Forever May She Wave

By Charlie Johnston

Fifty years ago, during the Bicentennial year,.  I was a young aide to Congressman Robert McClory. I was his driver and wrote some speeches and such for him.

He spent most of his weekends in the district and the week in Washington. He left his car at a hotel he used during the week. After a time, he asked me if I would mind driving his car during the week and just leaving it at the hotel on Friday evenings to pick it up again on Sunday evening. I lived in a quieter part of the district than his main office was in. I had a car which I liked just fine. But his car had something very important that mine did not: Congressional License Plates. Man, you have no idea how cool it was driving everywhere at 20 with Congressional Plates. Wherever I went, when people saw me get out of it, they called me, “sir.”

We would talk about various issues while we rode together, He liked bouncing things off of me. He even asked me to sit in on some of his high-level meetings in the district, so we could share impressions on the drive later. On Saturday, Sept. 7, we were at a swanky event in Lake Forest, Illinois at a mansion overlooking Lake Michigan from atop the bluff it was on, when our host came to say he had an urgent call from the White House. The Congressman took it and things continued normally until we got into the car to leave. Then he told me that Pres. Ford was going to pardon former President Richard Nixon on Sunday, but that I could not tell anyone until after it was done. (McClory was a member of the Judiciary Committee and so was briefed ahead of time as a courtesy). We discussed the likely response it would generate and how to deal with it. I thought it was totally cool that I, a mere kid, knew a day before most of the rest of the country and that my Congressman had entrusted me with a (quickly expiring) secret of state.

That summer the City of Crystal Lake in McHenry County was planning to bury a time capsule to be unearthed 50 years later in 2026. To help pay for the project, they were asking people around the community to give a dollar to sign their name onto a parchment to be buried in the capsule. Both the Congressman and I signed. I had long thought I would be there when the capsule was dug up, but as it turns out, I am otherwise occupied this weekend. But if any of you happen to be in Crystal Lake for the Fourth, if you scour the ranks of signatures from the unearthed capsule, among them will be that of 20-year-old me.

McClory also got me appointed as a surrogate speaker for the Ford Presidential campaign in northern Illinois. The last two months it was always about the pardon. My response always shut that down quickly and moved things along to more consequential matters. It was good enough that they started sending me out to mixed crowds a lot – but they never adopted my take on it nationally…and I didn’t really understand why.

A lot of critics had accused Ford of making a deal with Nixon on the pardon, in order to get the presidency. Ford denied it, but the charge continued to rage. The way I handled it was to say, “Look, President Ford said he made no deal. I think he is an honorable man, so I believe him. But if that is what it took to get us out from under this two-year nightmare, it was an excellent deal – and I would make no apology for it.” When I would say that, many in the crowd would rub their chins and nod their heads – and that was the end of it. I figured the national campaign must know something I did not because my take was so much better than their muddling and fumbling over the question. That was the year I began to suspect that maybe the guys from Washington were not as smart as I hoped and maybe they did not know better than me how to handle all things. But I was 20.

Once while we were driving I told the Congressman a joke I made up about Jimmy Carter. He thought it was hilarious – and repeated it to the president, who repeated it a couple of times at campaign events. It was not all that good a joke, certainly not my best work, but man, was it cool to have a president reciting a snippet that I wrote. I can’t even remember all of it…just the first two lines:

“What’s Jimmy Carter’s favorite color? Plaid.

What’s his favorite food? Stew”

I didn’t think it was that good because, though Carter was wrong about a lot of things, he was not particularly wishy-washy or trying to be all things to all people. But it is the only joke I ever made up that a president repeated that I know of.

It was a grand year and a great celebration. This year’s celebration is even bigger and grander. The only thing worse about it is that I’m not 20 years old anymore.

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It’s kind of fascinating that Iran has moved to the back burner so abruptly that few have even noticed. Oh, all the partisans (especially the Democrats and the black-pilled) still have their balloons full of talking points – but the helium that kept them aloft has grown stale and leaked off.

Nobody knows who’s running the place, probably because nobody is. It has been reduced to roving bands of rival warlords vying for their moment of mayhem. Meantime, without the ability to project terror or credibly threaten nuclear annihilation, it comes off as a particularly annoying collection of bitey little yap dogs. Truth is, it has largely become irrelevant to the conversation, either of its advocates or its opponents. The serious players go about their business, some random Iranian warlord screams they will annihilate us all, and the serious players continue about their business. Almost all of the rest of the Arab world has chosen to do business with the US – and Israel. All Iran has left for threats is the strait of Hormuz. Even there, it is firing off pop guns rather than heavy munitions. Meanwhile, the Gulf States are building pipelines and workarounds to completely bypass the straits, eventually making it irrelevant, too.

Pres. Donald Trump may continue to string them along (it is nice to see a president stringing along the lunatics rather than being strung along by them, for a change). He may occasionally blast vast swaths of their infrastructure to bits when they get too lively. But NO serious person regards Iran with trepidation anymore. It is a dead country walking, even if its dying brain causes it to twitch and kick a bit, in the process.

Life goes on.

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I was a bit disheartened by the conservative commentariat’s reaction to last week’s bevy of Supreme Court decisions. I disagreed with the reasoning of the majority in a couple of cases, but none were irrational. And, certainly, none merited the screeches of betrayal by conservatives who have lost the narrative on X.

The Court did NOT greenlight forever elections. It decided that ballots received by mail and postmarked by election day can be counted up to five days after election day. I have no doubt Dems will find some way of weaponizing this much narrowed window for their vital fraud tactics, but the Court also gave some guidance on how legislatures could change this. Deciding that ballots must be cast on election day rather than received fully on election day entailed wrong reasoning, I think, but not indefensible reasoning.

The birthright citizenship case disappointed me – and I think it needs to be fixed legislatively. But I knew from the get-go that language from near the turn of the last century, forged by both the legislature and the courts, was ambiguous enough that this decision could go either way. Again, the Court (Brett Kavanaugh in particular) instructed the legislature on how to fix this so as to unambiguously end birth citizenship.

We conservatives have long complained of activist judges who use their decisions to, in effect, act as a shadow legislature to enact their policy preferences. Judges are only supposed to interpret the law, as written, without imposing any personal policy preferences. What struck me was the Court’s restraint. Whether wrongly or rightly reasoned, it refused to do the legislature’s job. It kicked the can multiple legislatures have kicked to it right back at them – and helpfully explained what they can do to amend the bad policies, if they so choose.

Do we want to reform the judiciary or do we just want to replace the leftist policy outcomes with conservative policy outcomes? If we just want to replace their abuse with our own mirror abuse, I’m not signed up for that. Again, I disagreed with the majority reasoning on two cases, but that is a very different thing than demanding that the Court enforce my policy preferences. I am not at all interested in replacing the left’s thugs and bums with our own.

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I had a nifty little piece in our CORAC Newsletter on our 250^th. I thought it was  nifty enough that I am going to reprint it below in its entirety. (If you haven’t, you should check out our CORAC Newsletter, put out twice a month by its charming and delightful editor, Sheryl Collmer. It is chock full of news you can use and helpful, informative tidbits)

A Grand Old Flag

Saturday, July 4, this year marks the 250th Anniversary of America’s founding. It also marks the 200th anniversary of the deaths of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – the two most critical members of the Committee of Five which drafted the Declaration of Independence. Yes, that’s right, both men died exactly fifty years after their most memorable and lasting joint creation was publicly issued.

As I began to be mesmerized by history sometime during third grade, I later became fascinated at the reality that America was the first nation in history that was not based on ethnicity, ancestry, or religion – and required no such qualifications to become a full citizen. America was a set of principles, principles designed to safeguard liberty and guarantee opportunity and autonomy for all of its citizens. Anyone who subscribed to these principles and pledged fealty to them and this land could become fully American.

Yes, I know, those principles were not fully executed at the beginning and often are not well executed now. I am weary, though, of the petulant, angry children who insist that any failure is abject hypocrisy. They are the sort of stupid people who insist that any baby found in a tub of dirty water must be tossed out with the water. I gag at the aggressive idiocy that drives such nonsense. People are a bundle of contradictions. The best have flaws and the worst have virtues. It takes a special kind of malice to judge a good man by his worst failing as if that is all he is – or to judge an evil man by his best quality as if that is what he truly is. Judge righteous (not self-righteous) judgment.

Few know that John Adams was the driver of the greater part of the principles stated in the Declaration. He was its intellectual foundation – and the chairman of the Committee of Five which drafted it. Adams was, in many ways, a proud and driven man who could get offensively cranky when he did not prevail. But he was also an honest and candid critic of himself. Though he had the right, as committee chair, to draft the final Declaration, he knew very well that he wrote like an accountant. His friend – and often early rival – Thomas Jefferson, had a brilliant flair for writing – and routinely could turn a phrase that memorably captured the imagination and stirred the soul. So Adams, far more committed to the cause of liberty than to self-promotion (though he was certainly committed to the latter, as well) assigned turning the principles into stirring words to Jefferson, who had such a flair for it.

Jefferson was a man of passion and genius, but a lover of scheming intrigue and often blindingly poor judgment. In his first draft of the Declaration, he included a lengthy and biting denunciation of the slave trade. There was no fault with the substance of it, but the purpose of the Declaration was to unite the 13 colonies in a unified revolt from England. Many of them were slave states. However true Jefferson’s condemnation, it would serve to alienate a good chunk of the states. There would be no revolution, at all, if he got his way. So, to Jefferson’s loud complaints, Adams and the rest of the committee removed that section, as harmful – probably deadly – to the main purpose of the document.

Ironically, Adams never held any slaves. Jefferson did. For all his complaints, he never freed any of his slaves, either. Contrary to the limitations of small minds, it did not mean that Jefferson was not sincere. Nor did Adams’ removal of the clause mean that he supported slavery. He detested it. He just wanted to get America off the ground well first.

Jefferson had a weird obsession for revolution, generally. He supported the French Revolution long after it was clear that it was just an orgy of blood; nothing, at all, like the American Revolution. As President George Washington’s Secretary of State, Jefferson basely intrigued against his own administration and set various newspapers to try to undercut Washington. Yet Jefferson was truly a gifted genius – a man of contradictions.

During the Washington administration, Jefferson and Adams became more than rivals; they became often bitter opponents, a stance that continued for the rest of their active political careers. In their dotage, they became devoted pen pals, writing to each other constantly with real affection. In fact, one of my favorite lines ever came from one of Jefferson’s letters to Adams. “I am sorry to write such a long letter,” he apologetically began, “but I did not have time to write a short one.” Through friendship that developed into bitter rivalry, they still had served as compatriots in one of the greatest achievements in world history – and they understood the gravity and worth of that.

It was Abraham Lincoln who most clearly understood and championed what the founders had accomplished. Some silly faux intellectuals criticize him because his primary object was to preserve the union, not to end slavery. He wanted to end slavery, but preserving the union was his paramount goal. In his private writings and public utterances, he knew the astonishing measure of what the founders had accomplished.

Every governing system is eventually brought down by its flaws, which gain mass and weight as time wears on. Every system has flaws. Lincoln saw that the founders had created a system capable of healing itself as time went on and those flaws become clearer, rather than letting them amass weight. In his Annual Message to Congress in 1862, Lincoln said boldly that, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” Lincoln’s urgency was driven by his realization that with America, the world finally had a system that could heal itself and grow in goodness and grace. If it failed, then efforts to govern ourselves could only ever be a series of collapsing systems, varying only by the rate of their inevitable failure.

As I was considering conversion to Catholicism, I realized that Christianity was the first religion in world history which did not depend on ethnicity, nationality, or any other external factor for membership. A person simply had to subscribe, as best they could and with real effort, to the principles and truths enunciated by Christ. If they did so, they could become fully Christian, despite their flaws. It was then I realized that, in a very real sense, America was the first nation on earth forged according to God’s own plan, according to His own image.

People often look for God’s voice in the thunder. Though I have heard it there, I think He speaks to us profoundly and frequently in gentle whispers. I love the ordinary – and I look for His presence there in His creation more than anywhere else. I think the coincidence of Adams and Jefferson passing together on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of which they were the primary authors was no coincidence at all. I think it was an affectionate little wink from our benevolent God. In it, I hear fond echoes of Benjamin Franklin’s definition of what our system was: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

She is a grand, old flag, indeed!

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Thirty years ago I was in far southern Illinois on the 4^th of July. We were scheduled to to fly back up in a small plane to the far north Chicago suburbs just as dusk was falling. I was excited at the idea that I would be able to see fireworks displays erupting across the state on the trip. I asked the pilot if I might sit up front with him so I could see better. He said yes, and we had a lovely chat all the way back home.

The most memorable vignette from our chatter was when I told him I always felt a little safer in a twin-engine small plane rather than a single engine model because you have back-up if an engine goes out. With an impish grin he asked me if I knew the real difference in the loss of an engine in either type plane. When I said no, he said, “If an engine goes out in a twin engine plane, it takes it longer to hit the ground.” Point taken.

Sure enough, shortly after take-off, the fireworks started bursting below us. While it was not as spectacular as I expected (I don’t know what I actually expected) it was amazing, Almost the whole journey it was as if brilliant flowers of light were constantly bursting into brief, bright bloom below us. It was a sublime experience to, literally, watch a whole state celebrate the Fourth below us.

May you have a glorious and happy Fourth of July weekend this year. May this nation, under God, have a new birth of freedom so strong this year that 250 years from now, on our 500^th anniversary, our posterity will bless us for what we did here. God bless America!

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

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