In 1962, some of America’s most influential conservatives met to talk about a growing threat: the rise of paranoid conspiracy theories on the right.
Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) was thinking about running for president. A mutual friend set up a meeting for Goldwater with William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the conservative National Review, and Russell Kirk, author of the 1953 book “The Conservative Mind.”
In a hotel suite in Palm Beach, Fla., Buckley and Kirk found themselves giving Goldwater advice about how to respond to the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society’s surge in popularity. The society, founded in 1958, was fiercely anti-communist — and fond of crackpot theories. Its founder, candy manufacturer Robert Welch, had accused most of the U.S. government — including former Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower — of being under secret communist control.
Although Welch had been an early donor to Buckley’s National Review in the 1950s, Buckley had come to believe that Welch’s feverish rants threatened the conservative movement’s credibility and its future.
“Buckley was beginning to worry that with the John Birch Society growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn,” John B. Judis wrote in his 1988 biography, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives.” Buckley told Goldwater, according to Judis, that the John Birch Society was a “menace” to the conservative movement.
“Kirk, unimpeded by his little professorial stutter, greeted the subject with fervor,” Buckley recalled in a 2008 article for Commentary. “The John Birch Society should be renounced by Goldwater and by everyone else — Kirk turned his eyes on me — with any influence on the conservative movement.”
But Goldwater had a problem — much like the one that Republican leaders face today, as many of their voters embrace QAnon conspiracy theories and President Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Goldwater wanted to distance himself from the conspiracy theories, but he feared alienating his base.
“Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society,” Goldwater told Buckley and Kirk. “I’m not talking about commie-haunted apple pickers or cactus drunks. I’m talking about the highest cast of men of affairs.”
After considering Goldwater’s concerns, Buckley and Kirk agreed to a compromise. They would challenge Welch without directly criticizing the John Birch Society’s members, creating an opening for Goldwater to do likewise. Gingerly at first, but more forcefully as the 1960s went on, the conservative thought leaders began to distance themselves from the Birchers’ paranoid denunciations of the U.S. government.