Established in 1958 and peaking in influence and membership in the mid-1960s, the staunchly anti-communist John Birch Society quickly became a powerful force in conservative politics, with leading figures such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan making appeals to its members without fully endorsing its paranoid vision of a country secretly controlled by Soviet agents. Indeed, the society's founder, retired candy magnate Robert Welch, denounced President Dwight Eisenhower as a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy."
The society also became a running punchline during its heyday, with Bob Dylan recording a song called "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and the society's fixation on water fluoridation and vaccines finding its way into a character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove who is obsessed with protecting "our precious bodily fluids."
