The Anarchist and the Republican
The man on the motorcycle was an anarchist, a lawbreaker, a guy the Black Panthers could turn to when their leader needed transportation; his FBI file fretted that he might “participate in violent activities, such as bombings, should the right opportunity present itself.” He was in Vermont to speak at a hippie college, but he took a detour to visit someone else in a mountainside cabin about 40 miles away.
It was the middle of the 1970s. The man in that cabin was a longtime Republican who had served in the state Legislature. He used to work for Richard Nixon, and he would soon write radio scripts for Ronald Reagan. He and the anarchist had never met before.
They chatted in the kitchen for hours, enjoying each other’s company. After all, they agreed about a lot.
The anarchist was named Karl Hess, and—let’s get this out of the way quickly—he was not in fact prone to planning bombings. (The surveillance state’s files on him got some other things wrong as well, including his wife’s name and the color of his eyes.) The Republican was named John McClaughry, and—let’s get this out of the way too—his work for Nixon had not made him a Nixon fan.
Each man’s career looked like an inverted version of the other’s. In 1964, Hess had been a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, an Arizona senator with a hard-right reputation who had captured the GOP’s presidential nomination. McClaughry had been among the moderates who opposed Goldwater, and he had helped shape a speech for Michigan Gov. George Romney when that liberal-leaning Republican was thinking of entering the race. Since then, Hess had shifted to the “left”: turning against the war machine, learning to love civil disobedience, developing a distrust for corporate America. McClaughry had moved to the “right,” battling land use planners and devising Republican alternatives to Great Society programs.
Yet each had arrived at a similar distrust of the state and other centralized institutions. Both had been involved with the black power and neighborhood power movements, and both liked it when workers owned and managed their own workplaces. And both loved technologies that transfer power from institutions to individuals. It’s just that one worked within the system and the other ever further from it—two paths that offer lessons not just in libertarian and decentralist ideas but in the ways people pursue them.
‘To an Untutored Youth, It Was Pretty Persuasive’
Hess’ media career began in 1938, when the 15-year-old son of a divorced D.C. switchboard operator decided he’d had enough of classrooms. So he registered at every high school in town and then told each one he was transferring. Having trapped the truancy officers in a bureaucratic strange loop, he went to work for a radio station and a series of local newspapers.
Reading Hess’ earliest articles, you can catch a hint here and there of the anarchistic attitudes he’d be known for later. In a 1944 report on a jailbreak, he seemed to take delight in the details of the prisoners’ escape, saving his disapproving tone for the marshals “with a tenacious passion for anonymity” who threatened to arrest any journalists who photographed the scene. A year later, he set out to see which businesses he could bribe into ignoring wartime rationing rules—not to expose them (he didn’t identify anyone) but to file a fun dispatch.
But he was still figuring out his politics. After youthful flirtations with the far right and far left, Hess settled into a long-term relationship with the GOP, taking a strong interest in the fight against communism. While there’s an obvious intersection between anti-communism and libertarianism, his anti-communist impulses sometimes overpowered his libertarian ones. When the Coast Guard barred Communists from working as radio officers on privately owned merchant vessels, Hess sided with the government, arguing in a 1949 piece for Pathfinder that the risk of “mutiny or sabotage” meant the feds should insert themselves into these hiring decisions.
At times Hess’ anti-communism pulled him into potentially disreputable territories. He cranked out speeches for Sen. Joe McCarthy, the red-hunting Republican from Wisconsin, and he wrote for Counterattack, a sort of blacklister’s newsletter. He helped run arms to non-Marxist rebels fighting Fulgencio Batista’s Cuban dictatorship. (“I knew when I was very young that he had this connection to Cuba,” recalls his older son, Karl Jr., “because we had a garage full of Browning machine guns.”) He tried to convince the mobster Frank Costello to finance a plot to kidnap and interrogate Soviet couriers.
None of which kept Hess from rising through the ranks of respectable Republicanism. He was the primary author of two GOP platforms. He ghostwrote for future presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He worked at the American Enterprise Institute, where he did research for a host of Republican politicians and a few Democrats too, including future Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He was a well-respected man living a comfortable suburban life—you might even call it normal, if you overlooked those Brownings in the garage.
McClaughry didn’t have a standard two-parent upbringing either. Born in Detroit in 1937, he was raised mostly by his grandmothers, spending his summers in Pontiac, Michigan, and the rest of the year in Paris, Illinois. (His Pontiac guardian was much stricter, prompting him to joke later that he would spend nine months with Jesus and three with Jehovah.) He didn’t pay much attention to affairs of state until he got drawn into an attempt to draft Adlai Stevenson as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1960. When the party picked John F. Kennedy instead, McClaughry opted not to join the Young Democrats—even then, with his worldview not fully formed, he “didn’t see myself as a Democrat because of too much statism”—but he did somehow end up, at age 23, as chair of East Bay Senior Citizens for Kennedy-Johnson. Evidently the party was short on senior citizen talent.
The young McClaughry was still figuring out his political views—he even had a brief dalliance with the World Federalists—but a 1960 book called Decisions for a Better America drew him into the GOP. A manifesto for moderate Republicans, the volume spoke in broad terms about avoiding government intrusion and in specific terms about the many government activities its authors nonetheless favored. The committee that composed it was chaired by Charles Percy, the president of an Illinois camera company. “In retrospect, maybe it wasn’t all that good,” McClaughry recalls. “But to an untutored youth, it was pretty persuasive.”
Increasingly active in Republican politics, McClaughry joined Vermont Sen. Winston Prouty’s staff in 1964. He was briefly involved with New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign during the ’64 primaries, although he didn’t like most of Rockefeller’s platform, because the main alternative—Goldwater—talked about nuclear weapons in a way that McClaughry thought reckless. When Percy ran for Senate in 1966, McClaughry worked for the campaign and then for the new senator’s staff.
But he wasn’t some buttoned-down D.C. drone. He amused himself by writing politicians absurdist crank letters under assumed names. He had a hobby of hopping freight trains, a pastime that acquired a Coen brothers quality the day a brakeman joined him in the caboose; McClaughry expected to be kicked off, but the fellow instead insisted they sing old minstrel songs together. He built a cabin in the Vermont woods with no plumbing or electricity, then had a more comfortable home erected on the property; in 1967 he became town moderator of Kirby, and he still chairs his community’s annual meetings today. He read an assortment of decentralists, and he spent time thinking about ways to devolve power to civil society. That, he found, was not at the top of the Senate agenda.
‘You’re Not the Only Libertarian on Earth’
Hess’ exit from conventional politics began on Election Day 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson dealt Goldwater one of the most crushing defeats in American political history. Over the course of the year, a host of pundits had denounced Hess’ boss as a dangerous extremist. More than 1,000 psychiatrists signed a statement declaring him psychologically unfit. A TV ad suggested he might launch a nuclear war. At the University of Maryland, a band of anonymous students dressed in black pajamas snuck out to alter a campaign billboard in the middle of the night, giving Goldwater a Hitler mustache and replacing his slogan—”In your heart you know he’s right”—with “In your head you know he’s wrong.” Come November, he carried only six states.
With defeat came exile. At the Republican National Committee, Hess later recalled, “Anyone retaining an open loyalty to Goldwater and unwilling virtually to denounce him was on the outside.” There was still work: When the Los Angeles Times gave Goldwater a column, for example, he hired Hess to write it for him. But there was less work.
Hess started riding a motorcycle in his spare time. This was not yet a trendy thing to do, and some of the neighbors side-eyed him. After a couple of wrecks, he started working with a welder’s torch, at first just to fix his bike but then with the notion that it might be another source of income. He and a biker pal put up a shingle as K-D Welding, and soon Hess was simultaneously a self-employed blue-collar worker and one of Goldwater’s favorite ghostwriters. He had a side career as an artist too, welding abstract metal sculptures in his bathtub.
A transformation had begun. Even before ’64 Hess had been a fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, famous for her hymns to capitalism and rationalism, but by 1967 he was telling a reporter that he reread Atlas Shrugged “every couple of months.” Rather than pushing his politics to the right, this made him reconsider his alliances. In a letter to Goldwater, he distinguished “the status quo, mystically religious, elite types such as Bill Buckley” from folks like the senator, who had a “free-wheeling, very non-stuffy, very radical, if you will, open market society and open-mind philosophy.”
As he was drawing distinctions within the right, Hess came into contact with the left. The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), run by former Kennedy staffers who had grown more radical, reached out to him after the election. The group’s founders, Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, were intrigued by elements of the Goldwater campaign—the senator’s skepticism about executive power, his opposition to conscription, the number of large corporations that had been against him—and asked Hess to conduct a seminar. He gave his talk, and then he kept coming back to the institute, both to speak and to listen. He worked with leftists on one of the central libertarian issues of the day, serving alongside the socialist icon Norman Thomas on the anti-draft Council for a Voluntary Military. He met some of the kids who had vandalized that Goldwater billboard, members of a radical group called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He told them he thought the prank was clever.
He was becoming more bohemian too. He got into the radical satire magazine The Realist and the iconoclastic comedian Lenny Bruce. (That’s something else Hess and McClaughry had in common: Both wrote fan letters to The Realist.) Soon he was growing his hair, living on a houseboat, dabbling in psychedelics, and not always wearing clothes.
In 1968 the transformation shifted into overdrive. That spring Hess published several essays asking conservatives not to turn up their noses at civil disobedience. In the summer he befriended the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard, who had taken to arguing that libertarians weren’t really right-wing and should b
Article from Reason.com
The Reason Magazine website is a go-to destination for libertarians seeking cogent analysis, investigative reporting, and thought-provoking commentary. Championing the principles of individual freedom, limited government, and free markets, the site offers a diverse range of articles, videos, and podcasts that challenge conventional wisdom and advocate for libertarian solutions. Whether you’re interested in politics, culture, or technology, Reason provides a unique lens that prioritizes liberty and rational discourse. It’s an essential resource for those who value critical thinking and nuanced debate in the pursuit of a freer society.
