Wrapped in the Flag (15 page)

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “This is not good.”

“The John Birch Society has its roots in the frustration that many Americans feel at seeing the nation baffled, thwarted and humiliated in the cold war,”
Life
continued. Then the Birchers were accused of “condemning a few devils” so the United States could “be magically restored to some nostalgic Utopian condition.”

In the next pages, Birch friends and foes faced off. Ohio senator Stephen Young called Welch a “Hitler.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy called the Birch Society “humorous.” Even a few protestors marching outside the
Belmont offices of
American Opinion
, the society’s magazine, were pictured. The largest sign read: “In John Birch Society Everyone Not Far Right Is Left.” Boston’s Cardinal Cushing said, “I know that Welch is a man dedicated against Communism. I know nothing of the society.”

I puzzled over that remark. How did the cardinal, who lived in Boston, know nothing of the John Birch Society, headquartered less than ten miles away? The magazine also included an essay on the death of John Birch in China, followed by a full-page photo of Robert Welch. I laughed; he looked exactly like the man I had met in the front hall of my house—same hat, same coat, same cane, and same cigar. Well, I hoped it wasn’t the exact same cigar. Welch described himself to the reporter as a man having “one wife, two sons, a Golden Retriever dog and 14 golf clubs—none of which he understands but all of which he loves.”

That was the only nugget of humor in the entire six-page spread. As the shock of actually seeing myself in a national magazine wore off, I began to realize that the Birchers did sound odd, extreme, and even . . . dangerous. “How’s that possible?” I thought. “I’m just a kid.”

Over a lot of scotch, Mother and Dad dissected the article. While their analysis stretched on and on, I turned down the chicken, put the beans on low, and cut wedges of cheese for my hungry brothers and sisters. Finally, my mother appeared at the kitchen door. “Serve the dinner,” she said. “Hurry, everyone’s hungry.”

My father sat at the head of the table. His cheeks were ruddy, his lips thin and stretched. His eyes darted around the table while the fork in his hand drummed an erratic rhythm on the placemat. I sensed trouble.

I looked across the table at my brother. He lifted his finger to his lips, reminding me to say nothing. I saw the signal and sent him a tiny smile of recognition. I gave Larry’s hand a quick squeeze. I knew Jay R. was passing a signal to Janet. Janet would take care of Mary.

I worried for Jay—he’d take grief at school, just like I would. And we’d be navigating rough waters at home. Good thing we had each other.

Suddenly, Dad erupted. “The goddamned liberal press smeared us again.” He raged on about extremism, loyalty, and conspiracies. “We are patriots!” he screamed. “Do you hear me?
We are patriots!
”

Dad paused for a minute and took another sip of scotch. “Your Mother and I have dedicated ourselves to saving this country,” he continued. “We will do just that and no one—I tell you, no one—will stop us. By God, I’ll stay in the fight until my dying breath. We do this for our God and for our country!”

No one moved. No one said anything. I had to remind myself to breathe.

Mother broke the silence. “Children, we are under attack. You father and I have no time for trouble with any of you. Disobey and you will be punished.”

Then she spoke directly to Jay R. and to me. “People will talk,” Mother said. “It’s up to you two to defend your parents and the Birch Society. We expect your complete cooperation.”

In the morning, mother’s warnings followed me out of the house, onto the bus, and into my history class. My current-events teacher, Sister Anna Raphael, loved controversy, and I knew she’d be talking Birch that day. She never missed an opportunity to be “up to date,” as she liked to say. As I expected, she passed around the issue of
Life
so everyone could take in the photo. The giggles and the snide whispers stung so much; I put my head down on my desk and pretended I was on another planet.

Luckily, I had my three friends. “People will forget,” Kathy told me. “In twenty years, no one will even recognize you.” I prayed she was right. But in 1961, I could barely think about next week, let alone twenty years down the road.

Meanwhile, on the national front, the publicity in
Life
had added fuel to the fire of Birch criticism that had been raging all year.

Between early 1961 and the middle of 1962,
Time
ran thirty-three articles about Birchers, while the
New York Times
published over 250 articles, another dozen or so on Robert Welch, and another twenty that connected the Birchers to Southern opposition to the civil rights movement. JBS was also prominent in articles elsewhere about the rising right wing.

In the
Chicago Tribune
, there were over 150 JBS mentions, including a number of feature articles. The
Boston Globe
reported on the Birchers more than 300 times.

In March of 1961,
Time
described the Birch Society as a “tiresome, comic-opera joke” and
The Politician
as “Welch’s
Mein Kampf
.”
²²
A month later,
Time
reported on Welch’s speech in Los Angeles, where 6,658 people in the Shrine Auditorium heard him declare that “some 7,000 members of the U.S. clergy were Communists or Communist sympathizers.”
²³

On April 2, 1961, my father offered a ferocious defense of the John Birch Society at a meeting in Chicago. The
Chicago Tribune
quoted him as saying, “I would be glad to answer, under oath, and with a polygraph strapped to me, the question of whether there is anything secret, sinister, or un-American about the John Birch society. My answer would be a flat no.”
²⁴

Later that month, the
Tribune
covered a Chicago meeting where an organizer for the JBS, Kent Courtney, hoped that “the group will start a third political party.”
²⁵
It’s a safe bet that my father was one of the Birch leaders in that room.

“Birch Unit Pushes Drive on Warren” hit the front page of the
New York Times
on April 1. In that article, Bryton Barron, a paid Birch coordinator, explained that Chief Justice Earl Warren had “voted 92 per cent of the time in favor of Communists and subversives” and so deserved to be removed from the bench.
²⁶

An April editorial in the
Times
called the JBS the “latest publicized addition to the lunatic fringe of American life.”
²⁷
The piece continued, “John Birchers are busily looking for Communists in the White House, the Supreme Court, the classroom, and, presumably, under the bed.”

One attack in particular really smarted. The U.S. assistant attorney general declined to investigate the Birchers, saying, “The cadre of the John Birch Society seems to be formed of wealthy businessmen, retired military officers and little old ladies in tennis shoes.”
²⁸
This sarcastic smack hung on for years. I was still hearing about “little old ladies in tennis shoes” when I was in college.

Most of the attacks, however, were not funny. In early 1961, Robert Welch acknowledged that in two weeks more than a hundred newspapers had run articles hostile toward the society. One editorial in the
Los Angeles Times
described the Society as “bitterly critical and condemnatory.”
²⁹

In his book about Barry Goldwater, Rick Perlstein depicted the situation like this: “By April of 1961, you had to have been living in a cave not to know about Robert Welch and his John Birch Society. The daily barrage of reports left Americans baffled and scared at this freakish power suddenly revealed in their midst. It also left some eager to learn where they could sign up.”
³⁰

Despite the hostile environment, Robert Welch agreed to appear on
Meet the Press
, two weeks after the
Life
magazine article dropped. During the interview, Welch refused to walk back his accusations of treason against President Eisenhower. Instead, Welch framed the entire controversy as a “brazen violation of
my
property rights.” He insisted that the book
The Politician
was his property and releasing it without his permission had constituted an invasion of his personal property rights.

Later in the interview, Welch claimed that he was able to “smell out a communist.” And in the concluding segment, he defended the nonprofit educational status of the JBS, asserting that it took no part in political campaigns. He went on to admit, however, that two-thirds of the membership had worked for Goldwater during the 1960 primary.
³¹

After that appearance, my father blamed the liberal press for conspiring against Welch. “Always gotcha questions,” Dad said. “They could make God himself sound like a fool.”

At the time, it seemed that my father harbored no concerns about Welch.
Everything I heard at home indicated that Dad, along with the entire JBS council, composed a staunch, unwavering Robert Welch support squad.

It came as a big shock to me when Robert Welch exposed, in great detail, a plot to remove him as JBS leader. Writing in the February 1962 society bulletin, he described the effort as one of the Communists’ “steps in the projected destruction of the John Birch Society,” followed by five pages of details about who, what, and when.
³²

Welch traced the effort to get rid of him to a “prominent publisher of a conservative magazine,” who was suggesting that the JBS was a “wonderful group of people, if they would only get rid of Bob Welch and his dictatorial control.”
³³
I was sure this was a slam at Bill Buckley and his
National Review
, even though Buckley wasn’t specifically named.

Welch described what happened next in the effort to remove him from leadership: “It spread to a few strongly anti-Communist members of both the [U.S.] House and the Senate, and even to a few members of our COUNCIL.”
³⁴
In June and September of 1961, proposals were made that Welch “step aside and let somebody else take over . . . so as to give it [JBS] a new ‘image’ not affected by the smears against myself.”

The council, after lengthy discussion, realized that “the proposal was unrealistic,” Welch wrote. “. . . Even the very few who thought otherwise have now to feel that at least it is impractical.”

Welch was firmly in control. As he said, “A monolith is a pretty firm body. Do you know any other body in America today that now shows signs of being able to stand up permanently against their external pressures and
internal infiltration?
”
³⁵

In April of 1962, JBS released a statement that had been approved by the council: “We have every confidence in Robert Welch and never for a moment have thought of replacing him or rejecting his leadership. We have not been frightened nor discouraged by the frantic efforts of the conspiracy to destroy him and the Society and are resolved more than ever to support him and the principles upon which the Society is built until the battle is won and the Communist menace has passed.”
³⁶

Twenty-one members of the council approved that resolution. Six thought it went too far. I never knew how my father voted.
³⁷

All of this internal hullabaloo did not keep my dad from his Birch activities. On February 25, 1962, he spoke at the forum of the Unitarian Church of Evanston.
³⁸
I thought that was amazing; my father always called the Unitarians
“the one-worlders’ church.”

Then, in late June, Dad moderated a daylong seminar on Communism and “Americanism” in Chicago. Two thousand, yes, two
thousand
, people packed the Flick-Reedy Auditorium, where they learned that the JBS was “the best program to save America from insolvency, socialism and surrender.”
³⁹

Despite enduring almost two years of scrutiny and criticism, my father remained the Chicago face of the John Birch Society.

A month after
Life
hit the newsstands, I was still studying my picture. Did I look fat? Did I look cross-eyed? How would I ever get my hair into a smooth pageboy? The longer I looked, the more I hated my suit. I decided it made me look dowdy and stiff.

I fretted, secretly. One day I discovered that my mother was also fretting. “We’ve been victimized,” she said. “They used the worst possible shot. Look at your father’s arm. It’s not anywhere near his heart.”

I understood. I hated my picture because I looked fat and ugly; my mother hated the picture because Dad looked un-American. His right hand should have been over his heart during the Pledge—anyone who saw the picture would know that.

When Mother mentioned her concern, my father argued with her. “I don’t give a damn,” he said. “The pictures mean nothing. The real smear is in the editorial.”

That night, I read the editorial carefully. In “The Unhelpful Fringes,” the Birchers were characterized as extremists led by an “extremist [Robert Welch] . . . who believes that forms of government don’t matter much, since all government is dangerous to liberty; the quantity is what matters.”
¹