believed that “the enemies of my enemies are my friends.” However, at no time did Reich
participate in what was quite common in the early 1950s—informing on persons he had
known as Communists during the 1920s and 1930s. When an FBI agent visited Orgonon
and asked Reich for such names, he refused to give them, although he was quite willing to
talk about his own past and present political positions^4.
No one was able to challenge Reich successfully on the Red Fascist question. Wolfe,
who would have been best suited to do so, was no longer close to him. In my view, few of
his associates entirely shared his conviction, though a larger number tried to convince them-
selves that Reich was right. Some, including myself, argued with him about it but with little
success. Reich was at his most authoritarian on this particular matter, just as decades earlier
he had insisted that a true psychoanalyst had to be in the camp of the political left. In the
19508, Reich would allude to his earlier political experiences with the Communists, which
none of us shared—he knew what they were like firsthand, we didn’t. There could be no
real discussion in such an atmosphere.
Reich’s faith in the American government remained strong despite the FDA action
and was reinforced by the election of General Dwight Eisenhower as President in
November 1952. Like millions of other Americans, Reich found Eisenhower’s warm, engag-
ing personality very attractive. But his hope of help from somewhere led him into a highly
idealized view of what Eisenhower was like. On the night of Eisenhower’s election, Reich
taped a conversation he had at Orgonon with Drs. Baker, Raphael, Tropp, and Ilse
Ollendorff. He was thrilled by the landslide vote given Eisenhower: “Eisenhower has the
simplicity, the closeness and contactfulness of genital characters. I do not know him, really,
personally; but that is what I feel about him, also his wife. Now that is a sexual revolution.”^5
Reich began to develop the fantasy that Eisenhower was a secret friend, along with
other friends in high places. These allies would help him against the Food and Drug
Administration, the pharmaceutical industry, the American Medical Association, the
American Psychiatric and Psychoanalytic associations, and his political enemies. However,,
there is not a scintilla ofevidence that his notion of powerful friends had any reality. The
delusion that such friends existed would cost him dearly in the years to come.
Reich’s assumption ofpowerful governmental friends led him to believe, sometime
around 1953, that U.S. Air Force planes were making occasional flights over Orgonon to see
what he was doing and to protect him. Ilse could not understand this at all and it exacerbat-
ed the tension between them.
Then, in November 1953, Reich read a book on flying saucers by Donald Keyhoe^6.
He was primed to respond, for he had long believed that life had developed in the universe
and was not confined to our planet^7 .Not long after reading the report, Reich did more than
take flying saucers as fact. He began to use them, sometimes definitely, sometimes tentative-
ly,as a major cause of the DOR emergency. He became convinced that the UFOs were
“space ships” powered by orgone energy. He based this interpretation on certain observa-
tions that had been made of flying saucers: the bluish light shimmering through the open-
ings of the machines,their comparatively silent motion, and the unusual maneuvers they
28 : The FDA Injunction and Reich’s Responses: 1951-1955 383