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SALT LAKE TRIBUNE SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH How is it that a book by a dead Salt Lake City police chief, printed more than 25 years ago, is suddenly going gangbusters on Amazon's best-seller list? Two words: Glenn Beck. In an recent article on Salon.com, Alexander Zaitchik claims that the right-wing Fox TV personality was introduced to the writings of W. Cleon Skousen at least seven years ago. Beck, a Mormon like the late Skousen (who died in 2006), trumpets the writings of the one-time FBI agent, BYU professor, Salt Lake City police chief, professional anti-communist and anti-New World Order author and speaker, as being prescient. Skousen, Beck said on his radio show, "talked about some day the history of this country's going to be lost because it's going to be hijacked by intellectuals and communists and everything else. And I think we're there. I knew Skousen as a character. I'd often see him at BYU in the mid- to-late '70s. While I never had a class from him, you didn't have to go far before running into his influence on campus. In 1960, LDS Church President David O. McKay encouraged members during General Conference to read The Naked Communist . So I was surprised when one of my political science professors discouraged us from using the book as source material since the scholarship was so questionable. Another of my poli-sci professors, the esteemed Mormon scholar and apologist Louis Midgley, had in 1971 written a piece for Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought that took Skousen to task for, basically, making stuff up. At the Joseph Smith building, where I took religion classes, I endeavored to broaden my understanding of God's intentions for this world by diving into Skousen's The First Two Thousand Years . It was a tough slog. I did something that I have done only a handful of times in my life: I failed to finish a book. When I confessed this failure, my religion teacher remarked that a lot of folks had trouble with it. In 1979, under President Spencer W. Kimball, the church issued a statement forbidding the use of church facilities by The Freemen Institute, an organization founded by Skousen. The Church was skittish about being associated with Skousen's increasingly off-the-wall politics. It was also at BYU that I heard the story of Skousen's tenure as Salt Lake City police chief. His boss -- Mayor J. Bracken Lee -- was another colorful character. They should have been soul mates, as both despised taxes and big government. And Skousen was undeniably tough on crime. But when Skousen's police broke up a poker party attended by Lee, the mayor suddenly realized his chief was a closet commie. Skousen "ran the police department in exactly the same manner as the Communists in Russia operate their government," Lee said. Recently Beck wrote a foreword for a new edition of The 5000 Year Leap, which Skousen penned in 1981. Beck's right-wing star power has taken an old book that did middling-well among a narrow LDS demographic and made it a hot seller across the nation.
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