Wrapped in the Flag (32 page)

Though Wallace’s position on civil rights disturbed me, his position on the Vietnam War scared me. When he was asked about the idea of withdrawing from the growing quagmire in Southeast Asia, he took a whole different tack from that of most other politicians. “I think we’ve got to pour it on,” he said.
²⁵
To prove the point, Wallace selected as his running mate retired general Curtis LeMay, a hawk’s hawk who believed that the most efficient way to win the war would be to use nuclear weapons. “Bomb ’em back to the Stone Age,” was LeMay’s victory strategy.
²⁶

My father loved the general even more than he loved the governor. “The general understands. If it takes a nuke, it takes a nuke,” Dad said to me.

At first blush, my father’s prowar position appeared to be a complete switch from the antiwar position that the JBS had previously taken. But understanding the shift actually was easy. In my father’s mind, and in the minds of the rest of the JBS, the current administration was pro-Communist, which made their Vietnam War pro-Communist too. A Wallace administration would be absolutely anti-Communist, thus making
their
Vietnam War absolutely anti-Communist.

During the 1968 election, Robert Welch never took a position on the war or the candidates. In fact, in the November JBS bulletin, Welch went out of his way to defend his neutrality in the campaign, insisting that “nothing is going to be changed basically by this election.” He went on to describe what would happen if Wallace were to be elected: “The drive to thwart everything [Wallace] tries to do to expose the Communists and to halt their advance will be ‘out of this world.’ It will produce incredibly foul and determined efforts to smear him into the outstanding exhibit of a frustrated, futile, and angry man.”
²⁷

Conversely, according to Welch, a Nixon election would have this effect: “The only thing between us and the final catastrophe of subjugation, which the Communist influences that surround [Nixon] will seek to achieve, is also the increasingly vocal and determined opposition of an increasingly informed and aroused public opinion.” As Welch’s readers knew, those “informed and aroused” folks had to come from the JBS. No one else “has the slightest chance of doing the job,” he added.
²⁸

I suspected that Welch and the Birchers were putting everything they had into the Wallace campaign, but I had no proof until I read the 1996 book
The Politics of Rage
, by Dan Carter. “Beginning in 1965, Robert Welch had used Selma’s [Alabama] sheriff, Jim Clark, as a go-between to pass along the names of key Birchers across the nation anxious to help George Wallace,” Carter wrote. “In state after state outside the South, dedicated Birchers stepped into the organizational void in the 1968 campaign; they dominated the Wallace movement in nearly a dozen states from Maine to California.”
²⁹

As Election Day approached, my parents pushed harder for Wallace. They called me every day or two with the same message: “This is your first vote for president. Make it count.”

I did. On November 5, 1968, I cast my first vote as an adult American. After weighing the only two candidates I considered sane—Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey—I voted for Nixon. I don’t remember the exact reason I decided on him, but it had something to do with what I called the “Democratic boredom factor.”

When Mother called late in the day, she got right to the point. “Did you vote, dear?” she asked.

“I did, Mother,” I answered.

“Did you follow your parents’ direction and vote for Wallace?” she continued.

“I listened,” I said.

Apparently, she was satisfied. “Phew,” I thought. “That’s over for another four years.”

In late December of 1968, my husband and I made the trek to Marshfield, Wisconsin, to celebrate the New Year with my family. As a special present, Mother Nature sent us a blast of Arctic air that plunged the thermostat to an incredible forty degrees below zero. My little brother described it as “colder than a witch’s tit” and no one even raised an eyebrow. Over dinner at the country club, my husband proposed a toast: “Happy New Year. We can all climb in the refrigerator right now and be seventy degrees warmer.”

In the morning, while I huddled in front of a heating vent with a cup of coffee, my dad and my husband ventured out to take a “little look” at the factory. I knew about the challenges Dad faced in running the place, beginning with too many bills and too few customers. I wished my father well, but the business had been on a downward spiral long before he’d taken over, and nothing seemed to be changing the trajectory. As far as I was concerned, his
best move was to pray for a jackpot in the next Irish Sweepstakes.

Little did I know, but my father had already set his eyes on the “jackpot” he needed—a trained industrial engineer with production experience, someone just like the man I had married. Before I could mount a strong counterargument, my dad and my husband had made a bargain: he’d run the plant for three to five years as long as Dad didn’t interfere with his management decisions.

Knowing my dad as well as I did, I was doubtful about the “non-interference” agreement. But the two men shook hands and that, as they say, was that. A few months later, I found myself in a tiny apartment in Marshfield with a six-month-old infant and a husband who dashed out the door at 5 a.m. and returned twelve to fourteen hours later.

“This will only last three years,” I reminded myself and him.

My husband corrected me. “Five,” he said. “At the outside.”

This party is a distillation of the John Birch Society, the Christian Crusade and the Minutemen. We’re revolutionaries. . . . We’ll have constitutional government in this country and if we don’t get it through the ballot box, we’ll get it in the streets
.

—D
EL
M
YERS
, A
MERICAN
I
NDEPENDENT
P
ARTY
O
FFICIAL
¹

I was still unpacking boxes and organizing the kitchen in our Marshfield apartment when my mother arrived with a stack of “material” and a summons to the next John Birch Society meeting.

“We have a core of loyal John Birchers,” she said, “all eager to meet you.”

I brewed tea for both of us and joined her at the table. “Mother,” I said, “I’m not going to be a reliable member, with the baby and all.”

“Bring him. He can sleep upstairs.”

“Not this time,” I told her. “But we’ll see about next month.”

“Your father and I will expect you,” she said.

Before she left, I promised to read the new Birch bulletin cover to cover. “Small price to get out of the meeting,” I told myself as I thumbed through the pages.

Over the first fifteen pages, Robert Welch focused on the new appointments to President Nixon’s staff while insisting that he had “no wish to rock the ‘unity’ boat before it leaves the station.”
²
But wishes aside, Welch lit into Henry Kissinger, the president’s national security advisor, for his “vigorous anti-anti-Communist leanings” and his three degrees from Harvard, “the alma mater of subversion.” Welch then teed off on Daniel Moynihan, head of the Council on Urban Affairs, for “applying socialist measures to give the Negroes economic equality.”
³
Before long, Welch was in one of his frenzies about catastrophe lurking on the horizon if Americans didn’t wake up soon. “Must we wait to become aware of what is happening only when thousands of our daughters and sisters and sweethearts are herded together in some huge enclosure and subjected to several days of repeated rape by occupying Communist troops?” he wrote.
⁴

“Same old, same old,” I thought. “Welch has not changed a whit.”

A few pages later, Welch introduced the newest Birch ad hoc committee: MOTOREDE. The name, shorthand for the Movement to Restore Decency, was dedicated to stopping the “growing indecency in American life,” evidenced by the breakdown of “modesty, of cleanliness, of good manners, of good taste, of moderation in appetites, of restraint in behavior, of morality and tradition, and of all those attitudes which distinguish civilized man from pre-pastoral aborigines.”
⁵

Robert Welch identified the first step to any revival as opposition to the “filthy Communist plot” of sex education in the public schools. He insisted that sex education class included “instruction on sexual methods followed by encouragement to experiment and practice.”
⁶
“It is not unusual,” he wrote, “for a high school teacher to ask his students (boys and girls together, ages fifteen to eighteen) to tell the class about, or write themes about . . . kissing, masturbation, light petting, fondling breasts or genitals, sexual intercourse . . . and
sexual activities with an animal
.”

I laughed. “Sex with Fido? What the hell?”

MOTOREDE joined the other ad hoc committees of the John Birch Society: Get US Out!, TACT (Truth About Civil Turmoil), TRAIN (To Restore American Independence Now), and SYLP (Support Your Local Police).

My mother eagerly took up MOTOREDE and looked to me to partner with her. “Do it for your son,” she urged me one day while we sat at the kitchen table and I held my newborn. “What kind of world will he inherit if the sex peddlers win?” There I sat while my fifty-six-year-old mother talked about sex and perversion, quite the change for a woman who’d taught me about the “birds and the bees” by leaving a pamphlet on my pillow.

I tried to end the conversation by pointing out that lax morals were common in many civilizations throughout history, but Mother would have none of it. She was positive that 1969 marked the summit in the history of sexual sinning. In her mind, for the first time, children were learning how to have sex in school. And, adding insult to injury, teenage boys and girls were being taught how to use condoms, behind their parents’ backs.

“You need to listen to your Mother, young lady,” she admonished me. “Morality is under attack, from all sides, and the Communists are behind it.”

As she lectured, I remembered the fierce textbook warrior in 1959. There she was, marching to the principal’s office in her hat and gloves, the click-click of her three-inch pumps echoing on the tile floor. I remembered how my classmates whispered, “She’s here, again.” I remembered how I groaned and turned away.

I knew that she’d be just as formidable in her new fight. In fact, she was
giddy when she described her confrontation with the principal of the local Catholic high school. “It was wild,” she told me. “Just like Chicago.”

Given the tsunami of terrible, awful, no-good, very bad events that dominated the news, I gave little thought to mother’s crusade against sex education. It was the war in Vietnam that held my attention.

In April of 1969, the United States had reached peak troop strength of 543,400. Six years later, when the last American was evacuated from the roof of our embassy in Saigon, more than 58,000 Americans had come home in body bags.
⁷
The intervening years were hell.

When the My Lai massacre was leaked to the press in late 1969, eighteen months after the incident occurred, I struggled to understand what was happening in the jungles of Nam. I was appalled that William Calley Jr. and his C Company had murdered over three hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, in a horrific execution-style sweep.
⁸
I saw the
Life
photographs of My Lai, and I knew America had abdicated its role as the “good guys.”
⁹
I wanted every American home from the hellhole called Nam, and I wanted the My Lai killers in jail for the rest of their lives.

Many Americans, however, still believed in the war, a reality I confronted almost every time I turned on the Marshfield radio station. Several times a day, Barry Sadler roused the audience with his 1966 “Ballad of the Green Berets.”
¹⁰
While Sadler cheered for the military’s most elite killing squad and prayed that his son would join their ranks, I held my baby son and shuddered at the thought of him registering for the draft.