The Friend I Corresponded with

last week writes:

I don’t know if you have heard of the book *The Judge *(Ignatius Press), a biography of William P. Clark, who was Reagan’s national security advisor during the crucial years in the early eighties. I read it a couple of years ago when it came out, and Raymond Arroyo just aired an interview with Clark (who is now suffering from Parkinson’s) on EWTN last week.

Clark is a heroically virtuous man, plain and simple. The book (which only exists thanks to big-time arm-twisting by Clark’s friend Fr Fessio and a few others) documents how Clark remained steadfastly loyal to principles as well as to Reagan — Clark being one of Reagan’s few genuine friends, as opposed to associates/allies. Fidelity not only characterized his general ideals, but pervaded his work style down to the little things.

And of course, Clark was a major driving force behind normalization of relations with the Holy See, the covert support of Solidarity, and that whole ball of wax. Just a modest man who happened to think that Communism wasn’t the impregnable fortress it appeared to be, and was determined to do something about undermining it. And it succeeded, no thanks to the legions of pointy-headed people in the State Department and the White House staff itself, who heaped
him with abuse.

Here’s the punch line. Clark never in his life sought the least bit of recognition or credit. A lot of people today don’t know who he is. All he wanted to do was (literally) return to his ranch with his family. He had to be arm-twisted into a biography being written, never mind writing a book himself. Even in the TV interview, the man just shook his head and said, “Oh I don’t know…” when Arroyo pressed him about his accomplishments. He looks, sounds, and carries himself like an ordinary person’s ordinary grandfather. It’s plain that all he wanted was (as we put it in Opus Dei), to “do and disappear.”

What a living, stinging rebuke to our legions of venal, self-aggrandizing “public servants”. Not that they notice.

I think it was Chesterton who said greatness is possible anywhere–even in our ruling classes. Thanks be to God for such men. God knows we both need and do not deserve them.