CONFESSIONS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000500180011-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 29, 2000
• Sequence Number: 11
• Publication Date: June 19, 1968
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Approved For Release 2001 /,93IO7:a CIAARDP91-0
STATINTL
r - r--' WENTY YEARS AGO I Was an extreme right-wing
Republican, a young and lone "Neanderthal" (as the
liberals used to call us) who believed, as one friend
-LL pungently put it. that "Senator Taft had sold out to
the socialists." Today, I am most Iikely to be called an extreme
leftist, since I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, de-
nounce U.S. imperialism, advocate Black Power and have
just joined the new Peace and Freedom Party. And yet my
basic political views have not changed by a single iota in
these two decades!
It is obvious that something is very wrong with the old
labels, with the categories of "left" and "right," and with the
ways in which we customarily apply these categories to Amer-
ican political life. My personal odyssey is unimportant; the
important point is that if I can move from "extreme right" to
"extreme left" merely by standing in one place, drastic though
unrecognized changes must have taken place throughout the
American poiu cal spectrum over the last generation.
I joined the right-wing movement-to give a formal name
to a very loose and informal set of associations-as a young
graduate student shortly after the end of World War 11. There
was no question as to where the intellectual right of that day
stood on militarism and conscription: it opposed them as
instruments of mass slavery and mass murder. Conscription,
indeed, was thought far worse than other forms of statist
controls and incursions, for while these only appropriated part
of the individual's property, the draft, like slavery, took his
most precious possession: his own person. Day after day the
veteran publicist John T. Flynn-once praised as a liberal and
then condemned as a reactionary, with little or no change in
his views-inveighed implacably in print and over the radio
against militarism and the draft. Even the Wall Street news-
paper, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, published a
lengthy attack on the idea of conscription.
All of our political positions, from the free market in
economics to opposing war and militarism, stemmed from
our root belief in individual liberty and our opposition to the
state. Simplistically, we adopted the standard view of the
political spectrum: "left" meant socialism, or total power
of the state; the further "right" one went the less government
one favored. Hence, we called ourselves "extreme rightists."
Originally, our historical heroes were such men as Jefferson,
Paine, Cobden, Bright and Spencer; but as our views became
purer and more consistent, we eagerly embraced such near-
anarchists as the voluntarist, Auberon Herbert, and the Amer-
ican individualist-anarchists, Lysander Spooner and Benjamin
R. Tucker. One of our great intellectual heroes was Henry
David Thoreau, and his essay, "Civil Disobedience," was
one of our guiding stars. Rightswing theorist Frank Chodorov
devoted an entire issue of his monthly, Analysis, to an
appreciation of Thoreau.
In our relation to the remainder of the American political
scene, we of course recognized that the extreme right of the
Republican Party was not made up of individualist anti-statists,
but they were close enough to our position to make us feel part
of a quasi-libertarian united front. Enough of our views were
present among the extreme members of the Taft wing of the
Republican Party (much more so than in Taft himself, who
was among the most liberal of that wing), and in such organs as
the Chicago Tribune, to make us feel quite comfortable with
this kind of alliance.
HAT IS MORE, the right-wing Republicans were
major opponents of the Cold War. Valiantly, the
extreme rightist Republicans, who were par-
ticularly strong, in the House, battled conscrip-
tion, NATO and the Truman Doctrine. Consider, for example,
Omaha's Representative Howard Buffett, Senator Taft's
midwestern campaign manager in 1952. He was one of the
most extreme of the extremists, once described by The Nation
as "an able young man whose ideas have tragically fossilized."
I came to know Buffett as a genuine and thoughtful liber-
tarian. Attacking the Truman Doctrine on the floor of Con-
gress, he declared: "Even if it were desirable, America is
not strong enough to police the world by military force. If
that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced
by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot
be exported to other lands by dollars and guns."
Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP91-00901 R000500180011-5
by Murray N. Rothbard