Wrapped in the Flag (8 page)

In early December 1958, Robert Welch invited eleven men to join him in Indianapolis for a weekend.
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For two days, Welch climbed on his proverbial soapbox where he opined about the decline of civilization, the destruction of America’s Constitution, and the looming threat of Communism which he described as an “octopus . . . so large that its tentacles now reach into all of the legislative halls, all of the union labor meetings, a majority of the religious gatherings, and most of the schools
of the whole world
.”
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According to Welch, “The human race has never before faced any such monster of power which was determined to enslave it.”
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On the second day of the meeting, Robert Welch outlined specific plans for a national organization dedicated to stopping the Communist advance and restoring America’s constitutional purity. He named his group the John Birch Society.

If only a small number of Americans know Robert Welch, it’s a safe guess that only the tiniest sliver knows John Birch. For my parents and most of Welch’s associates, however, Captain John M. Birch was not unknown. Welch had memorialized him in a book written in 1954,
The Life of John Birch: In the Story of One American Boy, The Ordeal Of His Age
. In it, Welch described John Birch as the first casualty of the Cold War and an unsung American patriot.
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A week after the end of World War II, six days after I was born, John Birch, a twenty-seven-year-old Baptist minister and field officer for the 14th Air Force, volunteered to lead a secret mission into Suchow, China, (now written as Suzhou). The American was known in that area, having worked both as a missionary and an army officer. He was also semi-fluent in Mandarin.

After several days of travel, the group encountered Red Chinese soldiers who assumed that the men were working as spies. The Communists insisted that Birch turn over his weapons. The captain refused. Birch was bound, forced to kneel, and shot from behind. In an attempt to prevent identification, Birch’s body was mutilated.

Eventually, the body was taken to a morgue in Suchow, where an American officer, William T. Miller, arranged for a public memorial. Birch was buried on a hillside overlooking the Chinese city.
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The facts about Birch and his death at the hands of Communists on August 25, 1945, were never clear. Did Birch provoke the Chinese? Was he on a clandestine mission for the army? Why did he argue with his captors? These questions went unanswered, and Birch’s army records remained sealed.

Robert Welch determined that the failure of our government to demand an accounting from the Chinese, who were supposed to be our allies, constituted a deliberate cover-up. Welch often cited the silence around Birch’s death as proof that the American people were being deliberately kept in the dark about the nature of our Communist enemies.
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For Robert Welch, Captain John Birch was the pure American patriot; a man willing to give up his life fighting Communists.

Shortly after the Indianapolis meeting, my father accepted Welch’s invitation to join eighteen other men in Chicago for the second Birch Society recruiting meeting. As at the Indianapolis meeting, the men met for two days, and Welch did all the talking. My father joined the brand-new John Birch Society that weekend. He paid for a life membership for himself and for my mother, agreed to be the Chicago point man for the organization, and dedicated the rest of his life to saving the country.

“If the country doesn’t wake up,” Dad said, “we’ll be slaves ruled from Moscow.” For many years, in speech after speech, I heard him declare, “I will die before I let the Commies take my country.” I never doubted that my father meant every word.

My father was the first John Birch Society member in Chicago; my mother was the second. Working together, they built the entire Birch structure in the city and the suburbs. Recruiting meetings were scheduled for three to four times a week. The other nights were devoted to special meetings with Birch leaders who stopped by or with folks who wouldn’t become members but could help the cause in other ways—folks like our parish priests, Catholic clergy from around the city, or leaders of local civic organizations. It was not unusual for six nights in a week to be Birch nights.

While the younger kids were banished to the second floor with strict orders to play quietly, without fighting, and go to bed on time, my brother and I were drafted into service. We dragged folding chairs from the front-hall closet for the guests, emptied ashtrays, served coffee and cookies, handed out pamphlets, and collected donations. Night after night, new John Birch Society recruits were full of questions, and my parents answered every single one. The meetings might to stretch way past ten and sometimes past midnight.

Sometimes I’d nod off while the talking droned on and on. My mother, if she noticed at all, would shake my shoulder and send me to bed. “You can
straighten up in the morning.”

In those early days, my parents were totally engaged with the new Birch Society. Their efforts produced new members, and those new members brought in more recruits. “It was wild,” Mother liked to say.

My parents never doubted their decision to join with Welch. “We chose freedom over slavery,” Mother said. “It was good or evil, life or death, God or Satan.”

“Your mother and I will never stop, and we’ll never surrender. This is what we do. This is who we are,” my father said.

As one of the older children, I was drafted into this new army and saving the country became my job too.

It was a shock when I discovered that the task was much bigger than stopping the Commies. According to my dad, the Communist enemy was only one tentacle of a two-hundred-year-old conspiracy to take over the entire planet. I couldn’t imagine what a thirteen-year-old like me could possibly do against an enemy like that.

Enter the Illuminati.

I’d never heard of the Illuminati and, according to my parents, neither had anyone else. Until Robert Welch uncovered old writings and unmasked a plot to take over the world, the super-secret conspiracy group had existed in the shadows. Welch discovered the writings of an obscure eighteenth-century Bavarian canon-law professor, Adam Weishaupt, who nourished a hatred for authority. Weishaupt gathered a group of like-minded men—the Illuminati—who set out to destroy the monarchies of northern Europe. Once the kings were out of the way, the thinking went, the Illuminati planned to crown themselves the all-powerful leaders of a New World Order.
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The conspirators knew this plan would not be popular with the targeted governments, so they disguised themselves inside another secret organization, the Masons. Powerful princes in Europe discovered the Illuminati and tried to destroy them. After brutal attacks, including torture, murder, and exile, the powers that be believed they’d snuffed out the Illuminati forever.

But the brotherhood went deep underground and swore oaths to protect the Illuminati, even agreeing to be killed if they broke their vow of absolute secrecy. Hiding made the Illuminati strong, strong enough to disrupt the entire world.

According to Welch, the wars and revolutions over the last two hundred years had Illuminati roots. They had orchestrated the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and both world wars. In Welch’s mind, even the U.S. stock market crash in 1929 and the Great Depression were Illuminati-caused
disasters.
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All of this mayhem had one goal: to bring about the New World Order.
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To me, the complexity of this conspiracy seemed impossible. “How did it stay a secret?” I asked. “What happened when old Illuminati died? How did Mr. Welch figure this out?”

“Enough, young lady,” Mother said. “Do you think your parents would lie about something so vital?”

Dad dug in his pocket and pulled out a dollar bill, which he placed on the coffee table, with George Washington facing down. He pointed to the left side of the bill and asked, “What do you see?”

“A pyramid inside a circle,” I answered.

He then instructed me to look at the top of the bill. “See, right there. It’s a floating eye—and a secret code.” The eye was added to the dollar bill by President Franklin Roosevelt, proof, my father insisted, that FDR was himself a member of the Illuminati conspiracy. “Roosevelt understood the symbol, and he knew conspirators around the world would recognize it, too.”
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The words below the pyramid, in the unfurled scroll, were another key to the code. Mother copied out the Latin words for me on a piece of paper:
Novus Ordo Seclorum
.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Dad and Mother translated in concert: “New World Order.” (Though the actual translation of the Latin is “a new cycle of the ages.”)

“You have to understand,” my father continued. “The president used the U.S. dollar to send a specific message.”

All Illuminati members knew Roosevelt’s meaning, my father went on. The time had come for the biggest political coup in the history of the world: the violent merger of the United States of America into the Soviet Union.
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My parents went gung-ho into the conspiracy school of American politics. The story of the Illuminati and the codes on the dollar bill became key John Birch Society recruiting tools. Hardly a meeting went by that my father didn’t pull out a buck and tell the tale he’d told me.

Gradually, the Birch Society refined and expanded its conspiracy theory, eventually naming the organizations that were pushing the conspiracy’s aims and compiling lists of conspirators. Robert Welch got the ball rolling when he published
Proofs of a Conspiracy
, a 1798 manuscript that described the “Order of the Illuminati whose select members became part of a conspiracy to enslave all people in Europe and America.”
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A few years later, the book
None Dare Call It Conspiracy
, by Gary Allen, explained how the Communists, international bankers, and other highly placed bad guys, men called Insiders, aspired to the same goal of enslavement. Allen promised “to present evidence that what you call ‘Communism’ is not run from Moscow or Peking, but is an arm of a bigger conspiracy run from New York, London and Paris.” For Allen, socialism was the “philosophy,” finance capitalism the “anvil,” and Communism the “hammer to conquer the world.”
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Out of this conviction, Allen identified a web of men from a host of organizations including, but not limited to, the ones my father always mentioned. The central one, named by all conspiracy gurus, was the Council on Foreign Relations. Allen insisted that the council, founded in 1919, had only one goal: “abolish the United States with its Constitutional guarantees of liberty.”
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Allen shared his conspiracy theories with Dan Smoot, author of the 1962 book
The Invisible Government
, and with John McManus, later president of the Birch Society. These three men were friends of my parents, and two of them, Smoot and McManus, were guests in our home.

Today, the John Birch Society continues to add to their catalogue of conspirators. They’ve already traced the New World Order operatives through the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes in volumes titled
The Insiders
. The most recent edition included fifty-five pages of names and organizations that support the conspiracy.