Wrapped in the Flag (26 page)

Buckley wanted Goldwater at the top of the GOP ticket, but he was concerned that the JBS could derail the whole plan by making the Republican Party look too radical for most voters. Buckley decided that it was time to criticize Welch’s philosophy—while trying to avoid attacking JBS members. As one of Buckley’s closest advisors said, “Some of the solidest conservatives in the country are members of the John Birch Society, and we should act in such a way as to alienate them no more than is strictly necessary.”
²⁴

Buckley’s first critiques focused squarely on Robert Welch. “I myself have never met a single member [JBS] who declared himself in agreement with certain of Mr. Welch’s conclusions,” Buckley wrote in
National Review
in 1961. “If our government is in the effective control of Communists, then the entire educational effort conducted by conservatives . . . is a sheer waste of time. . . . The point has come, if Mr. Welch is right, to leave the typewriter, the lectern, and the radio microphone, and look instead to one’s rifles.”
²⁵

This jab did not create a major breach between Buckley and the JBS. In fact, Welch wrote that “the article is both objectively fair and subjectively honorable.”
²⁶

My father took a sanguine view of the Buckley article. “Bill wants Goldwater in the White House. The society wants Goldwater in the White House.
We can live with Bill’s criticism if it helps Barry,” he explained to his conservative friends.

By late 1961, Bill Buckley realized that the Birch Society was inflicting real harm on the Republican Party. Carl Bogus wrote of the situation, “The John Birch Society had been effectively discredited to the public at large . . . but it had not been effectively discredited on the political right. Like a cancer, it was continuing to grow and threatening the life of the conservative movement.”
²⁷

Buckley knew he had to do more to stop the Birchers. He wrote a six-page editorial, “The Question of Robert Welch,” in which Welch was described as “the kiss of death” for conservatives. Even Barry Goldwater agreed completely with the Buckley article and suggested that Welch should resign from leadership of the Birch Society.
²⁸

From that point on, my parents and Robert Welch were at war with Bill Buckley. Welch claimed, “Mr. Buckley has been utterly and continuously unwilling to take his hands off our throat.”
²⁹

My father put it differently: “Buckley’s a goddamned turncoat.”

William F. Buckley Jr. became the most influential right-wing thinker of his generation—“the golden boy of Conservatism”—and continued to be an influential American pundit until his death in 2008. His rejection of the JBS on intellectual grounds was a blow to Welch and to the national leadership.

Despite Buckley, however, the JBS continued to grow. By 1965, it was reported that the society had “eighty thousand or more members, a paid staff of 220, and annual revenues of $6 million [the equivalent of $39 million today]. It would also have its own publishing company [Western Islands] and operate 350 bookstores across the country.
American Opinion
magazine would boast a paid circulation of forty thousand.”
³⁰

I understood that my parents were mad as hell at Bill Buckley, and I wasn’t really surprised. After all, anyone attacking their precious Birch Society brought down their wrath. I was surprised, however, when they determined that the cause of Buckley’s move to the dark side—the all-powerful, omnipresent, capital-letter
Left
—was due in large part to his choice of college.

“Yale poisoned him,” my father said. “He even joined Skull and Bones.”

“Skull and Bones?”

“The secret college club controlled by the conspiracy,” Dad explained. “It’s the training ground for Lefties, socialists, and other big-government types.”
³¹

“Isn’t Buckley a conservative?”

“He is not. He’s one of the boys,” Dad insisted.

“Take a lesson from this,” my mother added. “You have to resist liberal
contamination.”

My parents believed that even a man with a prodigious brain like Bill Buckley’s couldn’t resist the allure of the liberals at Yale. If the worst had happened to him, imagine how easily I could fall prey to the insidious evil peddled at left-wing colleges.

“That’s why we insisted on UD,” Mother added. “It will be your salvation.”

My parents pushed me to give careful thought to my “course of study,” as they called it. Since they’d already found the “correct” school for me, they had no qualms about picking my major—history and politics. Only engaged in such a rigorous study, they reasoned, could I beat down my liberal tendencies and align myself with them, the Constitution, and God Himself.

“UD has Willmoore Kendall. He’s marvelous. Take his class,” Mother said.

“Dr. Kendall was Buckley’s teacher, and Revilo Oliver’s good friend,” I reminded Mother and Dad.

“Don’t be snide,” Mother said.

The first day of the second semester, I took a seat in Lynch Hall, our multipurpose auditorium and awaited the arrival of Willmoore Kendall, the university’s most eccentric professor and head of the Politics and Economics Department.

Kendall had arrived at UD a year earlier after a tumultuous fifteen years at Yale. In addition to discovering and mentoring the young Bill Buckley there, Kendall had vexed the administration with his antics and his temper. One writer described Kendall as a “wild Yale don of extreme, eccentric and very abstract views who can get a discussion into the shouting stage faster than anybody I have ever known.”
³²
When Kendall left New Haven with a tenure buyout, the University of Dallas offered him the chance to build a department free from the liberal biases of the Ivy League.

On our campus, the new professor gained instant larger-than-life status. Some of the faculty, so I’d heard, shuddered at his escapades, but students—especially arrogant male ones—idolized him for his prowess with women, whiskey, and words.

It was clear early on that Kendall’s love for debate extended primarily to the boys; girls were better off being seen and not heard. As one of my upper-class friends put it, “No matter what he says, don’t argue. He likes his girls cute, not smart.”

A couple minutes after class was scheduled to start, Dr. Willmoore Kendall strode down the aisle of the auditorium with an armful of papers. He wore a rumpled sport coat and jeans, which were not permitted on campus except on weekends, and never in class or chapel.

When Kendall reached the stage, he dropped his stuff on one of the front-row seats and reached inside his jacket for a smoke. He puffed on his cigarette and flicked ashes on the floor as he prowled across the front of the auditorium. A minute later, he leaned over one of the seats and pointed directly at me.

“And who is this?” he asked.

“I’m Claire Conner.”

“Ah, the Birch baby. Let me make one thing clear: your father and his friends know nothing about
real
Communists. The Birch business is a waste of time.”

I felt the blush blazing from my neck to my cheeks. Kendall paused and looked around the room. No one said a word.

Then, he turned back to me. “I’ll be watching you, Miss Birch. If you have a brain in that head of yours, maybe we can make something of it. We’ll just have to see.”

Dr. Kendall called me “Miss Birch” for that entire semester.

After class, I tried to make sense of what had happened. But an hour later, I’d talked myself into a huge headache and an undeniable reality: as long as my dad was a Birch big shot, I would be the target of teasing and ribbing. It had been true in high school, and it was turning out to be true in college, even in a school as right-wing pure as the University of Dallas.

I never told my parents about Kendall’s disdain for the JBS. I figured my father would have been angry with me for gloating. This was one secret I could keep.

Be that as it may, I did decide to take some definitive action of my own regarding Dr. Kendall. I grabbed my purse and my room key and tramped across campus to the student union, where I found my friend Socks sitting at a table playing bridge. This boy had two things I needed: an ID and a car. “I want a drink,” I told him. “Got any ideas?”

Pizza and beer helped my attitude but did nothing to change my problem: Dr. Kendall did not like me. Ironically, my brother—as much a Birch baby as I was—escaped Kendall’s needling. I couldn’t figure out how that worked until I watched Kendall arrive at a party with his entourage of enthralled students in tow. At the front of the pack was my brother, laughing at every comment
that tumbled out of Kendall’s mouth, scurrying to refill his glass, and spouting as many Kendallisms as he could.

“The boys adore Dr. Kendall,” I said to a friend.

“Yes, they do,” she answered. “Just look at them, fawning over him. Aren’t they jackasses?”

“For sure,” I said. “Every last one of them.”

“Dr. Kendall, too,” she added.

“I know. He’s the worst.”

A few weeks into the semester, I realized how little I knew about political philosophy and the colonial period, a situation I attempted to remedy with diligent study. Plowing through
The
Federalist Papers
proved to me that the founders of our country, so revered now, had fought like cats and dogs over the principles of our new government. It was a miracle, from my perspective, that we ever got a functioning federal structure at all.

Willmoore Kendall used his lectures to drive home one of his core ideas: the Constitution of the United States stood head and shoulders above the Declaration of Independence in importance. He passionately believed that the “all men are created equal” clause from the Declaration was never a defining idea in American governance. In fact, he went so far as to declare the whole business of individual rights and equality to be “false, liberal criteria.”
³³

Kendall said the defining principle of the United States was “self-government by virtuous people deliberating under God.”
³⁴
Those virtuous souls were the ones who spoke in the first three words of the preamble, “We the People.”

I’d read those words many times. In fact, I’d memorized the entire preamble and recited it as part of declamation exercises in grammar school and high school. Before 1964, I’d given the founders kudos for their wisdom in including all the people in the Constitution.

It was in Dr. Kendall’s class that I bumped up against one of the realities of colonial America—“We the People” actually included only a small group of citizens, those who were white, male property owners over the age of majority, an age determined by each state legislature.
³⁵

According to the first census, in 1790, free women made up 40 percent of the population and free men under the age of sixteen were 20 percent.
³⁶
Twenty percent of the people were slaves, but for purposes of electoral representation, each one was considered as 60 percent of a free human. Don’t even look for information about Native Americans; no one bothered to count them at all.

Quick addition and subtraction proved that those lauded words, “We the
People,” really meant “We—the 20 percent or less—of the People.”

“Guess what,” I reminded myself. “You, your sisters, and your mother were not part of that ‘We.’”

Kendall left little doubt that he would have preferred an America governed in the old colonial way. So what if slaves had finally been set free at the cost of a terrible civil war and women had fought 130 years to get the vote? Those good old days when noble white men of high moral principle and great wisdom ruled the country were, in his view, the golden era of the American republic.

In Kendall’s political philosophy, demands for individual liberty and equality—including any expansion of voting rights—were radical and dangerous. Ultimately, he reasoned, the pressures of liberty and equality would transform our constitutional government into a totalitarian one.
³⁷

In a paper Kendall presented in 1964, he identified the civil rights movement as the greatest existential threat to America, arguing that it would precipitate a “constitutional crisis comparable to and graver than that which precipitated the Civil War.”
³⁸
The civil rights effort was a “rebellion” fanned by “a liberal propaganda machine and advanced by the Warren Court,” he said. This rebellion would threaten the survival of the American political system unless immediate action was taken.