6

“IT’S EASY TO REMEMBER how old I am,” Robert Welch, tall, balding, animated, had begun his historic seminar in Indianapolis on December 8, 1958. “I was born minutes before the twentieth century came along.” Welch liked to make his points expansively, as his listeners had abundantly discovered by the end of the second day, when he tied it all together and said that he was founding an organization which he would call the John Birch Society.

True to form, he didn’t let it go with the simple “born minutes before the twentieth century.” He tied it down exactly: the assembly learned that it had been on the first day of December, a Friday, “and when the century actually arrived, I was all of thirty days old.” After that chronological fix, he proceeded with a little jollity, which appealed to Robert Welch and to most of his listeners.

But the levities were infrequent. Mostly there were long stretches of analysis and cadenzas of galvanizing, heroic rhetoric.

“I guess I was a prodigy of sorts.” He guarded immediately against the peril of self-praise with a qualifier: “It was my mother, Lina, who chased after me. Maybe that’s not the right word to use, chased after me. Because I was only two years old when she taught me to read. I could read at that age faster than I could walk or run!”

 

 

Twenty years ago—it was easy to do the arithmetic: in 1938, when he was thirty-eight—his pace, when he was addressing an assembly, had been different. He had become accustomed to press briefings, which he gave regularly in Washington and occasionally in other cities. After he began his public career as chairman of the education committee of the National Association of Manufacturers, typically there would be press kits to hand out at press conferences. His answers were succinct, though not his expositions. When his designation as education chairman had been announced in Washington, a press conference had been called. Three reporters showed up. A weathery lady (“Miss Greer”) had covered the NAM for the Associated Press for years and was renowned for her ability to take notes even as her eyes focused unremittingly on the speaker. She asked the first question. “Mr. Welch, what are your qualifications for serving as chairman of the NAM’s education committee?”

Welch permitted himself a smile. A very brief smile—he would not wish to appear unctuous.

“I am a graduate of the University of North Carolina.” He paused. “I was sixteen years old when I graduated.”

That revelation got raised eyebrows and a nod of appreciation. And then the question, Was that the end of his academic training?

“Actually, no. At seventeen I entered the United States Naval Academy. I was seventeen in 1917.” He used that mnemonic device every time he reasonably could.

“So you graduated from Annapolis?”

“Actually, no. In 1919, after two years, I pulled out.”

“Mr. Welch, excuse me,” the first questioner said, “but we have to ask these questions. Did you fall behind in your academic work?”

“I was number four in a class of about a thousand cadets.”

“Why did you pull out?”

“The war was over. I decided to go to law school. The Harvard Law School.”

The president of the National Association of Manufacturers, the silver-haired Eliot Parsons, smiled with satisfaction at the progressive display of the credentials of his education chairman.

“So you graduated from the law school. Did you go on to practice law?”

“No. I pulled out of law school halfway through my third year—”

“I guess I’m not going to ask you whether you pulled out for academic reasons.” Louella Greer was in the inquisitorial mode.

Robert Welch took the bait. A little smile on his face, he said, “I wanted to start a company to sell fudge. I had a recipe.”

Neither of the two reporters asked what the recipe was, though one contributed, mechanically, “Yes. Your candy company.”

“No, my brother’s, actually. I folded my firm and joined his. The James O. Welch Company.”

“Successful?”

“Yes.” This time Welch’s smile was broad.

President Parsons raised his hand and said he thought it appropriate now for the new education chairman to say a word or two about what he hoped to do in the service of education.

Robert Welch started in. He spoke mostly from memory and with considerable fluency. His approach was didactic, but not pedantic. Welch had never taught school and hadn’t picked up the habit of talking like teachers on duty. He was the businessman briefing business associates, merchandisers, colleagues. He wanted to tell a story, and this required that he hold the attention of those he was addressing. There was always a great deal on Welch’s mind, and education was a foremost concern.

He had spoken twenty-one minutes on the shortcomings of public education when, slightly lowering her head to minimize disruption, Miss Greer gathered her notes, rose, and edged out of the room, leaving Welch talking to a dozen members of the staff of the NAM and the single remaining reporter.

He stressed his belief that education was the key to the success of the whole American proposition, that students needed not only to learn to read and write but to understand the historical basis of American ideals.

Robert Welch didn’t reveal to the press that day, decades ago, the dark thoughts and premonitions that fermented in his mind. Although many businessmen affiliated with the National Association of Manufacturers were blunt in their privately expressed disapproval of the policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the rule at the NAM was that no official should take a partisan position at any public gathering. On legislation, yes, they were free to question, even to denounce, legislative initiatives or bills, but no adverse comments were to be made about government officials. The taboo on criticizing the president himself was especially stressed, with war in Europe threatening.

So Welch mostly kept it to himself, but what he didn’t say to his education-minded audiences was written out on his typewriter vociferously, as he stayed home in Belmont, by Boston, with his wife and two children. He gave time to the pursuit of mathematics and the appreciation of poetry, and he persevered with his intensive general reading. He would, one day, have accumulated a personal library of five thousand books, every one of which he had read.

When war came, he went to an intelligence military unit in the U.S. theater. Soon after his discharge he traveled to Great Britain, specifically intending to survey the effects of two years of socialism under the postwar government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee. As he toured Britain his determination hardened: he would devote more of his time to antisocialist activity, now brilliantly menacing as the Communists tightened their grip on Eastern Europe. It was perhaps his addiction to mathematics and logic that prompted him, with increasing insistence, to search out the causes of current problems. If A, then B was a logical sequence. It meant that if Situation A exists, then derivative Situation B must also exist. If all men die, then Jones will one day die. Well then, if America is the land of the brave and the free, why doesn’t America pursue policies that enhance freedom and reward bravery? How was it possible to account for the world he observed, in 1946? We had fought a great war to ensure sovereignty for Poland, and Poland was now a Soviet satellite. How was it possible that with the military advantages we enjoyed, the Soviet army should have been the first to reach Berlin? And having reached Berlin, the Soviet Union would, of course, make yet another satellite of the part of Germany over which its armies held sway.

His curiosity in the search of a cause-for-it-all continued, and his indignation and frustration increased. And then one day in June 1950, President Truman led us into war in Korea. A war, as Welch saw it, precipitated by the disastrous policies of Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Gooderham Acheson. We engaged in the military contest against a Communist force under the command of an American general whose skills and tenacity were unequaled. So? President Truman proceeded to win the war? No. He proceeded to fire General MacArthur.

The cordite in Robert Welch’s mind burst into flames. He collected his thoughts into a massive letter, which he distributed to friends. A copy of it was spotted by Henry Regnery, whose publishing firm in Chicago brought the letter out as a book in 1952, with the title May God Forgive Us. The closing paragraph was 200-proof Welch, the toughness, the unsparing postulation of cause and effect, the fire and the thunder of exhortation. People read the words, and now the little group in Indianapolis would hear him pronounce them:

For the pusillanimous part that we have played in all this spreading horror; for our indifference to the grief of others; for our apathy to the crimes we saw and our blindness to those we should have seen; for our gullibility in the acceptance of veneered treason and our easy forgetfulness even when the veneer has been rubbed off; for all our witting and unwitting help to the vicious savages of the Kremlin and to their subordinate savages everywhere, may God—and our fellow men—some day forgive us!