W. Cleon Skousen Is Asked to Write The Naked Communist
W. Cleon Skousen Is Asked to Write The Naked Communist. Written in November, 1998 by Earl Taylor, Jr. Also including the words of W. Cleon Skousen.
Dear Friends,
An amazing admission was made last April 18th in the Arts and Ideas Section of The New York Times. The writer, Patricia Cohen, said that a whole section was missing from American history books. Under the title, “Leftist Scholars Look Right At Last, And Find A History”, Ms. Cohen says historians have all but ignored modern American conservatism, calling it something of an “orphan in historical scholarship”.
But now, says Ms. Cohen, researchers (mostly liberal ones because there just aren’t any credible conservative researchers she says) are trying to find answers to a puzzling question – What made Ronald Reagan so popular? As they search and research, they have finally come up with some discoveries which are “spelling out how a set of ideas [conservatism] that was soundly repudiated 35 years ago is today front and center in American life.” And what was responsible for this whole chapter of American History heretofore ignored that eventually catapulted Ronald Reagan into the Presidency? It was that “mothers, dentists, businessmen and arms industry engineers exchanged newsletters and books like The Naked Communist…”
While there are other books written on the subject of Communism, Dr. Skousen’s book is the only one mentioned as the one book which seemed to have such a dramatic effect on American thinking. Today we see the evil doctrines exposed in this book having a firm grip on nearly the entire world. Because it contains some marvelous answers to help us combat this thinking, it is worth knowing what motivated Dr. Skousen to author both The Naked Communist and The Naked Capitalist. The following are his accounts:
W. Cleon Skousen Is Asked to Write The Naked Communist.
Shortly after we moved to Utah in 1952 and joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, I was asked to give talks on the threat of Communism as I encountered it in the FBI. There were two of us who specialized in this subject and we were the only ones allowed to speak on Communism in case Mr. Hoover could not take the talks himself.
As time went by I noticed that nearly every time the newspapers advertised that I would speak on Communism in Salt Lake City, David O. McKay would be in the audience. In due time he wrote to Ernest L. Wilkinson, the BYU president, and suggested that a text on Communism should be written by the heads of departments at BYU with myself serving as chairman of the committee.
We held a few meetings but Dr. Richard D. Poll of the History Department as well as the Dean of Economics and several other heads of departments seemed to know nothing about the core problem. They were not reading the bi-partisan reports of the Congressional hearings and they had not studied Marxist philosophy and tactics sufficiently to understand the reports published by these committees.
Finally the members of the committee recommended to President Wilkinson that I be given the assignment of researching and writing the book so I didn’t have to spend all the time in our meetings trying to explain to them what the latest Communist developments were. That’s how I got the assignment to write the text on Communism.
About two years later, after the text was finished, I sent it to several people who had spent years studying Communism and asked for their suggestions. They sent back warm commendations but very few suggestions. I then took the manuscript to President Wilkinson and learned to my amazement that the faculty would not support him in having a text on Communism published by the University. They suggested that I publish it. Of course, I had no money to do that since I had taken quite a severe cut in salary to accept my position at the Y.
Nevertheless, President McKay told me to go ahead and he would back me up. However, a series of unexpected financial blessings came to us so I was able to print 5,000 copies without asking him for help. The art work for the book was done by the well-known artist and friend, Arnold Friberg, while the layout and editing was done by another good friend, Keith Eddington, who also became a well-known artist and editor. Thomas S. Monson was in charge of Publisher’s Press and President McKay encouraged him to go ahead and print the book. To this day, he continually reminds me that he printed my first national best-seller.
However, in the midst of all this, I had been drafted to serve as chief of police in Salt Lake City, and at the October 1959 general conference President McKay got up and announced that he wanted every member and others to “read Chief Skousen’s new book on Communism.” That got us off to a good start. Then the vice president of the World Publishers asked for a contract to make them the distributor of the book. I was delighted and sent them what remained of the first edition. But nothing happened. I had an agent in New York who told me he thought the president of the World Publishers was very pro-Communist and had bought the distribution rights to bury the book. I called their warehouse in San Francisco and also New York and was told “the book is out of print and will not be republished.”
The next time I was in New York I went to their main office and talked to the vice president who had signed the distribution contract. He was very drunk but friendly. When I accused him of trying to bury this book he said, “Yeh, the old man doesn’t like that book.” I then said, “Well I would like to have the books for friends and those who hear my lectures so why don’t you let me buy the books back and tear up the contract.” To my amazement, he agreed and had the books all shipped to Salt Lake. His boss was in Europe at the time and as soon as he got back and found out what had happened, he fired the vice president.
But now I had the books to fill orders from people who had heard President McKay’s talk at conference and by the time we had run out of the first edition I had enough money to print the second.
Before long we were printing in lots of 10,000. By 1961 it had hit the best seller list and eventually The Naked Communist went to over a million copies counting both hard and soft back.
The Surprising Public Response To The Naked Communist
There was nothing about The Naked Communist that appealed to the liberal press. Look Magazine for March 13, 1962, said the popular reception of this book was “fabulous because [it] was never reviewed by the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune or the Saturday Review, the three musts in the field,” yet it was selling “1,000 copies a day and is now in its 11th printing.”
As I assembled over a hundred samples of the letters and reviews from all over the country, it is interesting that the principal attraction of the book was the fact that it was comprehensive, carefully documented and easy to understand.
It was equally interesting that the liberals who attempted to discredit the contents of the book never found factual errors, misrepresentations, or false conclusions which they could refute with documentation. Instead they resorted to ad hominem attacks. Seldom would they employ respectable terms such as “conservative,” “constitutional fundamentalism,” or even “traditionalist.” Always it was “extremist,” “ultra right,” “radical” or something even less complimentary.
I think the element of time has vindicated all the major premises of the book both as to the vicious and ominous nature of Marxist Communism as well as the suggested solutions which could have saved several million lives and oceans of human suffering.
W. Cleon Skousen Writes The Naked Capitalist
This reviewer had also observed a number of strange developments which seemed to point to a conspiratorial control center higher and stronger than either Moscow or Peiping. For example, when Harry Dexter White (Under-Secretary of the U.S. Treasury during World War II) was discovered by the FBI to be a Soviet agent, the White House was immediately informed. But instead of being fired or arrested, Harry Dexter White was appointed as the new Executive Director of the U.S. Mission to the International Monetary Fund of the United Nations. He was also given a substantial increase in salary. J. Edgar Hoover was amazed. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr. stated publicly that President Truman knew White was a Soviet spy when he made the appointment.
Why would men in charge of the world’s massive financial problems want an exposed Soviet agent such as Harry Dexter White to occupy such a highly important position in the World Bank? And why in the name of common sense would the President of the United States approve of such a thing? I heard both Congressmen and intelligence officers quizzically exclaiming, “What’s going on?”
It was not long after this that the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board began advocating economic aid and comfort to Communist China. His speech was all the more shocking because the American people had just been jolted by a Congressional hearing in which it had been shown with sworn testimony that the U.S. State Department had either recklessly allowed or deliberately propelled six hundred million Chinese allies into the grip of the Communist Chinese leaders. Nevertheless, here was this American capitalist (and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board) telling a large meeting (where the reviewer was present) that the United States should immediately undertake extensive trade with Red China. Said he, “We never fight the people we trade with.” I thought to myself, “Well, we certainly had to fight Japan in spite of all the oil and scrap iron we sold her just before World War II.” It did not seem possible that this famous international banker would have forgotten such an elementary lesson so quickly.
A couple of years later, while visiting Central and South America, I noticed that certain well-known American banks were extremely powerful in controlling the politics and economic affairs of many Latin American countries. But what was baffling about it was the fact that the political regimes which these American banks supported were often virtual dictators who promoted socialism and engaged in the confiscation of privately-owned industries, including American industries. Many of these bank-sponsored regimes were also openly pro-Communist.
Why was an American-owned bank financing a hard-core socialist regime? Wherever I had friends who knew the inside story in Latin American political circles, they verified the fact that the massive swing to the Left in Central and South America was being financed by certain American banks. It just didn’t make sense.
Politics in Washington were equally puzzling. Why were so many top government officials always members of the Democratic Socialist cadre called Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), or were members of the exclusive Council on Foreign Relations? Whether the President was Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon, it seemed to make no difference. There was often a change of personalities, but membership in these two organizations seemed a prerequisite for many top government jobs.
Another puzzle was the fact that whenever the political blunders of these high-powered people aroused the anger of the public, they were not only allowed to quietly resign, but were given extremely lucrative outside jobs, usually in one of the tax-exempt foundations. It didn’t look like government “of the people” but government by certain people.
I was reminded of the words of Benjamin Disraeli: “The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” I waited for thirty years for somebody on the inside of the modern political power structure to talk. At last, somebody did.
Dr. Carroll Quigley Writes a Book on the World’s Secret Power Structure
Dr. Carroll Quigley was a professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University. He formerly taught at Princeton and Harvard. He had done research in the archives of France, Italy and England. He is the author of the widely known text, Evolution of Civilizations.
When Dr. Quigley decided to write his 1,300 page book called Tragedy And Hope, he knew he was deliberately exposing one of the best kept secrets in the world. As one of the elite “insiders,” he knew the scope of this power complex and he knew that its leaders hope to eventually attain total global control. Furthermore, Dr. Quigley makes it clear throughout his book that by and large he warmly supports the goals and purposes of the “network.”
Anyone reading Dr. Quigley’s Tragedy And Hope will have little difficulty detecting the tremendous self-esteem of the author. He considers himself not only an “insider” but a member of the intellectual elite among the insiders. He feels that the forces of total global control are now sufficiently entrenched so that they can reveal their true identity without fear of being successfully overturned. He expresses the utmost contempt for members of the American middle class who think they can preserve what he calls their “petty-bourgeois” property rights and constitutional privileges.
The real value of Tragedy And Hope is not so much as a “history of the world in our time” (as its subtitle suggests), but rather as a bold and boastful admission by Dr. Quigley that there actually exists a relatively small but powerful group which has succeeded in acquiring a choke-hold on the affairs of practically the entire human race.
Of course, we should be quick to recognize that no small group could wield such gigantic power unless millions of people in all walks of life were “in on the take” and were willing to knuckle down to the iron-clad regimentation of the ruthless bosses behind the scenes. As we shall see, the network has succeeded in building its power structure by using tremendous quantities of money (together with the vast influence it buys) to manipulate, intimidate, or corrupt millions of men and women and their institutions on a world-wide basis. (end of Dr. Skousen’s account)
President Clinton Admits Carroll Quigley is His Mentor
Those who had read The Naked Capitalist were prepared for what Bill Clinton said in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Committee. He had studied under Professor Carroll Quigley and was proud to claim him as his most valuable mentor.
Are There Still Powerful Anti-American Capitalists Among Us Today?
Talk of the wealthy power-broker types as outlined in The Naked Communist and The Naked Capitalist seems to some to be decades old and may not have quite the applicability in today’s settings. All you have to do is pick up the September 1998 issue of the Reader’s Digest and read the Special Feature section on Ted Turner, owner of CNN, the Atlanta Braves, and controlling interest in many other opinion-molding corporations in this nation. Space will not permit a complete review of this article, but today’s Ted Turner can certainly be included in the “Naked Capitalist Profile” which continues to describe some super wealthy since the days of Andrew Carnegie. Here are some identifying characteristics of this profile which are nearly always present in their beliefs and actions:
1. They reject Christianity and the Ten Commandments.
2. They embrace Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
3. They have lost faith in America’s freedom formula which made them rich.
4. They criticize America while embracing anti-American ideas of socialism.
5. They hold America’s middle class in disdain and consider themselves our intellectual superiors who must use the power of government to force their superior ideas upon the stupid masses.
6. They befriend the most ruthless dictators in the world.
7. They donate huge sums of money to finance one-world government schemes.
Recognizing the Gigantic Dictatorship Which has the World By Its Throat
Communism is a form of socialism which is government control of the means of production and distribution in a nation. Socialism can come about democratically or by revolution. Revolutionary socialism is communism. Americans need to know that the basic beliefs of communism are present in any socialist country.
Dr. Skousen let his good friend, Cecil B. DeMille, director of The Ten Commandments, read his finished manuscript on Communism. After reading it, Mr. DeMille said to Dr. Skousen that he had stripped away all the pretense and propaganda of Communism leaving it completely exposed for the ugly system it is. He said, “You should name your book, The Naked Communist.” And so it received its unusual name.
The book could have been named The Naked Socialist because it espouses revolutionary socialist doctrine. Americans must not be lulled into a false sense of security thinking these ideas are now dead. They are alive and thriving. While the names sometimes change for appearance sake, Communism and Socialism continue to be tools of Satanic influence engulfing this world.
If you want to be able to discern ideas as they are presented in attractive packages, then the study of these two books is crucial. As was recognized by the New York Times writer, the explanation of what is happening in the world is for all to read – in The Naked Communist and The Naked Capitalist. To those who will read and study them, seeing the designs of powerful scheming men of today will not be surprising. Familiarity with the message of these two important books will help prepare us and our families for challenging times ahead. We invite you to see the enclosed offering and to consider giving them to family and friends.
Thanks for your continuing support.
Sincerely,
Earl Taylor, Jr.