Posted by:
steve benson
(
)
Date: May 06, 2011 02:54PM
Evidence for that includes the following:
--Reed helped write ETB's speech, "Fourteen Fundamentals of Following the Prophet," in which ETB declared that God's Mormon prophet, seer and revelator had the power and authority to address any and all political issues--and who, in that process, was not required to preface his "prophetic" views with "thus saith the Lord" in order for them to carry official doctrinal weight. The controversy sparked by that speech resulted in the Mormon Church putting official distance between the speech and the institution of the Church.
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--Reed's wife, May Hinckley, provided the resources for and wrote another of ETB's famous sermons, "Beware of Pride," which was largely cribbed from the writings of Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, as found in Lewis's book, "Mere Christianity." May as the source of that sermon was directly confirmed to me by a member of the Benson family who was in a position to know. May later complained to me that all of her research on the topic of pride (about which she felt strongly and which she had eventually planned to publish in a book of her own) was taken by the Mormon Church for incorporation into ETB's "Pride" sermon. (The fact that she essentially wrote that sermon, however, was something I learned from another Benson source close to Reed and May).
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--Reed was a high-level official in the John Birch Society (who opened its Washington, D.C. chapter in the early 1960s). Reed espoused the view that Dwight Eisenhower (under whom my grandfather served as Secretary of Agriculture from 1952-60) was a least a dupe of the Communist's international conspiracy to control the world and perhaps, even worse, a knowing Communist agent in that conspiracy (This was a view strongly expressed by the JBS's founder Robert Welch, who my grandfather greatly admired).
Reed provided constant Bircher fodder, reading material, magazine subscriptions and books to my grandfather which premiered the Red Scare mindset, including the poisonous notion that the American Civil Rights movement was funded, supported and orchestrated by Kremlin-based Soviets--and that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was supposedly a tool of the Russian Communists to incite a nation-destroying race war within the borders of the United States. My grandfather's blatantly racist, anti-Black views reflected those found in JBS literature.
My grandfather, in personal correspondence to me, declared that, outside the Mormon Church, the JBS was the greatest tool fighting Communism in the world today.
Reed was part of the JBS move to honor ETB at a national JBS "God, Family and Country" rally, held in Boston in the early 1970s (As a teenager, I was invited to drive back to Boston with Reed and his family for that event).
Efforts were made (with ETB's blessing) to get Mormon Church President David O. McKay featured on the cover of the JBS's flagship magazine, "American Opinion," but were canceled when McKay found out and strongly objected.
ETB also claimed publicly that the Mormon Church supported the JBS, which greatly upset then-First Presidency counselor to McKay, Hugh B. Brown, and led to ETB retracting his claim.
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--Reed was a close, personal political confidant of ETB (much like Roy Cohn was to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare era of the 1950s).
Reed, in fact, accompanied ETB to Montgomery, Alabama in 1968 where, in the state mansion of then-Alabama governor George Wallace (an avowed segregationist and White supremacist), Wallace tried to persuade ETB to join him (Wallace) on the 1968 presidential ticket of Wallace's states'-rights American Party movement as his vice-presidential nominee. My grandfather (under Reed's influence, no doubt) was quite interested in the offer and only turned it down after then-LDS Church president McKay rejected a personal plea to McKay from Wallace asking McKay to allow ETB to join the ticket.
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Reed Amussen Benson--first child and oldest son of Ezra Taft Benson (whose first name eventually became my middle one, since he and I were born on the same day, January 2nd) had a profound and lasting influence on the life, times and political mind of his father, Ezra Taft Benson.
(Being born and raised in Mormon-populated, poliically conservative, overwhelmingly White and socially sequestered rural southern Idaho also didn't help, I'm sure).
Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 05/07/2011 05:01AM by steve benson.