Nicole Hemmer looks back at three political paperbacks released in the spring of 1964 that sold an astonishing 16 million copies between them in just six months – a publishing phenomenon she calls the “leading edge of conservative media’s first presidential campaign”:
Appearing in rapid succession, the books startled observers with their dark and conspiratorial interpretation of American history. In None Dare Call It Treason, John Stormer spun a tale of internal subversion and weak-willed foreign policy that marked “America’s retreat from victory” in the Cold War. “Every communist country in the world literally has a ‘Made in the USA’ stamp on it,” he wrote. Phyllis Schlafly, author of A Choice Not an Echo, accused “a few secret kingmakers” in the Republican Party of conspiring to keep conservatives out of power. J. Evetts Haley’s A Texan Looks at Lyndon served up 200 pages of greased palms, stolen elections, and suspicious deaths to argue that President Johnson was better suited to the penitentiary than the presidency.
Haley’s claims rivaled the darkest and most bizarre Clinton conspiracies.
The author, a Texas cowman, called Johnson an “inordinately vain, egotistical, ambitious extrovert” and claimed Lady Bird Johnson mirrored “Lady Macbeth’s consuming ambition for the growth of her husband’s power.” Of the Kennedy assassination he wrote, “What a strange coincidence.”
These “hatchets with soft cover sheaths,” as the Chicago Tribune characterized them, owed their success to the conservative movement’s innate populism and its institutional architecture. Conservatives, like most populists, harbored deep suspicions of institutions not under their control, particularly the media and the Republican Party. If the newsmen of the Washington Post and the grandees of the GOP were left to shape the campaign narrative, the right believed, Goldwater’s campaign would be over before it began. So conservatives used their own media to craft an alternative campaign unmediated by outside institutions.
The Dish 