Revilo Pendleton Oliver (July 7, 1908 – August 20, 1994) was an American professor of Classical philology, Spanish, and Italian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a founding member of the John Birch Society in 1958, where he published in its magazine, American Opinion, before resigning in 1966. He was a polemicist for right-wing, white supremacist and antisemitic causes. He later advised the Holocaust denial group the Institute for Historical Review. Oliver attracted national notoriety in the 1960s when he published an article after the President John F. Kennedy assassination, alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a Soviet conspiracy against the United States. He was called to testify before the Warren Commission investigating the murder.
Life and career
Early life
Revilo Pendleton Oliver was born July 7, 1908, in Iowa Park, Texas, to Revilo P. Oliver and Flora R. Long. "Revilo P. Oliver" is a palindrome—a phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards. Oliver wrote that his name had been, in his family, "the burden of the eldest or only son for six generations". Colleagues at the University of Illinois later joked that "his first name is his last name spelled backward because he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going". He was raised and experienced his early education in California and Louisiana, before his family relocated to Illinois, where he attended high school for two years. With his family, he then moved to California, where aged 16 he entered Pomona College in Claremont.
Academia In 1930, Oliver married Grace Needham. He returned to Illinois, where he attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and studied under William Abbott Oldfather. His first book was an annotated translation, from the Sanskrit, of Mricchakatika (The Little Clay Cart), published by the University of Illinois in 1938. He received his PhD in 1940. That same year, the university published his Ph.D. thesis: Niccolò Perotti's Translations of the Enchiridion, which was republished in 1954 as Niccolo Perotti's Version of the Enchiridion of Epictetus. He received Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships. Oliver began teaching graduate classes. For a number of years he also gave graduate courses in the Renaissance, teaching in the Departments of Spanish and Italian. He said he read 11 languages. Oliver worked in a military intelligence unit in the Signal Services during World War II as a cryptanalyst for the Army Security Agency from 1942 to 1945. Following the war, he returned to Urbana, and joined the staff of the University of Illinois in 1945 as an assistant professor, became an associate professor in 1947, and professor in 1953. He retired in 1977 from the University of Illinois as a professor emeritus.
Conservative movement Oliver was an early book reviewer for National Review from 1956 until May 1960 when he was ousted by its editor, William F. Buckley Jr., for his public antisemitism. Oliver also wrote for The American Mercury. Buckley, who aimed to make conservatism more respectable to Americans averse to antisemitism and extremism, kept a close friendship with Oliver but acknowledged privately that Oliver was antisemitic. In 1958, Oliver joined as a founding member of Robert W. Welch Jr.'s John Birch Society, an anti-communist organization. He was a member of its national board and associate editor of its magazine, American Opinion. When Buckley repudiated Welch and the John Birch Society, the repudiation drove a wedge in Buckley's friendship with Oliver. Oliver is considered the likely author of the 1959 novel The John Franklin Letters, which focuses on an insurgency overthrowing a corrupt American government. The book was published in 1959 by The Bookmailer. It was distributed by the John Birch Society (JBS), which contributed to its popularity. No author was listed for the book and it included no publishing information. The book was edited by Harley N. Ogden, a professor at the same university as Oliver. The book displays many racial grievances but ultimately has a positive ending where the insurgents win and one of their own, a black man, becomes president. Kaplan noted that, given his later views, "one assumes that Oliver eventually found that the racially harmonious denouement of The John Franklin Letters to be a bit of an embarrassment". After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Oliver wrote a two-part article called "Marxmanship in Dallas" published in March 1964 in American Opinion, the Birch magazine. It alleged that Lee Harvey Oswald had carried out the murder as part of a communist conspiracy to kill Kennedy, whom Oliver described as a puppet who had outlived his usefulness. He also criticized Kennedy, writing that his "memory will be cherished with distaste". The University of Illinois held a vote on whether to fire him for the affair (as they had fired biologist Leo Koch four years earlier for promoting premarital sex). In March 1964, Oliver was reprimanded by the University of Illinois' Board of Trustees, but was allowed to keep his position after a vote came down in overwhelming favor of keeping him. Oliver testified in the fall of that year before the Warren Commission.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
