Capitol Ideas/Warren Brookes

...And that's what made me so angry with Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign," Brookes told Don Kowet of the Washington limes in 1990...

...171 16 The American Spectator March 1992...

...The EPA's cancer-risk calculations were based on highly unrealistic assumptions...

...The Vice President had even invited him to his Christmas party...

...On the day after Christmas he took to his bed...

...By the mid-1970s, however, Warren had a falling out with the Monitor...

...Warren worked for Cryovac Corporation, a subsidiary of W. R. Grace & Co., and for an advertising company, Kenyon and Eckhardt...

...It never occurred to him that he was very sick," she said...

...Born in 1929, Warren had grown up in New Jersey...

...I thought we had time, but we didn't," Jane said...

...Recently, referring to Brookes's phenomenal industry, Gilder said: "He put us all to shame...

...Brookes's great achievement was that he did not merely throw up his hands and disparage "lies, damn lies and statistics," but somehow managed to unearth the real science that the bureaucrats neglected as inconvenient to their purpose...

...And that was that...

...Warren and Jane Ewing Schwartz had met at the Christian Science Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1956...

...He "struggled almost continually with his superiors over the paper's direction during his nine years there," Paul Sullivan wrote recently in the Boston Herald...

...On December 19, Jane phoned The American Spectator to say that he wouldn't be able to make it to the magazine's dinner with HUD Secretary Jack Kemp that night...

...The family later moved to Massachusetts, where Warren attended the Brooks School in Andover...

...The big companies also get to "negotiate" their own regulations, and "are in a much better position to live with" such rules "than smaller companies, which often cannot afford the heavy capital and process costs of meeting these arranged standards...

...Petr Beckmann, whose Access to Energy newsletter exposes the environmentalists in Brookesian fashion, wrote in January that Warren was "the greatest journalist of our time...

...Since 1989, and the appointment of William Reilly as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (Warren regarded him as little more than an activist in bureaucratic garb...

...Brookes would be staying at the Capitol Hill Hotel in January and February...

...That was in 1975...

...The American Spectator March 1992 15 I said, 'Dear God, if I can just get him past this ...'" He recovered, and soon thereafter wrote an article and contacted the publisher of the (then) Boston Herald American, Robert C. Bergenheim...

...In 1982, the author George Gilder said in a foreword to Brookes's book, The Economy in Mind, that Warren was "the nation's best columnist on economics and society...

...En route, she stopped at the Loudoun County Hospital and asked him half jokingly if he was sure he didn't want to check in and let them take care of him...

...He was beginning to pierce the veil of ignorance that has allowed the environmental laws to posture as wise interventions by government to improve the state of nature," Smith said...

...Last summer, on Cape Cod, Warren did manage to complete most of the first draft of a book he had long planned on the ways in which science and the new technology are changing economic life—human capital displacing physical capital...

...Brookes also showed that other justifications for the Clean Air Act amendments were equally flawed...

...And so on...

...She went to get some rest herself, but by the time she returned to Warren's room, less than two hours later, he was already dead...

...t's a sad comment on our supposedly adversary press that Brookes was almost the only journalist who really did stand in an adversarial relationship to this dangerous coalition of bureaucracy and fanaticism...

...At last, his fact-filled columns were beginning to be noticed...

...They didn't see anything they liked, particularly, and then, after a couple of days' looking, Warren had an attack of the chills...

...By 1991 Brookes's column was being carried by sixty newspapers, although (as Warren told me himself a year ago) few gave him the prominent display that he received in the Washington Times...

...He couldn't believe that the Monitor was following this liberal line," Jane Brookes said...

...Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...

...The EPA's "junk science projects," he added, were hysteria calculated to frighten the American people into granting the EPA ever more power...

...A couple of hot summers had been seized upon by the bureaucracy to exaggerate urban air pollution—later data had been essentially suppressed by the EPA...

...Warren had business in his blood...

...In 1978 he wrote a column advocating a property-tax rollback comparable to California's Prop 13...

...He disagreed with them so much that he came home and went to bed and said 'I'm going to die.'" It took him about forty days to recover, she recalled...

...The coroner's report said "influenza-pneumonia...

...Warren Brookes by Tom Bethell The columnist Warren Brookes and his wife Jane had lived almost seven years in Lovettsville, Virginia, about sixty miles west of Washington, D.C., but by the summer of 1991 they had a For Sale sign in front of their house...

...We certainly couldn't have done it without him...

...In one of his last columns, published December 26, Brookes warned that Bush would have to undo the economic damage, preferably by suspending the clean air amendments and cutting capital gains tax rates, and would have to do so quickly, "or it is all over for him...

...Brookes's method was to dig out the real statistics that belied the anecdotal baloney...

...He was showing that they were nothing more than a set of traditional government actions: power grabs cloaked in environmental green...

...But he probably had no idea his time was so short...

...Dukakis was claiming credit for the 'Massachusetts Miracle' that he had fought all the way, and I decided it was my responsibility to expose him...

...He graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1952, with a degree in economics...

...A colleague of Brookes's unequal contest with the greens has been Fred Smith, whose Competitive Enterprise Institute will attempt to carry on where Brookes left off...

...We always called Brookes the father of Prop 21/2," said Barbara Anderson of Citizens for Limited Taxation...

...Later in life he remained a practicing Christian Scientist, Jane said, but he was not affiliated with, a church...

...She didn't feel so hot herself...

...He had been brought up as a Christian Scientist by his mother and grandmother, and Jane had become a church member, too, having come across Mary Baker Eddy's book in her grandmother's library in Pennsylvania...

...But by Thursday afternoon, things looked entirely different...

...The result is a higher cost of entry for competitors...

...Jane felt a little apprehensive when she saw Reilly at the Vice President's party), Brookes focused on the ever-increasing economic burden created by environmental regulations: a product of sham science, "green" fanaticism, and (given Bush's eagerness to be perceived as the Environmental President) a compliant administration...

...Jane became concerned and called the Christian Science practitioner who had seen Warren through earlier ailments...

...A theory and some anecdotes" were weaved together with bogus statistics into new programs for more and more regulatory intervention...

...Post-Reagan, Ed Crane of Cato thought Warren "one of the most significant journalists of our time," and the economist Paul Craig Roberts said that Warren was "the greatest journalist in the world...

...There was a sense of crisis at that point...

...But ,I feel so much better," Warren said to her...

...Jane said: "At times when I'm awash with tears, you know, I miss him so, it gets perfectly awful, but in a way if I could get out of here that quickly and live to be 62 and do something worthwhile, I would consider it a pretty good life...

...He became an editorial columnist for the Herald American and rapidly went from strength to strength...

...She was taking a business course at Radcliffe College...

...His columns on the Massachusetts Mess, and the facts therein repeated (sometimes without credit) by other newspapers, certainly didn't help Dukakis...

...They were married in June 1958...

...He drew attention to the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, for example, which had spent $500 million over ten years looking at acid rain, had found that the concerns were vastly overstated, that acidrain was at most a minor problem, perhaps no problem at all, and certainly not one requiring new legislation...

...As a result of the big tax cut, the Massachusetts economy boomed...

...By Friday afternoon, December 27, he had fallen into a semi-sleep...

...His father owned a trade-book business...

...His grandfather at one point was president of the Chicago Board of Trade, and his brother became president of a chemical company in Baltimore...

...For a while he was in a wheelchair...

...Less than a week before Christmas, Warren and Jane were looking for an apartment on Capitol Hill...

...Brookes thereby showed great faith in the integrity of science, incidentally...

...By 1980, Massachusetts had passed such a measure...

...Warren's editor, Tom Bray of the Detroit News, and Ed Crane of the Cato Institute felt that he should do a book on the environment, and arrangements had been made for Cato and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to provide support...

...The next day she bundled Warren up and drove him back home to Lovettsville...

...On Wednesday, Christmas Day, he took a shower, ate a chicken dish and some mint ice cream, and exchanged presents with Jane...

...The New York limes's new environmental reporter had recently spent a day with Warren in Virginia, and was planning an article on him...

...Bergenheim put him in the paper and Warren, who at the age of 46 was starting late as a journalist, found an immediate following...

...Over the next few days he seemed to improve, worked on his word processor, watched television...

...In a particularly interesting column in November 1991, Brookes pointed to an emerging alliance between big business and environmentalists...

...He suffered an emotional breakdown, quit the paper and did not leave his house in Marblehead for months...

...Facing declining grass-root contributions," Brookes wrote, the greens "have turned to corporations to help them raise money, offering 'green ribbons' of approval (or at least benign neglect) in return...

...Warren was about to call for a national moratorium on the implementation of the Clean Air Act," Fred Smith said, adding that "there has been a steady improvement in almost all air in all cities...

...Then he became promotions director for the Christian Science Monitor...

...A year earlier, Steve Kroft of "60 Minutes" had done a program on acid rain, lending support to Brookes's critique and including a filmed segment of him...

...Warren wanted to be closer to the city...

...In response, the paper received 16,000 letters favoring the proposal...