The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

56

Young Americans for Freedom

to the sinister material I had brought into the house. It’s

amazing how seeing hate stuff and touching it can make one

viscerally sick.

I was called out into the living room. My mother and father

were sitting on the formal sofa that we had and I was expected

to stand. My father had the junk beside him on the sofa. He

had called the FBI. They were going to come and question

me. They came and they did. Mr. Kane disappeared from the

street and Mrs. Kane would stand out on the lawn, her auburn

hair crowning her beauty, alone; she was now alone. Their

house was eventually sold.

The crime, it turned out, was to threaten a candidate for

president of the United States. The dirty drawings and words

were taken to be direct threats against Kennedy, as were the vile

insults targeted to the Catholic Church and the pope. I, too,

was punished, but not by the government. I can’t remember

what the punishment was, but it was tempered with mercy

because I had helped shut down a hate enterprise. I knew that

Mr. Kane was not a conservative in the way that Mr. Buckley

was, even though Mr. Buckley supported segregation, to my

shock and dismay.

To find out what was and was not conservative as such, I

approached a group called Young Americans for Freedom.

Their leader was a somewhat aristocratic man named Fulton

Lewis III. This was far outside any prior experience of mine.

I wanted to debate him. I set up the debate for a school

57

Heartbreak

assembly. I hurled liberal platitude after liberal platitude at

him. He won the debate. This made me question not my

beliefs in equality and fairness but how one could communicate those beliefs. I felt the humiliation of defeat, of course.

I don’t like losing, and I was stunned that I did lose. Stil , the

home team had lost because students thought that Mr. Lewis

III was correct. These were the years of the John Birch Society

and None Dare Cal It Treason, a book in which commies and

socialists were hidden in every nook and cranny of the government and the media, and the point was that these equality-minded folks were Soviet dupes, low and venal. I didn’t see

how my classmates could think being against poverty or for

integration were Soviet ideas or treasonous ideas. Mr. Lewis

was exceptionally gracious.

This was the beginning for me of thinking about something

the entertainer Steve Allen, a liberal, had writ en in National

Review. Roughly paraphrased, Mr. Allen’s piece asked why a

person was categorized as just a liberal or just a conservative.