# Clarence Manion Clarence Eugene "Dean" Manion (1896–1979) was a former dean of the Notre Dame Law School who became one of the most influential right-wing radio broadcasters of the 1950s and 1960s, a **founding member of the [[John Birch Society]]**, and — most consequentially — the publisher who commissioned and distributed *[[The Conscience of a Conservative]]* (ghostwritten by [[L. Brent Bozell Jr.]] for [[Barry Goldwater]]) in 1960, a book whose improbable million-copy sale launched Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign and catalyzed the modern conservative movement. If [[Robert Welch]] built the chapter network of the Old Right and [[Fred C. Koch]] built the donor base, Manion built the **broadcast layer**. For two decades — from 1954 until his death — he produced a weekly 15-minute syndicated program, *The Manion Forum*, carried on hundreds of radio stations across rural and small-town America, giving the JBS-adjacent movement a regular voice in American households before talk radio existed as a genre. ## Background - Born July 7, 1896, in Henderson, Kentucky - Graduated from St. Mary's College (Kentucky) and Catholic University of America (LL.B., 1922; Ph.D., 1926) - Joined the Notre Dame Law School faculty in 1925; appointed dean in 1941 - Fought the [[New Deal]] and FDR's foreign policy throughout the 1930s and early 1940s; was an organizer of the **America First Committee** (original 1940–1941 version, the anti-interventionist coalition, not the later populist rebrand) - Supported Taft over Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican nomination - Appointed by Eisenhower in 1953 as the first chairman of the **U.S. Commission on Intergovernmental Relations** (a federalism study body); **fired by Eisenhower in early 1954** after Manion publicly endorsed the Bricker Amendment restricting presidential treaty-making powers against the administration's position - Died July 28, 1979, in South Bend, Indiana, at age 83 ## The Manion Forum, 1954–1979 After the Eisenhower firing — which turned him into a martyr in anti-New Deal circles — Manion launched *The Manion Forum of Opinion* in October 1954. The operation ran for twenty-five years almost without interruption: - **Format:** 15-minute weekly syndicated program; initially on radio, later also on television; guests included sitting senators, generals, businessmen, and eventually [[Ronald Reagan]] - **Reach:** At peak, ~300 radio stations and ~100 television stations; estimated audience in the millions - **Funding model:** Underwritten by a national network of conservative businessmen (the "Manion Forum Trustees"), most of them overlapping with the [[John Birch Society]] donor base - **Editorial line:** Fiercely anti-New Deal, anti-UN, anti-civil-rights-federalism, pro-states'-rights, pro-Taft-wing foreign policy, anti-Warren-Court. Consistently to the right of *National Review* through the 1960s - **The distribution innovation:** Manion built one of the first national **direct-to-listener conservative media operations** — bypassing the major networks, paying for time on independent stations, and cross-promoting between his radio show, his pamphlets, and his book-publishing side The *Manion Forum* is the direct organizational ancestor of the later [[Rush Limbaugh]] / talk-radio model that Clear Channel and [[Salem Media Group]] would scale up in the 1990s. Manion was doing in 1955 what Limbaugh began doing in 1988, at a much smaller but structurally identical scale. ## The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) Manion's most enduring single contribution to American political history is his role as the **publisher, financier, and distribution architect** of Barry Goldwater's ***The Conscience of a Conservative***. The book's backstory: 1. In 1959, Manion asked Goldwater to write a short book laying out a movement-conservative philosophical platform 2. Goldwater delegated the actual writing to **L. Brent Bozell Jr.** (William F. Buckley Jr.'s brother-in-law and collaborator), who produced the text 3. Manion set up a specialized publisher — **Victor Publishing Company** — in the tiny Kentucky town of Shepherdsville, specifically to publish the book outside of the mainstream New York houses 4. Manion used his radio platform, his pamphlet mailing list, and the JBS-adjacent chapter network to pre-sell tens of thousands of copies in bulk to conservative organizations, business groups, and college Republican chapters 5. The book's first printing was 10,000 copies; within four years it had sold **over 3.5 million** *The Conscience of a Conservative* is, along with *[[The Road to Serfdom]]*, the most politically consequential conservative book of the 20th century. It created the intellectual and marketing infrastructure for Goldwater's 1964 campaign — and through that campaign, for the volunteer base Reagan inherited, which became the [[Heritage Foundation]]'s staffing pool, which eventually became the modern conservative movement. **Manion's structural innovation** — set up a specialized publisher to bypass the mainstream press, pre-sell bulk orders through an ideological distribution network, and use owned-media amplification to drive retail sales — is essentially the **Regnery Publishing / Christian Book Distributors / Amazon-self-publishing model** of contemporary conservative book production, invented thirty-five years before the tools existed to scale it easily. ## Founding the John Birch Society, 1958 Manion was one of the **eleven founding members** present at Welch's December 1958 Indianapolis convening and served on the JBS National Council through the 1960s. His role in the Society's early years: - Lent his Notre Dame Law School academic credibility to a movement badly short of it (Welch had no formal advanced education; most of the other founders were businessmen) - Provided legal-framework arguments for JBS positions — the Bricker Amendment, states' rights, federalism as a check on communism - Used the *Manion Forum* to promote JBS-adjacent causes and amplify JBS personalities without formally acting as the Society's house organ - Defended the JBS publicly as a legitimate civic organization during the 1962–1965 Buckley excommunication campaign, which he regarded as a grave tactical error by *National Review* Manion's defense of the Society from the excommunication is an important datum: **not every conservative intellectual agreed with Buckley.** The conventional history presents the 1965 *National Review* issue as settling the question; in fact, a substantial faction of the movement — including a former law school dean with a nationally syndicated radio show — continued to treat the JBS as legitimate throughout the 1960s and 1970s. ## The America First Continuity Manion is one of the most important **individual continuity points** between the **1940 America First Committee** (anti-interventionist coalition against entering WWII) and **later uses of the "America First" slogan** — Buchanan 1992, Trump 2016. Manion was a personal friend and organizational ally of the original America First leadership (including Robert E. Wood, [[Charles Lindbergh]], and others), carried their anti-interventionist foreign policy commitments into the Cold War era, and used his radio show to maintain a continuous paleoconservative non-interventionist tradition that had been tactically suppressed during the Cold War but remained alive in the movement's memory. Both [[Pat Buchanan]]'s 1992 revival of the "America First" label and the Trump-Bannon deployment of it in 2015–2016 tap into a tradition Manion kept alive through decades of broadcasting. Bannon in particular has cited *Manion Forum* recordings as formative. ## Why Manion Matters Manion matters in this KB for three reasons: 1. **He is the broadcast-layer missing link.** The story of right-wing media often jumps from Walter Winchell (1940s) to Rush Limbaugh (late 1980s). Manion fills the 30-year gap. The talk-radio genre did not appear in 1988 out of nowhere; it was prefigured by the *Manion Forum* and its imitators. 2. **He built the marketing infrastructure for Goldwater.** Without Manion's publishing operation, *The Conscience of a Conservative* is a small-press curio instead of a 3.5-million-copy movement foundation. Without that book, Goldwater doesn't get nominated in 1964, the delegate operation doesn't train the 1970s movement cadres, and the modern conservative movement has a different and weaker shape. 3. **He is evidence that the Buckley excommunication was contested at the time.** The respectable-conservative canon treats the 1965 rejection of the JBS as settled consensus. Manion's continued public defense of the Society — from a substantial platform, by a figure with real institutional standing — shows that the "respectable conservatism has always been anti-Welch" framing was a *retrospective reconstruction*, not a contemporaneous consensus. ## See Also - [[Robert Welch]] — JBS founder; Manion's co-founder and ideological ally - [[John Birch Society]] — The organization Manion helped found - [[Fred C. Koch]] — Another of the eleven founding members - [[William F. Buckley Jr.]] — The rival whose excommunication campaign Manion rejected - [[Old Right Ecosystem]] — The broader movement - [[Pat Buchanan]] — The journalistic inheritor of the America First / paleocon tradition Manion kept alive