Wrapped in the Flag (9 page)

From the American Association of Retired Persons and the Sara Lee Corporation to Jonathan Alter and Elie Wiesel, “Insiders” are everywhere, and the conspiracy seekers are busy naming them and blaming them for every move to the Left since FDR.
¹⁹

When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did my fear of the Illuminati and its web of conspirators. My mother and dad and the Birch Society took a darker view, insisting that the conspiracy was not defeated at all but growing stronger.
²⁰

“Just wait,” Mother told me not long before her death. “They’re still coming, and while you’re busy with your fun and games, the New World Order will arrive.”

The John Birch Society changed my parents. I didn’t understand how, but I knew that my brothers, sisters, and I were constantly in trouble. We played too much, didn’t finish our chores, talked back, or didn’t come when we were called. These infractions, which used to warrant a “talking to,” now became serious violations of the rules. All reason went out the window. Dad turned
into a father who yelled and hit; Mother became his informer. When she said, “You just wait until you father gets home,” we knew someone would face the heavy hand or the belt.

We kids lived by our parents’ rule: “When we say jump, you ask how high.”

My big brother and I tried to cover for the little kids whenever we could. We couldn’t bear to watch Dad hit Larry or listen to Mother attack Janet. “We’re all they’ve got,” Jay and I told each other. “We have to protect them.”

On a chilly, damp evening in 1959, I sat on a folding chair in the front hall waiting for the John Birch meeting to begin. I had asked to be excused to help with the baby, but Mother refused, saying, “People expect to see you. Remember, we’re doing this for you, young lady.”

My older brother, as usual, was parked in the living room. Periodically, he smiled at me or, when no one was watching, made a face or mouthed a silly comment. “No one will ever kill the joker in you,” I thought.

The room was stuffed with people; their Viceroys-Camels-Marlboros created a haze of gray-blue smoke. Mother tapped the table with a pencil to get the meeting underway. Everyone stood and placed their right hands over their hearts while Dad intoned the Pledge of Allegiance.

Sometime later, over the buzz of the projector—Birch meetings usually featured an educational filmstrip—I heard Janet calling. “I need help,” she said. “The baby keeps crying.” I bolted up the stairs.

My ten-year-old sister stood over the crib where Mary, eighteen-months-old, waved her arms and fussed. Blue veins covered the baby’s upper body, and she was shivering. “She has goose bumps,” Janet said. “I can’t get her warm.” Janet’s green eyes were huge; I knew she’d start crying any minute.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m here now.”

A year before, Mary had been diagnosed with dislocated hips. We were told that she’d never walk unless she spent several years in a body cast.

In the 1950s, before the development of rigid casts, the doctor had to build a cast out of plaster of paris. While the paste was pliable, Mary’s hips, knees, and feet were positioned at 90-degree angles, like stair steps. It took almost a week for the cast to dry, especially in the cold of winter.

Every few months, Mary outgrew her cast. The old one was sawed off and the doctor constructed a new one. Each time, we worried about the drying, especially after Mary struggled with a bout of pneumonia. After that, Janet and I decided to use a hair dryer to speed the process.

That evening, while I was stuck downstairs at a Birch meeting, Janet was struggling alone. “I can’t hold the hair dryer and keep Mary covered at the same time,” she said.

“Let me take over. You keep the blanket on her.”

I propped my arms on the top rail of the crib and moved the hair dryer back and forth, back and forth, covering every inch of the cast. When I’d been over the front, Janet and I gently turned Mary on her tummy and repeated the process.

The meeting in the living room went on and on. It seemed like forever before I heard Mother calling me. When I went to the steps, she looked stern and pointed toward the floor. “Where have you been?” she asked. I quickly explained. “Go back up then,” she said. “When everyone’s gone, I’ll be up.”

Ten o’clock came and went. Finally, my brother appeared in the doorway. “Everyone’s gone, and Mom and Dad want to see you,” Jay R. said. “I’ll help Janet.”

In the living room, Mother and Dad greeted me from their usual spots on the sofa.

“Your country is calling,” my father said. “You are old enough to join the fight.” Dad slid a membership application toward me. “Sign on the line.”

That night I became a full-fledged, adult John Bircher. I was thirteen years old.

Although Revilo Oliver remained unknown outside White Supremacist circles, his fingerprints showed up on virtually every far right tendency during the post-World War Two era
.

—L
EONARD
Z
ESKIND,
B
LOOD AND
P
OLITICS
¹

For ten years, my family and I lived in Rogers Park, a northside Chicago neighborhood of many Jews and a few Catholics. I was in the first grade when I started walking to school, a four-block hike from our apartment on Maplewood. The highlight of the trip was three blocks on Devon Avenue, a busy commercial street lined with small specialty shops, most with Jewish proprietors. Many of those folks had “come over from the old country,” which, in my mind, explained why the men sported beards and the women wore babushkas.

I was around ten years old when it dawned on me that many of the snippets of conversation I heard concerned Germans, Jews, and World War II. I didn’t understand a lot of the words, as the old folks often spoke in Yiddish. But I did know the English words “smoke,” “ghetto,” and “camps.”

One day, I asked our across-the-alley neighbor, Mrs. Fishman, about what I’d been hearing. “Oy gevalt, it’s bad luck to speak of the dead.” Even so, she sat me down at her kitchen table, offered me a cookie and milk, and shared her story.

“My family came from Germany when I was about your age. That was years before the war, but my father worried. ‘They hate us,’ he said. ‘We have to go to America.’ He was right. First, every Jew had to wear yellow stars, and then they were rounded up and put in railroad cars. Now they’re all dead. Everyone. No one is left.”

One evening I asked my father about the yellow stars and the boxcars. “Those were terrible times,” he said. He told me how Nazis arrested the Jews in cities and towns across Germany and Poland. The Jews were loaded into cattle cars without food or water and transported to camps to be killed. In
places called Treblinka, Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, men, women, and children were forced to strip naked. Their clothes were thrown into huge piles and their heads were shaved. Then they were gassed. After every extermination the bodies were thrown into huge ovens, called crematoriums. Day and night, smoke spewed from the chimneys.

“The ashes of the dead covered everything,” my father said. “Hitler planned to exterminate every Jew in Europe. It was his Final Solution
.”

My father told me that American soldiers who liberated the camps at the end of the war found thousands of emaciated prisoners in striped prison pajamas. In the camp yards, piles of decomposing bodies were stacked like cord wood. “How could anyone do these things?” I asked.

“The Germans claimed they were following orders,” Dad explained. “But that is no excuse. You can never do these evil things and make an excuse like that.”

“What happened to the bad men?” I asked.

The worst of the Nazi war criminals were arrested and tried, my father told me. Many were put in prison, and some were hanged. “It’s right for the men who did these things to be punished,” Dad said.

“They should have hanged all of them,” I said.

My father agreed with me.

I knew these things had happened during World War II and that the Germans had done them. I knew, as well as I knew my own name, that America had saved the world. “If we hadn’t beaten those bastards, you’d be speaking German,” Dad said.

I hugged my father and thanked God we’d won the war. “The Nazis are dead and gone, forever,” I told myself. “They’ll never hurt anyone again.”

Shortly after Mother and Dad became Birchers, they met Revilo P. Oliver, a classics professor from the University of Illinois, a founding Birch member—he had joined even before my parents—and a close friend of Robert Welch’s. Welch described Oliver as “one of the very top scholars in America in his field and one of the ablest speakers on the Americanist side.”
²

My parents welcomed Oliver enthusiastically, but he gave me the creeps. His long face was exaggerated by black hair glistening with pomade, bushy eyebrows, and beady eyes. He sported a mustache as wide as his mouth. When he smiled, his lip curled into a snarl. Oliver always showed up in a starched white dress shirt, tie, and tweed sport coat. I never remember him removing that coat, even in the heat of the summer.

His first name, Revilo, puzzled me, but he was quick to explain: “My name, an obvious palindrome, has been the burden of the eldest or only son for six generations.”
³
Revilo = Oliver. I thought that was peculiar, but it was hard to make a big deal about it when my father’s given name was Stillwell.

Revilo Oliver was the only person I ever knew who was able to translate ancient Sanskrit manuscripts. Dad bragged that he could write in a dozen or more languages, some with their own alphabets. I thought my father was exaggerating until I read that Oliver’s home office had “twelve typewriters, each with a typeface for a different language.”
⁴

For almost ten years, Oliver was a frequent contributor to
National Review
, William Buckley’s magazine, and to the John Birch Society’s magazine,
American Opinion
. Apparently, Oliver was allowed free rein to offer his views on politics, culture, and race. In 1956, Oliver used the pages of
National Review
to share this vision of America’s future: “Naked dictatorship, the rule of uniformed thugs, and the concentration camp for all who obstinately believe in human freedom.”
⁵

Seven years later, in
American Opinion
, Oliver attacked the United States for “an insane, but terribly effective, effort to destroy the American people and Western civilization by subsidizing . . . the breeding of the intellectually, physically, and morally unfit.”
⁶

From 1959 through the summer of 1966, Oliver thrilled audiences with his stories of war, treason, and Communist subversion. He ranted against American involvement in World War II, insisting that we were pushed into the war for only one reason: Franklin Roosevelt wanted to help his Communist friend Joseph Stalin. According to Oliver, “We [the United States] had fought for the sole purpose of imposing the beasts of Bolshevism on a devastated land.”
⁷

Those ideas were not the worst of the stuff that Oliver preached. Not long after he turned up at our house, I began to hear a new version of World War II, one in stark contrast to everything I’d learned. Oliver called the Holocaust a “hoax” concocted by the Jews themselves and said numerous times that “there were no gas chambers and there was no ‘extermination.’”
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