I have several reasons for keeping a half-century-old “Goldwater for President” poster on a wall of my university office. It serves as a reminder of youthful political passion (I turned thirteen the day before Lyndon Johnson crushed the Arizona senator at the polls), and it pays tribute to the plainspoken candidate’s libertarian anti-Communism. It also, I suppose, offers my own bit of micro-aggression toward those colleagues—which would be all of them—who find Goldwater’s world view, if they know it, even more abhorrent than antique.

There were things about him not to like, chief among them his constitutionally based refusal to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There was also his ongoing attempt, in the run-up to the nomination and throughout the Presidential campaign, to thread the needle in the matter of the John Birch Society. Founded in 1958 by the businessman Robert Welch, the society was the most robust political fringe group of its day, intent upon thwarting any U.S.-Soviet coöperation, withdrawing America from the United Nations, exposing Communists in the federal government, and impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren. Rick Perlstein, in his 2001 book, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,” summarizes the trimming strategy: “Goldwater would take the line that Robert Welch was a crazy extremist but that the Society itself was full of fine, upstanding citizens working hard and well for the cause of Americanism.” Throughout the 1964 race, Goldwater availed himself of Bircher money and manpower at the risk of being soldered, by his opponents, to the Birchers’ more addled views, the most notorious of these being Welch’s suggestion that Dwight Eisenhower had consciously acted as an agent of the international Communist conspiracy.

The association of Goldwater and the society helped to take both of them down. By 1968, Richard Nixon, a needle-threader extraordinaire, had captured the Presidency and cemented an identification with conservatism despite being loathed by the Birch leadership for a lack of true belief. Nixon had famously withheld his applause when Goldwater declared, at the 1964 Convention, that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”; two years before that, he had been badly bruised by the society during his failed run for the governorship of California. (Screeching Bircher resistance during the Republican primary had left him exhausted for the general election.) After Nixon reached the White House, the dignified, mainstream sufferings of the “silent majority,” not the rants of the Birchers, became the engine of his feinting, flexible conservatism, which pivoted most audaciously with his decision to visit China in 1972.

No destination could have been more infuriating to the J.B.S., China being where its eponymous idol, a twenty-seven-year-old American missionary turned military intelligence officer, met his death at the hands of Mao Zedong’s Red Army, on August 25, 1945—becoming, in Welch’s estimation, “the first casualty” of the Cold War. Welch did not discover Birch’s story until 1953: in his brief book “The Life of John Birch,” published the following year, he describes how “all alone, in a committee room of the Senate Office Building in Washington, I was reading the dry typewritten pages in an unpublished report of an almost forgotten congressional committee hearing. Suddenly I was brought up sharp by a quotation of some words an army captain had spoken on the day of his death eight years before.” Welch tells his readers it is “no accident” that neither he nor they heard of Birch until years after his death—never mind that Welch’s own awareness, however deferred, came from reading the official transcript of a legislative hearing.

In “Before the Storm,” Perlstein describes Welch as a “very curious” combination of “arrogance and innocence,” and Terry Lautz, Birch’s most recent biographer, believes that the founder may have envied Birch’s religious certainty and seen in him “the heroic figure that he always wanted to be,” something beyond a prosperous executive in his brother’s candy business. (The James O. Welch Company’s most distinguished product was Pom-Poms, my nickel-a-box confectionary preference during the years of Goldwater’s ascendancy.) The subtitle of Welch’s book—“In the story of one American boy, the ordeal of his age”—reveals an author who can’t wait to be off to the races, and by the second page of his foreword Welch is in full gallop toward his goal of exemplarity: “even the purity of character and nobility of purpose of a John Birch can atone for only a small part of so much human vileness. But there is strong encouragement in finding so firm an entry on the credit side.”

D. J. Mulloy, in “The World of the John Birch Society,” published in 2014, shows how Welch’s anti-New Deal views, ordinary enough in a businessman, contained an “embryonic” radicalism that expanded during the early years of the Cold War. He describes Welch’s “belief that both his great political heroes, Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy, had been ‘betrayed’ at crucial points in their careers by the Republican political establishment”—an entity that remains a given to both far-right Republicans and mainstream journalists. It has no clear counterpart in the Democratic Party, which even in periods of insurgency (Eugene McCarthy’s candidacy, say, or George McGovern’s) is rarely imagined to be operating by directives whispered from on high. Taft’s defeat by the Eisenhower vanguard at the 1952 Convention was especially embittering to Welch, “providing one of the principal launching pads for his career in conspiracism,” according to Mulloy. Two years later, in “The Life of John Birch,” Welch argued that “suppression” of the truth about Birch’s killing was “a minor chore” for the Communist conspiracy within the American government.

For a full understanding of that conspiracy, Welch directed his readers to “go back further”: past urgings by Dean Acheson and Henry Morgenthau, in 1933, that the U.S. recognize the U.S.S.R.; past the prior radicalization of American labor unions; even past the social-welfare experimentation of Bismarck’s Germany, which resulted in more “minute controls over the lives of its subjects than had been seen since the time of Constantine.” As the years went on, Welch became lengthily fixated on the Illuminati of the eighteenth century. But, in 1954, the immediate aim of his lives-of-the-saints prose (“love for his parents that amounted almost to reverence . . . his deep and glowing affection for his brothers and sisters”) was to make John Birch into the first Bircher. The conditional-perfect tense provided much help: “he would never have been willing to accept peace, even for a short time, when purchased by a tolerance of such evils as he would soon have seen the Communists spreading across China and the world.”

Most treatments of Birch’s life have tended to present it as a short preface to the history of the society carrying his name. But now, in “John Birch: A Life” (Oxford), Terry Lautz reverses the usual proportions and presents a biography of Birch in which the society figures as a sort of epilogue. Lautz has the kind of credentials—a trustee of the Harvard-Yenching Institute; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations—guaranteed to give fits to any Bircher past or present, but his book is thorough, judicious, and, except for a few overdone academic references to Cold War “paranoia,” respectful of larger historical realities. Even conservatives near the mainstream’s right bank will be hard-pressed to see it as another anti-anti-Communist undertaking.