After 20 Years, a Familiar Name Pops Up in Daily News Again

I ran into an old friend the other day in an unexpected place. I was reading with great glee The Times’ account of the recent adventures of our new congressman, Dana Rohrabacher. He was hot-dogging it around the world with an old buddy of Oliver North, tilting with U.S. foreign policy in Burma and Afghanistan and places like that. Well, my old friend popped up in the very last sentence when Rohrabacher told Times reporter Carla Rivera that the trip had been sponsored by “the Long Beach-based Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.”

Deja vu light flashes went off instantly. In Orange County’s roaring ‘60s, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade had always been associated in my mind with the John Birch Society’s tireless battle to expose the com-symps (its term) in our midst who believed in sex education, gun control, dirty words, the United Nations and the Bill of Rights.

I suppose I made this association because a month after I moved to Orange County from Illinois in 1959, Newport Beach High School students were allowed out of school to attend a Christian Anti-Communist School sponsored by the crusade. I went along with my son and heard a Kafkaesque program in which a series of self-styled FBI informants-- not agents--painted such a pervasive picture of communist influence and control that there seemed little hope of salvation for any of us.

Over the months and years that followed, I learned that the crusade was the creation of an Australian physician and evangelical Christian lay minister named Fred Schwarz. He made his first trip to the United States in 1950 and found us so receptive to his message that he stopped practicing medicine and started blowing the whistle on communism full time.

Then, in the early 1970s, the crusade seemed to disappear from view--at least from my view. I assumed that either its leadership figured we were on top of the problem, or the cause was irretrievably lost. Turns out I was wrong on all counts.

After I read the Rohrabacher story, I called a 20-year-old phone number and discovered that the crusade was not only still there but Dr. Schwarz, now 75, was still running the shop. I even got him on the line after several false starts and some obvious hostility from his staff. He explained the hostility right off. “The constant lying and slander about me and my work in the press has made me very reluctant to cooperate,” he said. “Everything that is written about me starts with the assumption that I’m a right-wing extremist.”

I admitted to being one of those people and asked that if that wasn’t true, then what exactly is he up to?

“I liken myself,” he said, “to a pathologist reporting to the physicians who make public policy. I deal with the pathology of communism, and I’m neither affiliated with nor active in furthering any political points of view. All I can do in this complex world is send facts.”

He says he knows that process also feeds fear of communism. “That doesn’t bother me,” he said. “Fear is a God-given instinct that protects us.”

He insisted that the urgency of his mission hasn’t dissipated one bit since the accords between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev have turned the Cold War into an era of good feeling and growing cooperation. “There’s no security in accepting the new Soviet position,” he said, “if we don’t fully recognize what we’re dealing with. I believe in a pluralistic society and a pluralistic world. They can have any type of society they want as long as we understand its basic tenets. When they change those tenets is when I will start to relax.”

At the same time, he admitted there are other valid interpretations that can be drawn from the facts he had made a lifework of ferreting out and distributing. “Every doctor,” he says, “is confronted with numerous possibilities when asked to diagnose pathological symptoms. I happen to believe that the current regime in Russia is acting on the premise that under some circumstances, retreat is an essential component of advance.”

Having thus clarified the “slander” about his work, Schwarz turned to Rohrabacher, whom he says he first met in 1968 when Rohrabacher was president of the Young Americans for Freedom (an ultraconservative student group that grew up on American campuses in the early 1960s). Schwarz says that Rohrabacher told him he had some contacts that would get him inside Czechoslovakia and asked for funds to make the trip. “I loaned him some money,” Schwarz says, “to go over there and report to us. We’ve been friends ever since.”

When Rohrabacher wanted to make a similar trip to Burma and Afghanistan last month, he went back to Schwarz for help and again received it. “He wrote us a report on his return,” Schwarz said, “which I have on my desk.”

Schwarz says he isn’t concerned with whether Rohrabacher entered these countries illegally or failed to clear the trips with the U.S. State Department. “That’s none of my business,” he said. “I’m an Australian citizen, and I’ve never even visited my own Foreign Office, so I know nothing about your State Department.”

Neither, it would appear, does our new congressman.