Wrapped in the Flag (19 page)

One of those bad liberal things was the current push to impose “statism” through medicine. Americans could fall for this plot because medicine seemed so “humanitarian,” but Reagan knew better. Medical coverage for old people would be the “foot in the door” to socialized medicine.

Real Americans had to wake up and stop this abridgment of freedom. If we didn’t fight hard enough, in sad days to come, old people would sit around and tell their children what it was like in the good old days when “men were free.”
¹⁶

As Reagan’s voice faded, several Birchers clapped enthusiastically.

Mother picked up on Reagan’s themes with additional information on the
perils of government health care. “The elderly in America are just fine under the current system,” she explained. “Government health care is unnecessary, expensive, and anti-American. It costs too much and threatens our freedom.”

While the arguments against government-run health care continued, my mind drifted to a story my friend Bob had told me. When he was a toddler, his father took him to a big hospital in the city to visit one of his relatives. The little boy held his father’s hand tight as they walked a long, noisy, crowded corridor. “In here, son,” Mr. Besse said. “This is Aunt Maude’s ward.”

Bob gripped his father’s hand tighter. “I don’t like it here,” he said.

“I know. But we have to stay awhile. She’s old and sick. We’re all she’s got. Everyone else is in Sterling, where she used to live. You know, with Grandpa Besse.”

“Send her back there,” little Bob said.

“We can’t,” his dad explained. “This is the only place for her.”

Mr. Besse led his son along a row of hospital beds. They stopped in front of a shrunken old lady curled on her side. She never moved or spoke, just moaned. After a few minutes, Mr. Besse leaned over, kissed Aunt Maude on the cheek, and turned toward the doorway.

“To this day, I remember the smell and the moaning,” Bob had told me. “Those poor people languished there until they died. Without money, charity wards were their only option.”
¹⁷

I looked at the folks in the living room and assumed that none of them would die in the charity ward of Cook County General Hospital. Hating government-run health care was easy when your doctor made house calls and your hospital stays were in private rooms.

I snapped out of my thoughts as Mother was quoting a letter Reagan had written in 1960 to Richard Nixon about the up-and-coming John Kennedy. “Reagan knew the score,” Mother said. “He recognized JFK for what he is. ‘Under the tousled boyish haircut,’ Reagan said, ‘it is still old Karl Marx.’”
¹⁸

Eighteen years later, just before Halloween, I parked myself in front of the TV to watch the debate between President Jimmy Carter and Republican nominee Ronald Reagan. Late in the discussion, when the issue of health care took the spotlight, Carter reminded the audience of Reagan’s long-standing opposition to Medicare: “Governor Reagan began his political career campaigning around this nation against Medicare.”
¹⁹

The president then moved to a full defense of national health-care reform. “Now, we have an opportunity to move toward national health insurance, with
an emphasis on the prevention of disease, an emphasis on out-patient care, not in-patient care; an emphasis on hospital cost containment to hold down the cost of hospital care for those who are ill; an emphasis on catastrophic health insurance, so that if a family is threatened with being wiped out economically because of a very high medical bill, then the insurance would help pay for it. These are the kinds of elements of a national health insurance, important to the American people.”

Carter completed his argument with these words, “Governor Reagan, again, typically is against such a proposal.”

Before I could clap my hands in agreement, Ronald Reagan looked over at the president, smiled, and said, “There you go again.”

By the time Reagan had finished his response, even I, who knew better, almost fell for the idea that he supported Medicare and always had. Then, I remembered the velvet voice on that scratchy record urging all Americans to oppose Medicare. “If you don’t do it,” Reagan said, “one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
²⁰

In August of 1962, my brother Jay R. stuffed clothes and books in his suitcase while I thumbed through his record albums. “I love this one,” I said when I came to the Kingston Trio’s . . .
From the Hungry i
. May I keep it?”

“Sister of mine,” he said smiling, “my albums are yours, until I get home next summer. Then, of course, they are mine again.”

With that, Jay R. intoned one of our favorite Kingston Trio hits, “The Merry Minuet,” a happy little tune about nuclear war and pestilence. “They’re rioting in Africa . . . ,” he sang, and I joined right in. Together, we did all the verses and ended on a flourish: “What nature doesn’t do to us, will be done by our fellow man.”
¹

“You’re such a jerk,” I teased my college-bound brother. “And I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too, but not to worry—as long as no one pushes the button, I’ll be home for Christmas.”

Over the next few weeks, I had plenty of opportunity to think about my brother’s “button” comment. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev seemed determined to flex every muscle he had, up to and including the threat of nuclear war. On September 12, 1962, the
Chicago Tribune
reported on its front page that the Soviet Union had “warned the United States that an armed attack on the Marxist outpost in the Caribbean [Cuba] would plunge the world into a nuclear war.”
²

As the tensions between our country and the USSR escalated, news reports, magazine articles, and everyday people talked about A-bombs, H-bombs, nuclear annihilation, and doomsday. People were on edge; people were afraid. Except at my house.

My father put it like this: “There are worse things than nuclear war.”

“What could be worse than blowing up the earth?” I asked.

“That’s just what the Communists want you to think.”

“Dad, nuclear war would be disastrous for all of us.”

“You’re talking nonsense,” he retorted. “We don’t know what would happen.”

“We do,” I told him. “Look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Dad shrugged and turned away.

My father’s views came directly out of the JBS school of history. Just like Robert Welch, Dad believed that “the conspiracy” had placed a web of “Insiders” deep within our government, where they steered American foreign and domestic policy toward Communist objectives. They accomplished this with a sleight-of-hand trick Robert Welch dubbed “the principle of reversal.”

Here, I’ll let Welch speak for himself: “Although our danger remains almost entirely internal, from Communist influences right in our midst and treason right in our government, the American people are being persuaded that our danger is from the outside, from Russian military superiority. And under the excuse of preparing to match that military might, of defending ourselves from this threat of outside force . . . we are being stampeded into the biggest jump ever toward, and perhaps the final jump right into socialism and then the Communist camp.”
³

Thus, the conspiracy is tricking us into “greatly expanded government spending for missiles, for so-called defense generally,” while “hammering into the American consciousness the horror of modern warfare, the beauties and the absolute necessity of peace—peace always on Communist terms.”

The goal of all of this: to “make us domestically a communized nation” and “pull us right into the world-wide Communist organizations, ruled by the Kremlin.”
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Think of it this way: our government does anti-Communist things that are really pro-Communist, but we the people think they’re anti-Communist because the pro-Communists in the government said so. So, military spending is just what the Communists want us to do and nuclear war is not nearly as bad as the Commies say.

When looking at current tensions, my parents leaned on one other Birch commandment: “Better Dead than Red.”

For me, however, a child born under the mushroom cloud, I saw things differently. Thanks to my teachers and John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
, required reading in my high school, I knew the exact moment the world had gone nuclear—August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. Japanese time.
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I’d followed as Hersey shared the stories of six citizens of Hiroshima as they endured the nuclear blast and the subsequent illnesses that plagued them. I could imagine the burns, the puss, and the purple blotches caused by radiation exposure. By the time I finished the book, I believed that atomic weapons should never have been built and were too terrible to ever use again.

What I thought had no impact on world leaders. Once Stalin got himself an atomic bomb, the nuclear arms race with the United States was on. When
we built one new warhead, the Russians built two. When we “improved” our atomic bomb, the Russians built a hydrogen bomb. Before I was sixteen, the United States and the Soviet Union had enough atomic stuff to kill every living thing three times over.
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My parents and Welch believed that we’d been tricked into this arms race. I didn’t really care who started it or why. I was afraid that one side would push “the button,” the other would retaliate and . . . my brothers, my sisters, my parents, and I would be vaporized.

For as long as I could remember, every Tuesday morning at ten, the air-raid sirens went off. The screaming sound sent my classmates and me into the hallway, where we stretched out on our stomachs and folded arms over head. I pressed my check to the cold floor, shut my eyes, and waited. The piercing whine of the siren went on and on and on. When the short blasts of the all-clear finally sounded, I pulled myself to my feet, smoothed my uniform, and filed back to class. “You’re safe,” I reassured myself. “This is not real.”

Sometimes, at the direction of my teacher, we did the “duck and cover,” stuffing ourselves under our desks for protection from a nuclear explosion. Every year until I graduated from eighth grade, I saw
Bert the Turtle
, a short movie that taught American children to “duck and cover” in case of nuclear attack.
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I don’t remember when I began to wonder, “Can my desk really keep me safe from nuclear destruction?” I also don’t remember when I answered with a big, fat no.

Following a 1961 plea from President Kennedy to Americans to “prepare for all eventualities,” surviving a nuclear attack became big business.
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People ordered and built personal air-raid shelters and stocked them with dry food and emergency radios.
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Families were reminded to get first-aid kits and radiation detectors. For citizens who could not afford their own safe rooms, a network of fallout shelters were prepared.

The experts said, “The next world war could be nuclear and it could be fought in the United States,” and Americans believed them.
¹⁰
Regardless of the experts, I’d reached my own conclusion about nuclear war: I didn’t want to live through the end of the world.