Wrapped in the Flag (2 page)

As I stepped off the curb, I noticed a rumpled paper on the ground. Staring up at me were two photographs of John Kennedy, a front and side image. “It’s a mug shot,” I thought. The banner below screamed “Wanted for Treason” in bold black letters.
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I picked up the sheet and scanned the list of grievances.

THIS MAN is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States:

1. Betraying the Constitution (which he swore to uphold): He is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations. He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).
   
2. He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations—Berlin wall—Missile removal—Cuba—Wheat deals—Test Ban Treaty, etc.)
   
3. He has been lax in enforcing Communist Registration laws.
   
4. He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.
   
5. He has illegally invaded a sovereign State with federal troops.
   
6. He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office; Upholds the Supreme Court in Anti-Christian rulings. Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.
   
7. He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).
   

These indictments of the president were not news to me. Over the last three years, I’d heard my father and other John Birch Society leaders attack Kennedy repeatedly for these same “crimes.” No doubt, the society hated this president. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Birchers in Dallas had printed the flyer.

Hours later, I fell onto my bed in the University of Dallas dorm. The president of the United States was dead and I was in shock. My neck hurt. I had a headache behind my eyes. My stomach growled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but I knew I couldn’t keep anything in my stomach. I needed to call my parents at home in Chicago.

My father picked up on the second ring. He immediately launched into a litany of the facts as he knew them.

“Don’t talk to anyone about this,” he warned me. “You may need a lawyer.”

“Me? Why?” I asked.

“They might think we did it,” Dad said.

“Did the Birch Society have anything to do with this?” I asked my father.

He hung up without answering.

I walked back to my room, pasted a “Sleeping” sign on my door, and
curled up on my bed. I needed time to think about my father, what he’d said—and what he hadn’t said. If the John Birch Society had anything to do with the murder of the president of the United States, he’d become an accessory to the crime of the century. I knew there would be lawyers, investigations, testimony, trials, and . . . prison for the guilty. I could only imagine what would happen to me.

I finally fell asleep despite a raging headache. Several hours later, I awakened with my first full-blown migraine. The campus nurse gave me a pat on the shoulder and a pill to kill the pain. “Get some rest,” she said. “You’ll feel better in no time.”

Soon, the crashing pain and the lights pulsing behind my eyes vanished. The side effects from that magic pill kept me in a fog for most of the weekend, but I didn’t care. Unfortunately, however, all the drugs on campus could do nothing to ease my heartache. Until that day, I’d never, ever imagined that my father and his friends might—and this is still hard to write so many years later—be part of killing the president.

All day Saturday, the university buzzed over the assassination. Oswald had been arrested and identified as a Communist, but it was a stretch to believe that he’d hatched and executed the plot all alone.
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Some folks insisted that the radical Right had to have played a part. Cuban freedom fighters had plenty of reasons to want revenge, and local anti-Kennedy groups, including the John Birch Society, had created a toxic atmosphere in Dallas. Others thought that Kennedy had run afoul of the Communists during the Cuban Missile Crisis and that they’d decided to avenge their humiliation.

I was still too fragile to talk much. As soon as I finished my breakfast, I walked back to the dorm and climbed into bed.

On Sunday morning, my friends and I jammed the TV room. In front of me, a dozen kids sat on the floor. Behind the last row of chairs, a dozen more stood. Scattered
around the room were remnants of the weekend: partially eaten sandwiches, empty Dr. Pepper bottles, and overflowing ashtrays.

We watched the formal procession of the president’s flag-draped casket down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. We heard the clack of the horses’ hooves and the methodical drum beat of the military escorts. At the Rotunda, the honor guard carried the body of their commander in chief up the thirty-six stone steps to lie in state.

Around 11 a.m., KRLD-TV switched to its live, local feed for the transfer of Lee Harvey Oswald to the Dallas County Jail. Just as Oswald appeared on the screen between two police guards, we saw a hat move toward the prisoner. A second later, Oswald crumpled into the arms of the deputies. The reporter screamed: “He’s been shot! He’s been shot! Lee Oswald has been shot. There’s a man with a gun. It’s absolute panic!”
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Behind me, someone whispered, “Shit. What the hell?”

When the shooter was identified as Jack Ruby, one of my friends said, “He’s the Mob’s man in Dallas.” At 1:07 p.m., Oswald died in Parkland Hospital, the same hospital where Kennedy had died two days earlier.

It was my turn to ask, “What the hell?”

By Monday, shock, chaos, and confusion had given way to raw grief. Whatever I’d thought before, whatever my politics, on Monday, November 25, I was an American burying my president.

I watched as the white horses pulled Kennedy’s coffin toward St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Behind the caisson, Jackie, draped in a black veil, walked to her husband’s funeral followed by family, friends, and world leaders. Units of the armed services came next, with the Black Watch piping a haunting dirge.
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My roommate put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. Tears streamed down our cheeks. It was hard to see how we’d ever be the same again.

A few days later, I talked to my father. “Don’t get emotional,” he reminded me. “Kennedy was a traitor. The Commies killed one of their own.”

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of Communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down—they really are down
.

—S
ENATOR
J
OSEPH
M
C
C
ARTHY
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The first time I met my father, I was eight months old. I was an easy conquest for the handsome, kind fellow just home from World War II. “You knew your father right away,” my mother told me. “The minute he picked you up, all you did was laugh and coo.”

As a child, I believed everything my father said, and I trusted everything my father did. When he worried about the Communists and the end of the United States, I worried too. When he agonized about the destruction of freedom, I agonized with him. As he fretted over the future, so did I.

As he careened toward extremism, I still believed him. A little, nagging voice inside me didn’t grasp his ideas about African Americans or Jews, but I was my daddy’s girl. If he said it, it had to be so.

I knew how much my father hated John Kennedy, and Kennedy was not the first or the last Communist my father hated. With the help of his arch-right-wing friends, in and out of the John Birch Society, Dad could recite a list of “dirty Reds,” as he called them, who had gotten themselves elected president of the United States. From Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy to Jimmy Carter, the Oval Office had seen its share of Commie dupes, Commie sympathizers, and out-and-out Commies.

According to Dad, those presidential traitors were just the tip of an enormous iceberg of bad guys who planned to bring down our country. These men may have looked like Americans and talked like Americans, but they actually were players in a two-hundred-year-old conspiracy to take over the world. His secret bogeyman, the Illuminati—with its New World Order scheme—would conquer the United States under the Red hammer and sickle.
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Even after the Soviet Union collapsed and China turned more toward
business than conquest, my father kept sounding the alarm. He knew the Communists—and their real bosses—were still coming, whether the rest of us did or not.

“As long as there is breath in my body, I’ll keep on fighting,” Dad said. “I swore my life and my sacred honor to save freedom. I won’t quit now.”

“No, you won’t,” I said.

And we were both right. He’d go to his grave rigid, uncompromising, and—in his mind—justified. In 1992, as pancreatic cancer ate his body and he slipped in and out of consciousness, I knew he remained true to the cause. “You are still ferocious,” I whispered to him one afternoon. “You always were.”

In the family stories I heard about my father, he was always the hero. He was “Jay dear” to his mother, Mabelle, a divorcee and self-made entrepreneur. He was “my dear brother” to his only sister, Ever Louise, who adored him as her protector and mentor. He was “a prince of a man” to his wife, Laurene, the beautiful, shy girl he’d met on a blind date in 1934 and married four years later.

He was Major Stillwell J. Conner to the Army of the United States, serving with honor during World War II. When he was sent to India in late November 1944, he saw human misery and bureaucratic nightmares on a scale that shocked him and changed him.

“In India, you could see the heat,” my father had told me. It shimmered around half-naked men pulling rickshaws, cows wandering in the square, and the starving people outside his bedroom door. Every day, skeletons lifted hands toward him, hoping for a small charity. Babies lay motionless in their mothers’ arms while black flies sucked at their eyes.
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Dad was so shocked by the horror that he gave half of his daily rations to children who were still able to chew. Often the gift was refused; it wasn’t rice.