M E E T THE PRE S S

�()duced "lI LAWRENCE E. SPIVAK

ROBERT WELCH
Founder The John Birch Society

Volume 5 SUNDAY, MAY 21, 1961 Number 20

10 cents per copy

I?Atnelf JACK BELL, Associated Press
ROBERT McCORMICK, NBC News
LAWRENCE E. SPIVAK, Regular Panel Member
RICHARD WILSON, Cowles Publications

�del'alb�.· NED BROOKS

Permission is hereby granted to news media and

magazines to rep1"oduce in whole or in part. Credit
to NBC's MEET THE PRESS will be appreciated.
 MEE T THE PRE S S
•

MR. BROOKS: In recent weeks the organization known as

The John Birch Society has been gaining increasing public atten­
tion. Its leaders describe it as a right wing, patriotic group
devoted to stamping out the Communist conspiracy. Its critics
condemn it as a witch-hunting organization engaged in irrespon­
sible attacks on public figures.
The Society was founded two years ago by Mr. Robert Welch,
who is our guest today. Mr. Welch is a retired businessman. His
home is in Belmont, Massachusetts. He has traveled widely,
spoken often in public, mainly on the theme of Communism. Mr.
Welch has written several books, the latest in 1954, on "The
Life of John Birch," the American missionary killed by the
Chinese Communists.
MR. SPIVAK: Mr. Welch, as you know, much of the contro­
versy about you and The John Birch Society centers around your
manuscript called "The Politician." It has been used by yoU!"
friends to prove you are an expert on Communists and on Com­
munism, and it has been used by your critics and your enemies
to prove that you are irresponsible. What led you to believe the
charges made in "The Politician" against President Eisenhower,
former Secretary Dulles, Allen Dulles, General Marshall?
MR. WELCH: I didn't know that my friends had been using
it. That is news to me. I certainly knew that our enemies and
critics had. But to try to answer your questions, concisely as I
can, if you will remember what the situation was like in 1953.
Internationally the nearest Communist dominion to us was prob­
ably East Germany, 3,500 miles away. Nasser was still a Lieu­
tenant General, and I won't go through the rest of the picture,
but go ahead then for eight years to the end of 1960 and see
what had. happened. The Communists were 90 miles from our
shores, very firmly established. You have seen what happened
during those years to North Viet Nam and Laos and Indonesia,
in Egypt, in many other countries. I will save time by not review­
ing it-the Communists had advanced terrifically. Domestically,
at the beginning of that period, due partly to the very campaign
that brought the Administration in, there was quite a revulsion
against the Communists, and they were somewhat on the defen­
sive and on the run, due partly to the great work that had been
done in my opinion by Senator McCarthy. But during those years
you saw all kinds of things happening in this country and the
advance of Communism 'domestically. And you saw, for instance,
the Supreme Court of the United States making decisions which
the Communists themselves praised and glorified and held rallies
to praise and which the Communists announced as the greatest
victories ever won by the Communist Party.

1
 MR. SPIVAK: Granted, Mr. Welch-I will not start an argu­
ment with you about whether what you have said is or is not
true. Let us grant what you have said is true: Do you think on
the basis of that you were justified, for example, in saying, ''But
my firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious
agent of the Communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation
of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems
to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt."?
MR. WELCH: Mr. Spivak, in the first place, for you to be able
to quote that involves a very serious breach of confidence on the
part of a friend of mine, some extremely unethical journalism
and a brazen violation of my property rights in my letter. This
was a private letter written in the fall of 1954, added to as I
made additional copies to send to friends. The final-last copy
was made in 1958, and I still have on hand half of those copies
that were never sent out at all because we began to stop it, and
it was sent out under the-not a copy was ever sold, it was sent
out with a flyleaf saying, This is not a book; it is not intended
for publication, this is a private letter on loan to you in confi­
dence for your eyes only and will you please try to tell us what
is wrong with it and what the errors are, and I don't believe
anybody who ever wrote a history before, or any historian in­
volving many great-or a lot abler than I am-was held re­
sponsible for what he said in a first draft of a document that
might someday be published.
MR. SPIVAK: But Mr. Welch-first let me make this clear:
As you know, these copies are now fairly widespread.
MR. WELCH: Only because of the reasons I have said.
MR. SPIVAK: Regardless of what the reasons are. The im­
portant question was, did you ever think that of President
Eisenhower? Did you ever know that about President Eisen­
hower?
MR. WELCH: I will answer that exactly the way I answered
Mr. Bell's firm, Associated Press, with the same question, and
let me say they took it exactly and carried it on the wires exactly,
with the correct pronounciation, which was important. And I
said, I never had that opinion and do not have it now with any
such assurance or firmness that I would ever state it in public,
and I never have. I pointed out in this-I can read it to you
right in the flyleaf that I asked my friends to tell me: What are
the mistakes, what are the errors, what are the corrections, how
do you interpret this?
And I also, which they have never told you, pointed out right
in that manuscript itself, that I had no quarrel with anybody who
attributed all of these actions to political opportunism.
MR. SPIVAK: But Mr. Welch even in that letter, however,
you said that you know a lot about Communism. In your books
you said that you could smell out a Communist.
MR. WELCH: Yes
MR. SPIV AK: And you thought these things, or you wouldn't
have written them. And at a later date, for example, you said in

2
a statement to The New York Times that the book-that "My
firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated Communist
agent--

MR. WELCH: May I stop you. I have never said any such
thing to The New York Times.
MR. SPIVAK: This is published as Welch's statement.
MR. WELCH: I never made a statement to The New York
Times that I can remember.
MR. SPIVAK: You never said, "Nowhere in my private 01'
published writings have I ever called former President Eisen-
hower a card-carrying Communist"? .
MR. WELCH: That is right, I said that, because I never
have. That is the denial I made when I was accused on the floor
of the Senate, and I said, No, I never called him a "card-carrying
Communist" anywhere in writing or in words.
MR. SPIVAK: Do you deny that you did in "The Politician"?
MR. WELCH: I certainly do. You prove-show me anywhere
I called him a "card carrying Communist" in "The Politician."
MR. SPIVAK: Not "card-carrying," but "a Communist"?
MR. WELCH: Oh, that's different.
MR. SPIVAK: What is different?
MR. WELCH: There is a big difference.
MR. SPIVAK: You said, for example, "In my OpInIOn the
chances are very strong that Milton Eisenhower is actually
Dwight Eisenhower's superior and boss within the Communist
Party."
MR. WELCH: Okay.
MR. SPIVAK: Does he have to have a card?
MR. WELCH: I was accused of calling him a "card-carrying
Communist," as I say, in a private document, which I never
would have been willing to do in public, but I merely said that I
had not, which I didn't. They are the ones who were putting
words in my mouth, Mr. Spivak.
MR. McCORMICK: Mr. Welch, is your society growing in
numbers and influence as much as you hoped it would?
MR. WELCH: Yes, it is, Mr. McCormick. It is growing quite
rapidly and has continued to grow through this storm of adverse
criticism, very rapidly, in strength and numbers.
MR. McCORMICK: Could you give us any precise figures or
even approximate figures?
MR. WELCH: We are not willing to give figures, numbers of
members, at all. We have not been. I don't know any other
organization that does either, so there is nothing secret about
that; we just do not. I can tell you this much if you want it,
that since the storm broke, primarily with the article in the Com­
munist People's ·World in San Francisco, an article on February
25, which became the mother article you might call it for all of
these attacks, we have }Mt about one-half of one percent of our
members, and we have gained more than that in membership
practically every day since then.
MR. McCORMICK: What about other financial support for

3
the Society, has that gone up, too?
MR. WELCH: Financial support has increased materially since
the 25th of February.
MR. McCORMICK: And you don't then find people less willing
to join or to contribute for fear of reprisals against them?
MR. WELCH: We find some less willing to join. We find some
who have resigned, but they are very few in numbers. We have
found far more who took more interest and were willing to come
in. We have had quite a number of contributions coming in from
people who say, "I don't know enough about the Society to join,
but from what I have heard we would like to help you, and here
is a check for a hundred dollars."
MR. BELL: Mr. Welch, on April 14 in Santa Barbara, Cali­
fornia, you were quoted as saying that President Kennedy is "less
a captive of Communist influences than Eisenhower."
MR. WELCH: I said-did I-or "the previous administra­
tion," I have forgotten which.
MR. BELL: Your words were carried as "less than Eisen­
hower." In the light of that, would you like to give us a brief
summary of your evaluation of President Kennedy's stewardship
since he has been in office?
MR. WELCH: So far as I am concerned, Mr. Bell, I would like
to see the honeymoon go on longer. I don't feel qualified. We
usually talk of the past, anyway, because you can bring it out
and find the facts and be fairly sure of them-and not .as to cur­
rent events or what is happening at the current time. I like to
have our people-we like to try to get a perspective where we
can see basically, generally, as I was trying to do just now, what
happened over eight years because then you can get a clear pic­
ture of it. I don't have a clear enough picture of what has hap­
pened in the last three or four months, and just to answer your
question briefly, I would prefer not to try to evaluate the
Kennedy administration.
MR. BELL: You had some thoughts about Senator Kennedy
at the time he was Senator and expressed those.
MR. WELCH: That is right.
MR. BELL: Which indicated to anybody who read that that
you thought he was under some kind of Communist influence.
MR. WELCH: I don't know that you would gather that. I was
quite critical of him, and this was in 1958, in the Blue Book, you
are talking about, I think, in which we indicated there our
almost certainty that the candidates in 1960 would be Kennedy
and Nixon. So we were talking about a political campaign two
years in advance, and I was quite critical of some things that
Senator Kennedy had done, especially some of his speeches on
behalf of the Algerian rebels, but I didn't say anything about
Senator Kennedy that was anywhere nearly as bad as some of
his opponents right within the Democratic Party were saying.
Might I just add this, that since the campaign is over, and he is
now President, on the recommendation of the Council of the
Society we have taken that out of the Blue Book of the Society,

4
and in the new editions it is not there because that campaign
has gone by. That was perfectly proper at that time.
MR. BELL: You have acted then in a practical way to absolve
President Kennedy of being influenced by Communists-
MR. WELCH: I would not say we have acted to absolve him.
We merely are not carrying in the Blue Book now criticisms that
were made in connection with a forthcoming political campaign
two years before the campaign.
MR. BELL: Mr. Welch, does this wipe the whole thing out?
MR. WELCH: Not at all.
MR. BELL: If you just take it out of the Blue Book?
MR. WELCH: Not a bit, and we don't care to have it wiped
out. It doesn't wipe it out any more than anything you could do
about President Truman's having called Eisenhower a Fascist,
which I believe he did-or a lot of other things that have been
said in such cases.
MR. BELL: Isn't there a matter of morality concerned,
though? You protest about your quotations about Eisenhower
being used.
MR. WELCH: Yes.
MR. BELL: You admit that you wrote them although you say
it was in a private letter. But isn't there just as much morality
involved in writing a private letter as there is in publishing a
book?
MR. WELCH: To me it doesn't seem to be even in the same
category, especially when you are writing to well-informed
friends to ask them to come through with corrections, errors,
additions, to tell you-I think most historians write three or
four drafts of their books and send around copies and ask for
criticisms and comments, and they may make their statements
very provocative, too.
MR. BELL: Did any friend write back to you and ask you to
take that Eisenhower statement out of the letter?
MR. WELCH: I don't know, but I had many letters from many
friends commenting in many ways on it, which is what I wanted.
I have had many friends in The John Birch Society who don't
like it, don't agree with it, don't believe it at all.
And may I point out, since you are talking about The John
Birch Society primarily, that the document you refer to was
specifically disavowed at the founding meeting of The John Birch
Society as having no part in the beliefs of The John Birch Society
in any way. It never has had. President Eisenhower himself
said he couldn't understand why so many of his friends were
joining The John Birch Society. We can tell him why. He has a
lot of good friends that are just as anti-Communist as you and
I are, and they joined The John Birch Society because they think
we are able to fight Communism. They are probably more hor­
rified than anybody else at what we are reputed to have said or
has been quoted there, but they still think we are fighting Com­
munism, and they are joining the Society.
MR. BELL: Thank you for including me among the anti-Com-

5
munists, Mr. Welch.
MR. WELCH: I certainly was. I certainly was.
MR. WILSON: Mr. Welch, your Society is described by yo.ur­
self as under authoritarian control, mo.no.lithic. Is this the kind
of a go.vernment you want to impose upon the United States, an
authoritarian and monolithic go.vernment like your Society?
MR. WELCH: No, sir. We made it very clear that we did not.
We made it very clear time after time that we think the best of
all forms of government is a constitutional republic, and the
worst of all forms of government is a democracy. We will stand
by that and argue it all day long as much as you want. What we
are talking about there is perfectly clear, if you go ahead in the
Blue Book-it is the internal structure of The John Birch Society,
and as our members all well know, that is solely for the purpose
of protecting us. We do not want Communists coming in and
taking over our chapters, and so we are able to drop them from
membership if necessary. We haven't had to use it to any extent
at all-three people so far in two years that we have dropped,
and only one of them because he was a trouble maker. But we
have it there to protect ourselves, and that is all it is for.
MR. WILSON: You are interested in getting so.me kind o.f
political result in co.nsonance with yo.ur conservative views?
MR. WELCH: Our interest really is in educating, informing
our fellow cititzens sufficiently so that they will do the right
thing politically.
MR. WILSON: You wrote in your Bulletin of May 1st that
under the general laws of Massachusetts The John Birch Society
is listed as a nonprofit educational corporation.
MR. WELCH: Correct.
MR. WILSON: And thus you are not authorized nor do. you
wish to take any direct part in Po.litics.
MR. WELCH: Appreciably.
MR. WILSON: Yet in other parts of your literature, which
is voluminous, you speak o.f the activity on behalf of Senator
Goldwater, yo.U speak o.f the activity o.n behalf of Vice President
Nixon. Yo.U are constantly referring to. achieving --

MR. WELCH: May I interrupt you, Mr. Wilson --

MR. WILSON: Excuse me. Would you permit me to finish the

question. I want to ask yo.U if your tax exempt status is revo.cable
in Massachusetts if you do. continue to. take part in politics?
MR. WELCH: Let me show you how far you are misquoting
me. We have pointed out over and over and over-and you can
go back to the Bulletins of last fall and find it spelled out time
after time-that I personally have been for Goldwater for Presi­
dent-for any great office. I have been an admirer of his for
years, and as a private citizen I still had a right to be for Gold­
water and I was, but that the Society was taking no part and
did not take any part in even the primary campaign. And after
the primary campaign we spelled out about eleven different ways
of voting and tried to spell out what each one meant and said,
"Follow your own conscience. The John Birch Society tells you

6
nothing." As far as the Society's taking a part, in the primary
campaign Mr. Wilson, so far as we could tell, two-thirds of our
members worked for Goldwater for the nomination and about
one-third for Nixon, and we sent the same material to both of
them to work on.
MR. WILSON: Under the federal tax laws is The John Birch
Society tax exempt?
MR. WELCH: It is not. We have not even applied for it.
MR. WILSON: Let me read to you a statement from a news­
paper in Santa Barbara. The Santa Barbara --

MR. WELCH: There is only one in Santa Barbara and we

know what the slant of that one is.
MR. WILSON: The Santa Barbara News-Express.
MR. WELCH: News-Press.
MR. WILSON: News-Press, that is rig·ht. It says that, "He,"
Welch, "also said that dues are whatever the member wants to
make them with a minimum of $24 per year for men and $12 for
women." "One million members," which they say is your goal,
"divided equally between men and women, would bring him $18
million a year." And the newspaper comments that that is quite
a sum to play with, without accountability. And as I understand
it, you refuse to make any accountability of the money you
receieve.
MR. WELCH: Where do you get that, Mr. Wilson?
MR. WILSON: Well --

MR. WELCH: Let me answer your question.

MR. WILSON: Are you ready to account for it now?
MR. WELCH: I am ready to account for it --

MR. WILSON: How much money did you get, and how did
you spent it?
MR. WELCH: The auditors are working right now and have
been for two or three weeks on probably the most complete audit
they have made in years, every word of which will go to every
member of our Council. We have 26 top flight Americans on
that Council, and they are informed as to everything we do,
including everything financial, and they will have the auditors'
report at the next meeting of our Council, which is in about two
and a half weeks, complete. We have told them from the begin­
ning, we do not supply financial reports to our members them­
selves, and they come in knowing that because we are bound to
have Communists within our membership. You cannot supply
complete reports without giving away too much of your informa­
tion. We are jus.t not going to do it, and we tell them so, but we
do give complete reports to the members of our Council.
MR. WILSON: What was the income of The John Birch So­
ciety in 1960?
MR. WELCH: We are not going to tell you that, Mr. Wilson.
We are not going to tell anybody except the members of our
Council and those who legally have to know it.
MR. SPIVAK: Mr. Welch, if your Society achieved its major
objectives, wouldn't you accomplish what the Soviet Union wants

7
to accomplish: Destroy NATO, the UN, weaken our defenses?
MR. WELCH: Well, Mr. Spivak --

MR. SPIVAK: Stop foreign aid, aren't all those things--­

MR. WELCH: When you convince me that the Soviet Union
wants to destroy the United Nations, then I will argue with you.
I see nothing to justify any such assumption. They proceed by
deception and every once in a while they pretend they are upset
with the United Nations in order to get the American people
more willing to accept it.
MR. SUIVAK: They don't want to destroy NATO?
MR. WELCH: They want to destroy any possible effectiveness
of NATO, which I think has been pretty well destroyed. I have
never been convinced that NATO was effective at all. But what
we are trying to do is to restore what has been lost of a constitu­
tional American republic as our founding fathers gave it to us,
and we are working towards that in every way we know how.
MR. SPIVAK: Mr. Welch, you have taken in, I think, hun­
dreds of tho.usands of dollars, and you have spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars in The John Birch Society. What would you
say you have accomplished with that expenditure and the effort
you have placed and the years you have been going-in the
direction you seek to accomplish?
MR. WELCH: I would say that perhaps the most significant
things we have accomplished are those which have brought on
the attack against us. Our people have probably made more
__

showings of that film "Operation Abolition" showing the Com­

munists already starting in their usual terroristic tactics toward
taking over this country on a small scale than all other groups
put together. I am pretty sure our people have shown more of
the film strip "Communism on the Map," which shows geograph­
ically the advance of Communism right to our shores over the
past years than all the others put together, and we have cer­
tainly in the last few months waked up hundreds of thousands
of our fellow citizens to the difference between a democracy and
a republic and to the fact that we have a republic, not a democ­
racy, and we want to keep a republic.
MR. SPIVAK: In your book, "The Life of John Birch,"
which was published in '54, you had this to. say about a dedicated
Communist, "Disguished as a patriot, he will distort the aims of
true patriots and help to ruin their careers by building up the
prestige of other traitors like himself." Couldn't you on the
basis of that statement be charged with being a Communist, since
there are so many things that the Communists want that you too
are seeking to accomplish?
MR. WELCH: I can certainly be charged, but we have tens
of thousands of very able, informed Americans who certainly
believe otherwise and are willing to support and follow me. Could
I answer one point about-of course, we are nowhere near a
million members, we are nowhere near a sizeable fraction of it,
but if we ever get that and get the whole 18 million that Mr.

8
Wilson is talking about, we will have about one-third as much to
work with as some big labor union which is fighting for the other
side.
MR. McCORMICK: Under your so-called principle of reversal,
which is that the Communists are never what they seem to be
and what they seem to be they never are, under that, couldn't
your organization be suspected of being Communist, too?
MR. WELCH: That is the question I -tn-ought I was answer­
ing. It is just the matter of the confidence you can obtain from
intelligent people.
MR. McCORMICK: Why do you think people should trust
your semi-secret organization any more than they trust any­
body else?
MR. WELCH: Ours is not semi-secret, Mr. McCormick. We
have absolutely no secrets.
MR. McCORMICK: I beg your pardon, you just told us about
some of them.
MR. WELCH: Our background, methods and purposes are all
laid out in the Blue Book of The John Birch Society, which any­
body can get for $2 from Belmont, Massachusetts, by just send­
ing for it. Our materials are all free.
Mr. Wilson was just quoting from our Bulletin for May. We
have absolutely nothing secret. We do not tell the names of our
members or their number, and I don't know of any organization
that you can name of any patriotic kind that does. There is
nothing secret about our organization.
MR. BELL: Mr. Welch, I would like to have your brief com­
ment on the April 6 statement made by Attorney General Robert
Kennedy. In speaking of the Birch Society he said, "I think
they make no contribution in my estimation to the fight against
Communism here in the United States. In fact, I think if any­
thing they are a hindrance." What is your reaction to that state­
ment by the chief legal officer of the United States government?
MR. WELCH: We disagree with him very vigorously, and I
was trying to show you some of the things I thought we were
doing. We don't object to criticism, and we are conscious
enough of the solidity of our position. We don't even object to
ridicule; we are getting some of it. We think that most of the
ridicule today stems from the arrogance of ignorance instead of
the humility of true scholarship in those who refuse to get their
opinions prefabricated.
MR. BELL: What have you done, sir, really to stop Commu­
nism, or Communist infiltration?
MR. WELCH: If showing the "Operation Abolition" film as
many thousands of times as our people have done it hasn't
helped, I don't know what would. If showing "Communism on
the Map" as many thousands of times as our people have, show­
ing them in broad perspective the Communist advance, doesn't,
I don't know what could.
MR. BROOKS: Gentlemen, I think at this point I will have to
interrupt. Our time is up. Thank you very much for being with us.

9
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