The original edition of None Dare Call It Treason came out in 1964 and, without benefit of a prestige publisher or reviews, sold something on the order of seven million copies. Arguing that the United States had been betrayed by its elite, it is a classic in what Hannah Arendt has called "backstairs political literature." Surprisingly for the genre, it did not contain the usual virulent animosity toward Catholics, Jews, and the like; rather, it blamed communist sympathizers. Nor did it unambiguously point to a plan: "Is there a conspiratorial plan to destroy the United States into which foreign add, planned inflation, distortion of treaty-making powers and disarmament all fit?" Stormer went no further than to resort to a metaphor about the pieces all fitting, whether planned by communists or not.
Twenty-six (not twenty-five) years later, Stormer has reprinted his original text and added an equally long update. This time, he is even more reticent. "Could some of those who make the tragic decisions and implement the wrong programs consistently be Communists? . . . We don't know and we can't know." He points to the Council on Foreign Relations and other institutions as "conspiracies" (in quotes) but denies that their members "could be knowing collaborators in a gigantic conspiracy." To the extent that he espies a plot, it results not from machinations in Moscow but a "conspiracy of shared values."
In brief, the man who may be the most popular U.S. backstairs author of all time is signaling that ours is not an age for American credibility in grand conspiracy theories.
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