Walter Berns was at once a scholar and a patriot.
And that, unfortunately, in the contemporary world, in the contemporary America, is kind
of rare.
Patriotism is not natural, but has to be taught or somehow acquired.
And the question was then, and I suppose still is: how was this new patriotism to be taught
or somehow acquired by later generations of citizens?
On the one hand, he loved the country.
He thought that people had to be encouraged to love it for reasons that had been stated
by Walter's great hero, Abraham Lincoln, especially in a free country.
It can’t be taken for granted that people will simply love the country and do the things
that are needed to protect it.
This was not simply the ra-ra patriotism of a war hero, which he was.
Walter was a veteran of World War II.
He had served from the absolute beginning in the Navy; he'd seen action.
He used to like to tell my children, he had taken North Africa single-handedly when they
were still young enough to believe that.
And so he had a very powerful sense of what the country had been through.
Walter, in particular, had a sort of Odyssey after World War II, but eventually he pitched
up in Taos, New Mexico where a writers-artist colony had been founded.
He was going to be the great American novelist, but then eventually he burned the manuscript.
He just decided that that wasn't him and wound up going to the University of Chicago.
And someone told him, "You have to take a course with this fellow, Leo Strauss," and
Walter said, "Nah, I'll do it next semester."
And finally, he did.
He was very greatly influenced by Leo Strauss, and Leo Strauss said, "We should go back and
read Aristotle.
We should go back and read old books because we can still learn things from old books."
And it's not enough to say, "I don't completely agree."
All right, you don't completely agree.
What is it you think is right?
And if you start by saying, "Well, no one is right” or “there is no right," you're
just going to go through life chortling and chuckling and being frivolous and silly, and
that isn't the life Walter Berns was going to lead.
Walter believed that true patriotism for an American includes an appreciation of self-criticism.
We are not expected to love our country simply because it is our country.
Love can be blind.
And love of country like love of wife, or husband, or lover can be blind too.
But ours is not supposed to be a blind patriotism.
But he always insisted that our criticism of the Constitution be fully informed.
That criticism had to be based upon a full understanding and it was that fuller understanding
that he spent a good deal of his life in reviving.
Walter Berns was one of a very small group of scholars who made the founding relevant
again and really fundamental to our understanding of ourselves.
We take it for granted now that, well of course, if you study America you have to read the
Federalist Papers, and you have to think about the Constitution and the Constitutional Convention
and John Marshall, not just the latest Supreme Court cases.
And you have to read Lincoln.
That was not the case when Walter Berns began writing on these topics in the 1950s and into
the 1960s.
And he and a small group of friends and colleagues of his really revived the study of the founders,
showed why you couldn't understand America without understanding the founders.
I think part of what happened to Walter and to a lot of other people is that the left
changed out from under them and came to really reject the vision of the Constitution.
To be a partisan of the Constitution, which is if Walter was any kind of partisan, I think
that was his party, meant by late in his life that he was conservative by default.
But I don't think he was a conservative in the way that the conservative movement understands
that term.
I can see how Walter would be uncomfortable with the term, and a lot of people of his
generation were.
But the fact is he and they transformed conservatism in a way that made it more like them.
And I think what today's young conservatives mean by thinking of Walter as a conservative
is purely a compliment.
It means that they see themselves shaped by his teachings.
Walter Berns was at AEI when I came here in 1986 and he was here for all of my tenure
as President.
Up until his 90th birthday, he was in the office every day.
Right up to the end, he was the complete intellectual and the archetype of what AEI has always tried
to promote and insinuate into larger political debate.
When Lincoln was a young man, he gave a speech about the Founding Fathers in which he called
them a forest of giant oaks.
And I thought Walter very much represented that image.
These were people in the founding whom Lincoln felt had greater challenges than his own generation.
Walter Berns was one of the giant oaks Lincoln spoke about, and he's left an extraordinary
legacy for those of us who are still here at AEI—his scholarship and his great strengths
as a colleague and friend to many here.