Requiem for a General
The year was 1999. I attended one of those Washington meetings
where the inner circle sits around the big table, while
assistants (like me, at the time) take up seats on the perimeter.
We were fighting for the Religious Liberty Protection Act, which
we hoped would reinvigorate the Free Exercise Clause of the First
Amendment in the wake of court decisions that had undercut the
cause of religious freedom.
Paul Weyrich arrived early. Even then, he was in poor health. I
could see he was in pain as he walked into the room, putting a
good bit of his weight on his cane. He wore suspenders and looked
like an elderly man from Middle America. During the meeting, he
sat quietly and listened, apparently feeling no need to dominate
despite easily being the most well-known and senior person in the
room.
When I heard about his death, I was shocked to hear Weyrich was
only 66 years old. Nearly ten years ago in that Capitol meeting
room, I would have sworn he was almost 70. The revelation of his
age at death explains his face, which seemed preternaturally
youthful in comparison to his burdened body when I met him. He
suffered from diabetes. During the last year, a combination of
complications from injury and lingering illness led to the
amputation of his legs.
Many would have dropped out to rest on the memories of battles
fought and victories won. Weyrich kept working until the end. One
of his friends reported seeing him at a high-powered political
gathering in November where he was an active participant in panel
discussions.
Paul Weyrich came to Washington from Wisconsin in the 1970s as a
senatorial aide, but he quickly became an organizational and
policy entrepreneur of the first order. In addition to being the
founding president of the Heritage Foundation, he also
established the Free Congress Foundation and occupied a perennial
position of leadership among religious conservatives in
Washington.
Many will remember that after the 1998 elections, he penned a
letter declaring the culture war lost and calling, like a modern
prophet, for a welling up of new institutions and ways of life
independent from a decadent mainstream society. That occasion led
to one of many rounds of the press declaring the death of the
"religious right" as a movement. Notably, Weyrich ended his
letter with a call for further conversation and strategic
planning. He never dropped out. He never stopped working and
never gave in to despair.
Upon hearing of Weyrich's death, I called Judge Paul Pressler and
asked for his impressions of the man. For those who don't
instantly recognize the name, he was one of the prime movers
behind a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention
during the last three decades. Pressler has also been heavily
involved in the conservative political movement and this year is
an elector for the presidential race.
The Texas judge was effusive in his praise for Weyrich. Today,
few are surprised to hear that one elder statesman of the
conservative movement has good things to say about another, but
there are larger issues beneath the surface. When these two men
were young, it would have been rare to hear a Southern Baptist
offering tribute to the legacy of a Greek Catholic like Weyrich.
In fact, during those years, evangelicals and other conservative
Protestants were at least as concerned with the threat of
ambitious Catholicism as they were with secularist encroachments.
Rare were the evangelicals who had the insight of Abraham Kuyper
that Catholics were natural allies against secular cultural
offensives.
Paul Weyrich is one of the people who built the bridge between
those camps. Today, conservative Protestants and Catholics waste
very little of their fire on each other. It is ironic to consider
how much ecumenism came from the cultural and political
engagement of people like Weyrich and Phyllis Schlafly (also
Catholic), as opposed to the weak, pink lemonade of
self-conscious efforts like those of the National Council of
Churches to pull believers together. The lure of theological
compromise proved much less potent than common purpose and
real-life stakes.
Interestingly, when I asked a veteran of the Reagan and Bush
administrations for his memory of Weyrich, he responded
instantly, "He spoke truth to power, even when that meant
disagreeing with the president in his presence." That particular
phrase about speaking "truth to power" is usually reserved as an
encomium bestowed upon liberal clergymen by adoring journalists.
Weyrich spoke his mind knowing it would earn him no similar
kudos.
It may be fitting to conclude by saying something about Weyrich
as a private person. We are accustomed to viewing well-known
figures in Washington as celebrities and often expect to see them
surrounded by wealth and luxury, even when they are known to have
strong religious sympathies. Weyrich did not use the money he
raised to support a lavish lifestyle. Instead, he lived simply
and labored faithfully despite pain and illness.
The loss of Paul Weyrich is a serious one. Taken together with
the death of William F. Buckley earlier this year, the
conservative movement has lost two leading lights. The burden
lies heavy upon the succeeding generations to find some way to
occupy their places.
Pat Rooney, RIP
PAT ROONEY was a special kind of businessman. He did far more
than merely provide jobs for employees and services for his
customers, as important as those goals are. He helped change the
course of public policy in our country because he believed in the
power of ideas and invested his money and courage in furthering
them. His death in September at age 80 robbed America of one of
its most principled business leaders.
J. Patrick Rooney started out as a humble door-to-door insurance
salesman who would gorge on pancakes for breakfast so he wouldn’t
have to spend money on lunch or dinner. He eventually built his
Indianapolis-based Golden Rule Insurance Company from nothing
into a leader in the individual health insurance market. But he
moonlighted as one of the country’s most innovative
philanthropists and policy entrepreneurs.
During the 1980s, while other businessmen were trying to apply
Band-Aids to a badly broken public education system, Rooney
plumped for school choice. He was one of only three white members
of Holy Angels Catholic Church in inner-city Indianapolis.
Talking to parents there, he resolved to do more than lobby the
legislature for school reform. In 1991, he established the
Educational Choice Charitable Trust, one of the earliest
scholarship programs of its kind; today it offers grants to more
than 1,700 low-income Indianapolis children.
But back then such a move was highly controversial. It brought
howls of protest from public school hard-liners. School board
members predicted that parents would shun the vouchers out of
loyalty to the public schools. A. D. Pinckney, president of the
local NAACP chapter, told reporters Golden Rule should give the
money to the public school system instead. “We need to support
them,” he said. “To do anything else will be disastrous.”
Mr. Rooney didn’t listen to such special pleading, and he soon
developed allies in the black community. Bill Crawford, a state
legislator at the time who represented a 70 percent black
Indianapolis district, stepped forward. He backed Rooney’s plan
and noted that 54 percent of the city’s elementary school
students scored below grade level on national tests. “Public
schools give up on kids more easily than private schools,” he
told the Wall Street Journal. “They are also unwilling
to discipline students effectively.” He quickly found that his
constituents enthusiastically supported Rooney’s plan.
Until Rooney’s effort, critics often attacked vouchers as a
subsidy for middle-class families who could already afford
private schools. Rooney put the emphasis on children in failing
schools who stood to benefit the most from the introduction of
choice and competition. “When all families, no matter how poor,
have the freedom to walk away from bad schools, competition will
force the public schools to improve.”
Today more than 60 such programs are providing choice for some
53,000 students around the country, all in part based on Rooney’s
original model. While political obstacles still block expansion
of school choice in many states, the Rooney model has proven an
effective demonstration program on how choice can open people’s
eyes to the possibility of change. Polly Williams, the black
state legislator who authored Wisconsin’s landmark school choice
law, says programs like Rooney’s are important: “If legislatures
won’t allow choice then corporate America can support it and
eventually that may shame politicians into letting my people go.”
She and other pro-choice minority legislators consider Rooney a
leader in what they believe is the 21st century’s great civil
rights struggle—establishing real educational opportunity for all
Americans.
Pat Rooney was equally farsighted in health care reform. He
became the leading advocate for health savings accounts at a time
when HSAs were on
