Posted by:
jw the inquizzinator
(
)
Date: October 24, 2010 06:15PM
For those who haven't enjoyed this article yet...
I figured someone would actually do the research to put all this together...very interesting read
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/18/101018fa_fact_wilentz?currentPage=allOne snippet to tease you with:
"...Beck’s version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch....
...Still, the most outlandish of the era’s right-wing anti-Communists was not Welch but Willard Cleon Skousen. A transplanted Canadian who served as a Mormon missionary in his teens, Skousen was considered so radical in the early nineteen-sixties that even J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. watched him closely; one 1962 memo in his extensive F.B.I. file noted that “during the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.” Skousen was himself employed by the F.B.I., from 1935 until 1951, much of that time as a special agent working chiefly in administration. These desk jobs, he claimed implausibly, gave him access to confidential domestic intelligence about Communism. Skousen also maintained that he had served as Hoover’s administrative assistant; Hoover informed inquirers that there was no such position.
Skousen taught for years in the speech and religion departments at Brigham Young University, interrupted by a stint, from 1956 to 1960, as the police chief of Salt Lake City. His time in office was contentious, and after he raided a friendly card game attended by the city’s right-wing mayor, J. Bracken Lee, he was promptly fired. Lee called Skousen “a master of half truths” and said that he ran the police department “like a Gestapo”; Skousen’s supporters placed burning crosses on the Mayor’s lawn...."