Capitol Offense
The Washington Post has been having fun lately with a recent Senate vote to allow visitors to bring guns into national parks. This has now become a recurring feature in the political sideshow: Some state or locality passes a concealed weapons law, or Congress votes to allow citizens to bear arms in public places, and the editorial pages/op-ed columns of America predict an epidemic of Wild West violence featuring members of the National Rifle Association-which, of course, never happens.
For example, in the recent national parks debate, Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. weighed in with what he must have thought was a devastatingly satirical observation on the subject: He proposed that the House and Senate eliminate various safeguards in place on their own premises-metal detectors, Capitol policemen, and so on-and put guns in the hands of legislators.
Why not let Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) pack the weapon of his choice on the Senate floor? Thune is the author of an amendment that would have allowed gun owners who had valid permits to carry concealed weapons into any state, even states with more restrictive gun laws. . . . Judging by what Thune said in defense of his amendment, he'd clearly feel safer if everyone in the Capitol could carry a gun.
Speaking, presumably, of citizens who go to the trouble to acquire a valid permit for their firearms, Martina Leinz of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence picked up on Dionne's theme: "An increasing number of dangerous individuals," she wrote to the Post, "are walking around with increasingly dangerous weapons in increasingly more places. . . . Apparently lawmakers are more comfortable with hypocrisy than they are with the risks of gun violence that the rest of us must face."
Of course, as THE SCRAPBOOK hastens to add, there is another side to this nonissue, and James A. Dueholm of Washington, D.C., wrote to the Post to make the obvious observation that "it's not likely that a licensed gun owner would tote a gun to a national park in order to shoot a stranger. [Defending oneself against a High Sierra grizzly is a likelier scenario, THE SCRAPBOOK would speculate.] It's quite possible that a troubled, vengeful, deranged, or publicity-seeking person would bring a gun to the Capitol for use against a member of Congress."
To which THE SCRAPBOOK can only add: How soon they forget!
On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican terrorists walked into the visitor's gallery of the House of Representatives, opened fire on the (nearly empty) House floor, and shot and seriously wounded five members of Congress: Reps. Alvin Bentley (R-Mich.), Clifford Davis (D-Tenn.), Ben Jensen (R-Iowa), George Fallon (D-Md.), and Kenneth Roberts (D-Ala.). The four gunmen, unharmed themselves, were subsequently tried and condemned to death; but President Eisenhower commuted their sentences to 70 years in prison, and Jimmy Carter released them in 1979 in exchange for American agents imprisoned in Cuba.
It is possible, but by no means certain, that if any House member had been armed that day they might well have limited the number of their colleagues who were shot. It is also possible that the letter writer is unaware of this incident in the annals of Congress. What impresses THE SCRAPBOOK, however, is the apparent ignorance of the Post about this dramatic incident in the recent history of the nation's capital-or worse, its knowledge of the incident, but deliberate decision to, um, conceal it in the debate.
Ernest Lefever, 1919-2009
Ernie Lefever, an occasional contributor to these pages, liked to call himself the original neocon. He was reared by Christian pacifists in Pennsylvania and ordained in the Church of the Brethren, a sect with roots in the radical Reformation. But a view he came to see as essentially utopian was inadequate to the brute realities of World War II. A visit to Bergen-Belsen shortly after the war crystallized his recognition that some evils must be opposed by force.
Ernie got his Ph.D. in Christian ethics at Yale, where he wrote on Reinhold Niebuhr, whose just war theory he came to admire. Ever after, a determination to resist airy moral preening and pursue instead achievable goods drove his thought about religion and politics. And so it was that the think tank he founded in 1976-the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which became his finest legacy when he died last week at 89-was the platform for a sustained critique of liberal Protestantism corrupted by casual Marxism. Two of Ernie's 20 books were devastating treatments of the foreign policy prescriptions of the World Council of Churches.
EPPC soon was the only home in Washington for a biblically informed (Jewish and Catholic as well as Protestant) analysis of foreign policy generally. Here, the center's signal achievement was, in the words of its second president, George Weigel, "a clear-eyed view of the moral squalor of communism." At a time when even the president of the United States was pooh-poohing the "inordinate fear of communism," Ernie "understood," as Weigel put it, "that what was really wicked about the Soviet system was that it reduced people to living a lie."
Another colleague, Michael Crom-artie, remembers Ernie as a meticulous editor, fastidious about carrying an argument only as far as the facts would bear. Once when the center was hurting financially, Ernie turned down flat the suggestion of a fund drive. "I don't do fund-raising letters," he told Cromartie. "There's too much of a temptation to hyperbole," embellishing past accomplishments or present plans.
Washington being what it is, Ernie's name, nevertheless, was in the news, and so is remembered in some quarters, principally for his withdrawal of his nomination to the top human rights post in the Reagan State Department over a savagely hyped appearance of conflict of interest. The center had sponsored a (never-published) study whose findings were favorable to the interests of the Nestlé company, an EPPC donor. The politics of personal destruction has been around a long time.
No surprise there for the Christian realist. With thanks for Ernie Lefever's life, for talents well invested in an institution that lives after him, and with condolences to his magnificent wife Margaret and their family, may he rest in peace.
Sentences We Didn't Finish
"In 1975, at All Soul's in Oxford, I participated in Leszek Kolakowski's seminar on Pascal. It fell to me to report on Lucien Goldmann and his celebrated interpretation of Pascal, and more generally of Jansenism, as the expression of the perplexity of a particular social class in seventeenth-century France, the noblesse de robe, which responded to its increasing isolation from the king, in the years of the emergence of monarchical absolutism and its powerful bureaucracy, with the tragic mystery of the deus absconditus, the hidden God. Here, I supposed, was a scholarly and unpolitical and humanistic Marxism; and I was encouraged to learn that Goldmann was never a Stalinist, or even . . . " (Leon Wieseltier, New Republic, August 12).
Always Look on the Bright Side
"Slide in Home Prices Is Slowing Down: For the fourth consecutive month, there was modest improvement in May in the rate prices are falling . . ." ( New York Times, July 28).