Claire Conner's Blog

At 11 a.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963, I stood in the crowd on Main Street. The early morning rain had stopped and it was nearly seventy degrees. For a Chicago girl used to bundling up in November, that morning in Dallas was glorious. I stripped off my light jacket and lifted my face to the sun.

Above me, red-white-and-blue banners hung in rows. As far as I could see, those pennants marched toward Dealey Plaza. People lining the street waved miniature American flags along with the occasional Confederate and Lone Star of Texas flags.

Around me, people chatted. Some talked politics; others talked weather. Everyone seemed perfectly polite. Given the anti-Kennedy drumbeat that characterized this right-wing city, I was surprised. It looked like the efforts of the Dallas officials, the chief of police, and the newspapers to tamp down the vitriol had worked.

“So this is Texas-nice.”

Sometime later, people surged to the curb. To my right, I saw a line of motorcycles and a white convertible. I didn’t recognize any of the passengers. A long, black, open-top limousine followed. John Connally, governor of Texas, and his wife, Nellie, were in the first seat, but I barely noticed. My eyes were on Jackie Kennedy, sitting in the back seat and wearing a bright-pink pillbox hat. The president sat to her right. For the briefest second, he turned in my direction, smiled, and waved. I waved back.

“We’re with you all the way!” some people cried.

“Help Kennedy stamp out democracy!” others answered.

In less than a minute, the motorcade had passed. A few Dallas cops on motorcycles brought up the rear. Folks pushed to cross the street and headed for their cars. I heard comments about “beating the worst of it” and “the traffic will be deadly.”

As I stepped off the curb, I noticed a rumpled paper on the ground. Staring up at me were two photographs of John Kennedy, a front and side image. The banner screamed “Wanted for Treason” in bold black letters.

“Oh God, it’s a mug shot.”

I picked up the sheet and scanned the list of grievances.

THIS MAN is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States.

1. Betraying the Constitution (which he swore to uphold): He is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations. He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).

2. He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations—Berlin wall—Missile removal—Cuba—Wheat deals—Test Ban Treaty, etc.

3. He has been lax in enforcing Communist Registration laws.

4. He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.

5. He has illegally invaded a sovereign State with federal troops.

6. He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office; Upholds the Supreme Court in Anti-Christian rulings. Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.

7. He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).

These indictments of the president were not news to me.

Over the last three years, I’d heard my father and other John Birch Society leaders attack Kennedy repeatedly for these same “crimes.” Just a few weeks earlier, Robert Welch, the leader of the John Birch Society, decried President Kennedy’s “fake” anti-Communism. The president was never really anti-Communist and people claiming otherwise “know that they are lying,” Welch wrote. In fact, Welch insisted that Kennedy was doing everything to “help the Communists, not to harm them.” (John Birch Society Bulletin, Sept. 1963)

No doubt, the society hated this president. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Birchers in Dallas had printed the flyer. I hoped that this bit of nastiness would be the only black spot in an otherwise perfect day.

I threw the “Wanted for Treason” poster back on the street and followed my friend to our date with the Kips Big Boy on Mockingbird Lane.

Unknown to me, at that moment Lee Harvey Oswald crouched in the window of the Texas Book Depository waiting for his target. As John Kennedy’s motorcade turned onto Houston and then on to Elm, Nellie Connally, the wife of Texas governor John Connally, turned to Kennedy and said, “You certainly can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” A few seconds later, the thirty-fifth president of the United States was dead.

By the time I got back to campus, I needed aspirin more than food. I had a headache behind my eyes. My stomach growled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but I knew I couldn’t keep anything in my stomach. I needed to call my parents at home in Chicago.

My father picked up on the second ring. He immediately launched into a litany of the facts as he knew them.

“Don’t talk to anyone about this,” he warned me. “You may need a lawyer.”

“Me? Why?” I asked.

“They might think we did it,” Dad said.

“Did the Birch Society have anything to do with this?” I asked my father.

He hung up without answering.

I walked back to my room, pasted a “Sleeping” sign on my door, and curled up on my bed. I needed time to think about my father, what he’d said—and what he hadn’t said. If the John Birch Society had anything to do with the murder of the president of the United States, he’d become an accessory to the crime of the century. I knew there would be lawyers, investigations, testimony,trials, and . . . prison for the guilty. I could only imagine what would happen to me.

I finally fell asleep despite a raging headache. Several hours later, I awakened with my first full-blown migraine. The campus nurse gave me a pat on the shoulder and a pill to kill the pain. “Get some rest,” she said. “You’ll feel better in no time.” Soon, the crashing pain and the lights pulsing behind my eyes vanished.

All the drugs on campus could do nothing to ease my heartache, however. Until that day, I’d never, ever imagined that my father and his friends might—and this is still hard to write so many years later—be part of killing the president.

* * *

On Saturday, the university buzzed over the assassination. Oswald had been arrested and identified as a Communist, but it was a stretch to believe that he’d hatched and executed the plot all alone.

Some folks insisted that the radical Right had to have played a part. Cuban freedom fighters had plenty of reasons to want revenge, and local anti-Kennedy groups, including the John Birch Society, had created a toxic atmosphere in Dallas. Others thought that Kennedy had run afoul of the Communists during the Cuban Missile Crisis and that they’d decided to avenge their humiliation.

I was still too fragile to talk much. As soon as I finished my breakfast, I walked back to the dorm and climbed into bed.

On Sunday morning, my friends and I jammed the TV room. In front of me, a dozen kids sat on the floor. Behind the last row of chairs, a dozen more stood. Scattered around the room were remnants of the weekend: partially eaten sandwiches, empty Dr. Pepper bottles, and overflowing ashtrays.

We watched the formal procession of the president’s flag-draped casket down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. We heard the clack of the horses’ hooves and the methodical drum beat of the military escorts. At the Rotunda, the honor guard carried the body of their commander in chief up the thirty-six stone steps to lie in state.

Around 11 a.m., KRLD-TV switched to its live, local feed for the transfer of Lee Harvey Oswald to the Dallas County Jail. Just as Oswald appeared on the screen between two police guards, we saw a hat move toward the prisoner. A second later, Oswald crumpled into the arms of the deputies. The reporter screamed,

“He’s been shot! He’s been shot! Lee Oswald has been shot. There’s a man with a gun. It’s absolute panic!”

Behind me, someone whispered, “Shit. What the hell?”

When the shooter was identified as Jack Ruby, one of my friends said, “He’s the Mob’s man in Dallas.”

At 1:07 p.m., Oswald died in Parkland Hospital, the same hospital where Kennedy had died two days earlier.

It was my turn to ask, “What the hell?”

* * *

By Monday, shock, chaos, and confusion had given way to raw grief. Whatever I’d thought before, whatever my politics, on Monday, November 25, I was an American burying my president.

I watched as the white horses pulled Kennedy’s coffin toward St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Behind the caisson, Jackie, draped in a black veil, walked to her husband’s funeral followed by family, friends, and world leaders. Units of the armed services came next, with the Black Watch piping a haunting dirge.

My roommate put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. Tears streamed down our cheeks. It was hard to see how we’d ever be the same again.

A few days later, I talked to my father.

“Don’t get emotional,” he reminded me. “Kennedy was a traitor. The Commies killed one of their own.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Excerpted from Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right by Claire Conner © 2013. With permission from Beacon Press. (Feel free to link to this blog post or contact Beacon Press for permission to reprint.)

To order: http://www.claireconner.com.
Or in your bookstore and on-line.

By 2007, I thought I’d heard the end of conspiracies, Communists and America’s looming collapse. The Cold War had been over for twenty years, my parents and their old radical right-wing buddies were dead and the Bush administration was killing America’s appetite for right-wing GOPers. “There’s no one left to hoist the extremist flag,” I told myself.

I was so wrong.

When the economy tanked in 2008 and Barack Obama emerged as the Democratic candidate for president, the radical right went off the rails. I heard frenzied voters at a Republican rally in Florida shouting, “Treason,” and “Kill him,” in response to one of Sarah Palin’s anti-Obama rants and I worried. “My parents are back,” I told anyone who’d listen.

People thought I’d lost my mind.

For as long as I could remember, my father and my mother hated Communists and Democrats. Anyone who said “Roosevelt” or “Truman” was sure to get an earful about “Commie-socialist traitors.”

So, in 1955 when Mother and Dad met Robert Welch, a candy-company executive turned conspiracy hunter, they embraced a kindred soul. My father said Welch was “a brilliant mind and the finest patriot I’ve ever had the privilege to know.”

Three years later in December 1958, Welch founded the John Birch Society. My parents didn’t hesitate—they became the first two members in the city of Chicago. My father wrote a check for $2,000—the equivalent of $12,500 today—for two lifetime John Birch Society memberships.

The Birch goal: “Taking Back the Country” meshed perfectly with my parents’ ideas. Dad would serve on the John Birch Society (JBS) National Council for 32 years.

While anti-Communism was the first banner the Birchers waved, it was dismantling federal programs and slashing 75% of the federal budget that became their centerplank. As my Dad often complained, “Socialism is taking over the joint.”

For my parents and their John Birch Society allies, socialism was every government program not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. The only cure for the socialist plague was to purge them all, as quickly as possible.

Mother and Dad gleefully anticipated the end of Social Security, the demise of all welfare programs and the elimination of federal funding for anything. They insisted that regulation was such a threat to business that it all had to be done away with. Nothing could stand in the way of unrestrained free enterprise and profit.

The resulting utopia, according to my parents, would free business and individuals to do anything while dismantling labor unions, ending the safety net, cutting corporate taxes, and slashing taxes on the wealthy.

“What happens to the poor, the old, the unemployed, the disabled if you succeed?” I asked my mother.

“It doesn’t matter, not at all,” she told me. “It’s all about the Constitution.”

“The Constitution doesn’t feed a hungry child,” I said.

“That’s not my concern,” she answered.

At first, the GOP applauded the John Birchers for their patriotic zeal and embraced them as good Republicans. Then, in 1960, a political scandal revealed that Robert Welch had labeled President Dwight D. Eisenhower a Communist and a traitor. Republican leaders along with conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr, painted the Birchers as crackpots and pushed them out of the party.

The effort worked. The Birchers were tagged as extreme reactionaries, exiled from mainstream American politics and forgotten. Birch leaders were not defeated or deterred.

Fred Koch, one of the original Birch founding members and a National Council member with my father, invested a small fortune on his pet projects, including the so-called right-to-work laws, designed to hamper union organizing.

Two of his sons, David and Charles Koch, inherited their father’s multi-millions, turned them into multi-billions, and invested in their political creations: the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, American Enterprise Institute and the Tea Party among others. These organizations have incorporated John Birch Society tenets and used them to drive American politics to the far right.

The Kochs and their allies envision the same framework for American government that I heard from my father and his John Birch Society pals: the New Deal dismantled, the federal government reduced to a quarter of its current size, and most federal programs gutted. Thus “improved,” America would assume its rightful place as a libertarian paradise where everyone who worked hard was rich, business had a free reign, and the central government was tiny, weak and poor.

For the old, unemployed, sick, disabled or needy, private charity might help. Otherwise, embrace your poverty and be glad you’re living in a free country.

Six months after President Obama was inaugurated, a new right-wing, populist movement arose. The Tea Party, bankrolled by the Koch brothers and the Americans for Prosperity—staged rallies and protests across the country. The economic meltdown was blamed on high business taxes, too many regulations and poor people. A parade of candidates preached that government couldn’t create jobs, stimulus programs never work, and a strong military had to have an ever-larger piece of the budget.

They dragged out the old saw about “tax and spend liberals,” while ignoring the real dollar costs of two wars and three tax cuts.

Real Americans were encouraged to stock pile guns and bullets as the last defense against a tyrannical liberal government. All of this was sworn on the Bible, declared to be the will of the founders, and wrapped in the flag.

This is the old John Birch Society, born again.

This time around the movement has political muscle, unlimited dollars, and right-wing media control. It will take an enormous effort to awaken Americans to the dangers of the radical right wing and push fanatics to the dustbin of history where they belong.

I know all of this because I lived it. I know that right-wing extremism broke my family. I don’t want it to break my country.

Every year, during Holocaust Remembrance Week, the people of the United States promise to “never forget” the six million who perished in Hitler’s death camps. I make the same promise. Then I add my own personal vow—to never forget Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, a classics professor from the University of Illinois and a founding member of the John Birch Society. Using an energized, anti-Communist right wing network, Oliver peddled his revised history of World War II; one in which the Jews invented the Holocaust and foisted the story of their imaginary persecution on an unsuspecting world. I heard Oliver spin his vile “Holohoax” ideas right in my parents’ living room.

In late 1958, my parents became the first two members of the John Birch Society in Chicago. They were welcomed into the brand new organization by founder, Robert Welch, who introduced them to Oliver. Welch and Oliver were personal and professional friends. Over the years, Welch often described Oliver as one of the “ablest speakers on the Americanist side.”

Any friend of Welch got a warm welcome from my parents. The first time I met the man, however, he gave me the creeps. His long face was exaggerated by black hair slicked back with greasy pomade, bushy eyebrows and beady eyes and wide handlebar mustache. I never saw Oliver smile. But his lips often curled in a nasty snarl, especially when he was berating someone who dared to disagree.

Oliver was a frequent contributor to National Review, William F. Buckley’s magazine, and to the John Birch Society’s magazine, American Opinion. In the pages of these journals, he expressed some of his most controversial positions including a 1965 slam against 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.”

Oliver peppered his speeches and his articles with racial slurs and discredited historical assumption. In his role as a member of the John Birch Society speakers’ bureau, he railed against Communist subversion inside our government while insisting that President Roosevelt tricked the United States into World War II in order to help his friend, Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator.

Along with this interpretation of World War II, Oliver peddled his version of the Holocaust, one in stark contrast to everything I’d learned from our Jewish neighbors and my own father. Gone were the yellow stars and the death camps. Gone were the gas chambers and crematoria. Even the witness of American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald and Dachau was repudiated. Instead, Oliver said that there were no gas chambers and no exterminations.

My parents parroted Oliver. The Holocaust stopped being so terrible, the death camps turned into detention camps. Jews were imprisoned because they were traitors, not because of their faith. The “Final Solution” became fiction, and the Nazis were loyal military men following orders.

I’d met Jews with tattoos on their arms. I’d seen photographs from Buchenwald. I knew that millions of men, women and children were gassed and their ashes coated everything when the fires roared. I knew all of this as well as I knew my name. I was not even 14 and I thought my parents had lost their minds. Dr. Oliver had helped them

No matter what Revilo Oliver said, he continued to serve (with my father) on the John Birch Society National Council, the inner circle of the organization. My parents drank in everything he said and repeated most of it, almost verbatim. Robert Welch heaped praise on Oliver for his outstanding contributions to the Birch cause.

All of this Oliver devotion stopped abruptly in July of 1966, when Oliver headlined the New England Rally for God, Family, and Country, an annual Birch-sponsored festival held in Boston and billed as a reunion for conservative Americans. In his speech, “Conspiracy or Degeneracy, Oliver talked about “vaporizing” Jews as part of the “beatific vision.”

Oliver’s statements generated an avalanche of negative press, followed by internal Birch turmoil on how to respond. Oliver had said all of this and more for years and every single member of the Birch leadership had heard him. But time this was different. Oliver’s public and blatant racism sounded like it echoed John Birch Society policies. And the press covered it.

In early August, Welch told council members that Oliver had resigned. In a split-second, he vanished from my parents’ conversation. They pretended that Oliver had never been a Birch leader or a personal friend.

Revilo Oliver lived the rest of his life as a hero to neo-Nazis, skin heads and white supremacists. His views never moderated. In 1982, twelve years before his death by suicide, Oliver wrote that democracy would only be possible by “deporting, vaporizing, or otherwise disposing of swarms of Jews, Congoids (Africans), Mongoloids and mongrels (mixed-race) that now infest our territory.”

Oliver put an indelible mark on the John Birch Society, built a network of Holocaust deniers and recruited countless followers to spread his message of hate. This year, the theme of the Holocaust Remembrance is “heeding the warning signs.” There is no warning sign of more significance than the continuing presence of Holocaust denial in our public life. We can’t begin to understand today’s deniers if we don’t take a hard look at the man who fueled the denial movement.

I’m Claire Conner, author of Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America's Radical Right, coming July 2013 from Beacon Press. I’m thrilled you found your way to Goodreads to learn more about me and my story.

Just a few years ago, I thought the right wing in the United States was defeated, deflated and powerless. My parents were dead and I was sure their ideas were dead, too. I was 100% wrong. Today I hear my parents every time I turn on the news and every time I read a newspaper.

My father and mother live in the “stop socialized medicine” crowd that fights healthcare reform. I recognize them in right wing Republicans who yearn to dismantle civil rights protections.

I can hear them insist that the safety net makes people dependent and lazy. They speak through the pundits who decry the destruction of our constitution and the socialization of America. The branding of the president as an un-American socialist Marxist echoes their attacks on every Democratic president of our time.

I hear my parents' words in the mouths of politicians who dream of bringing organized labor to its knees and making it harder for people to vote.

All of these ideas are not new; I heard them for years. You see, my parents were two of the first members of the John Birch Society, the right-wing populist insurgency of the 1960s.

I’m not an historian or a political scientist. I’m not a politician or a think-tank analyst. I didn’t study extremism in school or write articles analyzing its root causes or sociological outcome

I know radical because my father was a radical. I know fanatic because my mother was a fanatic. I recognize true believers because my parents and their Birch allies were true believers.

My parents were determined, dedicated and very, very wrong and they seeded the rhetoric that’s poisoning American politics today.

If you dismiss the current Republican stampede to the right as harmless, this is a wake-up call.

Today's right wing agenda is a repeat of the old, right wing agenda of the 1960s. If we don't so "no" to these old, recycled ideas, we'll wake up in a new country--a country controlled by big-money corporate bosses, no-government libertarians, radical Christians and the John Birch Society.