January 13-19, 2008 Issue |
Posted 1/8/08 at 12:22 PM
One of the most consequential Catholics of modern times is
also one of the least heralded and most enigmatic.
His name is William P. “Bill” Clark, known as “The Judge,” because
of his decade of service on the bench, including the California Supreme Court.
Those appointments followed his service as chief of staff to Gov. Ronald Reagan
in the 1960s and preceded his service as President Reagan’s deputy secretary of
state, national security adviser and secretary of the interior in the 1980s —
the positions through which Bill Clark changed history as Reagan’s most trusted
aide and adviser.
The Clark story is a moving saga of what was and what might
have been, a remarkable trail of footprints in the sand — a fitting image,
given that every one of us acknowledges the footprints but are unable to see
the figure who left them.
That path for Bill Clark started to come into focus in 1950
when he left an Augustinian novitiate in New York’s Hudson Valley, putting
aside the priesthood for a career as a lawyer, rancher and a litany of
unforeseen public service that he and Reagan would in retrospect refer to as
part of “the DP “— “the Divine Plan” that Providence had in store for them.
To fully chronicle “the DP” requires a book, not an article
— something I know well as Clark’s biographer. Most significant, however, were
two examples from 25 years ago.
First, what might have been:
In June 1981, Bill Clark was serving Ronald Reagan at the State
Department when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart announced he was
resigning. Reagan called “The Judge” into his office to ask him if he would
like to be considered for the position.
Before considering Clark’s answer, pause for a moment to consider
the offer:
Bill Clark had been a rancher’s son from rural California, a
family that lived off the land during the Great Depression. His beginnings
could not have been more humble.
He learned about the likes of Fulton Sheen not from TV —
like most people — but from books, since his family could not afford a
television. He managed to become a lawyer without ever earning a law degree,
taking just enough schooling (that which he could afford) to learn enough to
pass the bar exam the second time around.
He became a lawyer and a judge, and the ultimate honor would
be to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Bill Clark, however, declined the
president’s generous offer.
The quintessential citizen/public official, the lawmaker or
policymaker who puts down his plow for a few years to serve his country, and
then returns to the plow, Clark had come to Washington to serve his president
and his country, to accomplish some goals and then to return to his family and
his ranch. This was selfless service, as America’s Founding Fathers envisioned
public life.
Clark did not go to Washington to pad his resume, become
famous and die on the Supreme Court. Ronald Reagan knew that, which is one of
the reasons he so liked and trusted Clark.
“That’s what I thought you would say, Bill,” said President
Reagan with a grin, as he crossed Clark’s name off a short list of potential
replacements for Stewart.
Instead, the position went to Sandra Day O’Connor. And that
is the story of what might have been: If Clark had taken that Supreme Court
seat in 1981, he would not have voted the way that O’Connor did on pivotal
abortion cases like Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992). If Clark had taken that
job — which I have no doubt was his for the taking — Roe v. Wade would have
been reversed.
That was no doubt a major regret of Clark’s.
But the DP had something else in store. Rather than wage the
culture war, Bill Clark would wage the Cold War.
Six months later, he was tapped by Reagan to run the
National Security Council, the nation’s premier body for implementing national
security and foreign policy. It was in that capacity that Clark, as Reagan’s
closest and most influential adviser, became — by all accounts — the most
powerful man in Washington (next to the president himself) and, by extension, one
of the most powerful men in the world.
It was there, too, from that position of remarkable power
and influence — to which he never aspired — that Clark from January 1982
through October 1983, often working in consultation with only Reagan and no one
else in the room, laid the foundation to undermine the Soviet Union and win the
Cold War through a series of extraordinary and only recently declassified
National Security Decision Directives.
In addition to that work, Clark did a great deal for and
with Reagan to stop the Soviet Union, from shepherding the president’s
announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative, to being the White House
figure who worked with the Catholic bishops on controversial issues like the MX
missile, to serving as the principal liaison between the Reagan administration
and Pope John Paul II’s Vatican.
It was Clark who helped set up the June 1982 meeting at the
Vatican when Pope John Paul II and the president confided in one another that
they believed that God had spared their lives from assassination attempts the
previous year for the purpose of undermining atheistic Soviet communism.
From there, Clark (along with another instrumental Catholic,
CIA director Bill Casey) met weekly, sometimes daily during moments of crisis,
with Cardinal Pio Laghi, the apostolic delegate to the United States, at
Cardinal Laghi’s residence or other undisclosed locations, at times via a back
door at the White House.
By the time Clark left the National Security Council in late
1983, the pieces were in place for the Soviet downfall.
Clark was arguably the most important American Catholic in
the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, and, in that respect,
the second most important Catholic worldwide, behind only Pope John Paul II.
Yet most Catholics have never heard of the man. And why not?
Because of Clark’s genuine humility. He wouldn’t sell his
story or write memoirs even when everyone from Reagan’s most liberal
biographers to most conservative cabinet secretaries urged him to do so.
Only now, near the end of his life, did he consent to a
biographer’s request to tell his story. And, only then, the biographer
prevailed by appealing to Clark’s sense of duty to Reagan, to America and to
history — to setting straight certain key facts that only he knew. And, still,
he remains highly uncomfortable by the attention.
Today, the 76-year-old Clark spends his final days at his
ranch in Paso Robles, Calif., still surrounded by the works of the great
Catholic minds that inspired him for decades, from Aquinas to the latest
editions of Sheen’s Peace of Soul that rest on the coffee table in front of
him.
There he also pursues his final calling: He has built a
chapel on his ranch, which holds regular Mass and which plays host to some of
the finest minds in modern Catholicism: Franciscan Father Benedict Groeschel,
founder of Priests for Life Father Frank Pavone, Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio,
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn.
It is there, near the Blessed Sacrament on the inside, and,
on the outside, a small Italian fountain featuring a plaque inscribed with the
Peace Prayer of St. Francis — which Bill Clark and Ronald Reagan prayed
together — that Clark spends his final years, struggling with the onset of
Parkinson’s disease and even the occasional battle with what John of the Cross
called “the dark night of the soul.”
Of the Parkinson’s, he says, “God gave Parkinson’s to such
saints as John Paul II and my father, and now he has gotten around to the
sinners, such as myself.”
There, too, Clark also deals with, to borrow from St.
Augustine, a God-shaped vacuum, a yearning for the priesthood that remains
since those days at the Augustinian novitiate in New York.
It seems unlikely that a man of so many accomplishments can
still feel any longing, but, then again, Bill Clark’s story has always been
unlikely — and underappreciated.
Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, is
author of The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius
Press, 2007).
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