The Resistance to Ike and the John Birch Society

William F. Buckley was resistant to Eisenhower for all the reasons I just laid out. He is a crusader for conservatism against Ike and against the liberals in the Democratic Party. Later toward the end of the decade, the John Birch Society comes into being. It is anti-communist, shares some of the views of the Buckley conservatives. But its leader, Robert Welch, is a conspiracy theorist. And so much of the history of the conservative movement in the early 1960s was a battle between Buckley who wanted to purge American conservatism of all those elements that kind of delegitimized it.

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