Wrapped in the Flag (10 page)

Soon, my parents began to parrot Oliver. The Holocaust that I’d learned about from Mrs. Fishman and my father stopped being so terrible: The death camps turned into detention camps. Jews were taken prisoner because they were traitors to the German government, not because of their faith. The “Final Solution” became fiction, the “Holohoax,” as Oliver called it, and the Nazis were turned into loyal military men following orders.
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“In wartime, it’s
kill or be killed,” my father now said.

I didn’t ask my father about the Jews who were sent to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. I didn’t ask about the photographs and the eyewitness reports of the Americans who liberated the camps. I didn’t ask about the testimonies of those who survived. I didn’t ask about any of it. I thought my parents had lost their minds and that Dr. Oliver had helped them.

I remember how disappointed I was in my father for having anything to do with the awful Dr. Oliver. To me, it was obvious that he was a vicious, nasty man, and I couldn’t imagine what my father saw in him.

For the first time, I doubted my dad.

Revilo Oliver and my father served together in the leadership of the John Birch Society for seven years. During that time, Oliver spent many hours in our living room spewing forth some idea or other while recruiting new members to the society. My parents drank in everything the man said and repeated most of it, almost verbatim, to anyone who would listen. Robert Welch continued to praise Oliver for his outstanding contributions to the cause.

In July of 1966, Oliver headlined the fourth annual New England Rally for God, Family, and Country, an annual Birch-sponsored festival held in Boston and billed as a reunion for conservative Americans. Scott Stanley, managing editor of the two Birch publications
American Opinion
and the
Review of the News
, was listed as the moderator for Oliver’s speech, “Conspiracy or Degeneracy.”
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Near the end of his remarks, Oliver talked about “vaporizing” Jews as part of the “beatific vision.”

Oliver’s shocking statements generated an avalanche of negative press, followed by a month of internal Birch turmoil on how to respond. Finally, in early August, Welch told council members that Oliver was out.
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The minute Oliver left the Birch Society, he vanished from my parents’ conversations. I asked what had happened, but neither my mother nor my father would say; they pretended he’d never really been a friend anyway.

Revilo Oliver lived the rest of his life as a hero to the neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers, who spread his message of hate through their books and magazines. On August 10, 1994, Revilo Oliver died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was eighty-six.

In his recently published book, Arthur Goldwag says this about Oliver: “Hateful doesn’t even begin to describe Oliver’s racialism, which is expressed in impolitic, frankly Hitlerian terms that would shock even many a hard-core segregationist. His reflexive use of epithets like ‘sheeny’ and ‘nigger’ alone put
him beyond the pale.”
¹²

In addition to his vile ideas and white-supremacist ideology, Oliver also introduced the John Birch Society to its single most essential belief. In his 2009 book
Blood and Politics
, Leonard Zeskind identifies Oliver as “the person responsible for introducing the idea of a conspiracy by the Illuminati into Birch circles.”
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Thanks to Revilo, my parents embraced the Illuminati and toyed with denying the Holocaust. Personally, I wish I’d never heard of Oliver. I wish I could forget his creepy smile, slicked-back hair, and vile ideas. And I wish I could say that Oliver was the last Jew-hating, race-baiting, Nazi-loving extremist my parents brought home for supper.

Sometime during their lurch to the right, my parents decided that dinner was the ideal time to teach us kids about Communism. They no longer mentioned Nazis or the Holocaust; Mother and Dad made sure that we understood that Communists were the real evil monsters.

Before long, I could name all the Communist tyrants: Karl Marx, the father of Communism; Joseph Stalin, the scourge of Russia; Nikita Khrushchev, the current Russian gangster. In Asia, it was Kim Il-sun, the demon of North Korea, and Ho Chi Minh, the leader in North Vietnam. Finally, the newest member of the club was Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary just ninety miles off our coast.

“These Commies make Hitler look tame,” Dad said.

The ultimate fiend was Mao Zedong, the dictator of China. The scope of the murder and mayhem he’d unleashed on his own people was unimaginable; seventy million Chinese dead from starvation and mass murder.
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Statistics weren’t vivid enough for my parents, however. They used the dinner hour to paint detailed pictures of the horrendous things Mao ordered. Over chicken and dumplings, we heard about prisoners hacked to pieces by guards wielding machetes. Some unfortunates were forced to sit on chairs with seats of spikes. Their tormentors jostled the chairs until the victims were impaled. Thanks to my father, I learned how prisoners were forced to drink so much water that they died. From the specifics of sleep deprivation to the agonies of starvation, my parents shared it all.

Most of the time I could drown out the stories by pretending I was somewhere else. My sister and I used to call that “flying.” We’d see ourselves hovering above the table just far enough away that we couldn’t hear anything. That worked, most of the time. But some stories we could not escape; they
were seared into our memories.

One night, Mother described the atrocities in a village where Mao’s henchmen rounded up the women and girls, stripped them, and tied them to stakes. Nearby, the guards built fires and heated coals until they were red hot. Those coals were shoved into the vaginas of the victims. “You could hear the screams for miles,” Mother said.

Another evening, Dad explained execution quotas. In some villages, every man, woman, and child was killed. In other places, children reported their parents for crimes against the state. The children were then forced to kill their own parents.

“Remember this,” Mother said, “the day may come when you will have to turn on your father and on me. What will you do then?”

Around the table, silence. Finally, I took the risk to answer. “No matter what, I’ll never hand you over to a firing squad,” I promised. My brothers and sister agreed.

Mother, however, wasn’t convinced by our vows. “Don’t be too sure, children,” she said. “Until the worst happens, you never really know what you’ll do.”

The worst did not happen, but that never stopped my parents. They were positively sure that every secret Commie and every liberal Democrat was working around the clock to turn the United States into Russia, North Vietnam, or, worse yet, China. No one in Chicago had been butchered by machete-wielding revolutionaries yet, but disaster was definitely coming.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy
.

—R
ICHARD
H
OFSTADTER
¹

Our home buzzed with John Birch activity. Day after day, Mother was consumed with whatever project hit number one on her priority list. Sometimes, she enlisted the help of other Birch members who were eager to participate. Many weekends, I was recruited for the latest project. When my mother said, “You’re on deck,” I knew I’d be spending my Saturday stuffing envelopes and licking stamps.

What we did in Chicago was duplicated in chapters across sixteen other states. From Illinois to Florida, New Hampshire to California, the John Birch Society rallied scores of loyal Americans to take on the conspiracy and defeat the Communists.

In 1959, just as the Birchers were getting their organizational legs, President Dwight Eisenhower—in the third year of his second term—invited Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to visit the United States. If all went well, a presidential visit to Moscow would follow. According to David Halberstam, President Eisenhower dreamed that these meetings could “end the worst of the Cold War,” if Ike were able to negotiate a limited test-ban treaty, which would be “the triumph of his presidency.”
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For Robert Welch and his newly minted Birch Society, Eisenhower’s efforts were a call to action. Believing that “peaceful coexistence” with the Communists was impossible, the Birch leadership organized its first “front” group, the Committee Against Summit Entanglements (CASE), to publicize its objections to the proposed meetings.

CASE produced a full-page ad headlined, “Please, President Eisenhower,
Don’t!” urging the president to postpone Khrushchev’s September visit until the Communist leader proved that he was “no longer the enemy of freedom and of ourselves.”
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Over the summer, almost one hundred newspapers across the country ran anti-summit ads. Each ad included a petition with space for ten signatures and directions for mailing the completed form to the White House.

The ad campaign did not stop Khrushchev’s visit, but it did accomplish a major goal: prominent conservatives who were not John Birch members endorsed the campaign, contributed money to fund the project, and signed their names to the CASE ads. Barry Goldwater, William Buckley, and the libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises all signed, as did my father and dozens of other Birch leaders. In all, sixty-four names were printed in the national ads.

The success of that ad campaign set up the Birchers for their next battle: stopping the summit entirely. In January 1960, Welch unveiled the slogan that would drive the next six months of effort: “The summit leads to disaster.”
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“It is the most important, most comprehensive, and most dangerous of all the planned Communist advances now looming before us,” Welch wrote in February.
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In May, in a last-ditch effort to stop the summit, Welch instructed Birch members to write postcards and letters to the White House with the message, “Dear President Eisenhower — If you go, don’t come back!”
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Welch quantified the stakes in the battle: If the Communists “finally take us over,” he wrote, “. . . they will murder at least forty million of the most independent and family-loving Americans . . . fight while we still can.”
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I was a good little fourteen-year-old Bircher, and every month I tried to follow Welch’s directions. I read my
John Birch Society Monthly Bulletin
and wrote as many letters and postcards as I could. I didn’t recoil when Welch outlined his vision for the future, complete with death statistics. My parents had told so many graphic stories of torture and killing that Welch’s warnings seemed tame in comparison.

On May 1, 1960, the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane and captured the pilot, Francis Gary Powers. The political fallout forced the cancellation of Eisenhower’s trip to Moscow; the possibility of any accord with the Russians was kaput.

The John Birch Society claimed victory, despite the reality that they had nothing to do with the aborted visit. Still, the new grassroots organization had sent, according to Welch, six hundred thousand postcards to the White House.
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That, in itself, was a victory. The Birchers were on their way.

In the fall of 1959, right in the middle of the summit project, Mother called me into the dining room. On the table, piles of pamphlets, letters, envelopes,
and stamps waited. Mother scurried around checking the supplies. She stopped for a sip of cold tea and looked at me. “You’re on deck,” she said.

“The summit?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. “Today we’re saving Christmas.”

“Saving Christmas . . . from what?”

“The United Nations,” she told me.

The John Birch Society, she explained, had uncovered a plot to replace the baby Jesus with an international celebration of brotherhood. Before anyone was the wiser, traditional Christmas ornaments and trees would be replaced with United Nations insignias and flags.
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