THE PLOWBOY INTERVIEW: KARL HESS

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It was so easy back then-during the 1950's and early 60's-to be a Right Thinking Citizen of the United States. Easy because we all knew who wore the White Hats (yeaaa!) and who wore the Black Ones (boooo!).

"Capitalism"-which we naively defined as equal parts free enterprise, democracy, and the Winning of the West-was Good. "Communism " which was anything associated with Russia or Red China-was Bad

And "they" wanted to get "us" : And, despite the fact that God was on our side, they'd do it too if we didn't somehow "keep ahead" : (The day-and-night fear of Right Thinking Americans throughout the 50's and early 60's was that the United States would fall behind in some nebulous, unspecified
contest and quickly suffer a very concrete-though undefined-fate: "The communists I'll just come in here and take over.")
And so "progress"-which was already as American as mom, flag, and apple pie-became our secret weapon. Our be-all, end-all. ("Your future is great in a growing America.')

"New" and "improved" were Good while "conservation" and "little old bird-watchers in tennis shoes" were Bad ("Your future is Great in a growing America.

We all knew that. Just as we knew that "bigger" especially if we were measuring the good ole U.S. Government, business, or the family car-meant "better': ("Your future is GREAT in a growing America!")

And one of the reasons we knew these "truths" was because Big Business and Big Government hired some very clever and very talented people to convince us that we knew them. And one of those clever, talented people. was Karl Hess.

Back in 1964, Hess was an important public relations man for what Dwight D. Eisenhower had already labeled the `Military Industrial Complex': As a speech writer, aide, and one-man think tank for Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, Karl was the intellectual darling of the Republican Party (Goldwater's famous observation that "extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue", was a Hess invention). And, while other hawks of the time occasionally advocated hitting either Russia or China with atomic weapons before the country in question could throw a bomb at us, young Mr. Hess favored immediate, pre-emptive nuclear strikes against both Russia and China.

Karl Hess, in short, was the truest of the True Believers in 1964's upwardly mobile, upper-middle-class, uptight America. He dressed conservatively. Lived in a fashionable Washington, D.C. suburb. Wrote speeches for every major Republican spokesman. Was the idol of his country club set.

But that was a long time ago. Today, Karl Hess is ,a6 raggedy homesteader in the hills of West Virginia. So turned against the "bigger is better" Military-Industrial government he used to shill for that-for the past eight years-he has refused to pay any income tax at all. Which largely explains why Karl and his wife, Therese, now eke out a subsistence living by bartering his welding and her typing for the items they can't produce on their small piece of land.