Wrapped in the Flag (14 page)

Propelled by those words, Birchers jumped into the 1960 GOP presidential primary in support of their dream candidate: Barry Goldwater, the junior senator from Arizona. Goldwater embodied everything the Birchers loved; he was anti-Communist, anti–big government, anti–civil rights, pro-military, and anti-welfare.
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Barry was
the
man.

Robert Welch embraced Goldwater as both a friend and a patriot. “I know Barry fairly well,” Welch wrote. “He is absolutely sound in his Americanism, has the political and moral courage to stand by his Americanist principles, and in my opinion, can be trusted to stand by them until hell freezes over. I’d love to see him as President of the United States, and maybe someday we shall.”
⁵

Technically, I guess Welch could claim he didn’t tell anyone to vote for Barry Goldwater, but I doubt Birchers missed the message in his words.

In the summer of 1960, when it was clear that Richard Nixon would be the Republican nominee, many right-wingers, my parents included, refused to lift a finger to get him elected. Mother shut the checkbook, and Dad rebuffed every plea from the GOP for help.

Mother and Dad were not alone in their disgust with the prospect of a Nixon candidacy. Robert Welch was equally as negative. In September’s bulletin, he was still arguing against the GOP and the “left-wing pressures
within
the Republican Party.”
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He went on to say that those pressures would “so steadily increase as to smother all efforts . . . to make Americanist views effective.”

Obviously, Welch was not defining this election as a clear choice between the good guy on the GOP side and the bad guy on the Democratic side. The Birchers were taking aim at the Republican Party itself. The GOP establishment understood that they had to respond. The potential that the Birchers and their right-wing allies would boycott the election and hand the presidency to John Kennedy loomed large.

Only one person on the political stage could bring the right wing back into line: Barry Goldwater himself. The GOP leadership pressed Goldwater for a full endorsement of the Nixon–Henry Cabot Lodge ticket. Anything less would guarantee a GOP loss.
⁷

Goldwater delivered for the party and endorsed Nixon. “We are conservatives,” he said to the assembled delegates at the Republican National Convention in Chicago. “This great Republican Party is our historic house. This is our home. . . . Let’s grow up, conservatives. If we want to take the Party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work.”
⁸

The party crossed its fingers and hoped that Goldwater had pulled the reluctant
Right back into the fold. But even a month before the election, it was unclear whether the Goldwater contingent was going to turn out for Nixon.

Robert Welch hemmed and hawed about Nixon. He analyzed the events of the Chicago convention and scolded Goldwater for ignoring the chance to launch a third party, the American Party. “There had been created for him [Goldwater] a rendezvous with history which it was a tragedy for him not to keep,” Welch wrote.
⁹

Welch mused that a Goldwater–Strom Thurmond ticket for the new American Party, if announced from the podium during the GOP convention, would have “electrified the nation,” carried most of the South, and “made a terrific showing in November.” The third party would not win in 1960, Welch admitted. But its success would pave the way to take the White House four years later.
¹⁰

The remaining section of the September bulletin was devoted to various scenarios of how Birchers “might” vote in the upcoming election. For sure, Welch didn’t say which lever to pull, but he did put in a plug for a campaign button that said, “Goldwater Says Don’t Dodge; Vote Nixon and Lodge.”
¹¹

While Welch pined for a third party and the right wing refused to fall in love with Nixon, my father took a more pragmatic approach. “Hold your nose and vote Dick,” he said to Mother at dinner. “Otherwise, it’ll be JFK.”

The day after the election, it was JFK, but only by a tiny 113,000-vote margin.
¹²
For a whole lot of right-wingers, the GOP loss was proof of fraud. Mother claimed that Chicago had made Kennedy the president by allowing dead people in Cook County to vote. My father blamed Lyndon Johnson’s shenanigans in the Lone Star State.
¹³

After the inauguration, my father took a black-and-white approach to Kennedy’s presidency—if JFK was for something, Dad was against it.

Opposing Kennedy meant more than fighting his policies. It meant that Kennedy had to be a one-term president, a daunting project as the young president was very popular. At the same time, however, the people who hated Kennedy were becoming more organized and more determined. It didn’t hurt that they’d already found their anti-Kennedy in Barry Goldwater.
¹⁴
It also didn’t hurt that they had allies in Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, considered by at least one historian as “the premier example of right-wing activism in the early 1960s.”
¹⁵

Though most of the Right moved on to fighting Kennedy, my father still smarted from the debacle at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. It had been six
months, but he still worried that the storm about Eisenhower and the infamous secret book showed no signs of dying down. “The society has to fight back,” Dad often said. But he seemed to have no answer to the question how.

Welch had offered my father his personal support. The entire council had congratulated Dad for his perseverance in the face of the smear. But that support, as appreciated as it was, did not hold back the waves of criticism that just kept on coming.

My Chicago aunts and uncles—except for the one uncle who was in the society—rebuked my father for his Birch involvement. Before long, we didn’t attend family parties. I don’t know if the invitations never came or my parents declined them, but I do know that my cousins who attended Marywood turned the other way when they spotted me in the halls.

That was small potatoes compared to the criticism swirling around the society all over the country. Welch admitted in February of 1961, “We have given up all hope of avoiding publicity, either good or bad.”
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In March, he described increasing “smear campaigns,” including one in Chicago. “Good patriots are . . . being informed that The John Birch Society is Communist . . . two of Chicago’s leading citizens are being specifically named as Communists on the basis of their membership in the Society.”
¹⁷

I have no idea who those two Chicagoans were; certainly my parents could not be the targets. Not long after that bulletin appeared, however, Robert Welch changed his mind about society leaders giving press interviews. My father was relieved; he had worried for months that the society would be engulfed and destroyed by all the negative press.

Mother and Dad believed Welch’s theory that the society had originally been targeted for annihilation on direct orders from the Communists in Moscow.
¹⁸
Following that directive, “the whole Liberal-slanted press of America . . . went all out in a continuous and extensive smear campaign against the Society which created a furore [
sic
] for many weeks,” Welch wrote.
¹⁹

According to my father, standing by while that Commie-driven smear campaign did its work had been foolhardy. The only chance the society had was to tell the truth, loudly and often, on every television and radio show and in every newspaper and magazine. “Take the fight to the American people,” Dad said.

Once Welch gave the green light for interviews, Dad made himself available to all of the local press. Then, he agreed to go national with an interview for
Life
magazine.

“Millions of Americans will finally see us as we are,” he said. “Real patriots.”

“This’ll turn the tide,” Mother believed.

A few days before the interview, Mother told me to take out my only Sunday suit and give it a good brushing. “You’ll wear it for the photos,” she announced.

“Me? Why me?”

“People expect to see the Conner children. You and your brother will be dressed when everyone arrives,” she instructed. “Be ready to answer any questions.”

“What should I say?”

“Be polite,” Mother said.

All night long, I worried about the reporter and his questions. “Please ignore me, please,” I prayed.

The next day, I planted myself next to my brother while the
Life
crew busied themselves with my parents. After an hour or so of waiting, the photo shoot began. At first, no one paid a bit of attention to me; then, I was pulled away from Jay R. and stuck on the other side of the room. “Better balance,” the photographer said.

“I want to be with my brother,” I said to the man. “Please.”

The fellow stepped away and I followed him.

“Claire, stay where you were,” my mother called out. “Now.”

I obeyed.

The actual photography took a long time. It was “one more, please” and “another one” and “let’s try that again.” At first, I stood up tall, sucked in my tummy, and tried to keep my eyes open. After a dozen “one more, pleases,” I no longer cared how I looked. I just wanted everyone to go away.

Apparently, my parents had a similar reaction to the experience because they never mentioned it afterward. When I asked about the publication date, Mother was noncommittal. “It’ll be in when it’s in,” she said. “Don’t pester me about it.”

One day in early May, I came home from school, pushed open the front door, and found my mother seated at the dining-room table, surrounded by piles of newspaper clippings, books, and reprints. A cigarette burned in the overflowing ashtray, one of the forty or more she lit in the course of a day.

On the credenza, I spotted the new issue of
Life
. Mother looked up. “The Birch article is in it,” she said. “It’s a doozy.”

I picked up the magazine, dropped my books and jacket on the breakfast table, and plopped down on the bench. On the cover was a photo of astronaut
Alan Shepard being lifted from his space capsule into a Marine helicopter. I turned to the table of contents and glanced down the page. The fourth highlighted article was “The John Birch Society,” page 124. “Oh, God,” I said. “There it is.”
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According to the summary, the story described the “new and highly controversial political phenomena [
sic
], the John Birchers, violently anti-Communist and opposed to publicity.” Above the title, a miniature Jay R. stared out at me—my brother, my sixteen-year-old brother—captioned “Dedicated Bircher.”
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“A dedicated Bircher?” I thought. “He can’t even drive.”

The feature opened with a two-page photo—the one that had been taken in our living room. Twelve John Birch Society members stood with hands over hearts pledging allegiance to the flag. Six people were on each page. My parents and my brother were on the first page. I was on the second.

I studied my picture. I was focused straight ahead, eyes wide, mouth open forming some word of the pledge. I looked serious, stiff, and scared. No one looking at the photo would miss the poof of my hair and the white corners of my upward-slanting glasses.

Reality hit: my picture was in
Life
magazine, and
Life
was everywhere, in homes, newsstands, libraries, doctors’ offices, schools. My friends, my friends’ parents, my teachers, even my priest would see this, and they’d recognize me. I wanted to scream, “My parents made me!”

I read every word of the article. Then, I read it again.
Life
cloaked its criticisms of the society in questions wondering if “members are truly constructive American patriots” or “people who feel that flag-waving and what their critics call witch-hunting are substitutes for intelligent service to the nation.”

The author went on to describe Welch’s charge that “important figures in American public life have abetted the Communist conspiracy” as “incontestably scurrilous.” That word sent me to Webster’s, where I read: “scur-rilous
adj
. 1. grossly or obscenely abusive:
a scurrilous attack
.”