Wrapped in the Flag (31 page)

Two days after Barry Goldwater suffered defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson newspapers across the country were analyzing, evaluating, and editorializing about the meaning of the results. It wasn’t enough that Goldwater had lost; everybody with an opinion had to weigh in on some aspect of the election. Even the Russians offered their congratulations to President Johnson, along with some platitudes about “consolidating universal peace.”
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The
Chicago Tribune
bemoaned the election results: “It is apparent that socialism is on the march. The people want pie and they do not reckon tomorrow’s costs as long as they have the illusion of tasting it now.”
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Ironically, my parents wouldn’t read that editorial for three days. They had to wait until the U.S. Postal Service delivered the
Trib
to their new address: Arlington Street, Marshfield, Wisconsin.

When I thought about my upcoming Christmas vacation, I had to remind myself that I would never sleep another night in my Sioux Avenue bedroom or meet my friends for a pizza at Lou’s. No, the Conners now lived in a town with a population of thirteen thousand.

“There are more cows than people,” my brother Jay R. told me.

“That is not comforting,” I answered him.

“Look on the bright side, sister of mine,” he added. “In this state, we are old enough to drink beer.”

Great, I lived in a place with cows, beer, and a whole lot of nothing else. And just to add to the fun, winter was so damn cold that a person could freeze
to death. After a few weeks in Wisconsin, I pressed my dad to explain how we’d landed in that place. It was, in my opinion, a long way to fall.

After lunch at Julie’s, a local tavern Dad frequented, he lit a cigarette, sipped his martini, and explained what had happened.

“The Birch attacks escalated and our business slipped. More and more customers disappeared. Finally, Lou and Ray [Dad’s business partners] demanded that I quit the JBS. Of course, I refused. Then, they called a corporate meeting and voted their shares—66 percent—against me. I had to settle for the deal they offered.”

“What was the deal?” I asked.

“They took control of Conroth, including our factories and all the other business interests. I got this little furniture factory right here. They forgot to tell me that no one ever looked at the books; the company had never made a dime.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’ve borrowed everything I can, even against my life insurance policies. Now I’m trying to keep the wolf from the door,” my father said.

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“I’m trying to keep from going broke,” Dad said.

That night I thought about my parents and the situation they faced in Marshfield. I felt sorry for them, and I worried for their future. At the same time, I made a personal decision. “I’ll never live here,” I said. “Never, ever, and that’s final.”

Such an absolute, cast-in-stone, nonnegotiable promise was, as the saying goes, made to be broken. But that day, I had total confidence in my pledge. I had one good reason for that confidence: I’d met a boy, a handsome, tall, smart fraternity boy who went to Southern Methodist University, the crown jewel of Dallas’s colleges.

SMU was known all over the Southwest as the stomping grounds of Peruna, the school’s mustang mascot, and the home of 96 Guys and a Doll, the awesome marching band. Thanks to a blind date, arranged by my friend Lee Ann, I was introduced to everything UD didn’t have. “I’m finally going to college,” I told my friends after a few months. Suddenly, I had the best of all worlds: I studied at UD and played at SMU. The arrangement was just dandy.

Like me, my new boyfriend was a Midwest transplant, and like me, he had no plans to return to his roots. He was already working at Texas Instruments in an engineering school work-study program. Upon graduation, he’d be working full-time on a secret project for the Department of Defense, a job that guaranteed a critical-skills deferment. With it, he’d never see the jungles
of Southeast Asia or the alleys of Saigon.

“Thank God,” I said. “He can serve Uncle Sam from an assembly line in Richardson.”

GOP members used the months after the election to fight among themselves. The
Chicago Tribune
blamed “party [Republican] leaders who sulked in their tents” and the “ideological split . . . that dragged down Goldwater’s popular vote and undoubtedly cost him many states.”
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The fighting and fussing didn’t affect the John Birch Society; they went on the offense. In newspapers across the country, a slick fifteen-page insert appeared that painted the JBS as the real American patriots the country longed for. Heaping praise on Robert Welch, Birch founder, the ad quoted
National Review
, “There is no question that he has stirred the slumbering spirit of patriotism in thousands of Americans, roused them from lethargy, and changed their apathy into a deep desire to first learn the facts about communism and then implement that knowledge with effective and responsible action.”
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Bill Buckley probably didn’t like the reference, but the Birch ad had an impact. In July of 1965, Ben Bagdikian, writing in the
New York Times
, acknowledged the effectiveness of Birch efforts to turn Goldwater’s loss into their gain. “Tightest and shrewdest of all ultra operations is the John Birch Society, which claims to have inherited 30 per cent of the Goldwater activists in Los Angeles County,” a number around 3,500 people.
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Much of the credit for the JBS success has to go to John Rousselot, a former congressman from California who served as the society’s national PR director. Rousselot developed and implemented the new Birch advertising, including a coast-to-coast weekly radio message,
The Birch Reports
. He found the key to Birch success and conservative electoral success in one place—the Southern states. Turning that region Republican was Rousselot’s goal.
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According to Donald Critchlow, “Republicans were eager to move the party to the political center and reestablish it as a party of moderation.”
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But many conservatives pushed back against the desire to purge the Far Right from the party’s ranks. Their rising star, Ronald Reagan, said, “We don’t intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle that just ended.”

Robert Welch added fuel to this GOP civil war when he published his annual assessment of the level of Communist control in the United States. In the 1965 “Scoreboard” issue of the Birch Society magazine,
American Opinion
, Welch concluded that the United States was “60–80 percent Communist
dominated.”
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This assessment pushed Bill Buckley and
National Review
to take action. In the October 19, 1965, issue, they devoted twenty pages to pillorying the JBS, accusing it of harming the anti-Communist cause. Buckley used the example of the Birch position on the Vietnam War to prove his point: “The President of the United States is engaged in anti-Communist action in Southeast Asia, and for that reason is under great pressure from the American Left. But he is also, astoundingly, under pressure from a segment of the American Right which has been taught by Mr. Robert Welch that apparently anti-Communist action undertaken by the government of the United States cannot really be anti-Communist for the reason that our Government is controlled by Communists.”
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Here’s a simpler translation of Buckley’s criticism. According to the JBS, our government is almost totally controlled by the Communists. Obviously, those Communists would design our foreign policy to help the Communists, not harm them. Therefore, the Vietnam War can’t be hurting the Communists; it has to be helping them.

Buckley had it right; that was exactly why the JBS opposed the Vietnam War.

Robert Welch explained it like this: “There [is] less chance of this Administration conducting an honest war in Vietnam, for honestly anti-Communist purposes, than there is of Khrushchev being elected President of the United States Chamber of Commerce.” Welch continued, “The Communists . . . create a left wing demand that the U.S. pull out of Vietnam and fool the American people into thinking that we are serving some purpose, other than exactly what the Communists want. Naturally the Communists have been doing everything to advance the theme that it is our patriot and humanitarian duty to ‘stand firm’ in Vietnam.”
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One historian portrayed the Birch position on the war this way: “Welch’s neo-isolationist posture on Vietnam . . . earned him the most vociferous ire of the conservative movement leaders. In a convoluted, conspiratorial interpretation of events, Welch saw the war as a carefully managed fraud, designed to convince the U.S. public of President Johnson’s anti-communist goals.”
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The JBS position on the war cost them. Many folks who had supported the society abandoned the cause. In 1965, the California Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities reversed its previously positive view of the society, declaring that it “has attracted a lunatic fringe that is now assuming serious proportions” and “had been beset by an influx of emotionally unstable people.”
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For the next two years, Mother made sure that I was in the loop on all things Birch. Every time we talked, she urged me to step up and make the Birch cause my own. “You’re an adult now,” she told me. “It’s time to act like one.”

She faithfully forwarded the Birch bulletins to me—I’d never given the society my Texas address—and every month, she underlined passages and added comments. It didn’t take me long to flip through the pages and then toss the thing. When Mother would ask if I’d completed the Birch agenda for the month, I’d cross my fingers and say, “Just like always.”

I congratulated myself on the ruse. “I’m here and they’re there,” I told myself.

The day after Christmas in 1966, on a bitter cold day in Marshfield, I married my college sweetheart. Our future looked bright: all we had to do was get back to Dallas, set up our little duplex on Anita Street, and discover what being married was all about.

“You’ve landed that most important of all degrees,” my friends teased. “The MRS.”

“Yes, I’m a real Texas girl now,” I bragged.

For a couple of years, I dodged Birch politics. In our house, most of the stuff my mother sent ended up in the garbage while
Time
,
Life
, and
Newsweek
lived in our magazine rack. I thought of myself as a conservative, though not a John Bircher; but politics was not my priority. I was more interested in “fun and games,” as my mother would say.

Then in 1968, I became the focus of my parents’ full-court political press. Their goal was a simple one: they wanted me to support George Wallace for president.
Time
quoted Wallace as saying, “We’re going to shake the eyeteeth of the liberals of both national parties,” adding, “By liberal, he means anything left of the far, far right.”
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No wonder my parents were Wallace all the way.

My mother and father forgot one thing in their campaign to get my vote for Wallace—I despised the bombastic little man from Alabama and the racist ideas he peddled. As much as I wanted to appease my parents, on this issue I dug in my heels. “I will never vote for Wallace,” I told them.

Wallace’s campaign did nothing to change my mind. I was appalled when he explained his plan to stop the race riots and war protests to a
Life
reporter: “Bam! Bam! Bam! Shoot ’em dead on the spot! Bam!”
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Six weeks later, the magazine interviewed Wallace campaign staffers and supporters in Indiana. “He will bring tranquility,” one woman said. “He will put everyone in
their
place—the colored, the students, the people on welfare,
anyone who’s causing so much trouble.”
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In the same article, another Wallace fan, said, “The only difference between the races is that the majority of blacks are bad, and with the whites it is only the minority.”

Time
followed Wallace to Pittsburgh, where he roused a standing-room-only crowd of two thousand at a “Stand Up for America” rally. In the audience, the reporter spotted “well-dressed men sporting John Birch Society pins. At one point, an enthusiast shouted, ‘Wallace is a new Messiah!’”
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