By CHRISTOPHER MANION
“Every great movement — social, political, or religious — in its infancy, is marked by militancy. Its faithful shine with a spirit of sacrifice, a willingness to accept defeat and humiliation rather than compromise principle. Its True Believers are impatient, to the point of intolerance, with the half-hearted and the half-committed. He who is not with us is against us. That is the way we were. And that is the temper of the bugle called to battle” — Pat Buchanan, in his 1990 introduction to Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative.
As we reported last week, Pat Buchanan has announced that he is retiring his column, which has been featured in The Wanderer for decades.
Words fail me — but they never failed Pat.
I’m eight years younger than Pat, but we both consider 1960 to be a pivotal year in molding our conservative lives. In honoring his vast contribution to conservative thought, I focus on his introduction cited above because my father, Clarence Manion, published Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative in 1960 after every major publisher rejected it.
That calls to mind one of my favorite lines from Pat:
“In the 1960s, there were no conservative opportunists, because there were no opportunities for conservatives.”
Since the greats of the publishing trade rejected the Goldwater book, my dad seized the opportunity to publish it himself. It became one of the greatest political best-sellers in memory.
“No opportunities.” That fact, well stated, was liberating: the pre-Woodstock conservatives of my generation were free to speak our minds because nobody owned us. We weren’t getting funding from anybody. The fuel in our tanks was principles, not propaganda.
That was a terrific opportunity.
Pat was indeed “Right from the Beginning.” He was a natural to write the introduction to the new release of Goldwater’s Conscience thirty years later. At the request of Al Regnery, our family gave Regnery Publishing the rights because we knew that they would release the book not to bury Barry but to praise him.
Pat’s words 33 years ago are as valid today as they were in 1990, when he described the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s campaigns of 1968, 1976, and 1980:
“Like every smug establishment, the GOP was deaf to the sound of the trudging feet of the coming revolution. Relying, as ever, on money and media power, it could not match the fervor of those who fought for the true faith.”
Wait — could that have been the same spirit that caught the Bush ascendancy off-guard when Donald Trump walked off that elevator in Trump Tower on June 16, 2015?
Does the pendulum really swing back after all?
A Love Story:
In Love With The Truth
“Like a first love, the Goldwater campaign was, for thousands of men and women now well into middle age, an experience that will never recede from memory, one on which we look back with pride and fond remembrance. We were there on Saint Crispin’s day!”
And today, 33 years later, we’re all wearing the bottoms of our trousers rolled, but some things haven’t changed. Goldwater condemned LBJ’s “paranoia and cold deceit” after the election of 1964. Have we heard Republicans use those terms today regarding Joe Biden?
Where’s the beef?
And does this sound familiar? “Conservatives in 1964 were utterly unprepared for the savagery of the no-holds-barred campaign conducted by the Left…the portrayal of ‘Mr. Conservative’ as a warmonger, racist, and enthusiast of fascism was a lie, a Big Lie that convinced millions of young conservatives that the press’ claim to objectivity and neutrality in national politics was a textbook case of consumer fraud. In the campaign of ’64, conservatives acquired a distrust of the media that yet endures.”
The Left’s epithets have hardly changed at all, but their embrace of the dialectic has intensified. Today Biden is the warmonger, but Trump is still both “Hitler” and a “Putin Stooge” — and even the Left doesn’t believe the media anymore.
But consider one haunting particular that abides:
“In 1960, the difference between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, was narrower than today. In the 1950s, Americans agreed about what the good society was; we disagreed over how to reach it.”
This disagreement has become an abyss. And it’s almost Biblical. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who brought the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case before the Supreme Court, had it right on the morning of the 50th March for Life last month: State legislatures can pass pro-life laws, but they can repeal them after the next election. We have to change the culture, from the bottom up — an almost insurmountable task in a world where no one will even agree to what “the good Society” is.
And we can’t do it without recognizing that without God, there is no “good society” at all.
Crossing The River
Catholics worldwide are mourning the loss of Howard Walsh, a champion of the Church and the family, of the Holy Mass and Catholic truth.
Howard, a Third Order Carmelite, grew up in an Irish Catholic family in the Bronx. After two years in parochial school, “a nun brought Howard home from school, told his mother that Howard was unteachable, and instructed that he was not allowed to return,” his family writes.
That blunder was a right up there with Green Bay Packers’ coach Bart Starr’s choice of a no-name nose tackle instead of Joe Montana, fresh out of Notre Dame, in the third round of the 1979 Pro Football draft. Howard grew up to be a brilliant engineer, and the precision tool and fastener company he co-founded eventually boasted over 200 employees.
Howard met his lovely wife Eleanor at a New Year’s Eve party in 1965. He proposed to her after Mass the next morning.
Smart move.
During his life devoted to Catholic truth and spreading it, Howard founded Keep The Faith (https://keepthefaith.org/), which has distributed hundreds of thousands of Catholic books, videos, cd’s, MP3’s and tapes around the world. These include one of the largest collections of talks and other audios of Bishop Sheen, all of them available for download from Keep the Faith’s website.
Under Howard’s guidance, Latin Mass Magazine became an indispensable source for traditional Catholics, students, and scholars (even some of our Wanderer writers have occasionally wandered over to the pages of Latin Mass).
Howard was also a supporter of countless Catholic causes and institutions. He sponsored conferences and forums that featured speakers from all over the world. Many friendships were formed at those marvelous gatherings, and thousands of grateful Catholics will miss him. We offer our condolences and prayers to his lovely wife Eleanor, whose smile lit up every room she entered, to his children, and to his dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren who share the burden of his loss.
Crossing The Ocean
The news of George Neumayr’s death in Africa last month has stunned the world of Catholic journalism.
George came from a distinguished Catholic family; his father, Jack Neumayr, starred on Notre Dame’s basketball team as an undergraduate, and he worked with Dr. Ron McArthur to found Thomas Aquinas College in 1969.
George had all the fight of his father and more. He was a freelance Catholic journalist of the junkyard dog variety. His investigations got him banned from both the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (while investigating the notorious Msgr. Rossi) and the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in the Diocese of Richmond (while investigating the also notorious Bishop Barry Knestout).
George died of malaria while visiting the Ivory Coast to learn more about the Church there. We offer our prayers and condolences to his lovely mother Bridget, as well as to his brothers and sisters and their families.
May Howard Walsh and George Neumayr rest in peace.
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