Wrapped in the Flag (3 page)

His valet, an Indian fellow who had lived in Calcutta forever, told him, “You can’t go hungry to save them. This is India. People starve all the time.”

Before long, my father listened to his valet and stepped over the bodies in his path. He turned away from the raised hands. “I had orders,” he explained. “Winning the war trumped everything.”

Dad had arrived in India with one task: get the war supplies out of Calcutta and into the hands of the Allied troops on the China-Burma front. He quickly realized that his job forced him to deal with the British and their irksome bureaucracy. One day, Dad arrived at his office and discovered that the
railroad yard was at a complete standstill. Not one crate of supplies moved an inch while the Brits consulted maps, read manuals, and convened meetings. Finally, my father grabbed a pair of binoculars, scrambled up a narrow ladder on the side of a boxcar, and perched himself on the roof where he could survey the situation.

A British officer, decked out in his jodhpurs with a riding crop in hand, watched. “I say, old boy,” he said. “You ought not be up there. It’s inappropriate for an officer of your rank, really.”

“I’m here to win this war!” my father shouted back. “If that means climbing every railroad car in India, I will . . . sir.”

That day, Dad discovered the problem: several cows had wandered on the tracks and been run over. He didn’t bother to ask who had the authority to move the dead animals; he just ordered the tracks cleared. Before long, Major Conner had the main supply depot back in operation.

He also had his proof that bureaucracy made small problems into big problems. India convinced Dad that Britain, which he called socialist England, had delayed the Allied victory in World War II by an entire year.

On August 15, 1945, not long after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered. World War II was over. My father, however, didn’t get home for months. He was part of the clean-up crew that moved thousands of GIs back to the States and sorted mountains of supplies into military warehouses. When Dad was finally discharged on April 14, 1946, Lieutenant Colonel Stillwell J. Conner came home to his wife, my two-year-old brother, and me.

My father needed a job. He polished his resume and took any interview he could wrangle. In a matter of weeks, he understood that he was late; the help-wanted signs had come down six months earlier. Undaunted, Dad convinced two brothers he’d known since college to join him in a great adventure: their own business.

“Owning the joint is the quickest way to get rich,” he told them.

The three men merged their cash and their last names—Conner and Rothbauer—and set out to make some money. Each partner contributed, but when it came to closing deals, my father was the star. Modestly, he described himself as an “old-fashioned peddler.”

His partners thought otherwise. “Your dad could sell ice to Eskimos,” they said.

As I got a bit older, I realized that the Rothbauer brothers knew of what they spoke.
My dad had paid for college by giving speeches. At one point, he crisscrossed the Midwest speaking for the Women’s Christian Temperance League—yes, the queens of prohibition. When I got older, I thought it was both curious and hilarious: my dad had been making and selling bathtub gin at the same time.

The grown-ups saw my dad as a master salesman; I didn’t. To me, he was my Daddy and my pal. Many evenings he barely got his suit coat hung up and his tie loosened before Mother plopped me into his arms. “You can have her,” Mother said. “She has been difficult all day, and I’m exhausted.”

“Look at her eyes. Maybe she can’t see,” Dad said.

“Nonsense,” Mother said. “She’s just naughty.”

Dad ignored my mother and took me himself to an eye doctor downtown. A few hours later, I had tiny glasses and a patched eye. According to Mother, I fussed and fought every time she tried to change the patch. “Jay, you handle this,” she said. He did.

When I was little, I had the strongest, smartest, handsomest, bravest Daddy in the whole wide world. I hugged him so tight he could never, ever get away. That’s how it would be forever—cross my heart and hope to die.

Years later, I realized there was no postwar peace for my father. He quickly became immersed in new battles, battles about our country, its emerging enemies, and an increasingly uncertain future. Every morning before the sun came up, the paperboy tossed the
Chicago Tribune
on our porch. Around seven, Dad retrieved the paper, poured himself a cup of coffee, strong and black, and settled down for a read. Every few minutes, he lit another cigarette, took a deep puff, and sighed. I heard him mumble about “storm clouds” and “cold wars.” As Mother bustled around, feeding and dressing babies, she paused occasionally to commiserate with Dad’s worries.

By the time I was four, the Communists had accelerated their march across Eastern Europe. It was 1949 and millions of souls had fallen under Red control, subdued by torture, hunger, and a vicious secret police. By the middle of the 1950s, the Soviet Union’s empire stretched from Poland to China, from East Germany to the border of Greece.

The Red Menace was sucking up everything in its path.

Mao took China and my father began to believe that the Communists could take over the entire world. “The Reds are coming for us,” he told my mother. “We need a savior, now.”

When I was five, the United States and the United Nations went to war in Korea.
I knew little about the whole mess, but I remember Dad saying, “North to the Yalu.” The undeclared war in Korea under the guise of a “police action” confirmed Dad’s hatred of both the United Nations and Harry Truman.
⁴
Dad’s arguments against the UN always included quotes from General MacArthur. One of his favorites was: “In war there is no substitute for victory.”
⁵
My father never retreated from that position.

When I was six, I could name three great Americans: George Washington, the father of the country; Benjamin Franklin, the man with a kite and a key; and Joseph McCarthy. I wasn’t sure who the last fellow was or what he’d done, but my father raved so much about him, I knew he had to be really, really important. “McCarthy is our only hope,” Dad often said.

This fellow McCarthy had become a hero when he announced that he could and would name over two hundred people inside our State Department who were secret Communists.
⁶

Soon, the senator was investigating Communists everywhere: in the Truman administration, in the Eisenhower administration, in the Voice of America, in the Army. My parents were thrilled with the senator and his defense of all things anti-Communist.

“God willing, McCarthy will be our next president,” Dad told me.

When I was seven, I’d graduated from listening to my parents talk about the news to actually trying to read the paper myself. I didn’t understand a lot of the stories, but I was able to decipher most of the words. When I ran across a word that puzzled me, I’d ask for help. “Sound it out,” my mother always said.

As I pored over the
Chicago Tribune
on June 19, 1953, I came across an article about two people named Rosenberg. From what I could gather, they had been in jail at a place called Sing Sing because they had given secrets to the Russians. One word made no sense to me. I could sound it out, but I didn’t know what it meant. “What is
e-lec-tro-cut-ed?
” I asked.

Dad put down his paper and looked at me. “Claire, those goddamn Commie traitors were strapped in chairs and fried until they died. Now they’re in hell, where they belong.”

I didn’t understand what frying people meant, but I did understand that the Rosenbergs had done something very, very bad. Based on my dad’s reaction, I figured that those two people deserved whatever they got.

When I was eight, Senator McCarthy ramped up his investigations. To hear McCarthy tell it, the entire government, from top to bottom, was packed full of Communists. He promised to take all of them down.

McCarthy was unstoppable until he accused General Ralph W. Zwicker,
a decorated war hero, of being “unfit to wear the uniform.”
⁷
That nasty comment got the full attention of the Eisenhower administration. Public hearings were scheduled, but this time, the firebrand senator would be under scrutiny. Television networks were invited to broadcast everything.

For over a month, Americans tuned in to see Joseph McCarthy in action—live and unfiltered. But the man they saw was not the guy they’d come to love. Day after day after day, more and more folks soured on their hero as he revealed himself to be a bully and a thug. Even his Senate colleagues got disgusted and censured McCarthy.
⁸

The great Joseph McCarthy, the king of the anti-Communists, ended his career in disgrace.

Most of the country abandoned everything McCarthy, but my parents remained staunch supporters. “The Senator was smeared,” my father claimed. “The Commies won.”

When I was eleven, Joseph McCarthy died, reportedly from cirrhosis of the liver. My parents were outraged. “That’s a lie!” my father shouted to my mother. “Senator McCarthy did not drink himself to death. He was murdered.”
⁹

“They had to kill him because he knew too much,” my mother replied.

I couldn’t count the number of times I heard my father insist, “It will take a lot more Joes to save this country.”

When I was thirteen, my father took his place in a new anti-Communist army led by a new anti-Communist McCarthy. My mother joined him. Like it or not, I tagged along.

Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflct, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which has shown . . . how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority
.

—R
ICHARD
H
OFSTADTER
¹

My father didn’t become a fire-breathing, anti-Communist zealot without help. A healthy dose of it came from one man: Harry Curtis of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a retired sea captain who was married to my father’s only sister, Ever (yes, that is her name). My uncle Harry shoved my father to the far, far right. I can’t say he lit the final fuse, but Harry did hand my father the match.

My uncle was gruff, opinionated, and, sometimes, downright mean. Even at the age of eleven, I knew this, so I tried to love him from a safe distance. My parents had picked Uncle Harry as my godfather and that gave me special standing as his favorite niece, but that didn’t change anything.

Every so often, Uncle Harry gifted me with a few dollars and a pat on the head. “Take this,” he said. “From me, for your birthday.” I knew he had no idea when my birthday was, but I took the money, thanked him politely, and made my getaway as soon as possible. Any conversation with my uncle was a minefield. Harry knew, or believed he knew, everything about everything. From meteorology to religion, brain surgery to politics, the Captain had an opinion. I heard Harry criticize anyone who disagreed with him; I avoided him as much as possible.

Most days, Harry held court in the kitchen, hunched over the long plank table, with a cup of coffee at his elbow. On the wall above his head was a plaque, hand-lettered in bold script.

It read:
The Captain’s Word Is Law
.

Harry took a simple approach to selling his point of view. He just got louder and
louder. This method worked so well, he kept it up. Before long, folks either agreed with the Captain or pretended they did.

Most summers, my family spent the month of August in Gloucester. We piled into the house on Eastern Point with our cantankerous uncle, his wife, who escaped most days to her medical practice in town, four Curtis kids, and Ollie, the live-in housekeeper.

The cocktail party was a regular event at the Curtis home. Several times a week, guests began trickling in around six. By seven, the evening was in full swing. Usually, my brother, my oldest cousin, and I were summoned to the living room to greet the adults. The room was a hum of conversation, much of it political.