Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator.

Only two women were both wife to a president and mother to a president. One was Abigail Adams, who died 200 years ago, October 28, 1818; the other was Barbara Bush, who died yesterday, April 17, 2018. Mrs. Bush was 92 years old.

Barbara Bush will be remembered as simple and unpretentious, especially following Nancy Reagan as first lady. Mrs. Reagan was known for fancy clothes and fancy friends, as part of the Hollywood set. Mrs. Bush was known for being more homespun, more Texas, even though she was raised a blueblood with much fancier trappings than Nancy. She followed Nancy in many ways, including in death, as Nancy passed away in March 2016.

Still, Barbara humbly accepted the role of the older-looking and less-glamorous first lady. Her husband jokingly called her “The Silver Fox,” and she graciously smiled and accepted the ribbing. She was more Mamie Eisenhower than Jackie Kennedy.

We’ll hear all sorts of things about Mrs. Bush in the next few days. But there’s one story about her that I learned when researching and writing a biography of her oldest son—a story I think is well worth remembering. It’s probably the most human thing about this very human lady.

Free Download. An important speech by President Calvin Coolidge—overlooked by history—to celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Click here for your free download.

It was the fall of 1953. George W. Bush was seven years old. His parents’ green Oldsmobile pulled in front of Sam Houston Elementary School in Midland, Texas. George happened to be strolling down an outdoor corridor with his friend, carrying a Victrola record player to the principal’s office. The moment that he saw the car, he set down the phonograph and sprinted ahead to his teacher. “My mom, dad, and sister are home,” he shouted. “Can I go see them?”

The little sister was Robin. To this day, George W. Bush swears he saw her. He says he caught her small head barely rising above the backseat. His parents had been in New York, where they were tending to George’s little sister. He knew Robin was sick, but had no idea how sick. The 3-year-old was dying from leukemia.

George’s parents returned with an empty back seat and emptier news. “I run over to the car,” said Bush almost half a century later, “and there’s no Robin.” She was not coming home. “I was sad, and stunned. I knew Robin had been sick, but death was hard for me to imagine. Minutes before, I had had a little sister, and now, suddenly, I did not.” Bush says that those minutes remain the “starkest memory” of his childhood. When asked about the incident in an interview, his eyes welled with tears. He stammered his response.

Pauline Robinson “Robin” Bush started to show symptoms in February 1953, just after the birth of her baby brother Jeb. She simply wanted to lie down all day. Mysterious bruises began appearing on her body. The Bushes took her to Dr. Dorothy Wyvell, renowned in West Texas pediatrics. Wyvell was shocked by the test results. She told the Bushes that the child’s white blood cell count was the highest she had ever seen, and the cancer was already too advanced. She recommended they simply take Robin home and allow nature to take its course, sparing all of them the agony of futile treatments.

The Bushes couldn’t do that. George H. W. Bush had an uncle in New York who was president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer center. They agreed to do everything they could in the hope of some breakthrough.

As for Barbara Bush, she was constantly at Robin’s side during the hospital stay. Her husband shuttled between New York and Midland. Each morning of Robin’s New York stay, her father dropped by the family’s Midland church at 6:30 a.m. to hold his own private prayer vigil. Only the custodian was there, and he let him in. One morning, Pastor Matthew Lynn joined him. They never talked; they just prayed.

Barbara was the strong one throughout the affair. When Robin received blood transfusions at the cancer center, her mother held her hand. Her father had to leave the room.

Robin never had a chance. Eventually, the medicine that labored to try to control the evil metastasizing in her frail frame quickly caused its own set of problems, and George H. W. was summoned from Texas immediately. He flew all night to get there, but by the time he arrived Robin had slipped into a coma. She died peacefully.

“One minute she was there, and the next she was gone,” remembered her mother. “I truly felt her soul go out of that beautiful little body. For one last time I combed her hair, and we held our precious little girl. I never felt the presence of God more strongly than at that moment.”

It all happened so fast. By October, Robin was dead, only weeks from her fourth birthday.

“We awakened night after night in great physical pain—it hurt that much,” Barbara recalled.

Alas, it is said that this was the reason Barbara Bush turned prematurely gray. There was a story—quite a story—behind that trademark hair of Barbara Bush. The story’s name was Robin.

May Barbara Bush rest in peace, reunited at long last with that little girl.

Last Saturday was a poignant day for me. Not only was much-loved First Lady Barbara Bush laid to rest, but I received word of the passing of a dear friend, Gerald Hath (always Gerry to me). The parallels between the Haths and the Bushes were striking. Just as former President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush were nonagenarians who shared more than 70 years of marriage, so it was with Gerry and Betty Hath. (Betty passed away about a year-and-a-half ago.) Both couples were wed when the husbands were home on leave from their service in World War II—the Haths in 1944, the Bushes in 1945.

The Christian faith was important to both the Haths and the Bushes. In an age when Christianity is so often disrespected and the western civilization to which it gave rise is being driven from college curriculums, we should pause and contemplate how the practical Christianity—the goodness and good deeds—of people like Barbara Bush and Gerald Hath touched the lives of so many and made our country a better place. You know many of Mrs. Bush’s contributions to our society. Gerald’s, though less well known, were no less important.

Gerald and Betty raised three daughters who have lived good, solid, productive lives. Gerald had a long career teaching a subject he loved dearly—science—to middle-schoolers.

In fact, it was during my one year of teaching at Northeast Intermediate School in Midland, Michigan that I met Gerry. I got to know him and Betty through the teachers’ bowling league on Thursday afternoons. They graciously invited me to move into their home during the second semester of school (their daughters already having grown and moved elsewhere). Since I had been staying in an unwinterized cabin where frost and ice often appeared on the floor close to the walls, it was an easy decision for me to give up those inconveniences and move into a warm family atmosphere.

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Gerry and Betty expressed their love for others by participating in various church and community activities. Their greatest gift was the founding of Teenage Musicals, Inc.—a community theatre group that they shepherded for over 50 years. They lovingly gave what social scientists call “social capital” in abundance to their community—the kind of generous giving so essential for bringing people together.

Gerry’s passing reminded me of how young our country still is. His grandfather was one of the six Union soldiers who captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis a month after the Civil War ended. Many in the north sought to belittle Davis by charging that he was dressed as a woman when he was caught. Gerry had letters written by his grandpa that attested to the truth: Mr. Davis was ill, and one of his wife’s coats was being used to keep him warm; nothing more. Gerry’s grandpa was a man of integrity, decency, and fairness (like Gerry himself) who was not going to let a vanquished American’s honor be besmirched by scurrilous lies.

A few weeks ago, I received an Easter card from Gerry. This was something new. We would speak a couple of times a year and we always exchanged Christmas cards, so why, after all these years, was an Easter card added to the routine? To me it was obvious: Gerry, fast approaching his 97^th birthday, was embracing the promise of the Resurrection and signaling that it was time for him to close this chapter of his life and rejoin Betty. And now he has. Who knows? Maybe he met Barbara Bush along the way.

A final thought: The ranks of what Tom Brokaw dubbed “the greatest generation” are thinning out on a daily basis. What a blessing it has been to know Barbara Bush as First Lady and Gerald Hath as a friend for over 40 years. They indeed let their “light shine” (Matt. 5:16) in this world.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator.

The most respected academic authority on the Russian Revolution, 20^thcentury communism, and the Cold War has died. He was Richard Pipes, longtime professor of Russian history at Harvard, and a remarkable man.

Where to start with an adequate tribute to Professor Pipes? I’ll start with some biographical observations and then finish with personal reflections.

Richard Pipes was born in Poland on July 11, 1923. As a 16-year-old Jew at the time of Hitler’s invasion, Pipes mercifully escaped, thanks to a clever and shrewd father. He credited not only his father but also Providential intervention. That experience, and those that followed, taught Pipes several life lessons. In his memoir, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, he wrote: “The main effect of the Holocaust on my psyche was to make me delight in every day of life that has been granted to me, for I was saved from certain death.” Pipes observed: “I felt and feel to this day that I have been spared not to waste my life on self-indulgence or self-aggrandizement but to spread a moral message by showing, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences. Since scholars have written enough on the Holocaust, I thought it my mission to demonstrate this truth using the example of communism.”

Pipes would do exactly that.

Pipes earned a doctorate in history at Harvard in 1950. He spent the next 50-plus years there, as professor of Russian history, director of the Russian Research Center, and principal investigator of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies. He was well-received at Harvard, with full classrooms, even as one of its few outspoken conservatives. In 1996, he retired, though his association with Harvard continued under emeritus status. Among his most important publications were Russia Under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1990), Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), and Communism: A History (2001). The latter is a concise go-to book for understanding communism in theory, practice, and history.

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But among Pipes’ greatest contributions were outside the classroom, as he helped win the Cold War at a practical-policy level. To that end, he joined President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council in 1981, where he was the NSC’s senior Kremlinologist.

He did great work for Reagan, which means he was loathed by the Kremlin.

In January 1982, Pipes was described in Pravda as “one of the ideological mentors of the U.S. administration.” The Moscow Domestic Service excoriated this “odious figure” who “plowed the furrow of ardent anti-sovietism and anti-communism.” He was a “dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, hysterically fighting for nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.” Pipes was a favorite bogeyman of the likes of the disgraceful disinformation artist Georgi Arbatov. He would confess satisfaction over arousing the contempt of such “vile people.”

Pipes certainly had Ronald Reagan’s respect, and vice versa. He was impressed at how Reagan had “grasped that the Soviet Union was in the throes of terminal illness” at a time when “nearly all the licensed physicians” — academic Sovietologists, the State Department, the CIA, journalists, ambassadors — “certified its robustness.” Pipes said that Reagan “instinctively understood, as all great statesmen do, what matters and what does not.” This quality, said Pipes, cannot be taught: “like perfect pitch, one is born with it.”

Pipes’ most lasting contribution to the Reagan team was his hand in writing one of the most critical documents in the take-down strategy against the USSR: NSDD-75. Released on January 17, 1983, it became probably the most important document in Cold War strategy under Reagan’s and Bill Clark’s NSC. As Pipes put it, the nine-page directive “said our goal was no longer to coexist with the Soviet Union but to change the Soviet system.” Norman Bailey would call NSDD-75 “The Strategic Plan That Won the Cold War.” Bailey’s NSC colleague, Tom Reed, called it “the blueprint for the endgame.”

The Soviets certainly saw it that way, as evidenced by an article in one Soviet publication in March 1983, which carried the telling title, “Pipes Threatens History.” It alleged (correctly) that NSDD-75 “speaks of changing the Soviet Union’s domestic policy. In other words, the powers that be in Washington are threatening the course of world history, neither more nor less.”

They were indeed.

Warnings About Putin

It was two decades after NSDD-75 that I met Pipes in person. It was September 27, 2005, and he came to Grove City College to give our annual J. Howard Pew Lecture. (Click here for our Q&A.) A few things from that day have stuck with me.

I’ve never forgotten Pipes’ assessment of Vladimir Putin, which has stood the test of time. I asked his opinion of Russia’s prospects for a democratic future. Pipes described what he called a “very discouraging picture”:

I had high hopes that after the dissolution of the communist regime, Russia would take the path of democracy — imperfect, but a democratic path nonetheless. Instead, they went right back to autocracy. I have no hopes now…. Russia 10 to 20 years from now will be a kind of a mild dictatorship. If Russians elect their leaders, they will likely do so in skewed elections….

Of course, Russia today is certainly better than it was under the communist regime…. But it is not a democracy. It’s not what we hoped for. It’s an autocracy. Not a tyranny. Not a totalitarian regime. An autocracy….

According to the Russian constitution, the president can only serve two terms, but there is already talk in the Duma that he should be begged to run for a third term, that it is undemocratic to deny the people the right to vote for a man they want just because he has served two terms. Putin repeatedly says that he will not run for a third term, but I would not bet on that.

I argued with Pipes about that. At the time, I had a much more positive view on Putin and Russia, and I was surprised by Pipes’ pessimism. As usual, he was right.

Pipes and Ted Kennedy

Beyond that, two other things really struck me about that Pipes visit in September 2005.

I handed him two things that really piqued his interest: One was that March 1983 article from the Soviet press, “Pipes Threatens History,” which Pipes hadn’t seen. (I found it in Soviet press archives.) He loved it. It made him proud to so rattle the Kremlin.

The other document was unworthy of pride: it concerned Ted Kennedy’s private overture to the Kremlin.

I had been with Pipes all day, from the airport to dinner to the lecture and then getting him back to his room at Grove City College’s Cunningham House. Late that evening I showed Pipes the now-infamous May 1983 Ted Kennedy-KGB document of which I had recently come into possession. I was considering publishing it in my coming (2006) book on Ronald Reagan, but only if I could verify its authenticity. Given his expertise in Soviet archival work, Pipes was a perfect person to examine the document.

I handed Pipes the five-page memo in Russian, followed by an English translation. He sat in a chair in the corner, legs crossed, and began with the Russian version. I waited on the sofa, thumbing through a coffee-table book of Norman Rockwell illustrations. I impatiently headed to the entryway and then the kitchen in search of a piece of paper to jot down his conclusions.

Pipes calmly stared at the document and then muttered a curse word in reference to Kennedy. I immediately wrote down every word that followed. I’ve debated back and forth in writing this tribute whether I should quote Pipes verbatim. His reaction was visceral, and I implore readers to consider it in full:

After studying the document in silence, Pipes looked up at me and shared his immediate emotional reaction, “This is treason.” When I cautioned that it might indeed be close to treason but not necessarily, Pipes nodded, retreated, and reevaluated, speaking more carefully, “Yes, at least very close to treason.” He then provided a rough summation of what he read: “He [Kennedy] was operating behind the back of the president of the United States, reaching out directly to a major head of state, to work against the president.” He paused and added simply, in his typical style: “Terrible.”

I implore people to interpret this in the proper spirit: Pipes’ initial reaction was to curse Kennedy and utter the “T” word. It’s a natural first-reaction I’ve seen many times. But after his initial anger cooled, he stepped back, thought more deeply, and assessed that, yes, at the very least, what Kennedy did was bad. Treason? Maybe, maybe not. Pipes knew that treason was a significant legal, technical, Constitutional matter. He knew that far more information would be needed to level such a formal charge. But it was bad.

I told Pipes my understanding of the provenance of the document. Before I could ask my main question, he affirmed, in his distinctive voice: “I’m sure it’s authentic.” I pressed him (and many others, incidentally) on that, inquiring whether the memo might be a forgery. “Oh, no,” he said. “I have no doubt that this is authentic.”

I told him that I felt history needed to know about the document and what it describes. He completely agreed: “Yes, yes…. I hope you can publish it.”

Click here to read the V&V Q&A with Richard Pipes.

I shared with him my concern that Kennedy and his liberal admirers in the media would tear into me for questioning their vaunted “Lion of the Senate.” Pipes advised me on that and wished me luck. It turned out I had nothing to worry about it. Kennedy and his press sycophants simply ignored the document, and still do to this day.

“Fools and Useful Idiots”

I would remain in touch with Richard Pipes over the years. He was an invaluable expert and eyewitness. I could give example after example.

As I searched my email box today, the most recent Pipes’ email that I hadn’t deleted is dated April 7, 2014. I had asked him his thoughts on the role of the Soviets in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. He wrote:

Thank you for your letter of April 3 which arrived while I was in Moscow. I certainly was not skeptical about Moscow’s role in the attempt on the life of John Paul II while working in the White House in 1981: I believed then and believe now that the assassination attempt was initiated and organized by the USSR….

I trust you are well. All the best, RP

Like Ronald Reagan, like Bill Clark, like Bill Casey at the CIA, Richard Pipes never had any hesitation in thinking Moscow capable of all sorts of malice and mischief.

Another of my favorites was an email thanking me for exposing what Pipes called “the fools and useful idiots” among the American left who said stunningly ignorant things glowing about Lenin’s and Stalin’s USSR. It reminds me of when I saw Pipes at a Philadelphia Society conference in April 2012. I was speaking on dupes from the 1920s and 1930s, quoting the likes of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and Margaret Sanger and their outlandish encomiums for Stalin’s Russia, as well as Malcolm Muggeridge’s bewildered amazement at the spectacle of Western progressives raving about Bolshevism. I lifted my eyes from my text and caught Pipes with an impish grin, loving every minute of the roast.

And then there was a correspondence we carried on over the prospect and possibility that Moscow considered a full-scale invasion of Poland in 1980-81, with President Reagan contemplating a military counter-response, which, as Pipes said dramatically, would have erupted into “World War III.”

Well, those discussions are gone now. In fact, each time I received an email from Dr. Pipes I wondered how much longer they would continue, because his email address included the year of his birth: 1923. Each year that date grew older.

It ended last week, at age 94.

In God’s Image

I’d like to finish with a favorite Pipes’ reflection, which I’ve shared every year with my Modern Civilization course at Grove City College. It deals with what matters most to Pipes now, at this very moment. It concerned keeping rather than losing the faith. Pipes wrote:

Many Jews — my father among them — lost their religious beliefs because of the Holocaust. Mine, if anything, were strengthened. The mass murder (including those that occurred simultaneously in the Soviet Union) demonstrated what happens when people renounce faith in God, deny that human beings were created in His image, and reduce them to soulless and therefore expendable material objects.

As noted, surviving the Holocaust made Pipes delight in every day that God had given him. There would be many such days. He felt a “duty” to defy Hitler by living a joyful and contented life. To be sad and morose and to complain would thereafter strike him as “forms of blasphemy” in light of his Providential gift of survival.

Above all, he would spend the remainder of his long and scholarly life exposing godless ideologies and the totalitarian tyrants who deny that human beings are made in God’s image. Few human beings in the academy did that as nobly and expertly as Richard Pipes.

Full disclosure: I have never seen an episode of the long-running PBS children’s show called “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The only reason I went to see “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” the documentary about Mr. Rogers and his show, was because we were visiting friends who very much wanted to see it. Thank you, dear friends! The movie was very special—poignant, profound, elegantly understated and brimming with kindness, warmth, and understanding.

In one way, the documentary is like the old show itself: a simple story with cheap production values featuring a plain vanilla un-star-like “star.” In another and fundamentally crucial way, the documentary is different from the show: it is primarily for adults instead of children. Whereas “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was rated G, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is rated PG-13. It features adults candidly and sometimes colorfully talking about the adults who made the TV show.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” tells the dual stories of the long-lived TV show (1968-2001) and of Fred Rogers (1928-2003) himself. Along the way, we get to know Mr. Rogers’ real-life family—his wife and two sons—and his TV family. Both families share a lot of love and affection.

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This documentary showed me how often Mr. Rogers used his show to comfort children by courageously and gently addressing such challenges to childhood happiness as the death of a family member (including pets), divorce, scary news stories about war, etc.

The way the documentary makers weave elements of Fred Rogers’ personal life into the narrative about the show is refreshingly original. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is definitely not an “everything you ever wanted to know about Fred Rogers” indulgence. The little we learn about his childhood appears late in the documentary. The rumor that I had heard about Mr. Rogers’ military record was debunked. We come to see a man whose work was the embodiment of his life and values.

What surprised me most in this documentary was that Mr. Rogers was the target of denunciations and protests. Some adults vehemently attacked him for thwarting human development through the subversive technique of telling children, “I like you just the way you are.”

Huh? All I can say is that those critics must not have ever had children themselves. One of the most important things a parent can do for children is to help them feel comfortable in their own skin. Mr. Rogers wasn’t telling 5-year-olds that they would never have to grow up and get a job. He was giving them the reassurance that it’s OK to be a child today, and not to feel that they had to have the adult world all figured out while they were still in kindergarten. Fred Rogers had the wisdom to realize that the world can be a very confusing, even threatening, place to children, who lack the emotional and rational maturity to cope with all of life’s challenges. How immensely important, then, was his gentle, comforting voice reassuring kids that despite its bumps and bruises, life can still turn out well.

Others condemned Fred Rogers for not being condemnatory. The documentary makes clear that Mr. Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, upheld Christian standards in his life and on his show, but refrained from blustery denunciations. It becomes clear in the documentary that Mr. Rogers’ saw his ministry as not to sit in judgment and condemn, but simply to love others. He was content to leave the ultimate judgment of individuals to God.

Like many in the cinema where I saw “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” I had some tears in my eyes. I was deeply moved by how beautiful and powerful a loving heart can be. As I left the cinema, I almost felt a sense of culture shock. At a time when Hollywood relies on over-the-top stimulation to entertain us, this low-key documentary about an unpretentious man and his unpretentious show delivered a deeper, more genuine emotional experience. If your faith in the goodness of mankind needs a boost, go see “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

The post “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” — A review of the new Mr. Rogers Documentary appeared first on The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.

George Cahill was a man with a higher mission fixed to the skies.

He volunteered to fight in World War II at the earliest possible age: 17-and-a-half. Both parents signed off, and he headed to gunnery school in Las Vegas.

George met his crew in Lincoln, Nebraska. They flew to Newfoundland and then Iceland and England. And there, his mission would be a most daring one.

George flew on a B-17 with the Eighth Air Force. He was a togglier, a perilous position often alternately referred to as a “bombardier” or “nose-gunner” or “tailgunner,” though George was a stickler for the differences. The togglier sat inside the cramped “nosecone” of the plane and released the bombs.

Earl Tilford, my retired colleague from Grove City College, who himself served in the Air Force, and who had George speak to his classes, told me this about toggliers: “A B-17 togglier was responsible for arming and dropping the bombs in lieu of a bombardier…. The togglier had to flip a number of toggle switches to arm the bombs and activate the release mechanism and—above all—make sure your plane’s bombay doors were open, otherwise you’d blow yourself out of the sky. That happened on occasion.”

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George flew 28 combat missions under intense fire, wedged into a tiny spot between two 50-caliber machine guns.

Over lunch one day in September 2015, I pushed George to describe what that was like. He wasn’t surrendering much. I got a few short sentences from him.

“Nothing but plastic between me and the atmosphere,” he told me of his vulnerability while bombing Nazi targets. I asked if the plastic could stop enemy bullets. “Oh, hell no!” he scoffed. “Bullets go right through it, and you hope they go out the other side!” Out the other side of the plane that is, not the other side of the togglier and crewmates.

I asked George if he had “any close calls.” He shot me a shocked look, with another, “Oh, hell!”

This time, the “Oh, hell” meant “Oh, hell yes,” though he didn’t care to elaborate. There were, I pried out of him, “at least a dozen” close calls.

I later learned that on one occasion George’s “Flying Fortress” was so shot up with holes that his crew of 10 had to do an emergency landing in Wales with only one of four engines still operating. As the plane coasted into a landing, the final engine stopped. They barely made it. (Click here for a brief clip of George talking about this moment.)

That was what George faced.

“Incidentally,” adds Earl Tilford, “more B-17 crewmen were killed in World War II than U.S. Marines. In 1943-1944, attrition rates were near 90 percent for 25-mission tour.”

For a visual, if you’ve seen the chaotic opening scene of the film Unbroken, about World War II bombardier and Olympian Louis Zamperini, that’s what George experienced.

“Oh, hell.” That’s about right.

But during our lunch, George wasn’t there to tell me about World War II. He had two other missions that day. First, he showed me around Flag Plaza in downtown Pittsburgh—his creation, pride, and joy. George was the founder and president of the National Flag Foundation, a terrific organization.

George was our flag-man at our American Founders luncheon events, held quarterly by the Center for Vision & Values at the Rivers Club in downtown Pittsburgh. After saying grace, we would do the Pledge of Allegiance, which George always led, but first with an extemporaneous explanation of something about the American Founders’ understanding of their new flag as representing a kind of New Constellation.

And that brings me to the former togglier’s primary mission that day in September 2015. George took me to lunch to toggle my attention, to zero-in on a project close to his heart: something called The New Constellation.

An admirer of flags since his Boy Scouts days, George explained to me that the arrangement of the stars of the new flag envisioned by the American Founders represented a kind of New Constellation altogether. There was a divine Author to the heavens, who had set the stars in place. The men of the Founders’ era learned to navigate by the stars. Their country would be navigated by both a natural law and divine law—or, as Jefferson put it in the Declaration, by “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

Nate Mills, a GCC alumnus and emerging expert on the topic, puts it this way: “The Founders believed that by structuring a government inspired by the laws of nature and nature’s God they could look to the night sky as a metaphor for their experiment in federalism.” In the Flag Act of 1776, the flag implemented a design of 13 stars “representing a new constellation.” The Founders saw each colony as a fixed star, set and living in harmony with one another and not interfering in the spheres of any other state’s place in the celestial order. “In understanding their experiment in self-government in terms of astronomy,” says Mills, “the Founders appealed to a powerful set of metaphors to help explain to the world the unique synthesis of ideas that the United States of America represented.”

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The New Constellation was a stirring image grounded in the natural, the theological, the astronomical, the philosophical, the political. The Founders did nothing without meaning, and their flag and New Constellation was no exception.

George loved this concept, and was anxious to convince the Center for Vision & Values to pick it up. He told me he was old and running out of time. It was the last best thing he wanted to do. Current and future generations needed to know. He wanted our group, the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, to study it. One of my best students, Nate Mills, now with National Review Institute, jumped on it. He did not disappoint. We thrilled George with Nate’s paper and presentation on the topic at our American Founders event in March 2017, which you can watch here.

Nate’s work and ours isn’t finished. We will continue to carry this flag for George, whose time has indeed now passed.

George Cahill passed away on July 2, at the age of 92. This unflagging champion of America’s New Constellation now joins the shining light of the brightest and best of all constellations—no doubt a heavenly one.

We salute you, George.

The post George Cahill’s New Constellation appeared first on The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.

To help celebrate Veteran’s Day, we invite you to watch an episode of the animated series “Liberty Jr.”  In this 10 minute video, we share the story of an American hero: Frank Kravetz, a World War II veteran and former captive of Nuremberg Prison Camp. The freedoms we have today, many of which we merrily abuse today, are possible only because of the abuse they suffered at the hands of enemies 70 years ago.

Help us continue to promote the principles of faith and freedom to the next generation of American leaders, and to share those principles with the wider world. Make a tax deductible gift today: Giving.gcc.edu/cvv

The post The remarkable story of an American hero: Frank Kravetz appeared first on The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.

George H. W. Bush died on Friday at age 94. Few Americans have had a more distinguished political resume. He was a U. S. Congressman, a United Nations ambassador, chair of the Republican National Committee, U.S. envoy to China, and director of the CIA. He served two terms as vice president and one term as president.

Bush occupied the Oval Office during four momentous years that entailed the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, a successful military campaign to drive Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait, and major domestic financial problems. Bush used his bully pulpit as president to attack self-indulgence, focus on immediate gratification, and insider trading on Wall Street and to emphasize the importance of faith, morality, service, and family values.

Read: The Faith of George H.W. Bush

His son George W. Bush is better known for his religious convictions, but the senior Bush had a very strong faith as well, which significantly shaped his character and policies as president. Bush served as a Navy pilot in World War II, flying 58 combat missions and winning the Distinguished Flying Cross. During a September 1944 bombing mission, Bush was forced to parachute into the Pacific Ocean south of Japan. The Japanese searched for him, but a U.S. submarine found him first. Bush thanked God for saving his life and asked, “Why had I been spared and what did God have for me?”

Bush’s parents were devout Episcopalians, and he remained affiliated with this denomination almost his entire life. His father Prescott, a Republican senator from Connecticut, and his mother Dorothy led family worship every morning, using readings from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Although Bush worshipped for many years at Episcopal churches in Houston, Washington, and Kennebunkport, Maine, his theology and social policies had more in common with evangelicals than with many fellow Episcopalians.

His three-year-old daughter Robin’s battle with and eventual death from leukemia in the early 1950s both tested and deepened Bush’s faith. He declared that “prayer had always been part” of his and his wife Barbara’s lives, but it became more fervent during this ordeal. “Our faith,” Bush testified, “truly sustained us.”

Bush saw God as all-powerful and active in history and the Bible as divinely inspired and authoritative. “One cannot be America’s president,” the Republican frequently asserted, without “the strength that your faith gives to you.” The Bible, Bush attested, had strongly influenced America’s values and institutions and had long “been a great source of comfort to me.” He affirmed that Jesus was God’s divine Son and frequently referred to Christ as “our Savior.” Moreover, Bush peppered his speeches with biblical quotations, precepts, and stories to support his positions.

In his 1989 inaugural address, Bush prayed “Heavenly Father, we … thank You for Your love.” Make us “willing to heed and hear Your will and write on our hearts these words: ‘Use power to help people.’” All of Bush’s cabinet meetings began with prayer. George and Barbara, who died less than eight months before him, regularly prayed together before going to sleep during their 73-year marriage. As president, Bush referred to prayer in 220 different speeches, proclamations, and remarks.

Bush continually exhorted Americans to seek God’s aid in dealing with the nation’s problems. He asserted more than any other chief executive that the United States was “one nation under God” and accountable to Him. “Without God’s help,” the Texan avowed, “we can do nothing,” but “with it, we can do great things.”

Bush repeatedly argued that nations should adhere to transcendent moral norms and that America was founded upon Judeo-Christian principles. “In carrying out the responsibilities of government,” Bush averred, governments must “follow the teachings of our Heavenly Father.” Government, he maintained, had a limited but vital role to play in promoting the common good and alleviating social problems. Remedying social ills required the active efforts of federal, state, and local governments as well as parents, teachers, businesses, and churches. Government, Bush insisted, should “create a safe, healthy environment” and help citizens “lead more meaningful lives” by improving education, reducing drug usage, and retaking “neighborhoods from criminals.”

Freedom of worship, Bush contended, had enabled religion to play an essential role in American society. The liberty Americans enjoyed, he proclaimed, “is clearly rooted in our Nation’s Judeo-Christian moral heritage and in the timeless values that have united Americans of all religions,” especially “love of God and family, personal responsibility and virtue, respect for the law, and concern for others.”

Bush rejoiced that religious liberty was increasing around the world. Despite persecuting believers, destroying churches, and razing cemeteries, he observed, neither China nor the USSR had stamped out religious faith or worship. Attending Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral in Moscow in 1982, Bush was amazed when his widow made the sign of the cross after taking her last look at her deceased husband. He thought: “All the barbed wire and indoctrination classes in the world can’t keep Him out.” Prayer and worship services, Bush insisted, had helped topple communism in the Soviet Union.

While Bush’s faith helped shape many of his policies, it especially connected with his Thousand Points of Light Initiative. In more than 500 speeches and public statements, Bush urged Americans to increase their personal efforts and financial contributions to aid the less fortunate. He exhorted Americans to emulate “the selfless spirit of giving that Jesus embodied.” His Points of Light initiative helped significantly boost volunteerism. Individuals logged millions of hours aiding needy individuals during Bush’s four years in office, and 25 years later, Points of Light “is the world’s largest organization dedicated to volunteer service.”

Inspired by his faith, Bush was an exemplary Point of Light who for five decades energetically and effectively served God and millions around the world as a statesman and ambassador of goodwill.

Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Religious Liberty
from Center for Vision and Values on Vimeo.

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The final words of President George H. W. Bush tell us a lot about the kind of man he was, and especially the kind of father he was.

At 94 years old and ailing from Parkinson’s and the pains of old age, Bush said he was ready to go. He told his family he wanted to be with Barbara, his wife of 73 years, and Robin, the child they lost long ago to leukemia. And in a final conversation, his oldest son, George W. Bush, told him he had been a “wonderful father.” His father’s reply—and final words—were: “I love you, too.”

These final sentiments from Bush were touching and not surprising.

The death of that little girl Robin 65 years ago was the enduring heartbreak of his and his wife’s life. As Barbara approached death last April, Robin was on her mind as well.

Robin’s situation in the fall of 1953 became so acute that her parents flew her from Midland, Texas to New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Her mom held her hand through tears and blood transfusions. Her dad found it too hard to watch.

Robin’s demise came unexpectedly quick. George H. W. was in Texas and flew all night to get there, but by the time he arrived Robin slipped into a coma. “One minute she was there, and the next she was gone,” remembered her mother. “I truly felt her soul go out of that beautiful little body. For one last time I combed her hair, and we held our precious little girl. I never felt the presence of God more strongly than at that moment.”

Read: Remembering Barbara Bush and Robin

George H. W. Bush said he “learned the true meaning of grief when Robin died.” Though he firmly believed she was “in God’s loving arms,” the pain never went away. Asked in 1999 by Larry King how long it hurt, the former president said, “We hurt now.”

Five years after Robin’s death, George H. W. wrote a letter to his mother. It was a sort of poem, with a dozen lines that began, “We need….” The concluding line lamented: “We need a girl.”

In his final moments, George H. W. Bush was thinking about reunification with that three-year-old girl.

Also poignant was the fact that the parting words the elder Bush heard was that he had been a wonderful father. It was fitting that the oldest Bush child, now the family patriarch, would express that sentiment for the family.

George W. referred to his father as “the world’s greatest dad.” At the start of his Republican convention speech in Philadelphia in August 2000, in a subtle reference to President Bill Clinton allegedly calling him “daddy’s boy” two days earlier, George W. looked toward his father’s seat and proclaimed before a national audience, “I am proud to be your son.”

That 2000 presidential run for the younger Bush is hard to separate from his father’s 1992 presidential defeat. There had been speculation that George W. pursued the presidency in part to avenge his father’s loss in 1992, a charge that George W. disputed. Still, it had burned the younger Bush to see his father lose to a man he saw as lacking character, particularly compared to the father he held in the highest esteem. He hated to see “a good man get whipped.”

As for the younger Bush defeating Bill Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, in 2000, the senior Bush would savor the irony: “You ever heard the expression, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways?’” George H. W. Bush said in Erie, Pennsylvania in June 2004. “We had that [happen] in our family all the time, even with some bad things…. And if I’d had won that election in 1992, my oldest son would not be president of the United States of America.” With his voice crackling with emotion, the proud father concluded: “So, what more can a dad ask? I think the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

The son never forgot a moment in the 1960s while an undergrad at Yale struggling with the day’s events and finding purpose in life. His father suggested he visit Yale’s famous (leftist) chaplain William Sloane Coffin. Bush had questions about the Vietnam War and upheaval all around him. According to Bush, not only was Coffin unhelpful but insulted his father. Bush’s father had just lost a close Texas race for the U.S. Senate to a Democrat named Ralph Yarborough. “Your father lost to a better man,” Bush remembers Coffin remarking.

Coffin would later say he had no recollection of that conversation. It’s hard to imagine it didn’t happen, however, because Bush was so angry that he told his parents right away. His mother said the comment was “shattering” to him. “It was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college,” said Barbara, “particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I’m not sure that George ever put his foot again [in the college chapel].”

Regardless of what exactly happened with Coffin, the takeaway is this: George W. Bush considered his father his “hero.” And he certainly wasn’t the only Bush child that felt that way. And for a dad, even one of so many great achievements, that’s a pretty good way to go.

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On Friday, January 4, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute revoked its invitation to honor city native Angela Y. Davis at a February gala event where she was to receive the institute’s Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award. Many individuals inside and outside the city objected to giving Davis this award due to her record as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), brief association with the Black Panther Party, and ongoing association with Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement.

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, an ordained Baptist minister, founded the Alabama Christian Movement in 1956 after the state outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Later that year Shuttlesworth and his family were unhurt after the Ku Klux Klan detonated 15 sticks of dynamite under his house. He later fostered demonstrations in 1963 that led to desegregation of public facilities and hiring of blacks by downtown employers.

Throughout those turbulent years, Shuttlesworth and the NAACP renounced relationships with the CPUSA, and for good reason: the party targeted Alabama’s so-called Black Belt (language that CPUSA used) along with the mine and steel workers in Birmingham. Angela Davis, who was born in Birmingham in 1944, joined the CPUSA in the early 1960s and twice ran for vice president on the party’s ticket. She retained her CPUSA affiliation until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Examining the Davis record, during her freshman year at Brandeis University she joined the Che-Lumumba Club, a group sponsored by the CPUSA and named for Argentine Communist Ernesto Che Guevara and Congolese Communist Patrice Lumumba. (One of the leading Kremlin-run universities in the USSR was Patrice Lumumba University, which became a leading training ground for Middle East jihadists.) After earning a master’s degree in African-American Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 1968, Davis enrolled at East Berlin’s Humboldt University to earn a doctorate the following year. After the University of California, Los Angeles immediately hired her the California Board of Regents under Gov. Ronald Reagan just as immediately fired her. She was reinstated after the American Association of University Professors threatened UCLA with the blacklist.

In August 1972, Davis began her international support for human rights with a visit to Castro’s Cuba, a country she visited earlier as part of an American anti-Vietnam war delegation. A month later, it was off to East Germany, where Communist leader Walter Ulbricht conveyed upon Davis the Star of People’s Friendship Award along with an honorary doctorate from Leipzig University. In October, she was in the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Central Committee to receive an honorary degree from Moscow State University. Seven years later, in 1979, Davis was back in the USSR to receive the Lenin Peace Prize. In her acceptance address, Davis praised, “The glorious Lenin and the great October Revolution.”

How can 20 million Gulag dead jibe with any human rights award?

Defenders of presenting Davis with the Shuttlesworth Award point to her extensive scholarly and academic achievements. These include a professorship in ethnic studies at San Francisco State and as professor of human consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also received a visiting professorship at Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, and Syracuse University. In 2014, Davis was back at UCLA as a Regents Lecturer. Her scholarly writings are largely ideological polemics on feminism, revolution, and prison reform. Her academic accomplishments speak eloquently to the decline of American higher education.

What about Davis as social activist?  In August 1970, she became the third woman ever named to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list when she provided guns used to abduct Judge Harold Haley, a prosecutor, and three female jurors from a Marin County, California courthouse. During the escape attempt, Judge Haley and three of the criminals involved were killed in a shootout. Davis was arrested and charged with aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder. A jury’s not guilty verdict was based their contention that her ownership of the weapons involved did not imply criminal conspiracy.

Now that Davis is a mid-septuagenarian, some say her missteps are “ancient history.” Not so. In May 2017, sponsored by George Washington University Students for Justice in Palestine, Davis condemned Israel for its “ethnic cleansing strategies.” At GWU, Davis attempted to connect Black Lives Matter to her campaign for prison reform by stating: “If we call the U.S. a prison nation … Palestine under Israeli occupation is the world’s largest open-air prison.”

Charitably, one might assume that the attention and accolades conveyed on Angela Davis by American academic institutions and narrowly averted by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute issue from ignorance of her record caused by decades during which the study of history has devolved into fables conceived in self-serving multicultural and diversity polemics. To be ignorant of the past is to defile the present and destroy the future.

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Twenty years ago this week, the U.S. Senate began the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. All of America was gripped by the stunning story of the impeachment of a president of the United States. Few individuals witnessed that historic event quite like Paul J. McNulty, who held the position of Chief Counsel – Director of Communication for the Impeachment Proceedings by the House Judiciary Committee. Today, the Honorable Paul J. McNulty ’80 is president of Grove City College. Two decades later, Mr. McNulty shares his remarkable experiences as a key eyewitness to an extraordinary episode in history.

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