Wrapped in the Flag (12 page)

I want no part in this. I won’t even have it around. If you were smart, you’d burn every copy you have
.

—S
ENATOR
B
ARRY
G
OLDWATER, AFTER READING
T
HE
P
OLITICIAN
,
R
OBERT
W
ELCH’S SECRET MANUSCRIPT
¹

Chicago simmered in the summer doldrums. Up and down our street, kids ran through sprinklers. When the Good Humor truck arrived, they traded their nickels for ice-cream treats.

The heat and humidity encouraged an explosion in the pest population. One afternoon I opened the metal garbage can and found handfuls of white, squiggly worms crawling over the paper bags. I screamed for Jay R. “They’re maggots,” he said. “Baby flies.”

I ran to the house, grabbed a bottle of Lysol, and poured it all over those awful things. “When are we getting out of here?” I whined.

“Not this year,” Jay said. “They just canceled Gloucester.”

That summer, everything was about the John Birch Society. Dad’s position on the National Council had added a new urgency to Chicago recruiting efforts. After all, the city now boasted a national leader.

More and more people wanted to hear my father speak. The crowds had outgrown our living room, so alternative meeting places were found. One perfect spot was the hall at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic church in Glenview, which could accommodate several hundred people.

The pastor, Father John Dussman, a good friend of my parents and an avid Bircher himself, welcomed the meetings. Father suffered no qualms about the separation of church and state, and used the
Clarion
, his weekly parish bulletin to endorse everything Birch. “The conspiracy is afoot,” he wrote in one Sunday’s bulletin. “. . . It dubs itself liberalism & always its hidden purpose is the enslavement of human will to an Almighty State instead of Almighty God.”
²

My parents had set ambitious goals for Birch membership, hoping to create a network of five hundred members in two dozen chapters by the end
of December 1960. For the most part, things were “progressing nicely,” as Mother said.

Once in a while, however, a hint of trouble surfaced. I overheard my parents whispering about a rumor that wouldn’t die and a book that didn’t exist. From their conversations, I figured out that this imaginary book contained details that could never be revealed about secret Communists in the government.

“It’s a rumor,” Dad said. “It won’t amount to anything.”

“I hope you’re right,” Mother answered.

Several times, Birch members actually asked about the secret book. Dad never hesitated to answer: “There is no book. There never has been.” That was enough for me. I never dreamed my father would lie.

On Monday, July 11, 1960, Mother and Dad prepared for a big meeting at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I was shocked when mother announced that I did not have to come. “You’ve heard your dad many times,” she told me. “Stay home with the little kids.”

While I watched TV in the basement with Jay R., Larry, Janet, and Mary Elizabeth, two hundred people filled Our Lady of Perpetual Help’s hall. I had no idea, until the next day, exactly what had transpired, but I imagined the meeting being like every other one I’d attended. Father Dussman offered a prayer and an enthusiastic introduction. Then my father took the microphone. Dad went right into his usual remarks, the same ones I’d heard a dozen or more times. He talked about the Communist empire and its growing influence in our country. He decried Fidel Castro in Cuba and the evil intentions of the United Nations.

I figured that Dad attacked the federal government, taxes, and creeping socialism. His vivid descriptions of their lives when our country merged into the Soviet Union scared the audience into silence. By the time my father begged the loyal Americans seated in front of him to join the John Birch Society and save their country, the audience burst into loud, sustained applause.

At this point, my mother was waiting at the literature table knowing she’d sell books and sign up new members as soon as the question-and-answer session finished. It was a big crowd; she would be busy.

As Dad relaxed and took a sip of water, he removed his sport coat and invited questions from the audience. As usual, someone asked, “Who was John Birch?” Others wondered, “Why is the John Birch Society better than other anti-Communist organizations?” and “Are Republicans more anti-Communist than Democrats?”

Dad was prepared for these questions; they were the same ones he heard almost every time he spoke. This was his favorite part of every speech, debating
the skeptics and turning an adversary into an ally. He was good at it and he knew it. My father had learned his debate techniques back at Northwestern University as a member of the varsity debate team. In his Birch talks, he employed the very same tactics he used so well back then. After fifteen minutes or so, Dad announced that he’d take a last question.

That night, however, things went off the rails when a woman, seated in the middle of the hall, waved her hand. When Dad nodded to her, she jumped to her feet and asked about the “secret book.”
³

My father gave his standard response. “There is no such book.”

“Really?” the woman said. She reached into her satchel and produced an 8½" x 11" spiral-bound manuscript written by Robert Welch, the Birch Society’s founder. She turned to pages she had marked and began to read: “Eisenhower’s motivation is more ideological than opportunistic . . . he has been sympathetic to ultimate Communist aims, realistically willing to use Communist means to help them achieve their goals, knowingly accepting and abiding by Communist orders, and consciously serving the Communist conspiracy, for all of his adult life.”
⁴

The room was deathly quiet. The woman, who never identified herself, paused for just a few seconds and then continued reading: “My firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”
⁵

The audience gasped.

Everyone in the room that night understood what that sentence meant; according to Robert Welch, the president of the United States was a traitor to his country.

Over the next few weeks, I learned that Robert Welch had begun his book, which he titled
The Politician
, as a letter to a friend. He kept adding more and more material until the manuscript grew to three hundred pages. The mimeographed manuscript was only released to select friends or political allies, and each copy was numbered. Recipients had to promise, in writing, to keep both the book and its contents confidential. By 1960, five hundred numbered copies of the unpublished version had been distributed.

My father eventually revealed that he’d possessed a copy of
The Politician
for four years. He never did tell me where he hid it.

The book was finally published by the Birch Society in 1963 as
The Politician
, but in Birch circles, it’s usually called
The Black Book
because it had a black cover.

That night in Glenview, the idea that President Eisenhower was a Communist was too radical for the audience to accept. Many of the men who were in the audience had served under General Eisenhower, and everyone knew men who’d given their lives in World War II. Welch’s claim that Eisenhower was a traitor and had been for all of his adult life was an outrage.

The audience grew angry: angry with Robert Welch, who’d written those words, and angry with my father, who’d spent ten minutes denying they existed.

Confronted with the evidence, my father had to admit that the manuscript was real and foolishly tried to justify the secrecy. According to an FBI informant who reported on the meeting, my father insisted that “the book was only for those who had been properly guided within the Society.”
⁶

The audience burst out laughing. My father put down the microphone and walked away from the podium. No new members joined the John Birch Society that night.

In the next few days, my parents talked at length about the meeting in Glenview. At first, they decried the anonymous heckler who had disrupted the meeting with her unfounded attacks. The whole story came out two weeks later when my dad arrived home with the evening paper tucked under his arm. He slapped the
Daily News
on the table where Mother was seated. “Take a look at Mabley’s column on page three,” he said.

Jack Mabley was a hometown favorite: a hard-hitting newspaperman willing to tackle Mayor Richard Daley’s political machine.
⁷
Like most Chicagoans, my parents considered Mabley tough and honest. In fact, he was the only reason they even bothered with the
Daily News
. Otherwise, they were strictly
Tribune
people.

Mother spread out the paper on the table, turned to page three, and began reading. “‘Bares Secrets of Red-Haters,’” she said.
⁸
“What’s this?”

“He got a hold of
The Politician
,” Dad said. “Probably from that woman in Glenview.”

Mother immediately realized the trouble this kind of publicity could create. “Look at this,” she said, tapping the paper. Right there—in a major Chicago newspaper with a large circulation—were stunning quotes from Robert Welch, the same ones from the meeting in Glenview: “My firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable
doubt,” and, “There is only one possible word to describe his [Eisenhower’s] purposes and actions. That word is treason.”
⁹

That word “treason”—haunted the John Birch Society for years.

The next day, Mabley continued his expose with a piece entitled “Strange Threat to Democracy.” In the second installment, the columnist recounted the story of my father’s actions during the meeting and his bizarre explanation about the “secret book.”

Mabley wrote, “Recently a meeting in Glenview was disrupted when the book was brought up in open discussion by someone in the audience. . . . Stillwell J. Conner, leader of the meeting, had told a member that giving the book to a member of the Society before he became ‘qualified’ was like telling a first-year medical student to go out and cure cancer.”
¹⁰
Mabley went on to enumerate Welch’s beliefs about the Communists inside our government: Roosevelt and Truman were Communist pawns, but it was Eisenhower’s election that altered the entire equation. “The Communists have one of their own actually in the Presidency,” Welch wrote.

The Jack Mabley expose was picked up by papers far beyond Chicago. Within a few weeks, criticism of the Birch Society spread across the country, from the
Milwaukee Journal
to the
Los Angeles Times
and
Time
magazine.
¹¹

After the Mabley bombshell, the Chicago media clamored for interviews with my dad. Following Welch’s personal directive, my father refused all requests. No matter, reporters showed up at our house, and the phone rang off the hook.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Your father is standing up for the truth,” Mother said.

“Then why did he lie about the book?” I asked.

Mother came across the room toward me. “You dare to question your father,” she said as she slapped my face. “Go to your room. I can’t even look at you right now.”

In early 1961, the John Birch Society reversed its blanket refusal to speak with the media, and my father made himself available to the Chicago media. Dad’s interview with Frank Reynolds, the news anchor of WBBM Channel 2, a CBS affiliate, made him the Birch Society’s public face in Chicago.
¹²

My dad spared no effort to protect the John Birch Society. In an interview conducted April 3, 1961, Dad discussed “his willingness to testify in Congress about the society’s beliefs,” saying, “There is nothing sinister about the group.” He declared that “he would
not
plead the Fifth Amendment under questioning.”
¹³