Ronald Reagan was what they call a conviction politician. He often described himself as “a citizen in politics.” And if you look at his long, successful life, you see only two eight-year periods of office holding: theCaliforniagovernorship (two terms) and the presidency (two terms).

Ronald Reagan did not play by the playbook described on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post. The liberal voice of the nation’s capital headlined this thought:

Tricky pivot for Romney to the center.

Senior reporter Karen Tumulty led off the story with this:

“The playbook for Republican presidential contenders goes at least as far back as Richard Nixon: Run hard to the right in the primaries; steer back to the center for the general election.”

In other words, be as cynical as Nixon and take our advice: Sucker the voters of your own party into backing you. Then, once you’ve gulled enough of them to gain a first-ballot nomination at the convention, tack to the left to attract the broad middle of the electorate. 

Reporter Tumulty did not list Ronald Reagan in her widely-read story because he did no such thing and, gee, he only won two back-to-back landslides, carried only 44, then 49 states, and won only a total of 1,014 Electoral Votes. Of course, reporter Tumulty’s friendly advice on tricky pivoting is given to candidates she would never back in any event.

Why didn’t Reagan pivot? Why wasn’t he tricky? I remember a staff meeting at the U.S. Department of Education early in his second term. Five different proposals were on the table for discussion. “Well, we know we can’t do numbers 3 and 5,” said Patricia Hines, one of my favorite colleagues. “Why not?” I asked innocently. “Because,” she patiently explained to this slower student in the class, “the platform on which Ronald Reagan was twice elected specifically condemned those policies. President Reagan may not be able to achieve all he endorsed in that platform, but he would never, never go against his platform.”

I soon learned the high ideals and the deep commitments of the Reagan movement from Mrs. Hines and many other Reaganauts.  We never called ourselves “Reaganites.” (Leave “iting” for the Trostkyites and the Castroites).

President Reagan had a strong sense that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. And it was not only dishonorable to “pivot,” or to engage in tricky maneuvers to gain that consent of the governed under false pretenses. Worse, it was corrosive of free government to do so.

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“We who hate your gaudy guts salute you”

William Allen White

Republican William Allen White, editor of Kansas’ Emporia Gazette, was often exasperated with President Franklin Roosevelt, but he recognized his great qualities of leadership. Recently, one of the callers to a popular conservative talk show was especially angry at Newt Gingrich: “Why, he said FDR was the greatest president of the twentieth century!”

A highly acclaimed recent book, The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes, argues that Roosevelt’s famous New Deal did not improve the stricken economy in the 1930s, and may even have slowed the recovery. It’s a commonplace among conservatives to argue—against the New Deal’s vast public works projects—that it was really the military buildup leading into the Second World War that got us out of the Great Depression. But that leads us inevitably to look at FDR’s wartime leadership. Columnist Pat Buchanan agrees with libertarian Ron Paul that we should never have entered the war against Hitler in 1941. Both of those gentlemen seem to have forgotten that it was Nazi Germany that declared war on the U.S.

As a conservative, I would not defend many of FDR’s New Deal policies, although we should note that his Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins, the first woman of Cabinet rank, fought tirelessly to protect women from the hazards of coal mining, tunnel construction, and lumbering. Why? Because such jobs were hazardous to mothers. FDR’s backing of union demands was always linked to “a living wage” for the working man. It was assumed he was working to support a wife and children.

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Think of an iceberg and a ship. What comes to mind? The Titanic, of course. And if you don’t mentally picture the greatest luxury liner in history with her stern in the starry, moonless sky, about to break up and go under, you haven’t been to the movies. Unfortunately, Hollywood created a thoroughly dishonest account of that “night to remember.” The image of a bribed ship’s second officer who deliberately shot panicked civilians is only one of the many offenses against the well-documented truths of that night one hundred years ago.

I was researching an American history book several years ago when the subject of the Titanic came up in the text. Although some 1,500 lives were lost, she was not the greatest maritime disaster in history. So, what was the greatest? In those pre-Google days, I had to go hunting.

I learned that the greatest maritime disaster was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on January 11, 1945. That German vessel was evacuating terrified refugees from East Prussia. The Soviet Red Army was overrunning this Nazi territory, raping and murdering.

A Soviet submarine torpedoed the German ship and she went down with loss of 9,000 lives, mostly civilians, mostly women and children. The original name for the ship was to have been Adolf Hitler. Hitler, however, fearing the symbolism of any vessel bearing his name being sunk, had forbidden any such naming. So the vessel was named for the Nazi leader of Switzerland.

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Trip Dyer, one of the brightest of all our FRC interns, challenged me when I told his class I thought Winston Churchill’s life was the most documented human life ever lived. Trip thought that it was likely that the present Prince William’s life has been better recorded. He may have had a point there.

We certainly didn’t have photographs of Winston’s minutes after his birth–seven months after his parents’ marriage–on this day in 1874. But we know he was born not in his parent’s fashionable London flat. Instead, after his mother’s riding mishap that day, he came into the world early. He was born at Blenheim Palace, the ducal estate of his famous Marlborough ancestors. They were not nearly so famous then as they would become. Winston would write four great volumes on the great Duke of Marlborough, who had defeated the armies of Louis XIV and who was a central figure in England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89. Many American Founders looked to that revolution as their model for our own.

Winston was intensely proud of his noble English forbears. But he was just as proud of his American antecedents. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was a beauty from New York, whose tycoon father owned the New York Times. Jennie’s ancestor was said to be Pocahontas. That American princess married an Englishman and captivated the royal court of her own day with her beauty and wit.

Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a reforming politician, a Tory democrat, who was on track to become Prime Minister before he rashly challenged his party leader, Prime Minister Salisbury. Like Icarus who flew too close to the sun, Lord Randolph fell from the post of Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer–second highest in the House of Commons, never to rise again.

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We already know who the featured speaker at the Gettysburg Address Sesquicentennial will be. Organizers of this one hundred fiftieth celebration have asked President Obama—two years ahead of 2013–to lead the list of distinguished Americans expected to commemorate President Lincoln’s immortal words, delivered November 19, 1863. Event planners must be assuming that Mr. Obama will be re-elected. It would be awkward, wouldn’t it, to have him be the lead speaker if he has been defeated for office?

Well, awkward fits. President Lincoln went up to Gettysburg by train the afternoon before the cemetery’s dedication. He tried to get some sleep that night, but revelers kept him up with their drinking and singing. The party atmosphere that prevailed in Gettysburg at that time was worse than awkward; it was ghastly. Lincoln seems not to have noted it.

Nor did he mind being asked merely to deliver “some appropriate remarks.” The President of the United States, the commander-in-chief of the greatest armies and navy this country had ever assembled, the Great Emancipator himself, was given only a secondary role in the ceremony. It reminds us of the story of Lincoln greeting an old friend from Illinois. The visitor expressed surprise that the nation’s leader should be blacking his own boots. “Whose boots should I black,” Lincoln asked humorously.

I have been to Gettysburg dozens of times. I never tire of seeing that battlefield and walking through that National Cemetery, that hallowed ground. I took scores of students there on field studies. I made a point always of having them join hands atop the monument to the 20^th Maine Regiment, the unit commanded by Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

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A glittering panel was assembled this week on Washington’s EYE Street, the home of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). They had come to discuss Ronald Reagan’s career in the movies and how that influenced his political life. Before Reagan, people asked: “How can an actor be president?” After Reagan, people recognized his joke: “How can you be president if you haven’t been an actor?”

The panel was chaired by Politico’s John Harris. He led off by telling the 40-50 attendees that he graduated from high school in 1980 and cast his first presidential vote in 1984. Mr. Harris was too tactful to mention that it probably wasn’t cast for RR. That’s OK, 59% of the votes cast that year were cast for the Gipper; he carried 49 states.

The panelists included NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, ABC News’ Sam Donaldson, former White House Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, and, of course, former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) Dodd left the Senate in January to assume the presidency of the MPAA. I counted one likely vote for President Reagan of the five panelists. Fair and balanced.

Sen. Dodd was most charitable. He spoke of having gone to the White House early one morning for a meeting. The night before, President Reagan had “lost” the Louisville debate to challenger Walter Mondale. Fritz even got a baseball bat from his admirers in the press titled “The Louisville Slugger.” Dodd expected to find Reagan down in the mouth, or at least tired.

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Major media outlets are reporting the remarkable story of a French father’s 29-year quest for his daughter’s killer, a quest that has resulted in the arrest of a man who committed the murder.

For three decades, Andre Bamberski pursued the  rapist and murderer of his then-14 year-old daughter Kalinka, Dieter Krombach.  After offering a reward for his capture, Krombach was abducted from Germany and brought to France, where he had been convicted in absentia of causing a wrongful death in 1995.  Krombach, 76, will spend the next 15 years in jail, should he live that long.

Andre Bamberski is awaiting trial on charges of kidnapping.  Perhaps this is appropriate.  But what father cannot help but admire Andre’s dogged determination to see the man who assaulted and killed his daughter brought to justice?  To refuse to accept anything less than punishment for the monster who took his daughter’s life?

“History is a relentless master,” said John F. Kennedy.  “It has no present, only the past rushing into the future.”  History is relentless, in part, because men like Andre Bamberski refuse to let it elide quietly into memory.  That’s why Dieter Krombach is now in jail.  To borrow a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, “Here endeth the lesson.”

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I thought of President Theodore Roosevelt as I attended a wreath-laying ceremony in Annapolis recently. We were observing the 100^th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknowns at St. John’s College. Those unknowns are not American soldiers and sailors but those of France who died fighting for our freedom in the War of Independence. Theodore Roosevelt cared deeply about such things. As president, he presided over the return of the remains of John Paul Jones from France.

And he was more than willing to have his own body buried in France. Yes. Former President Roosevelt went hat-in-hand to the White House in 1917. There, he almost begged President Woodrow Wilson to let him go to France to fight against Germany.

Wilson demurred, saying it would be too dangerous to let a former President of the United States be captured or killed in combat. I would be more than willing, T.R. told his long-time adversary, to have my epitaph read:  Roosevelt to France.

Wilson didn’t turn T.R. down then. He said to his faithful aide Joe Tumulty after his rival left the presidential office: “Theodore is like a big boy.” Hopeful, T.R. said he thought the professorial Wilson might relent.

Today is Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday. T.R. is getting beaten up a good bit among conservatives these days. His embrace of national health care when he ran as the “Bull Moose” (Progressive Party) candidate for president in 1912 is seen, with some justification, by President Obama as an early endorsement of his own takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

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Commuting to Washington, D.C. can be nerve-wracking on the best of days. But when the hour-long commute drags on for more than two hours—as it did this week on the day of our earthquake—it might be especially trying. Motorists are not happy campers when traffic approaches gridlock downtown in the Capitol.

I go slightly out of my way, however, to drive daily down Pennsylvania Avenue. I count it a privilege to pass by the stately Capitol dome with its Statue of Freedom standing proudly on top. The Capitol was planned by George Washington. Hard to believe now, but there were no great domed buildings in America when His Excellency opted for a Roman architectural style. His favorite play was Cato, an English tragedy about a great Roman champion of republican virtue.

As trying as the drive on earthquake Tuesday might have been, the way was eased by my carpooling with George Washington. I’ve been listening to Ron Chernow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book-on-disk, George Washington: A Life.  It’s a wonderful book and the latest of some seven hundred I’ve been able to “read” during fifteen years of commuting.

Chernow’s Washington is a full-blooded figure. He has faults, to be sure, but his virtues shine forth. Chernow describes Washington’s incredible bravery. Young Col. Washington dashes into the teeth of battle during the French & Indian War. He even rushes into a hail of bullets, slashing with his sword against the muskets of British regulars to keep them from shooting their allies, the heroic Virginia militiamen.

Washington studiously avoids all boasting of his military exploits, but in a private letter to his brother Jackie, he notes that he had two horses shot out from under him on the Pennsylvania frontier and four bullet holes in his coat following the 1755 battle that left nearly 700 British and Virginia militiamen dead. It was the worst defeat British arms had suffered in the history of North America.  Washington organized the retreat after the death of Gen. Edward Braddock. He even ordered his wagons to drive over Braddock’s grave so that Indians would not find it and desecrate the body.

Ron Chernow follows Washington’s life where the evidence leads. We wince when we read that the young Washington sold recalcitrant slaves for shipment to the West Indies. That’s where the expression “sold down the river” comes from. And it’s terrible to read that he hanged two deserters from his Virginia militia company. Washington was a stern taskmaster. He expected to be obeyed. But everyone respected him for his justice and growing humanity.

Chernow gives us Washington’s religious views. You would not find him leading prayers, as Gov. Rick Perry recently did. But neither would he spurn public expressions of fidelity and duty to God.

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“You’ll always be proud when you hear them play that tune,” said Boatswain Mate Chief Clarence Ward Hollowell to the graduates of Lima 74. We were getting ready to march out of boot camp at Cape May, New Jersey.

That had to have been the most miserable, cold, diseased thirteen weeks of my life. When we first arrived, in the middle of the night, they shaved our heads, made us strip down, and put our civilian clothes, our shoes, any watches or rings, in cardboard boxes and address them to our home of record. All the while they were screaming at us and banging on steel trashcans with baseball bats. I would have climbed into that box if I could.

But at the end, Chief Hollowell was right. We’d always be proud when we hear the Coast Guard’s March, “Semper Paratus” (Always Ready), played.

We’re always ready for the call,

We place our trust in Thee.

Through surf and storm and howling gale,

High shall our purpose be,

“Semper Paratus” is our guide,

Our fame, our glory, too.

To fight to save or fight and die!

Aye! Coast Guard, we are for you.

 I am deeply grateful for the years I spent, enlisted and officer, in the Guard. It shaped my thinking. Not just about the military, but about life in general.

Recently, the pro-lifers in a Midwest state told me they regarded their governor as a friend. “If we can get a bill through the legislature, we can usually get him to sign it,” they said. They thought of him as a great improvement over his liberal predecessor. And, by that standard, he was.

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I was furiously scribbling notes as author James Swanson lectured last night at the Lincoln Cottage. He was speaking about his wonderful new book, Bloody Crimes: The he Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse. The room was filled with listeners paying rapt attention as the sun set over the home where Abraham Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation. Last night was the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. One year ago, I was at the Newseum, also taking notes as James Swanson lectured on his earlier book, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.

It should be clear I am a great admirer of this writer’s work. But in his lecture, Swanson offered an observation that stunned me as much as if he had fired John Wilkes Booth’s bulldog derringer above our heads:

He said: I regard Thomas Jefferson as the biggest hypocrite in American History.

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Author James L. Swanson could not have chosen a better place, a better time to discuss his wonderful book, Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse. He appeared last night on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination at the Lincoln Cottage, located on the grounds of Washington’s Soldiers’ Home. This beautifully restored Victorian summer home was a refuge for Abraham, Mary, and Tad Lincoln for three summers—1862, 1863, and 1864—while they occupied the White House. They first sought quiet and solitude there following the death of their beloved 11-year old son, Willie.

James Swanson’s book is a gem. He takes us on the long, last mournful way of the Lincoln Funeral Train throughout its 1,600-mile journey from Washington to Springfield.

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I was researching a U.S. history book several years ago when I read about Gov. Nelson Rockefeller shaking hands with the 110-year old Henry Herndon in Indiana in 1968. Rocky was very excited. You could have given him Venezuela and the billionaire would not have been as happy. The reason?

The governor was told that Henry Herndon shook hands with Abraham Lincoln. Rocky went around for days telling everyone he met: “Hey, fella, shake hands with me. I just shook hands with a man who shook hands with Abraham Lincoln.”

I mentally filed that not away. Nice to know. Interesting comment, too, on American politics. When Lincoln shook hands with Henry Herndon, he was no longer the poor lad born in the log cabin. By that time, Lincoln was a successful lawyer from Springfield, Illinois.

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Jonathan Bean’s Race and Liberty in America addresses the role race has played in the history of the United States. It develops the conjunction of race and ideas of liberty by compiling a diverse survey of pieces from America’s earliest days to the present.  Bean takes advantage of the perch that the year 2011 offers and allows history to speak for itself as these issues were (and most currently are) queried. As a result, this is a book likely to appeal to a wide audience as has already been evidenced by the praise it has received from critics on both sides of the isle.

From page one, Bean leaves very little doubt that Race and Liberty in America is not a partisan book, nor one advocating a conservative or liberal ideology. Rather, his thesis and emphasis is to track the classical liberal tradition and its response to slavery and other race issues by offering an excerpt from each period in American history. To do this, Bean fills each chapter by citing journalists and authors, pastors and activists, political leaders and businessman. He scopes-out the structure of the early anti-slavery movement, on into the Republican Era, through color consciousness, the Roosevelt years, and classical liberalism’s involvement in the Civil Rights Era.

As Bean prefaces most of these historical markers, he weaves in the definitive ways in which the American idea of liberty so affected the outcome of racial tensions in every season of note. The last part of the book takes the observations of the past and then turns to the role race and liberty will, in coming years, follow in the United States.

Ultimately Race and Liberty in America provides insight into what was central to the progress made by the classical liberal tradition and its critique of slavery and race in recent history. Bean effectively ties together the chronological flow of history and parallel flow of ideas that went along with it. It is because of this approach that Bean is able to thoroughly identify and investigate those concepts that played the most significant role in streamlining race and liberty in America: individual freedom, Christianity and Judaism, the Constitution, colorblindness, and capitalism.

Bean seeks to move beyond placing trust in political parties for the answers to the questions that yet remain, but rather encouraging citizens to once again seek out the basic questions for themselves: What is race? Why should government define race as it chooses? Why are immigrants available for other benefits not with other citizens? Why is government involved in the race business at all?

Bean poses these challenging questions as well as sobering, provocative statements: “If race is a fiction, then it is a fiction worth disposing of because it has done far more harm than good.” Race and Liberty in America maintains distance from the distractions of today’s political debate by providing a comprehensive framework on the issues of race and American liberty in which to properly gain knowledge and move forward.

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Left wing folks are forever proclaiming world days for this and that. World AIDS day is December 1st. Earth Day, of course, is April 22nd. I’d like to propose May 10th as World Freedom Day.

That’s the day in 1940 that Hitler’s panzers crashed through weak French defenses and began a powerful drive that would bring them into Paris itself in less than six weeks. The German army had bled and died for four years in World War I, unable to achieve that goal. The world was stunned by the speed and ferocity of the Wehrmacht’s attack in 1940.

So what has this to do with World Freedom? It so happens, in a coincidence that historian John Lukacs calls “a spiritual pun,” that Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of England also on May 10th. He was, in a sense, the last man standing.

Exhausted, disheartened, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was forced to resign that fiery May 10th. He had seen his hopes for appeasement go up in smoke. He had been dragged with great reluctance into declaring war against Hitler on September 3, 1939.

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Actor, historical interpreter Bill Barker says it’s the question he gets at every audience. Barker, of Colonial Williamsburg, plays the role of Thomas Jefferson. The question, of course, is: “Didn’t Jefferson have children by his slave, Sally Hemings?” The answer, in all likelihood, is that some Jefferson sired children by Sally.

Despite the calumnies of two hundred years, it has never been proven against Thomas Jefferson. The 2001 Final Report of the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter notes that the DNA testing done in 1998 “pointed the finger at Thomas Jefferson no more than it did at any of the other roughly two dozen known male descendants of Jefferson’s grandfather present in Virginia at the time.”

But, as Mark Twain said, “a lie can travel `round the world before truth gets its pants on.” It’s most unfortunate when today, even Judge Andrew Napolitano takes it as a given that Jefferson was a hypocrite and may even have been a rapist. “How could she give consent,” the judge asks. The Scholars Commission was composed of recognized historians, political scientists, and lawyers. The 15-member panel concluded—with but one dissent—that Thomas Jefferson was not guilty. You’d think that Judge Napolitano would consider such a verdict from such a distinguished panel before doubting Thomas.

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Seventy years ago on this month Paul Schneider, Germany’s first Christian martyr under Nazi rule, died heroically in the concentration camp of Buchenwald.  Seventy years ago from this month, Schneider’s fight against the evils and wickedness of his age ended in glorious victory as he proclaimed the message of the gospel to those killing him.  It is appropriate to remember such a brave man, and to be inspired by his bold stand against Nazi Germany.

Paul Schneider was born in a little town of Pherdsfeld, in northern Bavaria.  His father was a Christian pastor and a loyal German citizen. Paul had great respect for his father and as a youth knew he wanted to go into the pastorate.

Paul fought for Kaiser Wilhelm II in World War I and, due to the battle wounds he received, earned the famous Iron Cross award from the military.

After the war, he attended seminary in answering the call to go into the ministry. As a young pastor, his life and the life of his country changed dramatically in 1933. That year, Adolph Hitler became the dictator of Germany.

From the beginning of the Nazi regime, Hitler targeted the German churches as a means of spreading his message and his own gospel.  Unlike his fellow pastors, however, Paul Schneider refused to pollute the Gospel of Christ with the doctrines of the Nazi Party.

Schneider asked this question in a sermon to his congregation in 1934:

“Where are those Christian consciences who judge righteously, who take the standard for their politics neither from National Socialism nor from socialism, but rather from the Gospel?”

Despite immense pressure to stay quiet and not stand up for the truth of the gospel, Schneider became the lone vocal advocate of the Gospel and truths of Jesus Christ in his community.

He allowed only true Christians to partake of the Lord’s Supper and fought against incorporating the Nazi political agenda in his church.

After continuing Nazi persecution, Paul Schneider was arrested and sent to the Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald, Germany.

Despite torture, beatings, humiliation, hunger, and terrible suffering, Schneider’s message did not change.

He preached the Gospel from his confinement cell, and warned the Nazi guards and officers of God’s coming judgment on sin.

“I must call the evil – of which I am a witness-as it really is and to make clear to the SS that they are not escaping the judgment of God,” Schneider said of his protest against the Nazi guards. “I am God’s messenger in this prison.”

Finally Paul Schneider met his martyrdom on July 18, 1939.  Schneider fell into the grip of Ding Schuler, a Nazi doctor, known as the “experimental doctor.” Schneider was murdered by lethal injection and his faithful wife Margarete brought his body back home for burial.

In the presence of Nazi guards, this prayer was prayed over Paul Schneider’s grave:

“May God grant that the witness of your Shepherd our brother remain with you and continue to impact on future generations and that it remain vital and bear fruit in the entire Christian Church.”

May the life and death of Paul Schneider inspire followers of Christ here and in Europe to stand up for the timeless truths of Jesus, living out their callings in modern society.

Benjamin Scott is a summer intern at Family Research Council. He is a student at Covenant College. Benjamin Scott and his missionary family lived in Germany for eight years.

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