Richard Reichart.

It is Father’s Day as I write these words. And it’s one day after No Kings Day. My father, Dr. Richard Reichard, would have approved – he was a lifelong anti-fascist.

In the Air Force in World War II, he was shot down behind fascist lines in Croatia, where the Croatian resistance took him and his surviving crewmates overland to the Adriatic coast, and from there by boat to Allied-held southern Italy. Not all his crewmates survived the war, but he did.

After the war, my father went to graduate school at Harvard, where he became secretary of the Harvard chapter of the Communist Party, a move that later led to his being fired from his newly acquired teaching position at George Washington University, where none other than former F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover was on the board of directors and insisted on vetting every teaching candidate.

Soon after getting fired by GWU, my father was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. My mother sat next to my father, and my older brother and I sat on my mother’s knees as my father refused to cooperate with the committee’s witch hunt.

Eventually Dad got a teaching job at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where History Department Chair Dr. William “Bill” Heywood, a pacifist World War II war resister, and Dr. Erik Kollman, a refugee from Hitler’s Austria, stuck their necks out........

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