Wrapped in the Flag (39 page)

My parents were outraged and joined the new Committee for Free Choice in Medicine, which fought for the use of Laetrile.
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A number of prominent Birchers were involved in the committee, including Dr. Larry McDonald, who worked as the committee’s legislative advisor. Before his death, McDonald had prescribed Laetrile to his own patients in his urology practice back home in Atlanta.
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In addition to Laetrile, Mother bought nearly every vitamin ever marketed. The inventory was so great that it filled an entire kitchen cabinet and a
shelf in the refrigerator. Every morning, Mother sorted out Dad’s pills—and hers—into glass saucers. I’m sure they each swallowed upwards of sixty pills a day.

After the July debacle at our home, my husband encouraged me to make peace with my father. I tried to do just that, but my mother rebuffed every effort I made to see Dad. “You’ll upset your father,” she said. “You always do.”

In early June 1992, my husband and I were summoned to my parents’ house. We arrived early in the evening to find Dad freshly showered, shaved, and settled in his chair. He asked a few perfunctory questions about work and our kids, but he wasn’t really interested in the answers. After a couple of minutes, he got to the point.

“In the morning, I’m checking into the hospital for surgery,” he said. “I’m sick of being sick and nothing is really helping anymore. Your mother and I agree this is the best decision.”

This “best decision” was to remove his pancreas, gallbladder, spleen, and part of the stomach, a radical operation with the innocent-sounding name of the Whipple Procedure. Dad believed that this surgery would end his indigestion and his pancreatitis attacks.

“Your father will be home in less than three weeks with a very positive prognosis,” my mother claimed.

“What exactly is the diagnosis?” my husband asked.

“Persistent digestive-tract problems,” Mother said.

Dad said, “My pancreas is on the fritz.”

After the surgery, my father spent three weeks in the intensive-care unit. He wasn’t improving; he was just staying alive. The doctors finally confirmed that he had pancreatic cancer, which had spread all through his body. I knew he wouldn’t live long.

Most afternoons, I sat with him in the hospital. Sometimes I read to him. Sometimes I just sat quietly and watched him sleep. One day, while I paged through a magazine, a small, raspy voice called me. “Claire,” my father asked, “am I dying?”

I took his hand very carefully so I wouldn’t hurt him or dislodge one of his IVs. I put my lips close to his ear, so he’d hear me. “Dad,” I said, slowly, “you are not dying today.” I paused for a second and then added, “But I will sit next to you and tell you when it’s time. I promise.”

My father smiled a little, relaxed, and drifted back into a half-alive, half-dead sleep.

A week later, the doctors who been treating him announced the obvious: there was
nothing more to be done. Dad was dying. We could either take him home or move him to hospice.

“Absolutely no,” Mother said, rejecting both alternatives. “I will not kill him. I want him in intensive care, and I want everything possible to be done to keep him alive. That’s final.”

It took a kindly priest—my friend Father Don—to change Mother’s mind. He was able to convince her that prolonging Dad’s life was contrary to God’s will. “We have to let God be God,” he said.

That dear man sat with Mother when she signed the transfer papers. He walked beside her as Dad’s bed was wheeled to the hospice ward. He waited while the hospice staff removed my father’s feeding tube, bathed him, shampooed his hair, and shaved his beard. When he was dressed in his own pajamas and tucked into a clean bed, Father Don said the last rites, the Catholic sacrament for the dying. After that, I looked in on my father; for the first time in weeks, he was resting peacefully.

That evening, our family gathered to say our good-byes. My brothers had come with stories to share, while my sisters had planned personal blessings to help Dad on his way. I had a poem and a prayer tucked in my pocket.

My mother, however, had her own plans; she would allow no talking about Dad and no talking to Dad. All she wanted was the Rosary. “We’re here to pray for your father’s immortal soul,” she said. “That’s all.”

Finally, after we’d prayed the entire Rosary—five decades plus the “Glory Be” three times—Mother dropped her beads into her purse, touched her husband’s hand, and walked out the door. In turn, each of my brothers and sisters said their farewells to Dad and left the room.

When everyone had gone, I closed the door, pulled a chair next to the bed, and took my father’s hand. His eyes were closed. I could feel his weak breath on my face. I leaned close.

“Dad, it’s Claire,” I said. “A while ago, I promised that I’d tell you when you were dying. Tonight I’m keeping that promise.” I choked back my tears and continued. “Your body is tired. You fought the good fight for a long time and it’s time to let go.”

Sometime later, the night nurse stopped in to check on me. “Go home and rest,” she said. “I’ll call if anything changes.”

I kissed my father’s cheek and whispered to him, “Good night, my dear dad. I love you.”

Two hours later, my father slipped from his disease-ravaged body and went home.

The
Wanderer
eulogized my father, saying, “Jay provided the kind of thoughtful and principled leadership that enabled the Wanderer Forum Foundation to maintain a steady course throughout these years of crisis within the Church in America . . . his outstanding example as a faithful Catholic and a quietly effective leader will remain an inspiration for those who knew him.”
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The John Birch Society offered their condolences in the August 1992 bulletin, acknowledging Dad for thirty-two years of service on the National Council, honoring him for his “many contributions to the Americanist cause.”
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Mother saved these memorials, along with the cards and letters she received after Dad’s death. The most cherished message came from an old friend who wrote, “It must have been nice, and now very comforting, to have been married for so many years to a good man.” The friend never signed the card.

It soon became evident that the killers were Americans, born in the USA and bred on resentments circulating wildly in the terror zone where gun nuts met militias
.

—L
EONARD
Z
ESKIND ON THE
O
KLAHOMA
C
ITY
BOMBING
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Several days after my father’s funeral, I relaxed in the family room with an old issue of
Time
and a tall glass of iced tea. I was bone tired after all the activity. That two-week-old magazine offered a good excuse to sit back and do almost nothing, at least for a little while.

I turned pages, paying almost no attention to the stories until I hit “White & Wrong,” a report about Ku Klux Klan recruiting in, of all places, Janesville, Wisconsin.
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“The KKK in Wisconsin,” I said, right out loud. “What the hell?”

The Klan had erected a huge cross, soaked in kerosene, in the middle of Janesville’s most popular public park. Demonstrators threw mud, rocks, and their anger at the Klan but couldn’t get through the police barricade. The fellow who organized the whole thing, one Thom Robb, loved the uproar. “I couldn’t have bought this advertising for a million bucks,” he crowed.

A Klan wizard, Robb promulgated the idea of building a high-tech operation that would crank out articulate Klansmen and use modern advertising to enhance the organization’s image. As Robb described it, he was “selling white pride, white power.”
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Time
had combed through Robb’s life and discovered that his right-wing roots stretched back to the extremist political tracts favored by his mother. While in high school, Robb had joined the John Birch Society and at some later point had picked up the KKK banner instead.

When I read that white pride and power junk, Revilo Oliver, my father’s old JBS friend, came to mind. Though I’d tried to erase all memory of that hate-filled man, I learned later that he’d made quite a name for himself in the vilest segment of the radical Right, where he had a following among white supremacists and skinheads.

At the same time that the KKK was organizing in Wisconsin, the still-active and
ever-obnoxious Revilo was busy writing and speaking in every venue that would have him. In one of his pamphlets he suggested that true democracy could be achieved in the United States by “deporting, vaporizing, or otherwise disposing of the swarms of Jews, Congoids, Mongoloids, and mongrels that now infest our territory and are becoming ever more numerous and audacious in their unappeasable hatred of us.”
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I pushed Revilo out of my mind, grabbed my car keys, and drove over to see my mother.

A few days after Dad’s death, Mother had returned to her self-appointed task of defeating the ever-present, ever-growing conspiracy, whether it was the Communists or the one-world government folks. Most days, she hid away in her little office, reading and writing. I understood that her work was essential for her; without it, she’d be shattered by grief. She believed that my father lived in the work they’d always done together. In pressing on, she honored him.

I honored him by looking after her, as I’d promised. So, at least once a week, I coaxed her out of the office long enough to share a pot of tea and some conversation. I tried to steer our discussions away from religion or politics, but Mother had little interest in anything else. I knew when she said, “This is a very serious situation, dear,” that I’d be hearing about another nefarious scheme perpetrated by the scoundrels in Washington.

As far as I could tell, my mother and father had disapproved of every United States president since Herbert Hoover. Even Ronald Reagan, the conservative messiah, had fallen into disgrace for his embrace of amnesty for immigrants and his support for the United Nations’ Genocide Treaty. Making matters worse, Reagan had provided aid to the Soviets, raised taxes, and run up huge federal deficits. All of these policies proved that Ronald Reagan was really a liberal.

My parents called Reagan the “actor/President,” echoing what the JBS had written: “The actor/President who solidified his anti-Communist credentials with forensic fusillades against the ‘evil empire’ is now sharing top billing with Mikhail Gorbachev in an entirely new production promoting Communist goals.”
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My parents were convinced that Reagan was the latest traitor to encourage “Merger Mania,” the plan to merge the United States and the USSR and “lead all nations into an all-powerful world government.” As John McManus, the new JBS president and a longtime friend of my parents, said, “Anyone
with half a brain should see . . . a determination to tear the U.S. down with socialism and build the USSR up with Western aid. The result is that the two nations will become virtually indistinguishable and can be comfortably merged.”
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As far as my parents and the rest of the JBS were concerned, President George H. W. Bush was perfectly suited to expand on the socialist policies Reagan had initiated. Bush had deep ties to the “Insiders,” secret internationalists bent on merging the United States and Russia into a New World Order. Bush had been a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, two of the key organizations in that Insiders web. He’d also been a member of the Skull and Bones Society while at Yale, the organization that many Birchers labeled a “recruiting ground for the international banking clique, the CIA, and politics.”
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