From Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal and Judson Welliver Society, the bipartisan organization of Presidential speechwriters
What I remember most about Ben was his sense of urgency. He had the idea or the insight that was going to help his party break through. He had to tell you about it; it was going to make things better. He’d corner you and you’d get The Talk — What can we do to turn it all around?
He looked at politics less as win or lose, more as rise or fall. He wanted public policy progress that would yield practical benefits for the American people. He was a heckuva writer and a helluva talker. In our last conversations it was all about our kids and his grandkids and the world they’d live in. He had hope about that — he was no declinist or despairer. He was a Democrat who loved his party in an almost ancestral way but he resisted anything small or unduly partisan. He was old style: let’s work together, and when work’s over let’s get some drinks. He was a great one, and an active and proud member of the JWS.
From Chris Matthews, MSNBC and Judson Welliver Society, the bipartisan organization of Presidential speechwriters.
Ben Wattenberg kept his passion ‘til the end. We’d have these meetings of presidential speechwriters. People from each White House – going back to Truman’s – would offer a remembrance and then, inevitably, Ben would have his say. He was never out of the argument, never at a loss for a passionate addition to the conversation. Let us all hope for the same for ourselves as we enter the final moments, a love for “This Country” – that’s the way Harry Truman called us — that refuses to be muted until it is silenced altogether.
Our former AEI colleague Josh Muravchik’s eulogy for Ben Wattenberg
I met Ben in 1970 after publication of The Real Majority. The idea that America was mostly unyoung, unpoor, and unblack cut so radically against the Zeitgeist that it was electrifying.
This complete independence of thought reflected the essence of Ben.
In comparison, I felt like a living cliché: I went to CCNY, joined the Young People’s Socialist League, fought Commies, evolved into a neocon. There were only ever about 37 neo-cons in the world, and about half fit this profile.
Other neocons and other public intellectuals can mostly be grouped by school or mentor or ideological way station or the magazine they first wrote for.
But Ben attended Hobart, lettered in soccer (in the 1950s, before the invention of Granola!), wrote his first articles in Rivers and Harbors, and his first book was “The Story of Harbors”: this did not refer to Kronstadt or even Pearl Harbor, just harbors. The one holiday of the year when he would invite all his friends and colleagues was not Christmas or Hanukah or May Day or Memorial Day but Flag Day.
Who does this remind you of? No one. He was a complete original.
This extended also to his writing: he was a fierce believer in short sentences composed of short words and no modifiers–or very few. He preached that “the adjective is the enemy of the noun,” and I found it a valuable lesson.
Yet, in this simple prose he dealt with complex ideas. Contrary to another mantra of the time, his message belied his medium.
All the more so when he turned to television, the low-brow platform which he used for very elevated discourse–bringing on camera America’s premier intellectuals with whom he conversed knowledgeably not only on the gamut of political questions, domestic and international, but also American history, novels, poetry, art, music, sports, religion, the Bible, even manners.
He made these topics and guests, which and whom others regarded as too abstruse for television, interesting to a wide audience, largely by his own magnetic persona which was warm and witty.
Once he had Ben Stein on the show and began by speaking of the man’s father, Herb Stein, who had been our colleague at AEI. Wattenberg said: “Only 2 economists in America could write, and of them only your father made sense; the other was Galbraith.”
He was also quick at repartee. Interviewing Washington Post editor Jodie Allen on “new ideas,” she said: “my new idea is being pushed most forcefully by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, who argues that the West’s brand of dynamic capitalism is so careless of social costs that it is neither efficient nor satisfying to the very people that it’s supposed to serve.” To which Ben added without skipping a beat: “And that’s why the Malaysians enjoy a higher standard of living than we do.”
On another show, discussing different approaches to foreign policy, Ben rattled off various schools of thought before turning the floor over to Richard Barnet of the IPS, who began rather huffily saying, “at the risk of adding to your long list of silly ideas, let me suggest . . . “ At which point Ben interjected, “another silly one.”
Though he could thus pop balloons, he always remained genial and insisted on civility. Once I was on with Tim Wirth of the United Nations Association and we were getting pretty hot and I guess started speaking over each other, and Ben broke in: “Hold it. Let’s go sequentially,” he said, adding as if we were children who might not understand: “you go, you go, you go, you go.”
Once when a guest seemed embarrassed not to have something to say different from the previous speaker’s point, Ben reassured: “This is not Crossfire. We’re allowed to agree.”
Thanks to this engaging manner, “Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg” continued to draw a large weekly audience for fifteen years; and all that while Ben kept turning out first-rate books and most of the time also a weekly newspaper column. He was, in short, a whirlwind of energy, reflected in a comment of Herb Stein’s when AEI, in the name of efficiency, made us all share secretaries. Ben and Herb ended up sharing one, and after a while Herb was heard to say, “Sharing a secretary with Ben is like sharing a canoe with an elephant.”
Perhaps he was an elephant, although I believe he remained a registered donkey to the end. Whatever creature he was, he was a lovable one.
His own two great loves were his country, about which he never ceased writing, and his progeny, about whom he never ceased talking.
His memory will surely be a source of blessings to both, as well to those of us fortunate enough to have been his friends and colleagues.
We’ll miss you, Ben.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1JAMc5j
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