It's All a Plot

THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS by Richard Hofstadter. 315 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

The Great Conspiracy Against America first came to light in 1797, when the pulpits of New England rang with denunciations of the Illuminati, a sinister society of freethinkers who were purportedly prepared to attack the U.S. with a number of secret weapons--among them a tea that caused abortion and a "method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours." By 1835, control of the conspiracy had passed to the Pope, whose Jesuits were reported "prowling about all parts of the United States in disguise" and conjugating in clandestine convents with unnatural nuns. By 1951, according to Senator McCarthy, the perennial enemy had planted agents in the Truman Cabinet. By 1958, according fo "detailed evidence" collected by the founder of the John Birch Society, President Eisenhower had actually been converted into a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." And soon after that, still others with inside information reported that supreme command of the U.S. armed forces had secretly been transferred to a Russian colonel attached to the United Nations.

In the four long essays that make up the better part of this book, Historian Richard Hofstadter (The Age of Reform) briskly traces the history of political paranoia in the U.S., and wittily examines the political pathology that produced and sustained the legend of the Great Conspiracy. He concludes, somewhat magisterially, that the nomination of Senator Goldwater was the "triumphal moment of pseudo-conservatism in American politics," and finds that the ironic result was that Goldwater's "campaign broke the back of our postwar practical conservatism."

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