Welch’s ardent right-wing allegiances were firmly in line with conservative sentiments—so much so that he mounted a 1950 campaign for the lieutenant governorship of Massachusetts, a surefire stepping stone, he reasoned, to a seat in the U.S. Senate and a career on the national political stage. His stump speech was based on his recent travels to England, where he professed to behold the dystopian future of an American society already well down the path toward socialism. England, he pronounced, was mired in overregulation and profound civic resignation—a land afflicted with a “general overall lack of ambition to do anything,” and where “patriotism has ceased to exist.”
He lost the GOP primary badly to a former state treasurer and turned the bulk of his political energies going forward to grassroots organizing of the hard-core anti-Communist right. Seizing on several of Senator Joe McCarthy’s talking points—the foreign policy establishment’s alleged “loss” of China to communism in 1949; Harry Truman’s dismissal of hard-line anti-Communist General Douglas MacArthur from his post as commander of Allied troops in the Pacific during the Korean War; and the stalemated peace agreement in Korea itself—Welch formulated an explanation of virtually every world event as the handiwork of a Communist conspiracy. In 1954, he began working on a biography of the Christian missionary John Birch, slain by Communist forces in China during World War II—a killing that Welch alleged was covered up by the U.S. Department of State in order to conceal its own complicity with the rise of Communist rule in China.
Around the same time, Welch circulated an incendiary letter within the burgeoning network of far-right business conservatives, which eventually sprawled to more than 200 typewritten pages, alleging that Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was likely a willing agent of Communist subversion. Like Welch’s other speculations, the letter—later published in book form as The Politician in 1963, with its most sensational innuendos carefully excised—piled inference on inference to marshal readers to the shocking “surmise” that the sitting U.S. president was “an actual Communist agent.”
This brand of evidence-free scaremongering was entirely in line with the McCarthy inquisition. But Welch was a far more disciplined messenger and on-the-ground organizer than the drunken and voluble Tailgunner Joe ever was. McCarthy was a hair-trigger demagogue; Welch was a talented writer and ambitious thinker who could make the most unhinged sort of claim appear both copiously researched and politically urgent. What’s more, he was a respectable leader of the American establishment, having logged a long tour as an executive for the right-wing business lobby the National Association of Manufacturers. So when Welch founded the John Birch Society in 1958, he brought the anti-Communist crusade a new aura of gravitas.