The Once and Future Birch

[David Andrews]

From Thomas Mallon, author of Mrs. Paine's Garage, a disquisition on the JBS, plus a small review of the JBS-unaffiliated biography John Birch: A Life, a level-headed book that I happen to be reading now and can recommend to those curious about the life behind the legend.  The JFK assassination is discussed, interestingly, in Mallon's article:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/11/a-view-from-the-fringe

Edited March 25, 2017 by David Andrews

[Paul Trejo]

On ‎3‎/‎24‎/‎2017 at 5:46 PM, David Andrews said:

From Thomas Mallon, author of Mrs. Paine's Garage, a disquisition on the JBS, plus a small review of the JBS-unaffiliated biography John Birch: A Life, a level-headed book that I happen to be reading now and can recommend to those curious about the life behind the legend.  The JFK assassination is discussed, interestingly, in Mallon's article:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/11/a-view-from-the-fringe

David,

Great article.   Let me quote just a bit of it here, because Mallon speaks to a Walker-did-it CT.   Here is a bit to whet the appetite:  

------- Begin Extract from Thomas Mallon: A View from the Fringe: The John Birch Society and the rise of the radical right. (New Yorker, 2016) ------

For fifty years, the judgment that the far right was at least indirectly guilty of Kennedy’s killing has been a mainstream position.

From William Manchester’s “The Death of a President” (1967) to Bill Minutaglio and Steven Davis’s “Dallas 1963” (2013), the argument is made that a hateful climate created by extreme conservatives — particularly General Edwin Walker, a Dallas resident and perhaps the most famous Bircher after Welch — somehow hastened the President’s killing. 

It simply does not matter that Lee Harvey Oswald, a defector to the Soviet Union, had espoused an ill-tutored form of Marxism from the time he was a teen-ager, or that seven months before killing Kennedy, Oswald, with the same rifle, shot at and nearly succeeded in killing Walker. 

In April, we are supposed to believe, he was shooting at hate; by November, he was shooting from it.

J. Allen Broyles, in a book published the year after Kennedy’s death, “The John Birch Society: Anatomy of a Protest,” wrote, “The assassination of President Kennedy brought home to all thoughtful people our laxity in allowing the creation of an atmosphere in which assassination is not only possible, but almost expected.”

Broyles makes three references to General Walker in his slender volume, but none to Oswald’s attempt on his life.

“Communism killed Kennedy” remains one of the few defensible statements that the John Birch Society ever issued. Of course, Welch added his own evidence-free explanation of how Oswald received his orders from the American portion of the international Communist conspiracy.

------- End Extract from Thomas Mallon: A View from the Fringe: The John Birch Society and the rise of the radical right. (New Yorker, 1/11/2016) ------

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited March 28, 2017 by Paul Trejo

[Roger DeLaria]

Sounds like an interesting read. Another book to add to the ever growing list.

[Paul Trejo]

David,

Having posted excerpts from Thomas Mallon's 2016 article, A View from the Fringe, I have a few comments to make about it.

Mallon claims that for 50 years the CT that the Radical Right killed JFK "has been a mainstream position."

• Evidently Mallon never heard of the Warren Report or the HSCA.

Mallon actually names General Edwin Walker in his citation of the Minutaglio/Davis book, Dallas 1963 (2013) as a feature of the JFK murder.  This was promising.

Mallon then quickly throws cold water on the idea, saying, "It simply does not matter that Lee Harvey Oswald, a defector to the Soviet Union, had espoused an ill-tutored form of Marxism from the time he was a teen-ager..."

• I will interrupt this sentence to scrutinize Mallon's assumptions.  Lee Harvey Oswald was a defector to the Soviet Union who (1) never surrendered his US passport; (2) never applied for Soviet citizenship; (3) never joined the Communist Party; (4) returned to the USA with the blessing of the US State Department.
• Further, Lee Harvey Oswald's so-called "Marxism" was a joke.  Lee was a neglected child, and one psychiatrist said Lee had "rage" issues.  What Marxism?
• If Lee was really a Marxist, he would have joined one of the many varieties of Communist Parties in the USSR or the USA in the 1960's.
• But he didn't.   This is because Marxism for Lee Harvey Oswald was a pose, a hobby, a way to keep others at a distance -- not a real political position.
• LHO did like to claim to be morally superior because he was poor -- and he did believe that capitalism was the reason his family was poor.
• At the same time, LHO didn't like his family much, either.  For example, for Thanksgiving, 1962, the three brothers didn't invite their mother -- from down the street.
• Nor did the brothers see each other more than once every three years on average.
• So, LHO was emotionally hurting, and needed therapy -- but he wasn't a Revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination.
• Nor was LHO a raving maniac.  He was just a young, 23 year old, high-school dropout who couldn't spell or drive a car -- and hated his minimum wage jobs.
• As all of the 19 Russian Expatriates in Fort Worth and Dallas who didn't like LHO said of him -- there is no way this guy was a killer.
• Marina said the same. . Robert Oswald said the same.  Ruth Paine said the same.   Michael Paine said the same.
• Of course, the Warren Commission silenced all of them.

Mallon continues: "It simply does not matter that...seven months before killing Kennedy, Oswald, with the same rifle, shot at and nearly succeeded in killing Walker. 

• Mallon simply presumes that Oswald killed JFK with his rifle.  It never enters his article to question that.
• I believe LHO shot at General Walker too -- and so did General Walker -- but not as a "Marxist" killer.
• LHO was under the influence of George DeMohrenschildt and Volkmar Schmidt when he took his potshot at General Walker.
• The Russian Expatriate Community was stridently Anti-communist and Anti-fascist.  George DeM hated General Walker.
• LHO was an impressionable boy of 23.  There's the real root of it.

Mallon continues:  "In April, we are supposed to believe, he was shooting at hate; by November, he was shooting from it."

• What's so hard to believe?  LHO was not a Marxist, not an ideologue of any kind.
• Jeff Caufield (2015) showed that LHO was a right-winger.
• This was also shown by Jim Garrison (1967) when he showed LHO worked at 544 Camp Street, with Guy Banister.
• And that the FPCC in New Orleans was 100% Fake.
• LHO seems to have been easily pushed around by older men who took an interest in him.
• Even J. Edgar Hoover said the same to the Warren Commission.
• LHO shot at Walker because George DeM drove him to it (because George was older and took an interest in him).
• LHO didn't shoot at JFK at all. 
• The guys at 544 Camp Street were involved up to their necks.  Jim Garrison showed this, too.

Mallon says: "'Communism killed Kennedy' remains one of the few defensible statements that the John Birch Society ever issued."

• This, of course, was exactly what Guy Banister wanted the world to say.
• Guy Banister himself was a member of the John Birch Society
• George DeMohrenschildt hated the John Birch Society -- as most Russian Expatriates did.
• The conflict in LHO's immature brain started there.
• Trusting George DeM to shoot at General Walker was the second biggest mistake LHO ever made. 
• Trusting Guy Banister was the biggest.
• Communism didn't kill JFK.   A Lone Nut didn't kill JFK. 
• That leaves only one logical alternative: The US Radical Right killed JFK.
• The US Radical Right carefully framed LHO to look like a real Communist -- to try to blame Communism for the JFK assassination.
• And Thomas Mallon fell for it.

Regards,
 --Paul Trejo

Edited March 28, 2017 by Paul Trejo

[David Andrews]

I put that up just for you, Paul baby.  Because everybody believes Thomas Mallon.

Edited March 28, 2017 by David Andrews

[Paul Trejo]

5 hours ago, David Andrews said:

I put that up just for you, Paul baby.  Because everybody believes Thomas Mallon.

David,

Thanks, it was fun.  iIRC, Mallon was an able fiction writer with no experience in JFK literature until he wrote Mrs. Paine's Garage (2002).

As a first effort it was not really bad.  I still like his style.  

But as a researcher, he still has a lot of reading to do.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited March 29, 2017 by Paul Trejo

[Michael Walton]

Paul - I still simply cannot believe how you can somehow in your mind reconcile the notion that Oswald, while publicly stirring things up as a Communist in NO, how the plotters made a fake trip for him down in MC with the idea that he was cavorting with a Russian assassin, was a nobody. Yet you still believe, mind-bogglingly, that he was actually an unwitting right-winger who shot at Ed Walker.

And then to top if off, Oswald himself said - when he knew the jig was up - stated for all to hear and be recorded - that the only reason he was there was because he lived in Russia and he was a patsy.

It just doesn't make sense, Paul.

[Paul Trejo]

12 hours ago, Michael Walton said:

Paul - I still simply cannot believe how you can somehow in your mind reconcile the notion that Oswald, while publicly stirring things up as a Communist in NO, how the plotters made a fake trip for him down in MC with the idea that he was cavorting with a Russian assassin, was a nobody. Yet you still believe, mind-bogglingly, that he was actually an unwitting right-winger who shot at Ed Walker.

And then to top if off, Oswald himself said - when he knew the jig was up - stated for all to hear and be recorded - that the only reason he was there was because he lived in Russia and he was a patsy.

It just doesn't make sense, Paul.

Michael,

Thanks for the polite challenge.  I'll try again to explain my nuanced CT.

1.  Even in New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) was a nobody.  Who really cared that some street urchin was lobbying for Fidel Castro in the streets?

2.  In fact, who bothers to film a Communist handing out leaflets?   NOBODY.

3.  Jim Garrison was 100% correct to recognize that fact -- and that Ed Butler (a propaganda expert) was managing the publicity of LHO in newspaper, radio and TV in New Orleans.

4.  Some might say that Ed Butler was working for the CIA, but he wasn't a CIA agent -- he was sometimes a contractor for them, but he was a full-time enemy of Fidel Castro, and wanted Castro dead yesterday.

5.  I am not certain that Ed Butler was aware of the Kill JFK plot -- he was probably aware only of the Kill Fidel Castro plot.  His goal was to help LHO infiltrate the Communists.

6.  So, for the Radical Right in NOLA, our hero LHO was trying to become somebody -- but he was still a NOBODY.

7.  LHO went to Mexico City to try to gain entry into Cuba.  Marina Oswald was emphatic about this.  She said this over and over.  LHO was obsessed with getting into Cuba.

8.  LHO was almost certainly promised a big cash award if he was successful in getting into Cuba.   This explains his making a fool of himself in Mexico City.

9.  Of course he failed -- and IMHO Guy Banister knew good and well that he would fail.  (Ed Butler and DAP were hoping he would succeed.)

10.  IMHO, our hero LHO had no clue in the world that David Morales (?) was going to Impersonate him in order to link his name with KGB assassin Kostikov.   No clue.

11.  In my CT, LHO was a Radical Right winger who was trying with all his might to get a full-time job in the CIA.  That's why he did what he did in NOLA.

12. OK, NOW REWIND TAPE BACK TO APRIL 1963.

13.  I still maintain that LHO belonged to the Radical Right wing even in Dallas -- except that since LHO was not an educated man, and his ideas of Marxism were at a child's level, he did not understand what George De Mohrenschildt (DeM) was doing to him.

14.  The only sophisticated political science that LHO ever read was Marxism.  And according to George DeM, LHO's mastery of Marxism was pathetic.

15.  One reason LHO looked up to George DeM was because of George's obvious mastery of Marxism.   George had been a college professor -- perhaps some here didn't know that.

16.  Now -- George DeM probably did work for the CIA on a contract basis, here and there.   He wasn't a CIA agent, but he was smart enough to be useful to the CIA.

17.  It is very likely that George DeM boasted about this to LHO.   This would have impressed LHO very much -- because LHO wanted to be a CIA agent with all his heart.

18.  It is for this reason, IMHO, that our hero LHO took a turn for the worse.

19.  As it turns out, Russian Expatriates hate Fascists as much as they hate Communists.  This is because of the specific history of Russia in WW2.

20.  So, George DeM hated and despised General Walker.   We can read this in his WC testimony and in his 1977 manuscript, I'm a Patsy! I'm a Patsy! 

21.  George used to call General Walker, "General Fokker" to LHO, to make him laugh.  They used to call Volkmar Schmidt, "Messer Schmidt."  It was their thing.

22.  Volkmar Schmidt also hated General Walker -- and compared him to Adolf Hitler.

23.  THEREFORE, it is my humble opinion, that LHO would do anything in the world to impress George DeM, because LHO hoped that George might put in a good word for him with the CIA.

24.  In his political naivete, therefore, LHO decided that he would try to please both George DeMohrenschildt and Volkmar Schmidt by killing General Walker dead.

25.  LHO found out the hard way that George DeM and Volkmar Schmidt would be horrified by such a STUPID act.   He had failed again.  The story of his life.

26.  LHO had hoped to get a job in the CIA by shooting Walker.   That was his key motivation in Dallas in April.

27. LHO had hoped to get a job in the CIA by infiltrating the FPCC in Cuba -- that was his key motive in NOLA that summer, and in Mexico City.

28.  We see here how intelligence can be very relative.   LHO was better read than most people -- but just -- not -- enough.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited March 29, 2017 by Paul Trejo
typos

[Michael Clark]

32 minutes ago, Paul Trejo said:

Michael,

Thanks for the polite challenge.  I'll try again to explain my nuanced CT.

1.  Even in New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) was a nobody.  Who really cared that some street urchin was lobbying for Fidel Castro in the streets?

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

"Oswald's uncle, a man named Charles "Dutz" Murret, was an ex-prize fighter and promoter who was also a bookie. He was under the control of Carlos Marcello, who at that time was the head of the Mafia in New Orleans. These were the people who were in the sphere of Lee Harvey Oswald's life as a child."

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmarcello.htm

[Michael Clark]

On 3/28/2017 at 11:48 PM, Paul Trejo said:

Deleted

Edited May 2, 2017 by Michael Clark

[Michael Clark]

This is out of place, but I don't think I can justify giving it a separate thread. I'll take a bit of latitude by posting this here.

Whenever I read the words, "The Once and Future..." , the words "King" always pop into my head. I googled it, and found that that it is the name of a book by one T. H. White. I had never heard of him before. I looked him up. According to Wikipedia ...

 

T. H. White

For the magazine journalist, see Theodore H. White.

T. H. White

Photograph of White lecturing on his Arthurian fiction

BornTerence Hanbury White
29 May 1906
Bombay, British India

Died17 January 1964 (aged 57)
Piraeus, Athens, Greece

NicknameTim

OccupationWriter

NationalityEnglish

CitizenshipBritish

Alma mater

GenreFantasy

Terence Hanbury "Tim" White (29 May 1906 – 17 January 1964) was an English author best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958. One of his most memorable stories is the first of that series, The Sword in the Stone, published as a stand-alone book in 1938.

Biography

White was born in Bombay in British India, to English parents Garrick Hanbury White, a superintendent in the Indian police, and Constance Edith Southcote Aston. Terence White had a troubled childhood, with an alcoholic father and an emotionally cold mother, and his parents separated when Terence was fourteen.

Education and teaching

White went to Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire, a public school, and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the scholar and occasional author L. J. Potts. Potts became a lifelong friend and correspondent, and White later referred to him as "the great literary influence in my life." While at Queens' College, White wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur,and graduated in 1928 with a first-class degree in English.

White then taught at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, for four years. In 1936 he published England Have My Bones, a well-received memoir about a year spent in England. The same year, he left Stowe School and lived in a workman's cottage nearby, where he wrote and "revert[ed] to a feral state", engaging in falconry, hunting, and fishing. White also became interested in aviation, partly to conquer his fear of heights.

Novelist

White's novel Earth Stopped (1934) and its sequel Gone to Ground (1935) are science fiction novels about a disaster which devastates the world. Gone to Ground contains several fantasy stories told by the survivors; these stories were later reprinted in The Maharajah and Other Stories.

White wrote to a friend that in autumn 1937, "I got desperate among my books and picked [Malory] up in lack of anything else. Then I was thrilled and astonished to find that (a) The thing was a perfect tragedy, with a beginning, a middle and an end implicit in the beginning and (b) the characters were real people with recognizable reactions which could be forecast[...] Anyway, I somehow started writing a book."

The novel, which White described as "a preface to Malory", was titled The Sword in the Stone. Published in 1938 it told the story of the boyhood of King Arthur. White was also influenced by Freudian psychology and his lifelong involvement in natural history. The Sword in the Stone was well-reviewed and was a Book of the Month Club selection in 1939.

In February 1939, White moved to Doolistown in County Meath, Ireland, where he lived out the Second World War as a de facto conscientious objector. It was in Ireland that he wrote most of what would later become The Once and Future King; two sequels to The Sword in the Stone were published during this time: The Witch in the Wood (later cut and rewritten as The Queen of Air and Darkness) in 1939, and The Ill-Made Knight in 1940. The version of The Sword in the Stone included in The Once and Future King differs in several respects from the earlier version. It is darker, and some critics prefer the earlier version.White's indirect experience of the war had a profound effect on these tales of King Arthur, which include commentaries on war and human nature in the form of a heroic narrative.

Alderney, later work, and death

In 1946, White settled in Alderney, the third largest of the Channel Islands, where he lived for the rest of his life. The same year, White published Mistress Masham's Repose, a children's book in which a young girl discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people in Swift's Gulliver's Travels) living near her house. Mistress Masham's Repose was influenced by John Masefield's book The Midnight Folk.

In 1947, he published The Elephant and the Kangaroo, in which a repetition of Noah's Flood occurs in Ireland. In the early 1950s White published two non-fiction books: The Age of Scandal (1950), a collection of essays about 18th-century England, and The Goshawk (1951), an account of White's attempt to train a northern goshawk using traditional, rather than modern, falconrytechniques. Written while at his cottage in the mid-1930s, it was only published after its chance discovery by, and at the insistence of, White's agent, David Garnett. In 1954 White translated and edited The Book of Beasts, an English translation of a medieval bestiary originally written in Latin.

In 1958 White completed the fourth book of The Once and Future Kingsequence, The Candle in the Wind, though it was first published with the other three parts and has never been published separately. White lived to see his work adapted as the Broadway musical Camelot (1960) and the animated film The Sword in the Stone (1963), both based on The Once and Future King.

White died of heart failure on 17 January 1964 aboard ship in Piraeus (Athens, Greece), en route to Alderney from a lecture tour in the United States. He is buried in First Cemetery of Athens. In 1977 The Book of Merlyn, a conclusion to The Once and Future King, was published posthumously. His papers are held by the University of Texas at Austin.

Personal life

According to Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1967 biography, White was "a homosexual and a sado-masochist." He came close to marrying several times but had no enduring romantic relationships, and wrote in his diaries of Zed, a young boy: "I have fallen in love with Zed [...] the whole situation is an impossible one. All I can do is behave like a gentleman. It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them."

Broadcaster Robert Robinson published an account of a bizarre conversation with White, in which he claimed to be attracted to small girls. Robinson concluded that this was really a cover for homosexuality. Dame Julie Andrewswrote in her autobiography, "I believe Tim may have been an unfulfilled homosexual, and he suffered a lot because of it."

However, White's long-time friend and literary agent, David Higham, wrote, "Tim was no homosexual, though I think at one time he had feared he was (and in his ethos fear would have been the word)." Higham gave Warner the address of one of White's lovers "so that she could get in touch with someone so important in Tim's story. But she never, the girl told me, took that step. So she was able to present Tim in such a light that a reviewer could call him a raging homosexual. Perhaps a heterosexual affair would have made her blush."

Lin Carter in his book Imaginary Worlds portrayed White as a man who felt deeply but was unable to form close human relationships due to his unfortunate childhood: "He was a man with an enormous capacity for loving. It shows in his prodigious correspondence and in his affection for dogs and in the bewildered and inarticulate loves his characters experience in his books; but he had few close friends, and no genuine relationship with a woman."

White was agnostic, and towards the end of his life a heavy drinker. Warner wrote of him, "Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the human race."

Influence

Fantasy writer Michael Moorcock enjoyed White's The Once and Future King, and was especially influenced by the underpinnings of realism in his work.Moorcock eventually engaged in a "wonderful correspondence" with White, and later recalled that "White [gave] me some very good advice on how to write".

J. K. Rowling has said that White's writing strongly influenced the Harry Potterbooks; several critics have compared Rowling's character Albus Dumbledore to White's absent-minded Merlyn, and Rowling herself has described White's Wart as "Harry's spiritual ancestor." Author Neil Gaiman was asked about the similarities between Harry Potter and Gaiman's character Timothy Hunter, and he stated that he did not think Rowling had based her character on Hunter. "I said to [the reporter] that I thought we were both just stealing from T. H. White: very straightforward."

Gregory Maguire was influenced by "White's ability to be intellectually broadminded, to be comic, to be poetic, and to be fantastic" in the writing of his 1995 novel Wicked, and crime fiction writer Ed McBain also cited White as an influence.

White features extensively in Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. One of the components of the book is a biographical account of White and also The Goshawk, an account of his own failed attempt to train a hawk.

Selected writings

Note that the works of this author are now public domain in countries where the term of copyright lasts 50 years after the death of the author, or less; except for certain works first published posthumously.

Loved Helen (1929)

The Green Bay Tree (1929)

Dead Mr. Nixon (1931) (with R. McNair Scott)

First Lesson (1932) (as James Aston)

They Winter Abroad (1932) (as James Aston)

Darkness at Pemberley (1932)

Farewell Victoria (1933)

Earth Stopped (1934)

Gone to Ground (1935)

England Have My Bones (1936)

Burke's Steerage (1938)

The Once and Future King

The Sword in the Stone (1938)

The Queen of Air and Darkness (original version 1939, as The Witch in the Wood)

The Ill-Made Knight (1940)

The Candle in the Wind (1958)

Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)

The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947)

The Age of Scandal (1950)

The Goshawk (1951)

The Scandalmonger (1952)

The Book of Beasts (translator, 1954)

The Master (1957)

The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959)

America at Last (1965)

The Book of Merlyn (1977)

A Joy Proposed (1980)

The Maharajah and Other Stories (edited by Kurth Sprague) (1981)

Letters to a Friend (1984)

[David Andrews]

T. H. White's Arthurian books were popular paperbacks when I was a kid, thanks to J. R. R. Tolkein.

John Birch was "once" his own young man, missionary, soldier, and spy; and posthumously the "future" hero of the right wing, as their "first casualty of the Cold War."  Nobody knows how Birch would have looked on an organization like the JBS (under another another name, of course, had he lived), but his parents were happy enough to donate his name to Robert Welch's movement, having obvious reasons to hate communism.  Their vocal suspicions that the US government tried to cover up the circumstances of Birch's killing and of his last mission inside China are reminiscent of Marguerite Oswald's crusade for her own son.

The last chapters of Terry Lautz's recent John Birch: A Life (Oxford University Press, and non-JBS affiliated) are a short history of the JBS, and make useful comparisons of the JBS with other American anti-communist movements.  I'm reading those chapters now and will post anything related to the assassination-era climate.

P. S. - Does anyone know of a good book-length history of how the US "lost" China to the communists?  Several years ago I saw a review of a promising book on our post-WW II China policy decisions but have since lost the reference.  Just try searching for that on Amazon, which has more China books (including mine) than China has Chinese.

Edited May 4, 2017 by David Andrews

[Paul Trejo]

On ‎5‎/‎2‎/‎2017 at 6:14 PM, David Andrews said:

T. H. White's Arthurian books were popular paperbacks when I was a kid, thanks to J. R. R. Tolkein.

John Birch was "once" his own young man, missionary, soldier, and spy; and posthumously the "future" hero of the right wing, as their "first casualty of the Cold War."  Nobody knows how Birch would have looked on an organization like the JBS (under another name, of course, had he lived), but his parents were happy enough to donate his name to Robert Welch's movement, having obvious reasons to hate communism.  Their vocal suspicions that the US government tried to cover up the circumstances of Birch's killing and of his last mission inside China are reminiscent of Marguerite Oswald's crusade for her own son.

The last chapters of Terry Lautz's recent John Birch: A Life (Oxford University Press, and non-JBS affiliated) are a short history of the JBS, and make useful comparisons of the JBS with other American anti-communist movements.  I'm reading those chapters now and will post anything related to the assassination-era climate... 

David,

John Birch had nothing to do with the John Birch Society -- he had no idea that his name would be exploited by this Anticommunist political group.

Born in 1918, when he graduated college in 1938, he joined the ministry, learned Mandarin and was sent to China in 1940 by the World Fundamental Baptist Missionary Fellowship.   At that time Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese.  Although it was illegal, John Birch held Sunday services for Chinese citizens, flaunting the Japanese and also the Chinese Communists during World War II.  Birch knew it was dangerous, and he would often wear a pistol to Church.

On August 25, 1945, only days before World War II ended, John Birch clashed with Chinese Communists, and was shot dead.  That is why some Baptists called him "the first casualty of the Cold War."

Robert Welch (i.e. Welch's Candies) started an Anticommunist Organization in the USA in 1957, and decided to use John Birch as his "mascot."  The idea was that here was this young Christian boy who was made into a "martyr" by Chairman Mao.  He called it the John Birch Society (JBS).

John Birch wanted to convert the Chinese people to Christ.  Robert Welch didn't care about that -- he wanted a "mascot" for his political organization.  Robert Welch wanted to elect a Conservative to the White House -- and John Birch the martyred Christian minister was only a token in Welch's game.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited May 4, 2017 by Paul Trejo
Candies not Grape Juice

[David Andrews]

Delete, please.

. 

Edited May 4, 2017 by David Andrews
Cranky

[Michael Clark]

4 hours ago, David Andrews said:

 

Paul,

P. S. - Since I was raised in the New York State grape country where Welch's Grape Juice of Concord, MA opened one of its first factories, I know that Robert Welch of North Carolina had absolutely nothing to do Welch's Grape Juice, though he did open a candy company in Boston that also had not the first thing to do with Welch's Grape Juice.

What kind of grape juice are you drinking this morning?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Welch_Jr

. 

Lol, I noticed that too. 

Edited May 4, 2017 by Michael Clark