Wrapped in the Flag (23 page)

“For this, I could have stayed home,” I told my roommate.

In the early weeks of class, I tried to untangle the mysteries of Greek tragedy while piecing together a vision of the Judeo-Christian tradition. My spiral notebook overflowed with words, scribbles, and arrows; feeble attempts to capture big ideas and specific details from each lecture. Usually, note taking kept me too busy to ask any questions.

One morning, in my Western Civilization lecture, the professor declared that the thirteenth century was, “without doubt, the greatest century in human history.”

Without thinking, I blurted out, “Would the serfs agree?”

The professor pulled himself to his full height and stared down his nose at me. After a long pause, he called me a perfect example of “terminal ignorance.” Only stupid people, he pointed out, lacked respect for the political, cultural, and spiritual magnificence of the High Middle Ages.
³

Embarrassed, I put my head down and went back to scribbling notes.

Some days later, I sat cross-legged on my bed staring at a manila envelope with a typed parcel post label from my mother. Mother’s package included
the September
John Birch Society Bulletin
and a brief note in her nearly illegible hand. She reminded me to read Welch’s latest, study hard, and make contact with Dad’s friend General Walker. On a separate slip, she’d typed the General’s address, 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard, and his home phone number.

I settled back against the pillows and lit a cigarette. “I’ll take a peek so I can tell her I did.”

In the first section of the bulletin, Welch outlined the religious preferences of the JBS members: 60 percent Protestants, 40 percent Catholic, and 1 percent Jews. “We are aware that this adds up to 101%,” he noted. “But that is because any attempt at greater precision would be a sham.” Then, he launched into an explanation of “Operation Confusion,” the Pavlovian techniques used by the Commies to make “gibbering political idiots out of the American people.”
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Being totally confounded, I skipped the rest of that section.

A couple of pages later, photographs caught my eye: front and side shots of a parade float. It was a galley ship, aptly named
Freedom
, bearing the slogan “Row the Oars for Freedom” and the logo of the John Birch Society along the base. This entry had taken the first-place ribbon in the Dallas Independence Day parade that summer.
⁵

“Dallas loves JBS,” Mother had scribbled at the top of the page.

Following the pictures of the floats, Welch outlined the ongoing Birch agenda. The first item: recruiting new members. Impeaching Earl Warren, the JBS’s endless impossible dream, held forth at number two. The Supreme Court’s recent decisions rejecting school prayer and bible reading had reinvigorated this project. Welch wrote, “When the impeachment is finally accomplished—when that blockbuster is landed right across the front center of the whole leftwing advance—the Communist apparatus behind that advance will begin to crumble like a house of cards.”
⁶

Then, it was on to getting us out of the UN with a campaign of postcards, bumper stickers, and billboards, as well as opposing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. For seventeen pages, Welch wove a story about Soviet power, including this nugget, “Soviet ‘military might’ has been used and is being used primarily in the propaganda and diplomatic fields and never on any battlefields.” Despite this rather amazing assessment (without any facts or charts or expert testimony), Welch opposed all disarmament and all treaties on the basis that the USSR always lied about its intentions, making any treaty agreements impossible.

“What on earth do the Soviets need any real military strength for (instead of the mere shell for propaganda purposes), when they have ours available and completely at their service?”
⁷
Welch asked. He answered his own question with another: “If the Soviets have so much military strength, why do they
never
use it?”

According to Welch, the Soviets really didn’t have either a nuclear arsenal or much of a weapons program. He said that the “cases of military material . . . on the docks of Leningrad contain nothing more deadly than the worn-out bodies of long dead automobiles.”
⁸

All of this was astounding, but Welch really outdid himself in eighteen pages about civil rights. He was sure that “the rioting [in Oxford and Birmingham] was deliberately caused and precipitated by a bunch of hooligans sworn in as federal marshals, obviously in accordance with designs formed in Washington . . . the Communists are running the whole show.”
⁹

This bulletin included a full-page photo from 1957 of Dr. King at the Highlander Folk School under the headline “Martin Luther King . . . at Communist Training School.”
¹⁰
This photo was part of the “proof” that all civil rights legislation served Communist goals.

The Highlander Folk School was founded in the 1930s as a base for labor activists working in Appalachia. Years later, it provided training for civil rights activists who worked all across the South. Dr. King was just one of many civil rights leaders who attended seminars at the Highlander School.
¹¹
The John Birch Society believed that the school was founded by Communists in order to further Communist goals.

In that bulletin, Welch exhorted JBS members to action: “Many of you think that the Negroes should have too much sense, or should be too appreciative of a lifetime of good will on the part of their white neighbors, to fall for the Communist claptrap that converts them into enemies. But I ask you, good people of the South, to remember how you yourselves have been led to accept and support the socialist policies of the New Deal and the Fair Deal . . . which were inspired by the Communists to serve long-range Communist purposes.”
¹²

On page after page, Welch decried President Kennedy and his “fake” anti-Communism. The president was never really anti-Communist and people claiming otherwise “know that they are lying.” Kennedy was doing everything to “help the Communists, not to harm them,” Welch said.
¹³

By September of 1963, it was clear that Kennedy was the JBS’s public enemy number one. Not only was the president not an anti-Communist; he was helping the Reds at every turn.

These words sound shocking today, especially given what was about to happen only a few weeks later, but, at the time, those 144 pages of Birch propaganda did not shock me. It was the same old song and dance that I’d been hearing since 1958. Welch had added a few new names to his gallery of bad guys, and the Birchers had undertaken a few new projects, but the basic ideas remained the same: the Commies were coming—no, wait—they were already here.

Finally, Mother sent me a clipping from the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
about a big Birch event honoring Robert Welch. The headline screamed: “2000 Hail Welch as ‘Great Patriot.’”
¹⁴
I did some quick calculations: two thousand people at $50 per plate = $100,000. Mother had added another of her little notes. “Your father attended. It was glorious.”

That made me mad; not a dime for me, but my father could go to California for a Birch meeting. “Damn you,” I said as I threw the bulletin and Mother’s notes on the floor.

A year before I arrived at UD, the board of trustees had hired a new president, Dr. Donald Cowan, the man who would put the school on the map. He and his wife, Dr. Louise Cowan, fashioned UD’s core curriculum, which focused on literature, philosophy, and history. Before UD students could declare a major, we had to plow through Homer and Shakespeare, learn how to structure a proper syllogism, and spend some time with Aristotle and Aquinas.

After I graduated, UD racked up impressive academic accomplishments, including qualifying for a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, one of only fifteen Catholic universities with the prestigious honor society on campus. The university also pioneered its signature Rome semester, giving 80 percent of students the chance to live and study in Italy. In 2012,
U.S. News & World Report
ranked UD as fourteenth-best among regional universities in the West.

Of course, in 1963, when I was hired as Dr. Cowan’s student-worker, all of that glory was years away. The university had not yet received its first accreditation or a significant endowment. Dr. Cowan was swamped with phone calls and meetings and everyday disasters—plumbing, construction delays, problem students and faculty.

I worked under Dr. Don’s secretary, who used me for routine office tasks: drafting letters, typing envelopes, answering the phone, and filing. Lots and lots of filing.

One afternoon, the carbon copy of a letter to the White House appeared on the top of the to-be-filed pile: Dr. Don’s invitation to President Kennedy
to visit our campus during his upcoming presidential trip to Dallas.
¹⁵
I was surprised; Kennedy was wildly unpopular on campus. Much of the faculty and a lot of the students blamed him for the Bay of Pigs fiasco and for playing nice with the Commies. If the president did stop at the university, I figured he’d find only a handful of supporters.

“Will you applaud?” I asked myself. My question led to no easy yes or no answer. I had turned away from my parents’ opinions on civil rights, making me more sympathetic toward Kennedy. At the same time, I worried about the Communists ninety miles from Miami and thought the president needed to take a hard line with Fidel Castro. I appreciated the president’s resolve during the Cuban Missile Crisis and believed he’d saved the world from nuclear disaster. At the same time, I’d heard rumors that he was unfaithful to Jackie. On balance, I leaned toward the president, but I would not have described myself as a big fan.

Though I was
comme ci, comme ça
about the president, Dallas had made up its mind. It took only a glance through the editorials, columns, and letters to the editor in the
Dallas Morning News
to realize that Kennedy personified everything the right-wing town hated. No doubt, Kennedy was diving into hostile waters on this trip.
¹⁶

As the days to the president’s visit ticked down, Dallas civic leaders grew alarmed about the rabid anti-Kennedy sentiment. A chorus of folks asked people to be “Texas nice” when the president came to town. The city police chief, Jesse Curry, appeared on television urging respect for Kennedy: “Law enforcement agencies in this area are going to do everything within their power to ensure that no untoward accident or incident occurs.”
¹⁷

On November 17, the lead editorial in the
Dallas Morning News
, “Incident-Free Day Urged for JFK Visit,” quoted civic leaders asking Dallas to welcome the president. “These good citizens will greet the President . . . with the warmth and pride that keep the Dallas spirit famous the world over,” the president of the Chamber of Commerce declared.
¹⁸

At the University of Dallas, the specter of a Kennedy visit sparked action. A group of students who were organizing a chapter of Bill Buckley’s new group for college activists, Young Americans for Freedom, planned a campus-wide protest. One of the leaders, an avid fan of everything conservative (except the JBS), asked me to help with the posters. I refused.

“Why isn’t the
Birch baby
helping?” he said. “You must know Kennedy is no good.”

When I was invited to go to Dallas the next morning, I jumped at the offer. I’d see the president and grab some non-cafeteria food. Another plus:
President John F. Kennedy gave me the perfect reason to cut class.