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 one of the founders of National Review in 1955, and also was a co-founder of the John Birch Society in 1958, where he published in its magazine, American Opinion, before resigning in 1966. He later advised a Holocaust denial group. He was a polemicist for right-wing, white nationalist and antisemitic causes. 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 Oliver was born in 1908 near Corpus Christi, Texas. He attended two years of high school in Illinois. He wrote that he received "one of the first mastoidectomies performed as more than a daring experiment". He relocated to California, where he studied Sanskrit, finding a Hindu missionary to tutor him, he wrote. He later wrote that as an adolescent, he found amusement in watching evangelists "pitch the woo at the simple-minded", attending performances of Aimee Semple McPherson and Katherine Tingley. He entered Pomona College in Claremont, California, when he was sixteen. Academia In 1930, Oliver married Grace Needham. He returned to Illinois, where he attended the University of Illinois 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. 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, according to his writing. He wrote that he was in the War Department from 1942 until autumn 1945, and that he was "responsible for the work of c. 175 persons". Oliver left Washington, D.C. in 1945. He joined the University of Illinois in 1945 as an Assistant Professor,