AEI Occasions

Fractured Politics and Institutional Reform (2017)

Fractured Politics and Institutional Reform

Remarks at AEI Chairman’s Dinner
American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., December 14, 2017

On December 14, 2017, the American Enterprise Institute installed a bust of me at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. in recognition of my years as its president (1986–2008). This talk was delivered at a dinner following the installation.

A video of the occasion is here.

The talk was published here and quoted here and here.

Gerald R. Ford and the American Enterprise Institute (2009)

Gerald R. Ford and the American Enterprise Institute

Interview with Richard Norton Smith for the Gerald R. Ford Oral History Project

July 16, 2009

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Remarks at AEI Farewell Dinner (2008)

Remarks at AEI Chairman’s Dinner

Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, Washington, D.C., December 11, 2008

We have a rule of style at AEI never to begin a talk or letter on the assumption that people want to know about your personal state of mind. The formal rule is: Do not begin with “I am pleased …” or “I am happy …” unless you are the Queen of England. You all have me feeling like a king this evening, so let me begin by saying that I am pleased, and very, very happy, to be surrounded by my beloved family, and cherished colleagues, and best friends going all the way back to those 1950s glory days on the Joseph Sears Blues football team, and including many people who have profoundly influenced me, usually for the better, by your example, teaching, companionship, and love.

One of the closest is Bruce Kovner. Bruce and I go back 42 years to when we were loitering around Littauer Hall at Harvard, hoping to catch a little face time with our intellectual heroes James Q. Wilson and Edward C. Banfield. We have shared many adventures and enthusiasms, from New Jersey politics to high culture, which just about covers the waterfront of human endeavor. Since 1989 Bruce has been a trustee of AEI, then Vice Chairman, and then Chairman of the Board since 2002. I have sometimes found it a bit awkward to have my old friend as my boss. But for Bruce it has been, as the kids say, no problem. He has never shown any interest in crony nonprofitism. He has demanded the highest standards of scholarship and management and been supportive or critical as the circumstances warranted. And in his quiet, modest way he has been astoundingly generous. Just this year he has inspired his fellow trustees to pony up a Trustees Endowment of $75 million, which will help to bring AEI’s financial strength up to par with its intellectual strength.

We are engaged in a double transition at AEI—three weeks from today when I hand the president’s baton to Arthur Brooks, Bruce will hand the chairman’s baton to Kevin Rollins. So it is time for a tangible expression of our gratitude. At the end of a long day Bruce has a choice: he may sit down with an AEI book, or sit down at the piano with Brahms or Chopin. He will continue to be an AEI trustee and we need to stay in the game; we hope to tempt him with this set of leather-bound editions of thirty of AEI’s most important books during his tenure, which comes with our great affection and admiration.

Two individuals have been at my side throughout my tenure and have contributed immensely to AEI’s success and prosperity. David Gerson, AEI’s executive vice president, has been my constant partner and alter ego. Jim Wilson, the chairman of AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers, has been my teacher in the largest sense of the word throughout my adult life. I also want to mention my great friend and soul-mate Dan Searle, who died a year ago, two weeks after I had confided to him my succession plans for AEI and won his considered approval. Beginning in January I will be holding AEI’s newly established D. C. Searle Chair.

Arthur Brooks and I would like to convey our joint thanks to George Bush and Barak Obama for setting such a fine example of how transitions of power should be conducted. Arthur has told me that he particularly admires how President Bush is ceding power to the new regime with such grace and deference. I have told Arthur that I particularly admire how President-elect Obama has shifted his emphasis from change to continuity—from dwelling on the shortcomings of the old regime to recognizing its many good features which should be emulated and continued.

Twenty-two years ago this week I was called to the platform at the AEI annual dinner by Board Chairman Bill Butcher, accompanied by Gerald Ford, Henry Wendt, and Dave Packard, and introduced as AEI’s new president. That evening I offered a supply-side account of AEI’s mission:

Ideas have consequences, but there is no principle that says the best ideas are the most consequential; and without them government risks becoming nothing but a scramble for resources. To attempt disinterestedly to study and understand the issues facing our country, to be engaged in policy debate without being preoccupied with the headlines of the moment, to offer blunt criticism without losing sight of the great virtues of our political system—these services are not in urgent day-to-day demand in Washington; yet Washington cannot survive without them. . . . AEI’s specialty is to advance the long-run view in a short-run city.

Today we can say that AEI has continued to fulfill its special calling, honorably and effectively, for another twenty-two years on top of its previous forty-two. Yet we now find ourselves at a moment that feels extraordinarily grave and ominous, and we sometimes ask ourselves whether our age-old philosophy will continue to be welcome or useful. At such times it is important to hold to the long-run view. Politics and markets are filled with the most astonishing surprises in the short run, yet both regress in time to trend lines that reflect fundamental realities.

It is the business of the analyst—in politics and policy, it is the business of AEI—to discern beneath the tumult, and even from the tumult, durable truths and underlying trends. Let me venture two important trend lines consistent with a few recent big surprising data points. The first is auspicious, the second menacing.

The first is that the effort to study and think systematically about government is a progressive enterprise—it is capable of yielding a fair consensus about what constitutes right policy, and when it does, that consensus can move policy in the right direction. Politics is not similarly progressive; it is powerfully influenced by interest groups and by sheer mistake and let’s not forget the corruptions of power; and in a nation as vast and heterogeneous as ours, there will always be sharp conflicts of interests and values to be reconciled, which means muddling through rather than seeking truth. Yet the search for the public interest is not quixotic. It is more than a flicker. For one thing, bad policies, especially in economics and security, can produce disastrous harms even in the short run that are evident to anyone paying attention. But attention and interpretation are key. Intellectual leaders in think tanks, and political leaders in the White House, can help with the critical process of public education.

One of the reasons to doubt that the financial crisis will produce not just a hard recession but a 1930s-style depression is that we have a truer knowledge of monetary policy. Back then the conventional wisdom was that because supply and demand were falling sharply, therefore much less money was needed for exchange, therefore the money supply should be sharply contracted. Essentially no one thinks that way today. That the goal of monetary policy should be price stability is knowledge that was acquired at great cost through decades of study and contentious debate. In facing our current crisis, it is an asset as valuable as the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.

There is a fair professional consensus, equally bipartisan, about certain aspects of tax, trade, and regulatory policy, views that are beginning to peak through in the current transition from one political party to another. During the campaign, Senator Obama was unusually clear and vigorous in advancing a detailed policy platform, which included higher taxes on capital, higher taxes on high-earning individuals, new restrictions on international trade, and new efforts to promote unionization—all for purposes of better economic performance and greater social justice. Now there are intimations that these initiatives might be deferred for the duration of the recession. On the surface that seems very strange—better economic performance and greater social justice are especially urgent in a recession, so one would think that higher taxes, less trade, and a more unionized workforce should move up rather than down the agenda. Something else must be happening. Post-campaign, there is even some official recognition that taxing capital is a fool’s errand in a global economy.

Irving Kristol once said that America does not face a single serious problem that could not be solved by a hard recession. A President, much more than an office-seeker, is in a position to be a teacher; indeed he and his top officials cannot help but be teachers, for better or worse, through their deeds and words. Our new President obviously has the capacity and the desire to be a great teacher. In economic policy, the Republicans have not done a particularly good job at this component of political leadership. It is altogether fitting that the Democrats will now have their turn. We at AEI will be doing our part as well.

The second, adverse trend is the unprincipled scramble for resources that I mentioned twenty-two years ago, now in an ominous new form. I refer to the intermingling of politics and power with finance and commerce, going beyond government regulation to the government as direct owner and market participant. A new phenomenon of Fusion Enterprise is growing from the recent extemporizing in response to the financial crisis, but now involves increasingly bold and purposive action. It is clear beyond cavil that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were prime culprits behind the housing and credit collapse—so one would have thought that, in disgrace, they would be placed on course to privatization or liquidation, perhaps to be replaced by more transparent, responsible means of promoting homeownership. Instead they are to be redeemed with taxpayers’ money and reestablished as political-financial juggernauts. At the same time, the government has become major de facto owner of a leading insurance company and several major banks, and perhaps soon an automobile company or two as well.

Absent the financial crisis none of these things would have happened, and those who are administering the rescue efforts have no thought that they are doing anything but strengthening balance sheets and unlocking markets. But now that the situation on the ground has changed many in Congress have discovered that they have big ideas about how insurance services and banking services and automobiles ought to be designed and sold, just as they did about home mortgages. Meanwhile, the leading new proposal for health care reform looks eerily similar—with the government to operate its own huge health insurance company in competition with private firms. The momentum is toward GSEs—Government Sponsored Enterprises—throughout the financial sector, feeling its way into the commercial sector.

One can have a good libertarian laugh at the prospect of a post office bank or car company competing with UPS and FedEx banks and car companies. But the experience of many other nations, and our own with Fannie and Freddie, is sobering. Financial firms operating on the principles of coercion and patronage rather than voluntary exchange can have real staying power, can easily co-opt and infect private firms, and can produce social wreckage that becomes apparent only over long periods of time. Will the business community, our bastion of private enterprise, resist? Already, the government appointed CEO of AIG is boasting to his customers and others that his firm is much better capitalized—that is by Washington—than the mere private firms it competes with, and several of those rivals are lining up for their shares. We have no economic theory, and only fragmentary casual examples, to resist this half-way house between comprehensive socialism on the one hand and conventional regulation on the other, where the distinction between private and public had been reasonably clear. We—those of us in the world of independent policy research—will have to devise new methods of research, analysis, and argument to keep up with the growth of Fusion Enterprise.

I want to conclude with a word about my baby, the American Enterprise Institute, that I am about to let go of. It has been said that my leadership of AEI has been selfless, even self-sacrificing. Now any departure from rationally self-interested behavior is a dagger at the heart of our philosophical precepts, so I would like to set the record straight. I am of the view that AEI’s work is, at its best, miraculous. The mind of man has produced many practical miracles of late—the iPhone, the Internet. But nothing that compares to the pure intellectual feat of producing knowledge where there had been none, transforming confusion into clarity, organizing the blur of experience into words and figures and arguments that are persuasive to the human mind, and transmitting them to millions of people whose understanding of their world is thereby deepened and improved, including many in a position to use it to effect tangible improvements. Believing as I do that this is a miracle, I would say that if my twenty-two years of stewardship had produced one such miracle, I would feel richly compensated and happily justified. Instead it has produced many hundreds, of such miracles, crystallized for all time in books such as these and in reports and essays. This I find to be overwhelming. To have worked in the presence of the wonderful colleagues who have produced these miracles, and to have know the hard and vexing labor and many missteps along the way that have produced them, is beyond anything than I could have wished for.

On days such as today’s Board of Trustees meeting, and especially at times such as our current transition, we spend a great deal of time evaluating our strengths and weaknesses and what we need to do to improve our finances and dissemination and prepare ourselves for the future. These are tremendously important matters involving many uncertainties. But I know one thing for certain: that for as long as AEI remains a place where miracles can occur, its position will be secure, and it will continue to be esteemed and drawn upon as a font for better government and the progress of human freedom.

Permit me to end with a little poem—”The Sound of Trees,” by Robert Frost.

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your friendship and support and for this lovely evening.

Remarks on AEI Leadership Succession (2008)

Remarks on AEI Leadership Succession

Meeting of Scholars and Staff of AEI, July 14, 2008

Nine months ago I got up before you to explain why I thought the time had come for me to step aside as president of AEI. What I knew at the time was that think-tank successions at AEI and elsewhere had customarily gone poorly—because the difficult decision had customarily been postponed until the death or senescence of the Dear Leader, leading to a period of confusion, indecision, and loss of institutional momentum. And I knew that if AEI was to avoid that trap, now was a good time to grasp the nettle of a planned succession and do what we were eventually going to have to do anyway.

What I did not know was whether we could translate theory into practice. We have a wonderful Board of Trustees, composed of men of action and accomplishment, but like all boards it is a committee, designed for review and consultation rather than initiative and decision. I did not know whether the Board would be able to orchestrate an effective search and make confident collective decisions on the people uncovered by the search; whether the views of different trustees would be congruent when it came time to make the judgment call; or whether their views would be congruent with those of the people who make their lives at AEI. Most of all, I did not know whether we would be able to find someone who had the rare combination of attributes the job requires—and who would actually be willing to suit up and take charge of this large responsibility.

Today I can report that we have succeeded brilliantly. The same intellectual and institutional strengths that have sustained and improved AEI over many years have brought us through the complex and risky decision process that every institution must occasionally traverse. And those strengths have brought to us an extraordinary new leader: AEI’s future is in excellent hands in the hands of Arthur Brooks.

The search took six months. It was a creative and dynamic process with twists and turns and a developing conviction about the sort of person we were looking for. Our Board chairman, Bruce Kovner, established our Search Committee at the beginning of the year and chaired it. It consisted of Kevin Rollins, our Vice Chairman; Jim Wilson, the Chairman of our Council of Academic Advisers; Tully Friedman, our Board Treasurer; Roger Hertog, who chairs our Investment Committee, and me. We consulted with the other trustees and beyond. David Gerson played an important role, providing sure and incisive evaluations of the people we were considering, both for the substantial management responsibilities that would fall to them and for their capacities as intellectual leaders, fund-raisers, and the public face of the Institute. Many of the scholars and managers in this room provided excellent general advice and specific recommendations, and then meet with several of the people whom we were considering and who were considering us—and gave us (and no doubt them!) some deep and subtle advice.

We were assisted by a top executive recruitment firm, Spencer Stuart, which conducted individual interviews with our trustees and many scholars and donors and political, academic, and business leaders, and produced an initial list of about 80 prospects. The Search Committee moved with little ado to reduce the list to eighteen or twenty individuals, and shortly thereafter began conversations with several of them.

The initial process of elimination—when the trustees were first moving from general criteria to incarnate individuals—produced valuable information that guided the search thereafter. The initial list included many fine people, and many famous people, that many institutions would be thrilled to have as a president, but that our trustees had no interest in. What they cared about first and foremost was intellectual depth and capacity: someone who would personify AEI’s commitment to academic excellence and independence and provide confident direction to our research and publications. I’ll tell you a little secret: AEI’s success is build on a simple business model—attract unusually gifted people, put a roof over their heads, sustain and encourage them, see what they came up with, and then tell the world that that was our action agenda from the start. The trustees cared about fund-raising ability, experience, energy, sociability, and other capacities, but they basically thought that if someone had the intellectual strengths to execute our secret business plan, the other necessities would follow.

The search process was highly instructive to me, and I want to tell you a few of the things I learned.

The first is that AEI is a very special institution. We are not really a university without students as we sometimes say—our purposes and methods are quite different from those of universities. Neither are we a business organization, a political organization, a movement or creedal organization, nor a public relations or publicity firm nor a talent agency or publishing house. All of those institutions have their roles, and we are a little bit of all of them: we have borrowed from each to create something that is altogether singular in the intellectual and political realms and even among think tanks. This became clear as we considered and interviewed people from many of those institutional backgrounds and realized how specialized were our requirements. We needed to find an individual with our same combining instincts, and who understood our culture and the primacy we give to excellence in thinking, research, and exposition.

The second thing I learned is that we have a truly great Board of Trustees. The trustees understood immediately the magnitude of their charge, and worked very hard and poured enormous energy into the process. They set aside other big demands on their time and more than once crossed the country for meetings. The Search Committee’s deliberations were thoroughly serious, frank, and probing, with never once a hint of faction or of favoritism toward anything but AEI’s best interests.

Third, the scholars and managers involved in the search saw things very similarly to the trustees. They were both candid and discreet in sharing their views with David and me, which I in turn shared with the Search Committee. Their judgments on matters ranging from intellect and experience to temperament and character were of immense value.

And fourth, I learned that, despite our unique and demanding leadership requirements, there were many highly accomplished people who were keenly interested in the job and would have been terrific presidents of AEI. Moreover, when I told several of them who were the others we were considering, they replied without exception that the others would be much better, and began collaborating with us as co-searchers rather than searchees. This was all very gratifying.

Arthur Brooks first came to AEI through Henry Olsen, who as impresario of our National Research Initiative had become interested in Arthur’s research and writing, had gotten to know him, and had recruited him as an AEI visiting scholar last year. As the search process was getting underway, I was getting to know Arthur as a colleague, and coming to greatly admire the man and his work. He seemed to me the paradigmatic AEI scholar. He had mastered an academic field and was increasingly moving beyond it to broader, more practical and ambitious questions. He was intellectually capacious, concerned with economics and government policy but also with issues of culture, politics, religion, foreign policy, and the moral foundations of capitalism and freedom. He was intellectually original and bold; personally cheerful, optimistic, and sociable; and a man of strong character. And he clearly loved being at AEI; indeed he confessed to me his interest in moving his academic career to AEI at some time in the future.

It also struck me that Arthur was very similar to me. He is about the same age that I was when I came to AEI. He has three children—Joaquim, Carlos, and Marina—who are about the same age that my three children were when I signed up. We have similar backgrounds in music and especially in the brass section—Arthur played French horn with the Annapolis Brass Quintet and several symphony orchestras, and I played trombone with the Joseph Sears Elementary School Band. And Arthur would bring to the AEI presidency exactly as much experience in hands-on management and fund-raising as I did twenty-two years ago, which is to say zero.

So I approached Arthur and asked if he would permit us to consider him in our succession search. I put the proposition in very appealingly terms: the decision would be made by the trustees as a whole, most of whom did not know him; we already had several highly attractive candidates; his prospects would frankly be a long-shot—but it would be good for the process if the trustees could talk with him along with the others.

Arthur was dumbstruck. He needed some time to think it over and discuss it with his wife Ester. But when he spoke again a week later, he told much more than that he was willing to be considered. He had decided that he seriously wanted the job. Not for itself but as a calling—he loved AEI, believed it would be playing a critical role in the challenging times ahead, and wanted to try to help it grow and succeed. He knew it would be a long-shot and thought some other candidates better qualified. If one of them was selected, he would be personally disappointed but not sore at all; he would have learned a thing or two, he would remain happily absorbed in his academic work, and he would still hope to pursue that work at AEI.

In the weeks that followed, Arthur and others were treated to an extensive series of meetings at AEI and at several undisclosed locations. The Search Committee and other trustees were heartened by the caliber of the people we were meeting with and remained studiously open-minded. Until, two-and-a-half weeks ago, we all came together at the World Forum in Beaver Creek.

There the Search Committee sat down for a brief review of our thinking and to set a schedule for reaching a final decision. But we ended up meeting for more than three hours, and when we were through we resolved, unanimously and enthusiastically, to recommend at the next day’s Board meeting that we offer Arthur Brooks the position of president of AEI.

At the same time, I had arranged for Arthur, who was at the Forum, to have lunch with the trustees who were not on the Search Committee. That was something of a trick: this nice Syracuse professor surrounded by eleven sharp, no nonsense, alpha-male CEO personalities, peppering him questions from every side, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

That evening, several of these trustees took me aside. Each of them had been through corporate and non-profit successions and had routinely made complex, high-stakes hiring decisions in their business careers. And they had been deeply impressed by Arthur, not only by his intellect but his character, conviction, groundedness, and capacity for leadership. At the Board meeting the next day, we tore up the agenda and spent the entire time discussing the most important decision in my 75 AEI Board meetings. When we adjourned, Bruce approached Arthur and asked him to be our next president, and Arthur accepted.

So here we are. Arthur and Esther and their children will be moving down to Washington this summer, finding schools and a home and getting situated. He will be in residence at AEI beginning in September, finishing up at Syracuse teaching his two big courses in Fundamentals of Policy Analysis Non-profit Management, and preparing to take the baton from me on December 31.

We have already been doing a little traveling and fund-raising, and I can tell you that this fellow is a natural. In Chicago last week, I introduced Arthur to one of our major donors, a favorite of mine who follows our work closely and is something of a contrarian tough customer. Within five minutes, the two had connected and I was observing their conversation like a spectator at a tennis match. I thought to myself, “What am I—a potted plant?” Already I could feel the mantle of power slipping away. Then, as we were leaving, Arthur kindly mentioned to me his disappointment that my friend’s AEI support was not considerably higher, and assured me that this would be corrected under the new dispensation.

Now I have said some nice things about Arthur, and he may—he’d better—say some nice things about me. But we are both keenly aware that saying things is what think tankers do most comfortably, but that doing things—not just talk but action—is what is now expected of him. Nine months ago I had a great concept that had only to be demonstrated in practice. Now we are well on our way, but the final proof will come over the next several years, and this will involve more that giving a talk or writing a paper. So, rather than tell you more about what a wonderful man Arthur Brooks is, I want to say three things about what has transpired and what is ahead for us.

First, although the trustees have spent six months diligently searching, interviewing, and deliberating, ours was not the only search underway. In the end, I felt that we did not find Arthur so much as Arthur found us. I believe that he decided not only that we were right for him but that he was right for us. He realized that this was something that ought to happen, and he made it happen.

Second, Arthur understands that sustaining an institution—protecting and nurturing it and helping it prosper—is hard and difficult work. One does not preside at AEI, sitting at a desk, reviewing the inbox, reading interesting manuscripts, and giving interesting feedback to scholars. Success requires activism of the most intense kind, and presents more than occasional opportunities for complex and thankless decisions. It requires constant devotion to the Institute’s ultimate purposes, and the imagination and fortitude to put those purposes first and see them through.

Arthur knows all of this and is prepared. When I was telling him about some of the job’s difficult aspects, he replied, “You know, Chris, I have discovered that almost everything in life seems relatively easy when you are not holding a French horn.” Come to think of it, leading AEI is a little like playing the French horn: it can be a bit awkward, but if you master it the result is beautiful music.

Let me be clear that being president of the American Enterprise Institute is a tremendous opportunity for Arthur Brooks. To have one’s capacities pushed to the utmost; to be responsible for harmonizing the activities of a large number of very gifted and ambitious individuals, and orchestrating human and financial resources in an effective way; to be obliged to make important decisions in the face of uncertainty—and all for the purpose of achieving a purpose of immense social importance—this is more than any serious person could ask for in a career. It has been for me an unbelievable opportunity, the opportunity of a lifetime, and so it will be for Arthur, and we should all be delighted that the opportunity has come his way.

Which brings me to the third and most important thing I have to say. All of us in this room, and the institution and mission that we are part of, are facing a wonderful new opportunity in our transition to new leadership. Arthur will see things with fresh eyes. He will put his own stamp on things. He will do things differently. And he will need help from each and every one of us.

Last week I was speaking with our trustee Ray Gilmartin, who teaches management at HarvardBusiness School and has been through several corporate successions. I was telling him that I realize I will still have some big responsibilities after I vacate the corner office—twenty-two years is a long time, there’s a lot of church history, it’s not all in the files, Arthur will need a lot of help and I’ll be right there for him. Ray listened as I want on in this vein, and then said, “Chris, for you the hardest part of the transition is still ahead, and you might as well know it now: Arthur is going to need a lot less help than you think.”

That was very funny, and I am already imagining Arthur telling me, after I have given him some particularly astute piece of advice, “Well, that is a very interesting perspective. I really appreciate your mentioning it to me. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get to my next appointment.”

But in truth, Arthur is going to need my help and your help and all of our help. Leadership can be hard work, and is no less central at AEI than elsewhere—but scholarship and writing are hard work too, and we all know that AEI has the best management team of any think tank. Ours is, ultimately, a thoroughly collective, collaborative enterprise. It could not be any other way for an institution of our methods and mission. So, when I way that a great new opportunity awaits us all, I mean that we will all have to work together for the transition and for our continuing success. I know that Arthur is up to it—and, even more, I know that we are all up to it.

Arthur C. Brooks:

Thank you, Chris, for your gracious remarks. And thank you to all of you. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be here.

It was an interesting way to start off this meeting today to find the little souvenir Chris left you on your chairs—the photo of me in 1983, holding my French horn. In fact there has been quite a bit of interest in my former career as a classical musician. A lot of people have brought it up, wondering how being a musician could somehow lead to heading a think tank. Just this afternoon a New York Times reporter asked about this. She asked me, “How could you leave that career? You were obviously very successful.”

I started thinking back, and said to myself, “You know, it’s true. I was successful.” But then I remembered one disastrous event which, I think, helps to explain why I am no longer in that life. At the height of my music career, I gave a concert at Carnegie Hall. Obviously it was a big deal for me; I was very nervous, and a little unsteady. I stepped out to the front of the stage to play—and fell off the edge. I don’t think that had ever happened before at Carnegie Hall.

So far, this debut is going much better.

About two years ago, I received a call in my office at Syracuse University from Henry Olsen. He was with another think tank at that point. He began by saying, “You know, I’ve been reading your columns inThe Wall Street Journal and I believe that an affiliation with my institution might be really good for your career. Could we talk about that?” We talked about it a little bit, and then he came to Syracuse and we had supper and we talked that a little bit more. But then he seemed to disappear for six or eight weeks—I didn’t hear from him.

It turned out Henry had been recruited to come to AEI to head up the National Research Initiative. He called me after getting reestablished in Washington and started by saying, “I’ve had a chance to think about what we discussed before, and have had a change of opinion. I think there is another place that’s better for your career.” That was how I came to AEI.

I knew immediately that connecting with AEI was a good fit. After I had been coming here for about a month, I said to my wife, “I love that place. The people are wonderful; the ideas are so fresh. The thinking is completely unconventional. It’s a perfect fit for me. I’ve got to find a way to get down there full-time.” This is not exactly what I was envisioning at the time.

I’ve never been professionally more comfortable than at AEI. There’s no group of scholars I admire more than you. There’s no source of ideas I find more exciting and compelling and impressive. There’s really no organization I feel can have more positive impact on American public policy than AEI.

In truth, coming to AEI is like finally coming home. Research by AEI scholars literally changed my career. Fifteen years ago, when I was still a musician but studying economics pretty seriously, I happened across a work of Charles Murray. I thought it was about the most amazing thing I had ever read: a new way of looking at evidence and real-life social problems, and coming up with counterintuitive solutions. I had never seen anything like it. I said to myself, “This is what I want to do. I want to be an empirical social scientist, and to write books like this.” Easier said than done, of course—there’s only one Charles Murray. But it showed me the true north for my career.

When I started my Ph.D., I found I thought a little bit differently about most policy issues than a lot of my colleagues. This was, in part, because I was reading research that diverged from the academic norm—research by AEI scholars like Michael Novak, Irving Kristol, and Nick Eberstadt, who all had the audacity to show that democratic capitalism is good for people in America and around the world. On politics I was reading the work of David Frum and Michael Barone—both later to become AEI scholars.

Since that time I have been a devotee of an expanding list of AEI scholars, from Leon Kass to Sally Satel. When I finally arrived as a visiting scholar in 2007, it was a thrill: Finally I met the people who had shaped my worldview—and will continue to shape it.

Following Chris is not an easy thing to do—it’s a daunting task. This is the house that Chris built. From 1986 until now, the American Enterprise Institute has gone from being virtually bankrupt to finding itself in the black every single year. AEI enjoys unparalleled respect and impact. Chris has built a Board of Trustees that is as committed to changing the world in positive ways as any of the scholars—and willing to provide the support to prove it. Chris and David Gerson have developed a staff that is deeply committed to the mission of AEI. Coming from the university world, I can tell you that the sense of the mission all the way through a Board and a staff and a set of scholars is something that is simply extraordinary. And most amazing of all, Chris has achieved this in a way that reflects selfless service.

My own core research is concerned with giving and volunteering. One of the most interesting findings in experiments about giving and volunteering is that when people witness strangers behaving charitably toward others, they perceive that the givers are good leaders. Indeed, one of the best ways that people can signal to others that they are leaders is by being witnessed as givers. There’s actually no better example of this pattern than the career of Chris DeMuth. The fact that he has dedicated his own career to yours, as well as to the credibility, fame, and impact of the American Enterprise Institute, provides no better model that I could possibly ever find for this job.

In thinking about this position, one of the questions I asked myself was, “Why does AEI have so much more impact than other think tanks? Why does AEI win so many more policy debates than universities? What’s the secret?” As near as I can tell, it basically comes down to a strategy that Chris articulated a minute ago: Attract great people. But I think it goes subtly even further: Attract great people who have a shared set of strong, core values.

What are these values? Here’s one: A commitment to individual opportunity, based on a belief that people thrive best when they enjoy personal opportunity as opposed to a limitless state. Here’s another value: respect for free enterprise—not as a system to protect power and privilege, but as the best system to protect people who are vulnerable among us. And yet another key value—and a positively subversive one in some circles—is this: dedication to the interests of the United States, based on the belief that American public policy should serve American interests.

When great scholars share basic values such as these, it’s obvious. To do our work we don’t need a pledge of loyalty or any written creed—and even less, the adherence to the platform of any political party. All we need is a commitment to search for the truth as we see it; adherence to the highest standards of research quality and excellence; a desire to spread the truth with passion; and the self-assurance do this fearlessly.

Perhaps that sounds like a simple strategy—but behold its power. No comparably-sized organization has been a bigger force in public policy debates, from guiding deregulation in the 1980s, setting the agenda for welfare reform in the 1990s, and, today, looking at the biggest problems in national defense, social security, and our education system.

AEI has always produced the right ideas at the right time–and that’s why I’m excited to be here. It’s the reason I believe that your work is so much more important than any single research agenda, including my own.

Now, there is going to be plenty of time to talk about the ideas we’re going to work on together, and all of the ways that we’re going to think about the challenges that face us in the future. Before anything else, I want to tell you that my top priority is conserving our proven strategy for success. At the same time, we’ll be thinking aggressively about the gaps we want to fill, from energy and immigration to transportation and the promises of global entrepreneurship.

Other priorities I have will be to broaden our base of support and improving our infrastructure. I know that the infrastructure issue is something many of you are thinking about, too. People talk a lot about our space problems, which I will admit I’ve experienced: I’ve been in temporary offices for months myself, and I usually just try to squat in offices where I don’t find anybody. I get displaced a lot. When I was here last week, I got kicked out of three offices when the rightful tenants showed up. I thought about complaining to Michael Drueen, but I figured he’d just tell me to take it up with the next president.

As we move into the near future, together we may well be facing a policy environment that’s not particularly congenial to many of AEI’s core ideals. We may be looking at pressure for more regulation on the private economy, higher taxes, a growing government, and at the same time a shrinking military.

As challenging as these things might be, I think they will represent an amazing opportunity. This will be exactly the time to reestablish our central mission—through the force of our ideas and values—to reenergize the movement for democratic capitalism, with AEI as that movement’s brain. It will be the time to demonstrate that we are truly an independent intellectual force beholden to no political party. It will be the time to show our generous supporters, who share our values, how they can keep those values alive and well through AEI.

Most of all, it will be the time to make our fundamental case, the case which I dare say animates everyone here today: that the importance of freedom, strength, and prosperity is AEI’s gift to America—and that a strong, prosperous, free America is truly a gift to the world.

I am honored to serve you and I am honored to serve AEI. I can’t wait to get started.

Think-Tank Confidential (2007)

Think-Tank Confidential

Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2007

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In the fall of 2007 I decided that it was time to bring my twenty-year tenure as president of the American Enterprise Institute to a close, and worked with AEI’s trustees to put together a succession plan and process for choosing a successor. When it came time to make a public announcement, I thought it would be nicer than a standard press release—and more effective in publicizing our search for a successor—to mention my impending departure in a published op-ed article on the broader subject of the intellectual and political role of think tanks. The result was this piece in The Wall Street Journal, which served as a brief valedictory of my years at AEI. When I distributed the article to AEI donors and associates, I added a postscript explaining my decision, which is included here.

Letter to Four Senators on AEI Climate Change Research (2007)

Letter to Four Senators on AEI Climate Change Research

AEI Online, February 8, 2007

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In February 2007 the British Guardian ran a scurrilous article claiming that the American Enterprise Institute had offered cash inducements to scientists to dispute certain findings about climate change in the then-current report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The attack was regurgitated a day or two later in the Washington Post, and I soon received an inquisitorial letter from four U.S. Senators—Patrick Leahy and Bernard Sanders of Vermont, Dianne Feinstein of California, and John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Think tanks are continuously engaged in policy and political controversy—that is their calling—and not infrequently they are attacked by those who dislike their positions as serving as the cat’s paw of corporate or financial interests. I almost always ignored such attacks when I was at AEI, because responding would be tedious and would give renewed publicity to the false initial attacks. The letter from the four senators, however, was amazingly gullible, snidely accusatory, and was giving the Guardian story a second life on the Internet—and it also seemed to me to raise important questions about official disapproval of dissenting policy views. So I sent the senators a blunt reply, which is presented here along with their incoming letter, the Guardian article, and the documentation included in my reply.

I posted my letter and attachments on the AEI website, which had the desired effect of closing down the attacks and bringing the controversy to an end. But the denouement was unsatisfactory in one important respect. I had thought the senators owed AEI an apology—but, knowing that senators never apologize, simply asked them whether they still stood by their letter and thought it had been well-considered. I never received a response, nor as far as I know did any of them have another word to say on the subject. Senator Sanders, however, left his initial letter posted on his official government website, under a headline that he was “demanding answers from AEI”—and it is still posted as of this writing, eight years later (March 2015).

Introductory Remarks for Mario Vargas Llosa (2005)

Introductory Remarks for Mario Vargas Llosa

2005 Irving Kristol Lecture, March 2, 2005

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Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, President Aznar, distinguished guests, welcome to the American Enterprise Institute’s 2005 Annual Dinner and Irving Kristol Lecture. My AEI colleagues and I are gratified that such a large and accomplished congregation should be gathered here this evening. We are especially grateful for the generous support of our good friends at Pfizer and of the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of our Dinner Committee.

President Bush’s bold recasting of American foreign policy, and stirring recent developments in Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and now throughout the Middle East, maybe more this afternoon, maybe Iran is next, have given us what Michael Novak wrote of in a 2004 book–“some faint reason to believe that the narrative of liberty will not be finished until it has suffused every society on Earth.” Of course Michael and the rest of us at AEI are hard-boiled realists when it comes to foreign policy. We hold that the facts of human aspiration are what they are and must be faced without illusion, and that only the most woolly headed ideologue could ignore them.

The past two years have been harsh and brutal for the people of Iraq and for the men and women of the American and coalition military forces. Many good people have been killed and many have suffered, among them several guests here this evening. Our hearts have been seared and broken many times but our resolve has not been broken–quite the contrary. Now, with the dramatic events of the past two months, dare we hope that we have arrived at the end of the beginning? Can freedom turn the tide against such maniacal cruelty? In the Cold War, it was not only our military might but also our personal and political freedoms that gave us the strength that prevailed in the end. For the duration those freedoms had often appeared to be softness, handicaps in a mortal struggle. But freedom is not soft. It is hard to win and hard to practice, and the institutions it gives rise to–those of liberal democracy and competitive enterprise–are correspondingly adamant and resilient. Now Islamist and secular tyrants and terrorists hold freedom in the same contempt that the Soviets once did; now the Soviets await them in the ash heap.

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Remarks at AEI Annual Dinner (2004)

Welcoming Remarks at AEI’s 2004 Annual Dinner

February 10, 2004

Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, colleagues and distinguished guests, welcome to the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

George Shultz was once asked: What is the most important qualification for a senior position in government? He replied: A high tolerance for ambiguity.

Presidents and Cabinet Secretaries only get to make hard calls–the easy calls are made by others. Many decisions have good arguments on both sides, but the really hard ones are those that combine very large stakes with very large uncertainties. They call for intelligence of the larger and more profound kind, and a determination not to lose a kingdom for a shoe. If we were to form a commission of inquiry into every important Oval Office decision made without the luxury of waiting for more and better information, there would be no more worries about job creation in the service sector.

And in a fractious democracy such as ours, the hard decisions are endlessly contested–in public debate, in competition among the three branches of government, and even within the Executive Branch itself. For us, the biggest decisions are not executive calls at all, but rather a process of continuous advocacy, compromise, and adaptation.

During the past twenty-nine months, America and the Free World have entered a new political epoch whose defining features are, precisely, terribly large risks and terribly large uncertainties, especially concerning the operations of our enemies. Our political leaders have made a series of momentous decisions and have done so with great resolution. Their resolution is all the more impressive when one considers that the deficiencies of information, and of government institutions designed for an earlier era, are better known to them than to anyone else. Now their decisions and their resolution are being tested in the cauldron of democratic politics. Tolerance for ambiguity is not a predominate feature of partisan campaigning. But elections themselves have clarified and fortified our foreign policies to an impressive degree in the past.

In the Cold War, from the Truman Doctrine to the Reagan Doctrine, our enemies were demonstrating their WMDs out in the open, bragging about how they would use them against us, routinely invading and subjugating other nations, and slaughtering civilians by the millions. Still, fashioning and sustaining a political consensus was very hard, and was contested from start to finish. Many Americans sincerely believed, and argued vehemently, that the root of the world’s problems wasAmerica itself. But we prevailed. And we prevailed not in spite of, but because of, the vigor of our democratic practices and the sturdiness of popular understanding.

Can we do it again, in circumstances more shrouded and insidious? Today, despite stupendous initial victories, we are in the midst of strenuous and necessary debates over military and political strategy, the effectiveness of our intelligence and diplomatic institutions, and the maintenance of fiscal discipline and personal and economic freedom at home. But if we stand at the beginning of another fifty-year epoch–a “generational commitment” as Condoleezza Rice puts it–then we are still just getting started, still at the moment of creation of new policies and new institutions for facing the tasks and perils ahead.

That the two men who are speaking to us this evening have been present at the creation is another great stroke of American fortune. One, the recipient of AEI’s Irving Kristol Award for 2004, is a man of thinking and writing. The other, a former AEI senior fellow and vice chairman of our Board, now vice president of the United States, is a man of thinking and action.

Charles Krauthammer’s great contribution has been to see through fogs of uncertainty in times of upheaval. He has grasped the essentials of new problems while others remained confused by incidentals. More than once, he has provided us with an intellectual architecture that shows that what we already know provides a sturdy foundation for action.

Our media, which can take the silliest people and ideas seriously, often find truly serious men and women a bafflement. It is very funny to read the latest line on Dick Cheney–that this open and engaging man, who has expressed himself on every manner of policy question in thirty years at the center of American politics, who has been Minority Whip of the House of Representatives, who has served in the senior ranks of four administrations, who has become the activist vice president par excellence, is just now emerging from obscurity, getting around town, attending coming-out parties, and plunging into the thick of public debate.

At AEI we admire people who think before they speak, who choose their words carefully, and who understand when the time for research is over and the time for decision has arrived. We are very honored that the vice president would continue to attend our councils while on extended leave-of-absence through 2009–or 2017. Tonight he has graciously agreed to introduce our Irving Kristol Lecturer.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States.

Introductory Remarks for Allan Meltzer (2003)

Introductory Remarks for Allan Meltzer

2003 Irving Kristol Award, March 4, 2003

In our sixty years of labors, no one has had a more profound influence on the work of the American Enterprise Institute, or on American political discourse, than Irving Kristol. Combining philosophical depth with intense practicality and constant good cheer, he has, as President Bush has put it, “transformed political debate on every subject he approached, from economics to religion, from social welfare to foreign policy.” He has also transformed the careers of a very large number of the men and women here tonight.

In recent years Irving has retired from active supervision of the two great journals he founded, The Public Interest and The National Interest; he has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; and he has successfully traversed two major encounters with the Health Care Delivery System. Still he shows up at AEI regularly, and still he shows up everyone else with the fastest wit and most penetrating ideas at the table. It does AEI great honor, and it will inspire generations of policy scholars and activists to come, that Irving has agreed that AEI’s annual award may henceforth be know as the Irving Kristol Award.

The first Kristol Award has been bestowed by our Council of Academic Advisers on Allan H. Meltzer. Allan’s academic achievements began with his brilliant work on monetary theory in the 1960s, which made him the co-founder of the monetarist school with Milton Friedman. That work, revolutionary at the time, has long since been adopted in mainstream economic science. It has also, to a singular degree, been adopted in actual policy, to the immense benefit of the American economy, thanks to Allan’s relentless efforts of twenty-seven years as chairman of the Shadow Open Market Committee. Allan is also a founder of Public Choice economics, which explains the composition of government taxing and spending in terms of the rational self-interest of voters and political groups, and has greatly improved the realism of policy research.

Honoring Allan is also an act of political magnanimity at a time of reversal and dissension at the Democratic Party. He is the first economist to receive AEI’s annual award who get his start in the Kennedy administration and went on to be a prominent and vociferous opponent of Republican economic nostrums–that is, of the Nixon wage and price controls. Continuing in this vein, Allan recently reminded us that in 1962–a time like today of economic skittishness in the wake of a terrifying international crisis–it was President Kennedy who prescribed dramatic reductions in corporate and individual taxes. In the Congress, the Democrats’ proposals for tax relief for corporations and the rich were lambasted by Republican deficit hawks, who said they would be fiscally irresponsible and inflationary; whereupon they passed and ushered in years of prosperity for the nation and the national treasury.

In recent years Allan has led the bipartisan Meltzer Commission on international financial reform. The group’s recommendations have had a significant influence at the International Monetary Fund and on the Bush administration’s proposals for overhauling the development-assistance programs; in geologic time they may even penetrate to the Gnomes of 18th and H at the World Bank. Allan’s current Mr. Everest is his History of the Federal Reserve–the magnificent first volume out last fall, the second in progress, with time out to prepare the first Kristol Lecture, entitled “Leadership and Progress.”

The 2003 Irving Kristol Award, a leather-bound set of the complete works and correspondence of Adam Smith, is inscribed:

To Allan H. Meltzer
Pioneer of political economy and policy reform
Teacher to students, scholars, and statesmen
Intellectual leader in the causes of liberty and progress

Taiwan’s Democratic Development (2002)

Taiwan’s Democratic Development

Introductory Remarks for Madame Chen Wu, Sue-Jen, September 24, 2002

Five thousand six hundred ninety-seven years is a very long time, and much of it is unrecorded, but as far as we know the first peaceful democratic transfer of political power in all of Chinese history took place on May 20, 2000, when Chen Shui-bian was inaugurated President of the Republic of China on Taiwan. In the national presidential election two months earlier, he and his Democratic Progressive Party had defeated the candidate of the Kuomintang Party, which had ruled the Republic of China continuously since the arrival of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. But on Inauguration Day even KMT hearts put aside the bitterness of defeat, and swelled with unconcealed pride, for they knew that what they and all of the citizens of Taiwan had achieved was of world-historical importance.

From a distance–say, from the perspective of an editorial in an American newspaper–the emergence of democracy on Taiwan had looked natural and preordained: the “democratization process” it was called. And there had indeed been elements of process and planning: Just as Chiang Kai-shek had set aside his military instincts and established a free economy, so his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, had set aside his political heritage and begun to liberalize the press and the electoral system, and Lee Teng-hui, the nation’s first popularly elected president, had held fast to his democratic principles even as his KMT party was increasingly threatened by the emergence of political rivals. Yet from the inside the growth of democracy was not a process but a hard-fought battle with an uncertain result–with heroes and villains, sacrifice and suffering, grave risks and great deeds, and physical as well as verbal violence.

President Chen, and his wife Chen Wu, Sue-Jen, became indispensable leaders in that battle. For them it was certainly not a matter of process or planning, but rather of trying to do the simple right thing in reaction to discrete events, of personal growth, and of a succession of individual steps that led one to another in the cascade of popular insistence on political freedom that swept the Republic of China in the 1980s and 1990s. He was a man of humble origins, who had married above himself as so many of us have done, now a prospering lawyer with two children and a bright and comfortable future ahead. But there were abuses, official attacks on those who dared to criticize the government, a dramatic incident in Kaohsiung, a sedition trial of political activists before a military court. Chen Shui-bian could not pretend that all was well or that he couldn’t bother to get involved. With the vigorous encouragement of his wife, he became counsel for the defense, then a crusading human rights lawyer and political dissident, then a political prisoner himself, then an assistant to his legislator wife, then a legislator in his own right, then the first popularly elected Mayor of Taipei.

So it was that on that brilliant Taipei spring morning of May 20, 2000, a parade of official limousines pulled up to their home to escort two veteran freedom fighters to their inauguration at the top of their nation’s government. But how would they appear–and how would Taiwan’s new First Lady, confined to a wheelchair since 1985, make an appropriately stately entrance to the presidential stage? Suddenly the front door swung open and there stood the President-elect, beaming with joy and carrying his bride and political partner firmly in his arms (she was equally beaming and also somewhat surprised) across the threshold and out to the waiting limos surrounded by worried staff and delighted crowds. I daresay there will be no such moment of exuberant humanity when a new President of the People’s Republic of China is stiffly decreed next March. When one fine day a political leader in Beijing does present himself before a cheering throng carrying his wife and soul-mate in his arms, we will know that democracy, and political equality, have arrived on the Chinese mainland as well.

It is a very great honor for the American Enterprise Institute to welcome a democratic activist of such singular principle, accomplishment, and bravery as Madame Chen Wu, Sue-Jen. That she is also the gracious First Lady of the Republic of China makes the honor all the more gratifying–especially because of the continuing broken official relations between the United States and the ROC, and because this is the first visit of a Taiwanese First Lady to Washington in fifty years.

Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Madame Chen.

Landmarks of Washington, D.C. (2002)

Landmarks of Washington, D.C.

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, September 11, 2002

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In 2002, the American Enterprise Institute commissioned the artist and illustrator Elliott Banfield (who among other things is art director and regular illustrator of the Claremont Review of Books) to prepare a three-picture series of “Landmarks of Washington, D.C.”—the Capitol, the White House, and the Supreme Court. Mr. Banfield’s magnificent creations were installed in AEI’s Wohlstetter Conference Center on September 11, 2002. The document here includes the evening’s remarks, notably those of Daniel P. Moynihan—then retired from the U.S. Senate, and a member of AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers—who in his long public career led many successful efforts to improve the architecture, thoroughfares, and public spaces of Washington. The document also includes Mr. Banfield’s notes on his three pictures and reproductions of the pictures themselves.

Democracy for Peace (Forward) (2002)

Democracy for Peace (Forward)

AEI Online, September 01, 2002

This essay is the text of a speech delivered on June 20, 2002, by Natan Sharansky, deputy prime minister of Israel, at the AEI World Forum in Beaver Creek, Colorado. The World Forum is an annual conference of government officials, legislators, business and financial leaders, and academics; it is sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and hosted by former president Gerald R. Ford.

Mr. Sharansky’s address is notable, apart from its intrinsic intellectual force and stirring eloquence, for the circumstances of its delivery and its relationship to immediate political developments. It came at a crucial moment in the U.S.-led war on terrorism–following several days of suicide bombings in Israel that had left thirty citizens dead and dozens injured, and preceding a major statement of U.S. policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that President George W. Bush was scheduled to deliver the following week. Mr. Sharansky took the occasion to deliver a thorough exposition of the “Sharansky Plan” for achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians–a plan that would establish democratic institutions, accountable leadership, and civil freedoms among Palestinians as the precondition of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. In so doing, he made a larger and more fundamental argument: The conflict between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, he said, is not a tribal war between Jews and Arabs but rather one front in the global war against terrorist states and organizations. The new war–like the earlier, cold war against Soviet communism, in which Sharansky himself had played a prominent role as political dissident and prisoner–is in reality a struggle between democracy and tyranny, and must be understood as such if terrorism, like communism, is to be destroyed.

Although the Sharansky Plan had previously been neglected or scorned in Israel, the United States, and elsewhere, the plan–and the relationship between national tyrannies and international terrorism–had been receiving increasing attention in the weeks preceding Mr. Sharansky’s address, as President Bush’s public statements had emphasized the importance of democracy to undermining terrorism at its political roots. Then, four days after the address, President Bush made a fundamental shift in U.S. policy, calling on the Palestinian people to “build a practicing democracy” and “elect new leaders not compromised by terror”–effectively embracing central elements of the Sharansky Plan (“President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership,” June 24, 2002). In the following weeks, President Bush extended his call for democratic freedoms to other areas of the Middle East, notably Iran, that are sources of terrorist organization and financing (“Statement by the President,” July 12, 2002). Mr. Sharansky’s essay stands as a deep and compelling argument for what is now a central strategy in the war against terrorists and as an important historical document in the development of that strategy.Christopher DeMuth is the president of AEI.

Remarks at AEI Chairman’s Dinner (2001)

Remarks at a Dinner for AEI Trustees and Scholars

December 7, 2001

The principle of regression to the mean is one of the most powerful in the universe, and a reliable humbler of enthusiasts and declinists. Tonight we meet in somber circumstances—much more somber than the circumstances of last year’s dinner were festive. That evening came just two days after the vice chairman of the AEI Board of Trustees had been definitively pronounced Vice President–elect of the United States, and Lynne Cheney regaled us with tales from the campaign trail and the new Veep promised gleefully to raid AEI talent for the new administration—a promise in which, as ever, he proved true to his word. And our poster that evening showed John Bolton frowning over dimpled ballots and hanging chads in the Palm Beach County recount. Tonight our attentions are on a war campaign rather than a political campaign; John Bolton is in Moscow in urgent negotiations to end the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; and our poster is from an earlier December 7, displaying a torn and battered Old Glory much like the one that flew over the 2001 World Series.[1]

For almost the entire fall, up and down the Atlantic seaboard, from Boston to Washington, we have been faced, day after day, with brilliant, crystalline skies such as I have never seen before—just as preternaturally clear as the sky on the morning of September 11. The perfect clarity and stillness of the Earth, forming the tableau for so much human carnage, grief, anger, and confusion, seemed to me a rebuke—the meteorological equivalent of God’s pronouncement to Job: Where were you when I created the universe? And, more prosaically, it seemed to me that we had entered a world where act was everything, and thought and idea nothing, and that as our fate now depended chiefly on the progress of our arms very little depended on the progress of our ideas.

But on the latter point I was entirely wrong. We are all of us consigned to Job’s part, only we sometimes realize it more clearly than at other times; and it is especially the part of those who work at AEI, whose job is not just to understand and explain but to rail–to use our faculties of reason and argument as best we can not only to analyze but to reform and improve, often against implacable circumstances.

Almost everyone has his post-911 spin on why exactly what he was doing before has now become more important than ever. This is captured in the New Yorker cartoon showing a customer addressing a bartender: “If I don’t have a second martini, the terrorists will have won.” Here is my post-911 spin: Just as we are filled with admiration and gratitude (and some of us a little envy) for the deeds of our military men of action, so we are coming to realize that our own work at AEI, and its influence on pulpits and pundits and generals and legislators, is even more important in wartime than in peacetime.

In times of peace, it is often easy to know what should be done—the challenge is figuring out how to do it. But in war, knowing what to do is often the hard part, because this requires not only intellectual skill and insight but also moral clarity. And what distinguishes AEI scholars from others in the knowledge business, such as many university scholars, is the attempt to combine analysis with moral purpose. For us, ideas are not playthings to be toyed with and manipulated and paraded for their own sake. We are here because we have moved from mastery of a particular academic field to a moral calling: to use what we know to try to make the world as it is conform more nearly to our conception of an achievable better world.

We have learned this fall that horrible events can make us better than we were before. This has begun with the fervent, patriotic outpouring of gratitude for things we had taken for granted. As Michael Novak quipped the other day in introducing his new book, On Two Wings: If we are going to be murdered just for being Americans, then we might as well be Americans. The war has begun so well because the skill and bravery of our military has been matched by the great moral clarity of our President—as clear as the September skies and the best response to them a man could give.

Before the war is over it will make America and Americans better still. A truly mortal danger will leave us less distracted by the trivial and contrived, and the necessities of responding to the danger will make us less self-indulgent than we had become. The war against terrorism will oblige us to confront the phenomenon of militant Islam itself, not just its criminal epigones; among other things this will require that we cease treating the Arab world as hopelessly backward and begin to help it come to grips with modernity, pluralism, and liberalism. These tasks will provide many new outlets for the reforming, improving impulse that is so essential to the American spirit, and they will lead us to understand our own culture and institutions with new perspective and seriousness.

In all of this, we at AEI now have a generation of work cut out for us. What I have called the need to combine intellectual skill with moral clarity Donald Rumsfeld put with greater and characteristic crispness this morning, in his December 7 essay in the Wall Street Journal. He wrote that we need to be smart as well as brave. If we at AEI can be as brave in our work as our warriors are smart in theirs, I know that we will shine.

Notes

1. The poster, “Remember Dec 7th!—We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,” is a 1942 War Information Office poster recently donated to AEI by Kenneth Rendell.

Remarks at AEI Annual Dinner (2001)

Be Not Afraid (Welcoming Remarks at AEI’s 2001 Annual Dinner)

February 13, 2001

Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the annual dinner and Francis Boyer Lecture of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

My colleagues and I are very grateful to the Dinner Committee and to our stalwart friends who have purchased and sold tickets to help us raise funds for AEI’s work. We are indebted above all to Cathy Windels and her wonderful associates at Pfizer, which is again sponsoring our dinner. The fine dinner wine has again been supplied by Henry and Holly Wendt, proprietors of the Quivira Vineyards. We are specially grateful to them and hope they will join us from Sonoma County this evening in raising a toast to Justice Clarence Thomas.

We are delighted to have so many distinguished guests in attendance. Some of you were our office-mates at AEI just a month ago. Since you’ve left we have discovered just how distinguished you really are, because the word “honorable” has suddenly appeared before your names. May your service to our new President indeed be honorable and accomplished.

Speaking of honor, before we do anything else this evening I know we all want to express our great admiration, appreciation, and affection for Vice President Cheney and Lynne Cheney.

Washington is at one of its perennial moments of political rejuvenation. Old hierarchies are swept away; Washington is filled with arrivistes with new ideas and ambitions; jaded old-timers cluck knowingly that the new approaches are naïve and bound to fail; and then, right on schedule, many of the new approaches prove to be triumphs.

Here is another uplifting political rhythm: Just as a new President is taking charge, we arrive at February, the birth month of our three greatest presidents, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald Reagan. Nowadays the government lumps all of our chief magistrates into an undifferentiated glob to be celebrated on “Presidents’ Day.” This concoction expresses the modern, judgment-free spirit that Charles Murray has dubbed “ecumenical niceness.” It also expresses the preoccupation of our politicians with status as opposed to merit, with group identity as opposed to individual character—call it “affirmative profiling.” Yet Americans obviously persist in taking intense interest in the role of good and bad character in public office. And when the birthdays of our greatest fathers come around, we note and long remember what they did to make and keep us free, and take increased devotion to that cause.

Yesterday was Lincoln’s Day, and brooding over Justice Thomas, Judge Bork, and the rest of us is this magnificent bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s times were so terrible, and his words and deeds so great, that they continue to instruct us in a much thinner age. The recent outpouring ofLincoln scholarship demonstrates that he was the original compassionate conservative.

Harry Jaffa’s New Birth of Freedom notes the decisive political consequence of Lincoln’s boldly reestablishing the Declaration of Independence, and its premise that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable Rights, as one of our founding and governing documents. This reminds us that in times of moral confusion, the resurrection of lost traditions and original intentions can be progressive not reactionary, liberating not oppressing.

Allen Guelzo’s Redeemer President notes that Lincoln, a life-long Doubter, ultimately believed and announced to his Cabinet that he was directed by his Maker to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and later delivered in the Second Inaugural, which turned out to be his epitaph, the most profound and humbling invocation of Divine judgment in our national history. This reminds us that there can be no wall between political leadership and religious faith. It also reminds the ACLU to suffer in silence when a modern President delivers an eloquent, religiously inspired Inaugural address.

Stephen Ambrose’s Nothing Like It in the World notes that Lincoln, on an 1859 swing through Iowa to test the waters for a national candidacy, paused at Council Bluffs to decide on the best Northern route for a transcontinental railroad—his favorite pro-growth project, which he also saw as an anti-slavery project. This reminds us that economic progress and moral progress can be and often are reinforcing. It also reminds us that presidential hopefuls visiting Iowa can do even more to promote the common good than ethanol subsidies.

The bust of Lincoln is AEI’s Boyer Award for 2001. It was cast in 1914 by the great neoclassical sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman. Weinman created many of America’s finest works of civic sculpture and designed two of our loveliest coins, the Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty half-dollar. His many works in Washington include Destiny on the north pediment of the National Archives;The Drafting of the Declaration of Independence on the pediment of the Jefferson Memorial; the statues of Reason facing Justice now at the entrance of the Ronald Reagan Building; and–get this–Good Versus Evil, portraying Justice defiant and unblindfolded as she confronts Evil, which forms the frieze on the back wall of the courtroom of the United States Supreme Court.

In his youth, Weinman studied at Cooper Union just twenty-six years after Lincoln had kicked off his campaign for the 1860 Republican nomination there. Later in life he created two monumental statues of Lincoln for the state of Kentucky. One stands in the State Capitol at Frankfort; the other, commissioned in part by Lincoln’s son Robert, is at Lincoln’s birth-place of Hodgenville. Weinman had this bust specially cast from the Hodgenville Lincoln. It is inscribed:

To Clarence Thomas
Judge, Teacher, and Exemplar
Of the Best in Our National Character
And of Our Constitutional Ideal of Ordered Liberty

To elaborate, and to introduce our lecturer, I call upon my esteemed colleague, AEI Senior Fellow Robert Bork.

Remarks at AEI Chairman’s Dinner (1998)

Remarks at AEI Chairman’s Dinner

AEI Online, December 10, 1998

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One year ago this evening Jim Wilson delivered his Boyer Lecture entitled “Two Nations.” He described America as two nations to dramatize the contrast between our dominant culture—rich, powerful, and accomplished, the successful children of the Enlightenment—and our subculture, which he did not call the underclass but many now do, characterized by broken or nonexistent families, lack of attachment to work, school, and other social institutions, promiscuous and often predatory sex, and high rates of violent crime, illegitimacy, and drug use. Jim’s concern that evening was with the second nation—with our many failed attempts to bring it into the dominant culture and with how we might do better in the future. But his opening passage contained more than a hint of concern about the first American nation as well:

We live in a nation confident of its wealth and proud of its power, yet convinced that this wealth cannot prevent and this power cannot touch a profound corrosion of our cultural soul. We are materially better off than our parents but spiritually worse off.[1]

Moreover, Jim’s lecture was an extension of earlier work with obvious application to American culture in general as well as to the cultural problems of modern poverty. His book The Moral Sense [2] emphasized the crucial social role of the traditional family in instilling moral understanding and virtuous habits in each succeeding generation. His 1985 essay, “The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy,”[3] published as the Reagan economic boom was getting into full throttle, argued that good policy could not be concerned exclusively with economic incentives and formal rules of law and policy—which up to then had been the strong emphasis of neoconservative policy argument—but needed also to be concerned with the stuff upon which all those incentives and rules operate: with individual character, with the family that shapes character, and with the larger culture that shapes and is shaped by individual character and family structure.

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Remarks at AEI World Forum (1997)

Opening Remarks at AEI World Forum

June 18, 1997

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On behalf of everyone at the American Enterprise Institute, I wish to thank President and Mrs. Ford for hosting the sixteenth annual World Forum. We are delighted to be out of miasmic Washington for a few days and up in the clean air of the Rocky Mountains. And we are very gratified that so many distinguished men and women have come from near and far to this year’s gathering.

Before proceeding further, I have a few announcements to make about last-minute additions to our schedule.

First, Lord Callaghan will be making a special presentation tomorrow on the subject, “Why the British elections have refuted everything said at the last ten World Forums about the inevitable triumph of conservative government and the end of the welfare state.” Jim’s presentation will begin at eight o’clock tomorrow morning and run through 12:00 noon. We have canceled all previously scheduled morning sessions to make room for it.

Second, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing will be making a special presentation on the subject, “Why the French elections have not confirmed anything said at the last ten World Forums about the inevitable political turmoil resulting from European monetary union.” Valéry’s presentation will begin at 12:00 noon and run through 5:00 p.m. We have canceled all the afternoon sessions to make room for it.

Third, we are all invited to gather outside Village Hall on Friday afternoon, immediately before the reception at the Fords’ residence, to watch President Ford make a parachute jump form 5,000 feet overhead, aiming for the lawn next to the Centennial ski lift. We expect to attract extensive national media coverage of this event. Our press release quotes President Ford as saying that he is making the jump to “reach closure”—on a long-standing wager with George Bush over which of them would maintain his youthful athletic prowess longer.

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Remarks at AEI Annual Dinner (1995)

The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism

Welcoming Remarks at AEI Annual Dinner, December 6, 1995

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Open with singing of “America, the Beautiful,” led by Rev. Robert Childs, Pastor, Berean BaptistChurch.

Rev. Childs, thank you for leading us in that stirring musical benediction. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the American Enterprise Institute’s 1995 annual dinner and Francis Boyer Lecture.

This gathering is substantially the handiwork of the sixty-three corporate and professional leaders who constitute our dinner committee, led by two outstanding generals, George Peapples of the General Motors Corporation and Susan Walter of the General Electric Company. I would like to extend heartfelt thanks from everyone at AEI for their spirited hard work on behalf of our common enterprise.

I also want to recognize and thank Mr. Henry Wendt, AEI trustee and former chairman of SmithKline Beecham, and Dr. Jerry Karabelas, president of the firm’s North American Pharmaceuticals division, not only for SmithKline’s long-time sponsorship of the Francis Boyer Award in memory of their former chairman, but for their own steadfast intellectual and moral support of AEI.

We are not uncompromising deficit hawks at AEI, but we have of necessity been engaged in our own deficit reduction program since the mid-1980s, and tonight I am happy to declare victory. Nine years ago AEI had a few thousand dollars in the bank and $9 million in debts; tonight we have zero debt and $13 million in the bank. At long last AEI’s financial resources are catching up to her prodigious intellectual resources; I am profoundly grateful to the many people in this room who have made that possible.

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Not Quite the End of Racism (1995)

Not Quite the End of Racism

Wall Street Journal, November 3, 1995

Letter to the EditorYour article on Robert Woodson’s and Glenn Loury’s resignations from the American Enterprise Institute over Dinesh D’Souza’s book The End of Racism (“Two Black Conservatives Are Now Searching For a New Home,” page one, Oct 19), seemed a bit off balance to this participant-observer in the affair.

Mr. Woodson was a resident fellow at AEI from 1977-82, but he has not been actively involved in our work for more than a decade. Prof. Loury was a member of AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers, a group of university-based scholars that advises on our appointments, publications and research. In this capacity, he was given a draft of The End of Racism for review when the book was being written, and Mr. D’Souza and I asked him earnestly and repeatedly for his criticisms and suggestions. He provided none.

The juxtaposition of the deeply thoughtful and anguished Messrs. Loury and Woodson on the one hand, and the insensitive and incendiary Mr. D’Souza on the other, is most unfair. Although you report that they avoided the “r” word, Messrs. Loury and Woodson not only called the book racist but made the charge the headline of their press release (“Black Conservatives Resign From American Enterprise Institute in Response to ‘Racist’ Book by AEI Resident Scholar Dinesh D’Souza”). Mr. Woodson has several times, and with great relish, called Mr. D’Souza “the Mark Fuhrman of public policy.” These attacks are being leveled by men who say they object primarily to the “tone” and “insensitivity” of The End of Racism. The book they are attacking in this manner has been praised by serious intellectuals and political activists of all races and political creeds, and has been reviewed seriously even by those who disagree sharply with its arguments. Its most dramatic practical consequence to date has been the firing of Washington Times columnist Samuel Francis over his remarks at a white supremacist gathering, chillingly documented in The End of Racism.

I doubt that Mr. Woodson has read The End of Racism with any care. He telephoned the Free Press, the book’s publisher, and asked them to ship him a copy by overnight express, after he had announced the press event to denounce the book as “racist” and to proclaim with Prof. Loury their resignations from AEI. His subsequent attacks have consisted mainly of parading a few sentences from the 550-page book, wrenched out of context to give a highly distorted impression of Mr. D’Souza’s arguments.

There is no gainsaying that both Prof. Loury and Mr. Woodson dislike The End of Racism intensely. No doubt AEI has published many things they disagree with along with many things they agree with. AEI publishes dozens of books and hundreds of articles every year, including frequent pieces on issues of race and social welfare from a variety of political and intellectual perspectives. We eagerly promote reasoned debate on everything we publish, and have already sponsored several forums where The End of Racism has been vigorously criticized as well as vigorously supported.

Messrs. Loury and Woodson’s action was more than a resignation and more than an intellectual argument with an erstwhile compatriot. It was a carefully staged political event aimed at anathematizing a book and its author, centered on the demand that others in the conservative camp denounce and repudiate Dinesh D’Souza on their say-so (“just as Fuhrman’s legal advocates dropped him as a client,” as their press release put it).

Irving Kristol’s 75th Birthday Dinner (1995)

Toasts and remarks at a dinner in honor of Irving Kristol

American Enterprise Institute, January 21, 1995

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Gerald R. Ford and the American Enterprise Institute

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Be Not Afraid (Welcoming Remarks at AEI’s 2001 Annual Dinner)

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The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism

Not Quite the End of Racism

Toasts and remarks at a dinner in honor of Irving Kristol

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