Quin Hillyer remembers Walter Berns:
Walter Berns provided generations of students a wonderfully prejudiced attachment to, and reverence for, the Constitution of the United States of America. It was a great life’s work. May we be ever grateful for Berns, for his work, and for the system of ordered liberty he expounded. And may he rest in God’s good peace and joy.
I’ve “known” Walter Berns since the early 1970s. As an undergraduate and graduate student studying political science at, respectively, the University of Dallas and the University of Chicago, I had read any number of pieces by Walter by the time I finished my PhD course work. His writings were models of clarity and insights and, most often, an exacting challenge to then conventional understandings of the American constitutional order and its underpinnings. In short, while not a teacher of mine, Walter was from very early on a mentor for sure.
However, I first met Walter in late summer of 1977 when he came to the memorial service at the University of Virginia for one of his closest friends, Herbert Storing—my teacher at the University of Chicago and dissertation adviser. Storing had just arrived at Virginia from Chicago a few days before to take up a chair in the government department and begin running a new program on the American presidency at the campus’ White Burkett Miller Center. (Storing had brought two other students and me from Chicago with him to be junior faculty and help set up the program.) Tragically, Storing suffered a fatal heart attack on the very first day we all met to organize ourselves at the Center.
What I will never forget was Walter reaching out to my colleagues and me in the midst of all the commotion that can and does go on with a funeral service—especially one involving such close friends—to make sure we were doing okay in the wake of having lost our teacher and adviser. Without hesitation, Walter was offering to be my mentor again—this time in person.
However, I first met Walter in late summer of 1977 when he came to the memorial service at the University of Virginia for one of his closest friends, Herbert Storing—my teacher at the University of Chicago and dissertation adviser. Storing had just arrived at Virginia from Chicago a few days before to take up a chair in the government department and begin running a new program on the American presidency at the campus’ White Burkett Miller Center. (Storing had brought two other students and me from Chicago with him to be junior faculty and help set up the program.) Tragically, Storing suffered a fatal heart attack on the very first day we all met to organize ourselves at the Center.
What I will never forget was Walter reaching out to my colleagues and me in the midst of all the commotion that can and does go on with a funeral service—especially one involving such close friends—to make sure we were doing okay in the wake of having lost our teacher and adviser. Without hesitation, Walter was offering to be my mentor again—this time in person.
Walter Berns was simply the finest scholar and gentleman I have ever known. For evidence of the former claim, read his work. For evidence of the latter, consider this AEI story.
I first met Berns when I was an intern at AEI with his fellow scholar Michael Novak in summer 1983. I continued to work at AEI for many years and also met Andrea, the cleaning lady on our floor. She was a petite, middle-aged woman who had immigrated from Bolivia. She had lots of smiles but only a little English; she was also an extremely thorough worker who thought some of her fellow cleaners were “lazy.”
One evening she asked me if I knew Walter Berns, whose office was nearby. I said yes, and she proceeded to tell me he was a great man. It seems she was owed overtime by the company that had the building’s cleaning contract, but they were refusing to pay her. She had told Berns about this injustice.
I suspect that had Andrea approached many of DC’s think tank scholars, she would have been lucky if they had forced themselves to listen to her story with a pretense of patience. Not Berns. He not only listened to her story, he marched down to the supervisor’s office the next day and demanded that they pay her what she was owed.
I first met Berns when I was an intern at AEI with his fellow scholar Michael Novak in summer 1983. I continued to work at AEI for many years and also met Andrea, the cleaning lady on our floor. She was a petite, middle-aged woman who had immigrated from Bolivia. She had lots of smiles but only a little English; she was also an extremely thorough worker who thought some of her fellow cleaners were “lazy.”
One evening she asked me if I knew Walter Berns, whose office was nearby. I said yes, and she proceeded to tell me he was a great man. It seems she was owed overtime by the company that had the building’s cleaning contract, but they were refusing to pay her. She had told Berns about this injustice.
I suspect that had Andrea approached many of DC’s think tank scholars, she would have been lucky if they had forced themselves to listen to her story with a pretense of patience. Not Berns. He not only listened to her story, he marched down to the supervisor’s office the next day and demanded that they pay her what she was owed.
When I audited a course Walter taught at Georgetown before I came to AEI, he scared me to death. He was always formidable but I was to later learn how kind and caring he was. When Walter was already feeling the effects of old age, I pushed him to give a lecture at AEI on Lincoln on the 200th anniversary of his birth. I could tell he had reservations about doing it. His voice wasn’t as strong as in the past, and he told me he would have to sit rather than stand to deliver the lecture. But I am so glad he did. I have rarely seen audiences at AEI give standing ovations, but they gave one to Walter for a brilliant lecture and for Walter and his many contributions. The last lines of that lecture “[A] nation, a people, can be known and be judged by its heroes, by whom it honors above all others.We pay ourselves the greatest compliment when we say that Abraham Lincoln is that man for us” still linger.
In a speech delivered when he was a young man, Lincoln lamented that his generation didn’t face the same heroic challenges that the founding fathers did. He called the founding fathers a “forest of giant oaks” who had built “a political edifice of liberty and equal rights.”
The forest of giant oaks today – scholars who have tended to the important work of explaining and defending the political edifice our founders built – has lost one of its giants. We mourn his passing.
In a speech delivered when he was a young man, Lincoln lamented that his generation didn’t face the same heroic challenges that the founding fathers did. He called the founding fathers a “forest of giant oaks” who had built “a political edifice of liberty and equal rights.”
The forest of giant oaks today – scholars who have tended to the important work of explaining and defending the political edifice our founders built – has lost one of its giants. We mourn his passing.
