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An article of faith among U.S. conservatives of the Cold War era stated that the Soviets aimed to destroy America from within by promoting a program of creeping socialism, by which they meant the gradual replacement of democratic, free-market institutions with centralized government control. Never mind that the communists themselves subscribed to a different version of the end of free-market economies, namely Marx's theory that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, an end which he argued was inevitable and would culminate in a socialist revolution. Regardless, conservative icons such as Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater saw creeping socialism in every piece of progressive legislation that came around the pike, from Roosevelt's New Deal to Medicare to LBJ's Great Society social-welfare programs of the mid-1960s. They further claimed that at least one Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had explicitly announced the regime's intent to export small doses of socialism to the U.S. in a statement he allegedly made in 1959. Reagan was fond of quoting this supposed pronouncement in speeches he gave as a crusader for conservative causes before launching his own political career later in the '60s. This instance is from an address he delivered in 1961: Variants of this passage also appeared in newspaper opinion columns, letters to the editor, and even political ads portraying Democratic Party candidates as enemies of freedom. This example is from the Muncie, Indiana, Star Press of 5 November 1960: Fast-forwarding to some 56 years later, we find the same quote being deployed against Democrats of today, only now in the preferred venue of social media: The authenticity of the quote was questioned practically from the get-go, however. In 1962, Sen. Lee Metcalf (D-Montana) assailed it as a fabrication, attributed to the leader of the Communist Party, (which) arouses Americans against their elected officials. Metcalf told the Los Angeles Times that the quote was being circulated by organizations including the far-right John Birch Society, which operated a bookstore called Poor Richard's Book Shop in Hollywood: The Times reported that the president of Coast Federal Savings & Loan, Joe Crail, claimed responsibility for printing the postcards but admitted he couldn't authenticate the quote and said the campaign had been discontinued for that reason. Similarly, Sen. Morris K. Udall (D-Arizona) recruited the Library of Congress to verify the authenticity of the statement attributed to Khrushchev and shared the results in the 10 May 1962 issue of The New Republic: All that supposedly changed four years later when a witness came forward to claim that Khrushchev had uttered those very words in his presence. Ezra Taft Benson, who served two terms as President Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture and would later head the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said in a 1966 address at Brigham Young University (BYU) that Khrushchev made the statement during a one-on-one discussion the two had in September 1959: Such a meeting did occur, documents show, but Benson's 1966 account of their exchange on communism raises more questions than it answers. Benson had cited versions of the same quote on more than one occasion prior to 1966 without claiming that Khrushchev said it in his presence. Like Ronald Reagan routinely did during the same period, Benson told audiences that the Soviet premier made the remark before, not during, his 1959 visit to the United States. Benson presented it as follows in an August 1961 commencement address at BYU (from a report in the Provo Daily Herald, emphasis added): He introduced the quote more or less the same way in a book he wrote the following year (1962) called The Red Carpet: Socialism -- The Royal Road to Communism (emphasis added): The three different versions of the story don't jibe. Did Khrushchev utter the remark three weeks before visiting the U.S., a few months before, or did he utter it during a face-to-face meeting with Benson on U.S. soil? Why did Benson write in 1962 (three years after Khrushchev's visit) that the Soviet premier was reported to have said it? Why was there no mention before 1966 of Khrushchev's saying it to his face? Unfortunately, Ezra Taft Benson died in 1994, so we can't ask him. Nor, as far as we know, has any third-party witness to the alleged exchange ever come forward. Far from settling the question of whether Khrushchev really vowed to slip Americans small doses of socialism, Benson's conflicting stories leave the authenticity of the remark very much in doubt. We should also mention, in passing, that U.S. conservatives were sounding alarms about Americans being plied with small doses of socialism long before Khrushchev attained the premiership of the Soviet Union. This is National Association of Manufacturers President Claude A. Putnam speaking in April 1950 (as reported in the Times Herald of Olean, New York): If we've learned nothing else in the roughly 60 years of its existence, the durability of the Khrushchev quote shows that a politically charged statement needn't be authenticated to serve its purpose as a partisan cudgel. As if to prove the point, the quote was tweeted out to 70,000 followers as recently as February 2018 by none other than Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan's son:
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