Free Wrapped in the Flag by Claire Conner

It was his Final Solution
.”
    My father told me that American soldiers who liberated the camps at the end of the war found thousands of emaciated prisoners in striped prison pajamas. In the camp yards, piles of decomposing bodies were stacked like cord wood. “How could anyone do these things?” I asked.
    “The Germans claimed they were following orders,” Dad explained. “But that is no excuse. You can never do these evil things and make an excuse like that.”
    “What happened to the bad men?” I asked.
    The worst of the Nazi war criminals were arrested and tried, my father told me. Many were put in prison, and some were hanged. “It’s right for the men who did these things to be punished,” Dad said.
    “They should have hanged all of them,” I said.
    My father agreed with me.
    I knew these things had happened during World War II and that the Germans had done them. I knew, as well as I knew my own name, that America had saved the world. “If we hadn’t beaten those bastards, you’d be speaking German,” Dad said.
    I hugged my father and thanked God we’d won the war. “The Nazis are dead and gone, forever,” I told myself. “They’ll never hurt anyone again.”

    Shortly after Mother and Dad became Birchers, they met Revilo P. Oliver, a classics professor from the University of Illinois, a founding Birch member—he had joined even before my parents—and a close friend of Robert Welch’s. Welch described Oliver as “one of the very top scholars in America in his field and one of the ablest speakers on the Americanist side.” 2
    My parents welcomed Oliver enthusiastically, but he gave me the creeps. His long face was exaggerated by black hair glistening with pomade, bushy eyebrows, and beady eyes. He sported a mustache as wide as his mouth. When he smiled, his lip curled into a snarl. Oliver always showed up in a starched white dress shirt, tie, and tweed sport coat. I never remember him removing that coat, even in the heat of the summer.
    His first name, Revilo, puzzled me, but he was quick to explain: “My name, an obvious palindrome, has been the burden of the eldest or only son for six generations.” 3 Revilo = Oliver. I thought that was peculiar, but it was hard to make a big deal about it when my father’s given name was Stillwell.
    Revilo Oliver was the only person I ever knew who was able to translate ancient Sanskrit manuscripts. Dad bragged that he could write in a dozen or more languages, some with their own alphabets. I thought my father was exaggerating until I read that Oliver’s home office had “twelve typewriters, each with a typeface for a different language.” 4
    For almost ten years, Oliver was a frequent contributor to
National Review
, William Buckley’s magazine, and to the John Birch Society’s magazine,
American Opinion
. Apparently, Oliver was allowed free rein to offer his views on politics, culture, and race. In 1956, Oliver used the pages of
National Review
to share this vision of America’s future: “Naked dictatorship, the rule of uniformed thugs, and the concentration camp for all who obstinately believe in human freedom.” 5
    Seven years later, in
American Opinion
, Oliver attacked 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.” 6

    From 1959 through the summer of 1966, Oliver thrilled audiences with his stories of war, treason, and Communist subversion. He ranted against American involvement in World War II, insisting that we were pushed into the war for only one reason: Franklin Roosevelt wanted to help his Communist friend Joseph Stalin. According to Oliver, “We [the United States] had fought for the sole purpose of imposing the beasts of Bolshevism on a devastated land.” 7
    Those ideas were not the worst of the stuff that Oliver preached. Not long after he turned up at our house, I