Not P but Anarchy among John Birchers

[Allan Balliett]

This from a 1976 Plowboy Interview with Barry Goldwater's speech writer and
one time neighbor here in rural WV, Karl Hess (RIP) Hess gave us the great
'extremism' lines in Goldwater's speeches among other things but he morphed
into a tax resisting biker / community technology advocate after
Goldwater's horrible shoring against LBJ.

Some good info in these few paragraphs and good insight into Goldwater's
actual character, which seems to have been written out of history.

https://c4ss.org/content/40275

*MOTHER EARTH: How could the New Left suddenly turn your political thinking
so completely around?*

*HESS: *They had done their homework. Their reasoning was irresistible.

*But didn’t you have access to their thoughts all along?*

No. It’s astonishing, but when you circulate in the political channels
through which I moved, all your information about the left comes directly
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And the FBI, as far as I can see,
hasn’t learned anything new about left-wing politics since the Bureau was
founded. It’s still operating on suppositions that were obsolete in 1925.
So the FBI gives you a version of reality that absolutely cannot be
believed; only most politicians do believe it.

*So no matter what the FBI might say, you now think that some elements of
the left are a lot closer to the ideals of our founding fathers than most
of us will admit.*

When you get right down to the basic issues — the questions of individual
responsibility and whether or not we should stick our noses, and our guns,
into other countries’ business — you’ll find that the New Left has a great
deal in common with Robert Taft and other old-fashioned American
conservatives. There is a definite moral confluence between the Old Right
and the New Left. And any right-winger who’s fair and dispassionate about
the matter will admit it.

*Give me an example.*

OK. Even though I was going through personal changes by that time, I was
still Barry Goldwater’s speech writer when he ran for re-election to the
Senate in 1968. I was a member of the leftist Students for a Democratic
Society by then, and Goldwater knew it but he didn’t give me a hard time
because he’s a tolerant, open minded man.

So one day I read him the section on foreign policy in the Port Huron
Statement — which is the founding document of the SDS — and Goldwater said,
“That’s really wonderful! Did that come from the Young Americans for
Freedom?”

Now that was a laugh right there, because the YAF is a bunch of right-wing
military groupies. Its members are not young, they’re distinctly
un-American, and they hate the concept of individual freedom — they call it
“license”. What the YAF likes is order. Their idea of freedom is a hitch in
the Army they all want to be lieutenant colonels or senators. Needless to
say, they support the Pentagon a hundred-thousand percent.

*What did Senator Goldwater say when you told him that the foreign policy
statement he liked came not from the right wing YAF as he had supposed but
from the leftist SDS?*

Well, of course, he was stunned. But one of the great things about Barry
Goldwater is that his thinking is not limited or directed by labels. And
after a while he said, “I don’t care who wrote that statement, it’s right.”
A short time later, when he spoke at the University of Arizona, he began
his address by saying, “I recently discovered that I have a lot in common
with the anarchist wing of the SDS.”

*Were the authors of the Port Huron Statement anarchists?*

Yes. And, curiously enough, it was the same faction that later became the
Weathermen which seems logical to me. I’ll bet you that half the original
Weather people were old right-wingers who finally realized that they had
been fed a big pack of lies about free enterprise and capitalism and their
reaction was a violent one.

This new awareness of reality — although, thank goodness, it usually
doesn’t spark such a violent reaction — is, by the way, a growing trend
among right-wingers. Here lately, I’ve even noticed some staunch John
Birchers beginning to question the wisdom of laying down their lives to
defend dear old Standard Oil, in the illusion that they’re defending
private enterprise. They’re beginning to understand that corporate
capitalism doesn’t have anything to do with free private enterprise.
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