October 16, 2006
Dear Mr. Doe,
By way of introduction, my name is Wayne Rickert. I joined The John Birch Society in 1968, and I was a member of its Council from 1988 until October 20, 2005. As a member of the Council’s Executive Committee, I worked closely with several of the Society’s CEOs and was personally involved with the selection process to replace two CEOs when they resigned.
I am writing you with the help of two longtime, faithful former Executive Committee members, C. Walter Ruckel and Keith Van Buskirk. We are writing out of concern for the future of The John Birch Society and our nation. We feel we have an important story that you need to hear.
We know some will wonder why we continue to fight what transpired a year ago. Why don’t we just walk away and let the new JBS leaders do as they wish without opposition? The answer is simple. We have stayed because we believe The John Birch Society to be the most important non-religious organization ever in the battle for freedom and for decades we have supported it with our time, influence, and money. We have stayed because of our tremendous admiration for Robert Welch, and because we know he would expect us to do so.
Because so very much is at stake — our nation, our freedom, the future of our civilization, and the only organization (JBS) ever conceived that is capable of preserving all of this — we have written this letter. We ask that you please read it carefully. And when you have done so, it would mean a great deal to us if you would let us know how you feel. We simply need to know if you share our concerns about the future of The John Birch Society and its role in the freedom fight.
Background to Revolt
Let me start by sharing some of the concerns and troubling events the former Executive Committee was dealing with during the past several years. The Committee members included the three of us — myself, Walt, and Keith — as well as Joseph P. Grinnan, Thomas N. Hill, Dr. Philip Binzel, and, then later, newcomers Ray Clark and Art Crino.
As Executive Committee members and as concerned major donors to the Society, we were putting pressure on Vance Smith and his team to improve the overall production of the Society, especially from its paid office and field employees.
During the George W. Bush years, the organization had become stagnant. It certainly was not growing at a rate that would enable it to stop the advances of the Conspiracy. In our local areas and when we were at Council Dinners and other Birch gatherings, we could easily see the problem right before our eyes. Instead of the field staff working with their members to build a new and vibrant membership and chapter base, in far too many cases they were simply doing maintenance work with Birchers who had been around for years.
When we looked at the donor base, we saw that the highest paid field staff — the fundraisers, under the direction of Art Thompson — were not reaching up or out, but were instead going back to the same contributors over and over again. This concerned us greatly.
Now let me make this clear: We all like the Coordinator and the Fundraiser who come by to see us. However, the issue for us has nothing to do with whether we are friends with field staff members. The important issue is whether or not the staff member is getting results, and if the Society’s money is being spent on growth or on stagnation.
You answer for yourself. How is the membership or chapter situation in my community? Does the local area compare favorably with times past? When I look at The New American donors — the advertisers — do I see any new ads or advertisers? Or, do I see the same old ads that have been in the magazine for years and years?
Clearly the Society needs to find and develop new contributors. But many of our aging staff members were pushing back against Vance’s leadership. One ambitious effort Vance launched to help the staff reach out to new high-level donors was the Reclaiming America seminars. Unfortunately, our staff had lost the vision of high-level seminars. Often we would see just the same faces at these programs — a complete failure of the seminars’ purpose.
One good example was the seminar held in San Jose, California, just as the mutiny was unfolding. Despite the future opportunities that depended on the program’s success, our top veteran fundraiser could not arrange for hardly a new face in the audience. It was a total bust, and I am told that the fundraiser seemed completely indifferent to the failure, if not resentful that this project for reaching new people had been put on his plate.
We as the JBS Executive Committee were gravely concerned about the future of the Society. We knew we personally were getting older and that we would not be around forever to work with and to fund the JBS. And, again, we could see clearly that the rest of the organization was aging and becoming less effective. We were also asking ourselves and Vance, where would the next generation of leaders of the Society come from?
The John Birch Society desperately needed an infusion of new blood, and we challenged Vance Smith and his team to step up and improve with the needed growth of new members and supporters. In business, it is “grow or die.” We felt the same principle applied to JBS.
So the Executive Committee was putting increasing pressure on Vance. And in turn, Vance was putting pressure on managers in both the office and the field to improve their productivity. But his attempts to raise standards, set goals, and track results were repeatedly met with push-back from those unwilling to stretch to improve their skills and performance.
Creating an Opportunity
Pressure was put on Art Thompson and other department heads. But, instead of working with Vance, Tom Gow, and others to improve organizational performance and spend the Society’s resources more wisely and effectively, Art Thompson deviously took advantage of that climate to start a whispering and smear campaign against Vance and the Executive Committee.
Art’s campaign would have gone nowhere had Tom Hill, Joe Grinnan, and Phil Binzel still been alive. Nor could Jack have subsequently played his Incorporator card. These veterans, standing with us, would have quickly squashed such nonsense. But with these men now deceased, the key remaining Executive Committee members — Walt, Keith, Vance, and I — were taken by surprise. We did not learn of this smear campaign until September 20, 2005. Yet to our great disappointment, Art Crino, a relative newcomer to our Committee, later admitted having been a part of this “get Vance” campaign since the previous April.
Art Thompson and his co-smear agitators, Cliff Wasem and Art Crino, took their message of destruction secretly to selected Council members, staff, and a few others. The methodology Art Thompson uses to gain support is particularly illuminating. One chapter in that story started much earlier.
As I remember, it was in 2000 that Art accepted a promotion from Vance that would move him to Appleton. During that time, Art advised Vance that he had come across some videos of speeches that Jack McManus had unwisely presented before religious conferences, some of which, incredibly, featured blatant anti-Semites.
In those speeches Jack, introduced as President of the JBS, had inferred that the real Conspiracy we were fighting consisted of Masons and the militant Jews behind them. One of Jack’s most outrageous statements was: “From the year 33, when Christ did found His organization, His Church, onward, the Jewish Religion was dead from that day forward, but not deadly. After the year 70, the Jewish religion became not only dead, but deadly.”
Since for years the Birch Society had fought the false accusations of anti-Semitism, we on the Executive Committee took immediate steps to try to rein Jack in. Initially Jack expressed sorrow and regret for what he had done. But, as time went by, Jack couldn’t resist invitations to appear on the same unacceptable programs, lending the Society’s name to views and opinions that we were unable to tolerate.
And, after several years of patiently working with Jack, the Society’s officers, directors, and Executive Committee determined that Jack must step down as the Society’s president, which at the time Jack graciously did.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we can now see that perhaps even more serious than Jack’s outrageous comments was another deadly scheme being orchestrated by Art Thompson.
Almost simultaneous with Jack’s demotion in early 2004, Art Thompson’s longtime friend and collaborator, Cliff Wasem, suggested that Art be promoted to replace Jack McManus as JBS president. Because of Art’s lackluster performance in several positions, we dismissed the suggestion out of hand. At the time, we attached little significance to the proposal.
However in hindsight, we have to ask ourselves: Was Art’s concern about Jack’s misstatements relative to the Jewish religion because of the possible harm that might come to JBS? Or, was Art’s exposure of Jack simply a way of ingratiating himself with Vance Smith and the Executive Committee in an effort to claim the high office of president for himself?
Vance Smith made the following information available to me. I believe you will find it interesting, to say the least. In the year 2000, when Art was gathering information to indict Jack McManus, Art Thompson sent this message to Vance:
“Vance, this is not simply an aberration. This is [Jack McManus’] religion to be anti-Semitic and anti-Mason. That’s all there is to it — through and through, up and down, sideways. She [Art’s daughter] says that a website called St. Benedictine something or other [exists] and she’s downloaded some stuff called ‘Neutralizers.’ It’s basically: everybody but [sic] a Muslim is a neutralizer and a liberal and out of salvation because they are not Catholic. And it’s all Masonic and Jewish control…. So you know it’s amazing the more you dig the more widespread you realize all this is, and it’s been probably a problem for us for years and we didn’t even know it.”
Despite his lead role in focusing attention on Jack’s transgressions, Art had no trouble using Jack and Jack’s control over the JBS Board of Incorporators to take succession authority away from the Executive Committee and Council. Yet Art’s audacity in burying his earlier anti-Jack role didn’t stop there. While defending himself against the valid charges of orchestrating a “leftist-style attack,” Art stated in a July 3, 2006 letter:
“This from the same group [referring to us] that tried to spread the idea that John F. McManus is anti-Semitic for his Catholic beliefs!”
In 2004, the Executive Committee did not reward Art Thompson for having blown the whistle on Jack by allowing Art to become the Society’s president. Is it only a coincidence that within a year or so Art would be found orchestrating a smear campaign against Vance that would ultimately rid the Society of both Vance and the Executive Committee and would put him, Art Thompson, in the top spot as JBS Chief Executive Officer?
Was all of this about Art Thompson rising to a position of control in the Society? And if so, what was his motive? We, of course, do not know what Art’s true motives are, but we do know that the results of his smear campaign and coup have damaged the Society more than any attack we have ever received from the Conspiracy.
It is interesting that even though Art Thompson and his co-conspirators had been orchestrating their sub-rosa coup for several months, they did not pull Jack McManus into it until early September 2005. Why was that? Most probably the only reason they included Jack was because of Jack’s often-boasted control over the JBS Board of Incorporators.
We knew there was some resentment of Jack McManus in the ranks. Complaints included Jack’s unwillingness to move to Appleton even though he wanted the title of “President.” Further resentment was expressed because Jack would take his personal religious views with him into the field. Complaints would come back to us that Jack was constantly combining “Birch and Church” instead of staying focused on building the Society.
But only at the end did we learn firsthand how destructive were Jack’s “anti” views. Not only was Jack expressing his negative beliefs about the “Jewish Religion,” but he was also speaking ill of other faiths. Last October, when Keith Van Buskirk and I had him on a speaker-phone to try and talk him out of his October 21st Board of Incorporators meeting, Jack unleashed a vicious attack on the Mormon Church. He claimed that Vance Smith could not lead JBS, because his church was pro-abortion, pro-New World Order, and pro-UN. When asked for his proof, Jack replied that he got his information from a friend of Will Grigg’s, an apparent anti-Mormon in Salt Lake City.
My reason for disclosing this information is to show the deviousness of Art Thompson and to help make the point that we on the Executive Committee were not idle in our roles as “watchmen,” and that we were constantly supporting management in dealing with very serious problems. Not even the Council at large had any idea these problems existed. And, thus it has always been through the long history of the Society.
The Revolution
Let’s move on to the reason why Jack insisted on holding his Board of Incorporators meeting on October 21, 2005 instead of waiting a mere eight days for the Executive Committee and Council to deal with these issues at the scheduled Council Meeting in Orlando on October 29th. The reason was very simple: Jack and Art knew very well that, even if a case could be made against Vance Smith to where we on the Executive Committee would remove Vance, under no circumstances would we have ever put Jack and Art in positions of leadership.
If you have visited Don Fotheringham’s website (www.donfoth.com) or read any of the several mailings from the RWU headquarters, such as the recent RWU Freedom Report, you are probably aware of how the JBS leadership was replaced and the Society’s authority structure turned on its head. In short, a few employees orchestrated a crescendo of letters thereby creating the appearance of crisis. With that smokescreen, Jack’s Board of Incorporators could dare to step in and squash the long-established authority of the Council and its Executive Committee.
Despite our efforts to calm the waters, it soon became clear that a three-to-two majority on Jack’s Board of Incorporators were bound and determined to go forward with their revolutionary Incorporator revolt and precipitate a real crisis.
So Walt, Keith, and I resigned from the Executive Committee and Council in protest. Vance Smith and Tom Gow also resigned as officers and directors at JBS. They then moved their offices to RWU and focused their efforts on that organization. The new leaders at JBS were frustrated that the JBS Board of Incorporators had no authority over RWU. But that’s another chapter of the story.
Ambition and pride may explain the actions of Art and Jack, but how about the others who worked to bring this about? As trusted veteran staff members, they tampered with the stability and future of the Society. What they did to create this crisis was incredibly irresponsible and simply wrong!
The Fruits of Their Labors
In pushing forward their coup, the leaders promised that many problems would be solved and things would be better. Now that a full year has passed since Art Thompson, Cliff Wasem, Art Crino, Jack McManus, Larry Waters, Alan Scholl, Chris Bentley and others orchestrated this coup, let’s evaluate for ourselves the fruits of their labors.
The coup lopped off the head of The John Birch Society and left it functionally leaderless. Even if Jack and Art were capable leaders, which they are not, neither of them is willing to live in Appleton. How can a headless organization lead the fight against the Conspiracy?
How can the perpetrators of this scandal keep a straight face? We have been told that we are fighting the most ruthless Conspiracy that ever existed — a Goliath more powerful than any country or power in the world. It intends to enslave everyone on this planet it does not kill. And the coup leaders would have us believe they can fight this monster without a full-time leader at its headquarters? Incredible! Can you imagine the head of General Motors not working full time at its headquarters? Can you imagine Robert Welch running the Society from a beach chair on the Florida coast? No, it’s too ridiculous to even imagine!
Birchers committed to Robert Welch’s organizational principles are no longer in charge. The rogue leaders have either deferred to non-Birch public relations and marketing personnel or are trying to create a false sense of progress by cozying up to pseudo-conservative organizations.
A case in point is the recent issue of The New American reporting on the North American Union. Graphically the magazine is impressive. But the meat and potatoes you need to fight a Conspiracy aren’t in it anymore.
In its urge to win friends and sound positive, this issue of TNA touts several non-Birch programs while pushing the Society’s program and leadership into the background. How does that help inspire Birchers and attract new members? Without recruitment as a serious objective of each campaign, there can be no talk of victory. As Mr. Welch emphasized, no combination of single-issue organizations is going to win the freedom fight. The Society must take the lead, and it must grow to win.
We find the Bulletin even more disappointing. You likely agree. It offers no plan for victory. Instead, just as leaders of so many other worthless organizations have done, the new Society “leaders” appear content to just play at the opposition game by sitting at the table with the other “conservative” groups that also have no realistic plan for, or even objective of, victory.
And that leads to a parallel reason why the Society can’t succeed under its current leadership — the lack of focus on building field organization. While the Appleton bureaucracy struggles to keep their jobs, the commitment to building and supporting the needed Chapter organization in the field has disappeared.
One of the most effective ploys used by Cliff Wasem, Bill Jasper, Jack McManus, Alan Scholl and others to gain sympathy for immediate, revolutionary change was their cry that if we don’t get rid of Vance now, we are certain to lose all our good people.
Gullible Council members and some staff succumbed to that fear. But look at what has actually happened under Jack and Art’s leadership. The following staff and Council members have either quit or been fired, William Norman Grigg being the latest:
National Council
Brett Favero (resigned)
Walt Ruckel (resigned)
Wayne Rickert (resigned)
Keith Van Buskirk (resigned)
JBS Headquarters Staff
Kathy Braun (resigned)
Tom Gow (resigned)
William Norman Grigg (fired)
G. Vance Smith (resigned)
Paul Smith (resigned)
JBS Field Staff
Mike Armstrong, NC (fired)
Tom Bean, FL (fired)
Royce Bounds, KS (fired)
John Campbell, GA (fired)
Cedric Crawley, CA (resigned)
Richard Dilworth, NY (resigned)
Ron Lanfear, TN (resigned)
Gregg Smith, UT (resigned)
Mike Tomaso, OH (resigned)
Norman Tregenza, NJ (resigned)
The bodies are really piling up! How hypocritical! Since the present Council is obviously going to do nothing, how many more bodies will be added to the pile before the general membership says, “We’ve had enough!”?
We are told that there are now only 13 Coordinators left in the field. Art, however, has kept his eight field managers — several of whom helped orchestrate the coup — thus leaving the balance of 8 “Chiefs” to 13 “Indians.” In the business world we live in, this kind of self-serving managing would never happen.
The present “leadership” team has tried to blame their staff cuts on the poor financial situation they inherited from Vance Smith and Tom Gow. But in October 2005, the Society was debt-free and current with payroll and expenses. And the pledge not to mortgage the buildings had been maintained unequivocally for more than a decade. No, the rogue leaders have only themselves to blame for their financial woes.
To summarize — what the coup leadership did to turn the Society’s fundamental authority structure on its head was wrong. As it stands, the Society’s rogue leaders are unaccountable. With their bloated egos, they can simply run the Society into the ground, and it will be tough for anyone to stop them. But the damage simply must be repaired if the Society is to survive, let alone succeed in building the leadership force envisioned by Mr. Welch.
And So, Let’s Act!
If this letter doesn’t do anything else, it should help you understand why the Society is declining so rapidly, and why, if unchecked, it will surely be found on the ash-heap of history.
But we hope our story has made you informed and angry enough to do something more than just understand why the Society is declining. We hope it inspires you to support us and do your part to put the Society back on its proper path to greatness.
For the past year, it has been a lonely struggle to help a few Birchers here and a few there understand the magnitude of what has transpired and then wait to see if they would take a stand. We could not help wondering where the true Birchers and patriots were.
We don’t know for certain that you, the reader of this long epistle, will be moved to stand with us. But we do know that we are going to continue with all of our might to return the Society back to its proper role in giving patriotic Americans hope that we can stop a godless Conspiracy and preserve freedom for ourselves and future generations.
We care nothing of personalities. Nothing! Mr. Welch was 59 years old when he founded the Society. He knew he would not live forever, so he built a body, an organization based upon principles that would, if right and true men and women were vigilant in keeping it on track, stand the test of time. Robert Welch wanted the Society to give hope to patriots of freedom everywhere for decades — yes, even hundreds of years.
When all is said and done, maybe there are only a handful of us who can divorce ourselves from personalities. One man wrote me, “I will always choose Jack McManus over Vance Smith.” Well, that is fine, but it has nothing to do with whether The John Birch Society will build an organization of patriotic Americans large enough, effective enough, or soon enough to save our civilization from the worst fate ever devised by the most ruthless Conspiracy in the history of the world.
So, if you are part of that handful who are determined to right these wrongs and get the Society back on the track where it will reach up and out to tens of thousands of true, patriotic Americans, then for Heaven’s sake, stand up and be counted with us!
With the help of Walt, Keith, and a few others, I have put together a one-page response letter. Please fill it out and return it in the enclosed envelope to the RWU headquarters in Appleton where the information will be gathered for us by Kathy Braun.
Thank you, and God bless you in your decision to continue the greatest battle of all, the battle for freedom.
Sincerely,
Wayne C. Rickert, C. Walter Ruckel, Keith Van Buskirk
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