BOOK RECOMMENDATION

I just finished Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm and I encourage anyone who isn't deeply familiar with right-wing politics between WW II and 1964 to read it. Some of the names, like Melvin Laird, will be familiar to people who started keeping track of politics in the late 60s and others, like Clarence Manion, will be new to most people under 50.

Manion was New Dealer who became an anti-interventionist in 1940 and later came to detest almost everything FDR had done. He later joined Sen.Taft in objecting to foreign treaties like NATO. Manion favored the strongest version of the proposed Bricker Amendment, which would require a referendum in all 48 states (this was 1953) before any foreign treaty could go into effect.

He worked briefly for the Eisenhower Administration until Ike finally caught on that he was a freakshow. After his dismissal, Mannion claimed that "some of the left wing Communists, who have had an unfortunate effectiveness in this Administration" told him he was fired for supporting the amendment.

Like other conservatives at the time, he bemoaned the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision and in 1954 began a new group, For America, which advocated isolationism and the abolition of the Federal income tax. He later tried to organize a movement to have Orville Faubus elected President by creating an electoral college deadlock, thus forcing the House of Representatives to decide.

Manion joined the governing council of the John Birch Society in the late 50s.