THE ANARCHIST AND THE REPUBLICAN

HOW JOHN MCCLAUGHRY AND KARL HESS FOUGHT TO DECENTRALIZE POWER-ONE FROM INSIDE THE SYSTEM, ONE EVER FURTHER FROM IT

- JESSE WALKER

THE MAN ON the motorcycle was an anarchist, a lawbreaker, a guy the Black Panthers could turn to when their leader needed transportation; his FBI file fretted that he might "participate in violent activities, such as bombings, should the right opportunity present itself." He was in Vermont to speak at a hippie college, but he took a detour to visit someone else in a mountainside cabin about 40 miles away.

It was the middle of the 1970s. The man in that cabin was a longtime Republican who had served in the state Legislature.

He used to work for Richard Nixon, and he would soon write radio scripts for Ronald Reagan. He and the anarchist had never met before.

They chatted in the kitchen for hours, enjoying each other's company. After all, they agreed about a lot.

The anarchist was named Karl Hess, and-let's get this out of the way quickly-he was not in fact prone to planning bombings. (The surveillance state's files on him got some other things wrong as well, including his wife's name and the color of his eyes.) The Republican was named John McClaughry, and—let's get this out of the way too-his work for Nixon had not made him a Nixon fan.

Each man's career looked like an inverted version of the other's. In 1964, Hess had been a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, an Arizona senator with a hard-right reputation who had captured the GOP's presidential nomination. McClaughry had been among the moderates who opposed Goldwater, and he had helped shape a speech for Michigan Gov. George Romney when that liberal-leaning Republican was thinking of entering the race. Since then, Hess had shifted to the "left": turning against the war machine, learning to love civil disobedience, developing a distrust for corporate America. McClaughry had moved to the "right," battling land use planners and devising Republican alternatives to Great Society programs.