In an effort to post more often on our magazine’s website, I’ll go ahead and post the notes of Hunter’s that I found yesterday. I go through his library very, very slowly (I’ve only gone though about half of them in 25 years that I’ve lived here) and every time I find his notes in any book about any topic, I often like to share them on a public source to share the new thread of his knowledge and way of thinking that keeps me going, despite his absence. So, thank you to whatever angels guided me to the living room top shelf to find this gem yesterday.
The book by Richard Dudman, titled “Men of the Far Right” was published in 1962 by Pyramid Books is by Richard Dudman. Subtitled: “The conservatives – a fascinating comprehensive report on the new force in American life”. Richard Dudman was a journalist known for his work as a foreign correspondent covering significant events including the Vietnam War and the overthrow of Chile’s government by Pinochet in 1973. Eight years after the release of this book that Hunter made notes in, Richard would be captured by the Viet Cong and would write a book about his 40 days in their captivity.
Anyway, this post is simply to transcribe Hunter’s highlights and notes in this particular book as I attempt to post more often about life at Owl Farm again.
As Hunter often did, the inside dust jacket has Hunter’s notes and page references for those topics that he took the time to hand-write on the front cover with the page numbers.
It’s possible that Hunter read this book and made these notes before the assassination of JFK. Before that fateful day, Hunter was still intending to follow the path of novelist. Although Hunter was an excellent researcher, writer, and foreign corresponded that gave him the foundations of Political trend acumen, he planned to write novels. It was the assassination of John F. Kennedy that changed the course of his career. On that day, he declared that he would no longer be a novelist, but would do his service, as in serve his country in the best way that he knew how – as a journalist.
Despite the book being published in 1962, it’s not clear if he wrote these notes immediately after the book was published, or he wrote them after JFKs assassination. This was the way in which Hunter made notes in books from a very early age through the 1970s. Later, he he did not write the notes in the front cover as much, but did indeed read with a pen.
These earlier decades of his note-taking style paint a beautiful picture of Hunter’s education. For example, the inside cover reads:
“[page] 69 – not “democracy”?
24 – Goldwater’s appeal
72 – “little hope” in Deoc
73 – desperation for “repeal”
75 – unit-democratic
They quotes he noted are as follows:
24 “Goldwater’s appeal”– “But among a sizable number of American voters, largely the same ones who are attracted to the organizations and leaders of the far right, his [generalities amount to a virile, optimistic view of tan America that can win the cold war decisively and somehow return to a frontier life that seems in retrospect to have been a time of individual courage and self-reliance and self-confidence unmatched since.” -pg. 24
(for context, the preceding paragraph reads: “Senator J. William Fulbright, the Arkansas Democrat who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assailed Goldwater in a speech in 1961 as being no conservative at all, but a radical, who “paints a picture of virtue, morality, and conscience in the fuzziest generalities and a maze of inconsistencies. It is as appealing, and yet as unreal, as a mirage in the desert of his native state.” )
69 “not democracy?”– the passage starts off on the previous page” Welch’s book purports to be a documentation of that charge [that Birch murdered in cold blood by the Chinese communists], as well as an expose of a “cover-up” by the United States government in a policy of “appeasement” of Red China.
“It is clear [Welch wrote] that the Communists, high and low, recognized John Birch as standing for America, for Christianity, and as the very embodiment of those qualities and forces which were in their war… He was the first, or very nearly the first, casualty in American uniform in a war still being waged… with his death and in his death the battle lines were drawn, in a struggle from which either communism or Christian-style civilization must emerge with one completely triumphant and the other completely destroyed.”
Hunter’s asterisks here ,a rare star that he noted in the margin next to, and underlined “Christian-style civilization” with Hunter’s question “not democracy?” Good question. Did the Ultra right of the time view their fight as one for Christian-style civilization or of democracy.
72 – “Little hope” in Democracy- “3. The Birchers are “convinced that the communist have gone so far in penetrating American politics that there is little hope in the existing political system.”
73 – “Desperation for repeal” – Professor Westin points out hat some items on this list may be opposed by conservatives or by liberals but, that, taken together, “it adds up to a nihilist’s plea for the repeal of industrialism and the abolition of international politics.” He observes: “Such a program can be called rational or even political only by people who do not know what those words mean.”
75 – “Anti – democratic” The authoritarian character of the John Birch Society is made clear by Welch in the Blue Book. He says: “The John Birch Society is to be a monolithic body … [ it] will operate under completely authoriative control at all levels. The fear of tyrannical oppression of individuals, and other arguments against the authoritative structure in the form of government, have little bearing on the case of a voluntary association, where the authoritative power can be exercised and enforced only by persuasion. And what little validity they do have is outweighed by the advantages of firm and positive direction of the society’s energies… As I have said before, no collection of debating societies is ever going to stop the communist conspiracy from taking us over, and I have no intention of adding another frustrated group to their number.”
Here are the photos that correspond with the transcriptions:
