Wrapped in the Flag (25 page)

“Christmas is definitely over,” I thought.

I knew without listening that Mother had swapped Christmas music for war music—Civil War music to be exact. I knew without looking that her music choice was
The Confederacy
, a two-record set of the music of the South.
⁵
And I knew, if I waited a minute, Mother would cry; she always cried for the boys in gray.

Even though Mother was a Yankee, she’d fallen in love with the idea of the old South and its hero, General Robert E. Lee. “A true American patriot who lived his principles,” she said of the West Pointer turned Confederate.

Mother believed that the northern states had oppressed and abused the Southern states until war became the only option. “The South fought to save their way of life,” she explained. “It was a war for Southern independence.”

She even found justification for the Confederacy in the U.S. Constitution. “It was all about states’ rights,” she said. Somehow, she spun the Tenth Amendment into approval for secession, rebel government, and bombarding Fort Sumter.

Even more disturbing were her notions about slavery. Mother often argued that “slavery was really a welfare system. The slaves were taken care of, and they were baptized.”

Arguing with her was futile.

That day, when I heard Mother humming, I turned away and tackled the Christmas cleanup. I stowed the ornaments and lights in their boxes. I crawled under the Christmas tree, unscrewed the stand, and lifted the little balsam out of the putrid water. I wrestled the thing out the front door and down to the street, leaving a trail of dry, brown needles behind me.

“You have to sweep,” Mother shouted. “Don’t track that in here, and take off your shoes.”

“I need water first,” I told her. “Then I’ll finish.”

Mother followed me into the kitchen. Before I got near the sink, she ordered me to take a seat. “We sent you to Dallas to learn the truth and now you sound like a liberal.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You sympathize with the coloreds,” Mother explained. I stared at her without answering, and she raced on. “All of this civil rights agitation is a threat to the Southern way of life,” she insisted.

“Damn, Mother,” I interrupted. “What would you know about the Southern way of life?”

Mother wagged her finger at me. “Don’t take that tone with me, young lady. You know nothing.”

“Yes, I do,” I blurted out. I proceeded to tell her what I knew: Colored-only drinking fountains and white-only restaurants and bars. Maids working twelve-hour days for hardly any money. Police arresting African Americans for loitering. Two kids sharing a tattered textbook. “There are two halves of the South, Mother. One for you and me, and one for those with black skin. Your American dream, the one you love so much, hasn’t arrived in Dixie, or
in Dallas.”

My mother shrugged. “People have the right to decide how they treat their coloreds.”

“Easy for you to say, Mother,” I fired back. “You’re white. You have no idea how blacks are treated.”

“You are impossible,” she said. “I give up on you.”

That day confirmed what I suspected: my parents and I were in different universes. I believed that my country would stand stronger and taller when all Americans were guaranteed equal rights. My parents believed that expanding civil rights threatened their country. Our views would never be reconciled.

After that confrontation, Mother didn’t let go. She continued to preach about the evils of civil rights legislation, using her favorite right-wingers to bolster her case. I ignored most everything she said about George Wallace, the governor of Alabama; I’d already dismissed him as an ass after his “segregation forever” speech.

I did listen for a minute when Mother brought Bill Buckley, the editor of
National Review
and one of the rising conservative thinkers, into the mix. But I was shocked and disappointed to hear that Buckley believed whites to be the advanced race. As such, whites had to “take all necessary measures to prevail, politically and culturally,” he said.
⁶
In my humble but increasingly self-assured opinion, that malarkey put Buckley in the same category as Wallace.

Mother also quoted Barry Goldwater, right-wing oracle: “The problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned. Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be effected by the engines of national power.”
⁷

“This is serious,” Mother told me. “You need to listen to your mother.”

I reminded myself to shut up. This was no time to provoke my mother. I needed her help. All through vacation, while Mother and Dad were talking politics, I was contemplating my dwindling bank account. After a real “come to Jesus” moment, I’d had to face the fact: the dollars I had would barely cover my next semester at school. Any unexpected expenses and I’d be broke.

I fretted about my cash flow while I noticed how much money flew out the door in support of my parents’ pet causes. I’d seen Mother write checks to the
Dan Smoot Report
and the Manion Forum, the Liberty Lobby, and the Conservative Society of America.
⁸
Each one of these organizations was part of the broad Birch network and sported close connections to Robert Welch and other members of the council. Some of these folks, like Dan Smoot and Clarence Manion were active members. Others, like Liberty Lobby and Conservative Society of America were fiercely anti-Communist. All of them got regular contributions from my parents.

Mother had even sent money to the Christian Crusade, despite Reverend Billy James Hargis’s biblical bombast and fierce anti-Catholicism, two things Mother despised.
⁹
“This is no time to argue theology,” she explained. “Hargis is a Birch champion.” I knew what that meant: Hargis was a personal friend of the society and of my parents.

One afternoon, after I watched my mother write a check to the John Birch Society for $150—a sum that would have been a huge help to my budget—I spoke up. “Mother, I need to talk to you,” I said. “School costs more than I expected, and I’m running out of money. Will you help me?”

“How much?” she answered without looking up.

“One hundred fifty dollars would be great. Please?”

“No, and don’t bother me again,” she said. “Your father and I made it clear—you have to fund your own education. We are fighting for our lives here.”

“Will you, at least, get Dad to apply for a National Defense Loan?”
¹⁰

“Your father won’t disclose information to the Feds, you know that.”

That evening, my father had to add his
no, no, no
to Mother’s. “Why would you even ask?” he demanded. “You know we have no extra money.”

“I’m in trouble. I thought you might help.”

“For the last time, don’t ask again,” he said.

“At least fill out the loan forms.”

“I won’t, and that’s final,” Dad said. He went on, growing more and more agitated with every word. “You think you have problems? Your mother and I are fighting for the future. Now even Buckley is on the attack.”

“Bill Buckley?” I asked.

“You heard me.”

“I thought he was your friend.”

“Was,” Mother added. “Not anymore.”

“What happened?”

“He’s a damn traitor,” Dad said.

Wow! This was a titanic shift. In 1955, my parents had heralded William F. Buckley Jr. as an intellectual powerhouse and a rising conservative sage. Mother couldn’t get enough of Buckley’s first book,
God and Man
at Yale
, in which he accused the educational establishment at his alma mater of being both anti-God and anti-free enterprise.
¹¹
“A brilliant mind,” Mother said of her new favorite.

The story of Bill’s discovery by Dr. Willmoore Kendall, a cantankerous politics professor at Yale, was part of the Buckley mythology. Kendall had
recognized Buckley’s enormous potential and encouraged him to hone his public-speaking skills until he became Yale’s most formidable debater. Kendall mentored the young man throughout his Yale years and Buckley returned the favor; when Kendall converted to Catholicism, Buckley was his sponsor.
¹²

Kendall’s relationship with Buckley was a stormy business, as Buckley himself acknowledged. “Willmoore Kendall, the finest teacher I knew at Yale, the most difficult human being I have ever known . . . he must not be on speaking terms with more than three people at any one time.”
¹³

It was Kendall who introduced Bill Buckley to another conservative leader, our former family friend Dr. Revilo Oliver, the brilliant linguist and virulent anti-Semite.

According to Carl T. Bogus’s 2011 book, Buckley knew that “Oliver was the vilest sort of bigot. Oliver disparaged a wide assortment of ethnic groups, especially Jews, and did so in Buckley’s presence and in correspondence with Buckley.”
¹⁴
Those views did not disqualify Oliver from joining
National Review
as a regular contributor, and even after Buckley expelled Oliver from the magazine, the two remained personal friends.
¹⁵

Buckley also cultivated a relationship with Robert Welch, and when Buckley started
National Review
, in 1955, he turned to conservative leaders for financial backing. “I was all for it,” Welch wrote. “I gladly contributed my small pittance of a thousand dollars to the fund. . . . [A] year later, when Buckley’s magazine had run out of money and was facing its first financial ‘crisis,’ I contributed another thousand dollars.”
¹⁶
(That “pittance” would be about $15,000 today.)

In the fall of 1958, Buckley wrote to Robert Welch requesting a copy of the confidential manuscript Welch had written about President Eisenhower, the book subsequently published as
The Politician
. According to Welch, Buckley stated that he’d “very much appreciate being permitted to read a copy.” Welch did send manuscript #58 to Buckley with a “strong explanatory letter” concerning the confidential nature of the book and stressing that it was “for his eyes only.”
¹⁷

Several months later after the Birch Society was organized, Buckley’s mother joined and one of his sisters became a chapter leader in Hartford, Connecticut.
¹⁸
By 1959, Buckley, whom my parents called “Bill,” was recognized as a Birch ally.

Beyond my parents and Welch, Buckley was respected by a large swath of the anti-Communist, small-government gang. Even Phoebe and Kent Courtney, the eclectic founders of the Conservative Society of America, embraced him.
¹⁹
The Courtneys were such Birch cheerleaders that they described their
efforts as picking up “where the John Birch Society leaves off.”
²⁰
One of those efforts included seeding a new political party, the States’ Rights Party, which, according to the Courtneys, would be powerful enough to control both Congress and the White House.
²¹

In October of 1959, my parents attended a Conservative Society of America conference in Chicago that featured both Robert Welch and Bill Buckley as speakers. Along with these luminaries of the newly emerging Right, a who’s who of the John Birch Society was on hand to applaud both speakers.
²²

During the meeting, my parents and other prominent Birchers talked privately with Buckley. After that, Mother and Dad were even more enthused about the prospects of a national conservative movement. “We’ll all work together,” Dad told our Birch chapter. “Bill [Buckley], Bob [Welch], and the Courtneys.”

For a few years, it seemed like a match made in heaven: Buckley and the John Birch Society leading the energized Right. The bloom started to fade when Buckley realized that with “the JBS growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn rather than leading toward the kind of conservatism
National Review
had promoted.”
²³
Analysts inside Buckley’s organization predicted that “Goldwater would turn to the
fundamentalist right
,” if he did not get the 1964 GOP nomination.