “defeatists” in the enemedia all that prevents a splendid victory in our struggle with Islamofascism^TM, the very oldest of Bircher memes – Eisenhower sabotaged the war on Communism! – flourish. Ironically, National Review, particularly its website, is one of the foci of post-Birch paranoia. But National Review isn’t unusual. What’s left of American conservatism these days is little but “a dark vision of paranoia and loathing.”