My Father’s Day Falls Every Day and Year
Sunday
The air is clear. There is a soft spring breeze blowing over our swimming pool. The night blooming jasmine is giving me and our household a sumptuous gift of that perfect plumed air that is America in all of its glory — sweet, flowing endless, an endless fountain of all that makes America glorious — courage, patience, forgiveness, again, peace, acceptance of everyone else right at this instant.
The best friend the Jewish people had ever had was forced out by a largely Jewish media for what I still do not know.
I just finished a long nap lying in bed with my bride and her nurses. She’s not terribly ill. We’re both just old.
I’m thinking of my father and his father and my goddess wife and her father and his father.
My father’s family came from the Baltic States. They were not geniuses. They made one perfect choice. In about 1840, they could have chosen to go from Lithuania to Argentina or to America.
Thank you, God, they came to New Orleans.
Let’s skip a few decades: My father’s antecedents, like my Pop, were amazingly good with mathematics. About 120 years ago, they were skilled tool and die makers at Ford Motor. They were great with a slide rule. There were no computers or Internet.
They did all right. Henry Ford was well known to hate Jews. But my granddad rose there in Dearborn until the Great Depression hit everyone. The big banks failed. For close to a decade, my grand-pop was in the U.S. Army.
My father’s father was skilled on a mule and then on a horse. He was a dead shot at long distances, fighting in the Aguinaldo insurrection. We still have his U.S. Army Marksman medal in a Lucite case in our living room.
After that, there were long stretches of unemployment. But when Pearl Harbor came, my grandfather was too old to sit a horse in the jungles of the Philippines. Instead, my grandfather worked in the armories of the U.S. Army to make sure artillery and bombs worked as they should on Berlin and Manila.
My Pop, also incredibly good at math, was in the Navy, drawing up plans to make certain we had more than enough ordnance to ruin a stormtrooper’s night and day. Williams College, probably the finest small college in the nation, had taught statistics and economics well to this poor boy from Schenectady. By 1945, corporations and the government were bidding for his services. As far as I know, he never had to survive any protracted period of unemployment.
He also came up with some serious theorizing about macroeconomics. His main contributions had to do with whether the federal government should run deficits in peacetime or whether we should try to run surpluses. There was serious math in this work, and my Pop was good at it.
For most of his time in this vineyard, he was research director for the Committee for Economic Development — CED. It was the CEO’s of the largest U.S. Corporations and the largest labor unions — and even some extremely large farms and ranches.
My Pop was a serious student of Economics. He was mild-mannered and pretty much followed where the data told him to go. There were no shouting matches and absolutely no personal criticism of any kind.
To some, the CED and his spinoffs were as close to a real (not fantasy) establishment running the country as there would ever be. My Pop was the intellectual leader of the pack. In so doing he found himself closely connected with the GOP research and policy old hands.
By 1968, he was asked by the ultra-math heads, like the genius Milton Friedman, to draw up the economics policy for Richard Nixon. My pop soon became Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He ran national economics policy during the severe inflation of the early 1970s. But he did it with maximum bipartisanship and did not start a Civil War over statistics.
Pop had no enemies at the White House. He was kind enough to get my mother and me invited to many high-end social events. He was especially kind enough to get friends for me at the White House Mess lunch room over a period of years.
My father had zero economics policy connection with Watergate, although to this day, I do not know what “Watergate” even was — and neither did he, again, as far as I am aware.
When I became a speechwriter, one of seven, for Mr. Nixon and a few of his top guys, I became involved in writing about “Watergate” on a daily basis. I never could figure out what “Watergate” was.
My Pop and I ate lunch almost daily at the White House Mess and smoked life over until by August 9, 1974, Mr. Nixon was forced to resign for a fictitious “scandal.” The best friend the Jewish people had ever had was forced out by a largely Jewish media for what I still do not know. I was sobbing. So was my Pop. So was my mother, who would have done anything for Mr. Nixon.
That was fifty years ago. My father and I grew ever closer in that time. In the late days of Summer 1974, my Pop, my endlessly devout Mother, and my friend Pat stood near Mr. Nixon as a great tragedy played out for the Nixons, Israel, and America. In 1994 Mr. Nixon entered immortality, following closely his glorious Pat Nixon (not to be confused with my erstwhile college student Pat K.).
It’s Father’s Day 2024 now. My father has been in immortality since 1999. But he’s never going to be really gone. For me, every day is Father’s Day. He was the best father and best friend I ever had. Thank you, Pop. Thank you, Mr. Nixon.
READ MORE from Ben Stein:
A Few Words About a Coup D’état in Our Perfect USA
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