Word: mcmanus
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...want to know the truth, that's why we're so controversial," says the Society's public relations director, John F. McManus, in his Belmont office...
Regardless of political stance, however, most observers agree that the Society--which reached its height in the mid-'60s--is now more an interesting relic than a strong political force. McManus likes to say that the organization was partly responsible for the nation's electoral surge to the right in 1980, but most analysts of popular opinion doubt that...
...McManus says repeatedly that the John Birch Society has been "victimized" by that and other incidents. That may be so. A negative media blitz against the Society escalated just after it began to establish a sense of legitimacy the public had never before allowed. Since then, the Society has tried to rebuild itself by softening some of its earlier stances while still maintaining that a decentralized powerless national government will cure society's ills...
Because of its newer emphasis on purely political issues, McManus can not understand why the public still associates the Society with book burning. "We've been victimized by book burning," he explains. "I suppose some books deserved to be burned, but it's not our business to go about burning them. It hasn't been done in any organized fashion. It's not a program of ours. Our program is for a better world...
...Robert Welch decided to form an information service for the American people. John Birch is an educational institution," McManus says. "We preach less government, more responsibility and, with God's help, a better world to live in. We are therefore opposed to communism, but we are just as much opposed to collectivism." McManus defines collectivism to be "big government, small people...socialism...