By CHRISTOPHER MANION
In 1916 my father was a graduate student at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. On election night that November, he stood outside the headquarters of the Democrat National Committee, leading a crowd that chanted,
“We Want Peace, We Don’t Want War! We Want Wilson, Four Years More!”
Woodrow Wilson had attracted Catholics like my dad with a simple slogan — “He kept us out of war.” When Wilson finally revealed, after his reelection, that he had actually intended to give us “the war to end all wars” all along, my father and his classmates did not dwell on Wilson’s prevarications. They dropped out of school, joined the U.S. Army, and went off to the Great War.
Dad survived, thank God, and left the Army in 1919 as a captain. He taught history to work his way through Notre Dame Law School, and started teaching constitutional law there in the early twenties. An avid Democrat in spite of Wilson’s betrayal, he supported Roosevelt in Indiana throughout the 1930s, joining other Catholics at the time who considered the New Deal to be not only compatible with, but supportive of, Catholic teaching. Like millions of Catholics, he supported FDR’s bid in 1940 for a third term because the president had promised Americans that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
Well, most Americans didn’t want their boys sent to anther foreign war, and neither did my father. In fact, he had been one of the founders of the America First Committee, “formed to defend America by keeping the United States out of the European war” (Clarence E. Manion, The Conservative American [1966], p. 39.)
But Roosevelt wanted war, and he was skillful at manipulating the goodwill of the common people. He knew that, however strongly the majority of Americans might oppose entering the war, they would fall in line and patriotically “support the troops” once combat was under way. After all, it’s their sons who would be on the front lines. True to patriotic form, three days after Pearl Harbor the leaders of the America First Committee demonstrated this all-too-dependable civic virtue of the American common man. They officially gaveled the organization out of existence.
Years later, as an Army ROTC student, I defended the Vietnam War in debates sponsored by local high schools. My 1968 Notre Dame yearbook devoted an entire page to a classmate’s critique of the war and another page to my defense of it. He praised Ho Chi Minh and condemned U.S. aggression; I quoted Douglas MacArthur and condemned President Lyndon Johnson’s duplicity. Johnson warned the nation to expect “more cost, more loss, and more agony,” I complained, but only victory over Communist aggression could justify sending Americans into battle.
Be Clean For
Gene Comes Clean
I had supported the Vietnam War because I believed it was the only alternative to “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.” But I was wrong. Eighteen years ago, my wife and I had dinner at a friend’s cabin a ways down the Blue Ridge from our place. His neighbor Eugene McCarthy joined us, and surprised me by asking if I was related to the dean from Notre Dame who used to travel (as Professor McCarthy had in the 1940s), speaking on Catholic college campuses on the “Te Deum” circuit. I liked him already.
That night Sen. “Be Clean for Gene” McCarthy bluntly told us why he had opposed the war in Vietnam. “Lyndon lied to me, McNamara lied to me. Bobby lied to me. No one would tell me the truth.”
Sen. McCarthy argued that night that there were more than two sides to arguments about war. I realized that I had “supported” the war in Vietnam for two primary reasons: first, an innate sense of patriotism — call it what you will, love of faith, family and freedom, support our troops, our guys versus the bad guys, my country, my patria, right or wrong. Second, a hatred of Communism, and of the domestic American leftists who supported a Communist victory in Southeast Asia.
Well, Lyndon Johnson had our number. He knew that millions of patriotic Americans would want to believe their government, and would want to defeat Communism. So he lied through his teeth. Millions believed him. Millions more died.
New arrivals in Washington these days are always cautioned to “seize the moral high ground”; if you frame the issue, you win the debate. Lyndon Johnson had framed the issue: If you oppose the war, you’re for the commies. Holding my nose, I supported the war.
It was hard for me as a college student with seven years of ROTC to realize that it wasn’t unpatriotic to oppose your government, even in war, because it was lying to you.
Criticize the government, even when your party is in the majority? Well, my dad used to tell his law students, if you tell the first lie, you may as well tell the rest. Gene McCarthy proved that there was a price to pay, but it is possible. In fact, it’s the truly conservative thing to do when you’re being lied to. You need not support either the enemy or your own lying government. If neither one tells the truth, be the Lone Ranger, if you must, but insist on the truth. One precaution, however: Taking this position doesn’t pay, while propounding lies often pays extremely well.
Washington is full of multimillionaires. Draw your own conclusions.
New York Cardinal
Reveals Stunning Truth
Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York and chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on March 22 to make a startling revelation: the Democrat Party is pro-abortion. Moreover, that position has alienated Catholics. “[I]t saddens me, and weakens the democracy millions of Americans cherish, when the party that once embraced Catholics now slams the door on us,” he writes.
Cardinal Dolan is truly saddened. How did this happen? In a fascinating passage, he explains that “the dignity and sanctity of human life, the importance of Catholic schools, the defense of a baby’s civil rights — were, and still are, widely embraced by Catholics. This often led Catholics to become loyal Democrats. I remember my own grandmother whispering to me, ‘We Catholics don’t trust those Republicans’,”
As Fr. Gavin put it in Logic class, the cardinal’s fascinating syllogism is “missing a middle” — the assumption that explains his “this.” As in, are we to assume as a given that Republicans opposed “the dignity and sanctity of human life, the importance of Catholic schools, the defense of a baby’s civil rights”?
It causes one to ponder: How many bishops have shared that curious assumption over the years?
Beyond his logic, the cardinal’s sense of history also invites consideration. After all, millions of “Reagan Democrats” voted Republican in 1980 — but of course our bishops were not among them. In fact, for some forty years the USCCB has advocated the “Seamless Garment” canard, effectively allowing that Catholics can vote in good conscience for — guess whom?
That’s right, those pro-abortion Democrats.
Six years ago this week, Cardinal Dolan told The Wall Street Journal that bishops had “gotten gun-shy . . . in speaking with any amount of cogency on chastity and sexual morality” — since “the mid- and late ’60s”!
Could one conclude that those bishops might have largely “slammed the door” on Humanae Vitae? Many prelates did, to be sure, and still do — publicly. But if it has taken bishops forty years to discover that Democrats are pro-abortion, perhaps as Humanae Vitae celebrates its fiftieth birthday this July they might stumble over another startling discovery:
Humanae Vitae was right!
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