Birch View of JFK
(Newsweek, 24 February 1964)
The pattern of the intricately stitched plot makes secret
agent James Bond’s preposterous adventures read as soberly as the Federal
budget.
John F. Kennedy, the handsome young President of the United
States, is a valuable agent of the International Communist Conspiracy, but he
has become a liability to his Moscow masters. Try as he does—staging a phony
invasion of Cuba, collaborating with Khrushchev on a fake “missile crisis,”
forcing hateful civil-rights legislation down the throats of a loyal
Congress—he just can’t keep pace with the Communist timetable for capture of
the country. He must be removed from the picture to pave the way for a Red coup.
Lee Harvey Oswald, an American defector painstakingly
trained by the Russians as a terrorist and readmitted into the country with the
connivance of the Communist-dominated State Department, is picked for the
assignment. He kills the President, setting the stage for a bloody purge of true
patriots. But through blind luck or divine intervention, the Dallas police
capture him. He is about to blurt out a full confession—unmasking the entire
operation—when the order goes out for his own liquidation. Thwarted for the
moment, the Directorate of the Conspiracy bides its time, probing for another
chance to ravage America, perhaps tomorrow.
The ‘Right’ Way: A grotesque, paranoid fantasy? Not the way the ultra-right
wing John Birch Society reads events. With a plethora of additional detail, this
version of the life and death of John F. Kennedy is appearing in deadpan earnest
in the current edition of American Opinion, the Birchers’ pocket-size monthly
mouthpiece. The author: Prof. Revilo Oliver, 53, a slim, mustached classics
scholar at the University of Illinois and member of the society’s national
council.
“So long as there are Americans,” writes Oliver, an
editor of American Opinion, “[Kennedy’s] memory will be cherished with
distaste…And if the international vermin succeed in completing their
occupation of our country, Americans will remember Kennedy while they live, and
will curse him as they face the firing squads or toil in brutish
degradation…”
Publications of Oliver’s twist touched off the expected
furor at the university, where he teaches Latin and Greek. But while deploring
the taste of Oliver’s article, officials held that his teaching role on the
campus was not affected. Student editor Roger Ebert wrote in the Daily Illini:
“Only a strong and free society could permit Professor Oliver his own
freedom” The hubbub hardly fazed the professor. Busy on a second installment
last week, he blandly explained, “If you are a patriotic American, you must
expect to meet all kinds of defamation, both open and snide.”