Walter Berns had good reason to be standoffish when I arrived at the American Enterprise Institute as the Weyerhaeuser Scholar in 2002. He knew that I came from Claremont, and had been a student of his archenemy Harry Jaffa, of whom he once said, borrowing the famous phrase of King Henry about Archbishop Thomas Becket, “Who will rid us of this pest of a priest?” Now a carrier of the pestilence was settling in down the hall. My first attempt at a “hi, nice to meet you” conversation didn’t go very well. I’m not sure I’d say Walter was rude, exactly, but . . .
In part because of his deep baritone voice and his very direct manner of expressing disagreement with whatever nonsense he confronted, Berns could seem gruff. As everyone who knew him will attest, at his core he was anything but that. A more kindhearted, even cheerful man seldom graced the hallways of Washington. When something amused him or met with his approval, his eyes would visibly brighten and a wry smile that started at the corner of his mouth would spread into an irrepressible grin. Like his nemesis Jaffa, he had a low tolerance for unsound thinking (of which there is no shortage), and it summoned forth his gravitas; his deep voice, when expressing disapproval, made you think you were hearing from Moses himself. During discussion periods at AEI events, there were comments and questions from the rest of the audience, and then there would be Walter. You could make out a clear difference between the categories; you could sense the room snapping to special attention for him.
There are limitless examples of Berns at his blunt but clarifying best. My favorite is his summary judgment of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who for some reason seems to have every would-be jurist bamboozled. Contrary to Holmes’s popular reputation as the greatest judicial statesman since John Marshall, Berns wrote that “no man who ever sat on the Supreme Court was less inclined and so poorly equipped to be a statesman or to teach, as a philosopher is supposed to teach, what a people needs to know in order to govern itself well.” Boom! (My codicil to Walter’s argument is that any potential GOP Supreme Court nominee who names Holmes as someone they admire — as David Souter and Harriett Miers both did — should be immediately disqualified for the appointment.)
Although most students rightly attach loyalty to their principal teachers, fairness all around compels me to note that Harry Jaffa admired many parts of Walter’s work, and recommended to students especially Walter’s bracing series of articles on the folly of world government — a bad idea that was especially popular during the early phase of Walter’s academic career and which still returns to favor from time to time. Jaffa also agreed enthusiastically with Walter’s analysis of First Amendment issues and capital punishment. And at one time the two men were cordial friends. Jaffa’s inscription to Walter’s copy of “Crisis of the House Divided” reads; “To Walter, who waited impatiently! Appreciatively and warmly, Harry.” (Walter’s copy now resides in AEI scholar Peter Wallison’s office.)
More so than perhaps any other two figures of their time, they revered Lincoln as the practitioner of constitutional statesmanship at the highest level.
As such I was never ill-disposed toward Walter’s thought. The Jaffa-Berns feud over how Hobbes and Locke should be understood in relation to the American founding, while serious, seems less important than the many things they agreed about. More so than perhaps any other two figures of their time, they revered Lincoln as the practitioner of constitutional statesmanship at the highest level. They both understood and argued in nearly identical terms about the urgent need for a properly grounded patriotism. They both bore in on the pervasive nihilism of our time, and both understood what was wrong with the main currents of political science in the academy today in exactly the same terms. Indeed, I could draw parallel passages from their respective writings and play a parlor game of trying to name the author correctly.
Leo Strauss had said of modern social science that “one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.” Walter had contributed a long essay to the same edited volume where Strauss wrote those words, in which he offered his own critique of social science technique in which the result is “the sacrifice of political relevance on the altar of methodology.” One of Jaffa’s typical formulations runs: “It sometimes seems as if the highest goal of ‘mainstream political science’ is to be able to predict the outcome of the Emperor Nero’s chariot races, while viewing his despotism in the tolerant light of ‘value free’ methodology.”
In any case, Walter’s wariness of me began to wear off initially through the solvent of single-malt scotch, for which we both made a beeline to the bar following evening events at AEI. He must have figured that anyone who liked his single malts neat couldn’t be all bad, if for no other reason than that Jaffa was a teetotaler (except on Winston Churchill’s birthday), as well as a militant non-smoker. By degrees, however, between casual conversation and comments made in formal panels and events at AEI, it became apparent that we were throwing in with exactly the same point of view for the same underlying reasons. The initial wariness was being replaced by nods of approval.
One day Walter called me on the phone to applaud my embrace and deployment of John Locke’s doctrine of “executive prerogative” from the “Second Treatise,” which happened to coincide exactly with Walter’s muscular understanding of the idea, and which differed diametrically from our in-house champion of legislative power, Norm Ornstein. Walter noted with enthusiasm my interest and periodic work on Churchill, and started regularly asking when the long-promised unabridged edition of “The River War” was ever coming out. (It still hasn’t, alas, though I often tried to shame the editor and publisher by saying “Walter is waiting on you guys, damn it!”)
Soon I noticed that Walter was showing up for nearly ever panel or conference I was on at AEI, and he was especially enthusiastic about the second volume of my “Age of Reagan” when it finally appeared in 2009. At the back of this was Walter’s fundamental agreement with Jaffa about at least one major point; Jaffa argued that “political science, properly so-called, would have at its heart the study of the speeches and deeds of statesmen.” In our last conversation, over the phone about three years ago as I was preparing to leave Washington and re-enter ordinary academic life, Walter said he hoped I would continue working in the vein of my Reagan and Churchill books because “the proper method for the study of politics is biography!”
Walter did something else in that last conversation that stunned me: he apologized for having been rude to me a decade before. I never made anything of it at the time and had forgotten all about it, but it obviously had grown in Walter’s mind, and this expression of decency and respect was humbling in the highest degree. No matter how old I get to be, or whatever my own accomplishments, I shall always think of Walter and my other great teachers and colleagues from the generation ahead (add to this list Leon, James Q., Michael, and Ben) as my superiors in every way, from whom no apology could ever be owed.
Steven F. Hayward, AEI’s F.K. Weyerhaeuser Scholar from 2002 to 2012, is the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Public Policy.