CAPITOL IDEAS: An Officer and a Gentleman
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM 8ETHELL An Officer and a Gentleman EITH EILER, A DEAR FRIEND, died the other day. I had spoken to him by phone a week earlier, on his 85th birthday, but we exchanged only a...
...Bill Mahrt is a longtime member of the Stanford music department and I'm glad to say that his choir keeps up the good work to this day, although at a different church, nearby...
...He graduated on D-Day, and within months had joined General Patton's army in Europe...
...His wife MaryAnn came into his room one morning-he slept in a special bed in the living room-and found that he had slipped away quietly at night...
...SEEM TO HAVE NO ANECDOTES ABOUT HIM...
...His mother was the featured guest and her many children were brought to the studio from all over...
...Wedemeyer died in 1989, at the age of 92...
...this before his conversion...
...His family appeared on the TV program This Is YourLife...
...all this set against the backdrop of the Great Depression...
...That may seem to be conventional politeness about the dead but I mean it and I want to try to convey what I mean...
...always courteous, polite, considerate...
...He would work on the papers and on the general's biography...
...I loved him dearly and although I never quite said so I think he knew that...
...His sister Fern told me that their father had a team of horses and wagon, but they had no car, telephone, or electricity...
...They don't wear halos and you are unlikely to find them in any way remarkable or even particularly interesting...
...It had been built by Clare Booth Luce to commemorate her daughter Ann, killed in a car accident while an undergraduate at Stanford...
...Mary Ann would invite friends out to their condominium in Pacifica, and Keith would enjoy making mai tais, a festive cocktail, for his guests...
...I also think that Keith was a saint...
...When I would see him quietly walking across the courtyard or down the hall my heart would give a small leap for joy...
...They celebrated a Latin Mass in that rather plain, 1950s-era structure...
...Bill Mahrt's Gregorian Choir provided the wonderful music that has been so carelessly discarded almost everywhere in favor of the children's ditties that pass for Church music today...
...I think it is a sign of sanctity when someone can evoke such a response just by his presence...
...In 1952 Keithjoined the 8th Army in Korea, where he was stationed on the front lines...
...But I treasure his memory and hope that one day we may meet again...
...I had spoken to him by phone a week earlier, on his 85th birthday, but we exchanged only a few words...
...But we were happy and we didn't know we were poor," Fern said...
...Later, she maneuvered him into the Catholic Church...
...Often they would go out to lunch on Fridays and when Keith would come into his office it was a moment of joy, he said...
...His body was still warm...
...Mary Ann worked for a few years behind the scenes at the San Francisco cathedral and often Keith would accompany her...
...perhaps only an hour or two earlier...
...FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43...
...Two more dissimilar people it would be hard to imagine...
...There is a video of the program but Fern found it "kind of sad" to watch, so many years later...
...Keith was a retired Army officer who worked at the Hoover Institution for about 20 years...
...He had suffered from pulmonary fibrosis for two years and by then it was difficult for him to speak at all...
...in the History of American Civilization at Harvard...
...People with Keith's virtues do cross one's path from time to time, but it is not easy to recognize them...
...necessary, but not sufficient...
...Sometimes at Hoover I would look for him so that we could have lunch and it Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and a visiting media fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford...
...But as always he remained calm and unruffled, externally...
...Water came from a cistern, and in dry summers "my dad would haul barrels of water from town...
...Oddly enough, he befriended an eccentric British journalist named Henry Fairlie...
...He was seriously wounded by a booby-trapped mine 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 TOM BETHELL at the Battle of the Bulge...
...In my case it was a matter of simple proximity, extending over years...
...Keith flown in from Korea...
...Keith once showed me around this famous military base, now closed after 150 years' service and inherited by the U.S...
...At about the same time he met his future wife Mary Ann Ellery and converted her (in her words) from her "flaky academic socialist-liberalism...
...A friend told me that he was exhausted and quite worn down by his condition and ready to go...
...Park Service...
...In the evening, there was homework by the light of oil lanterns...
...I don't recall Keith ever talking about these things and wish now that I had asked him...
...For that reason it is unlikely that you will notice them or have a reason to get to know them...
...When Wedemeyer gave his papers to the Hoover Institution, Keith went, too, as a research fellow...
...He was never out of sorts, never short-tempered...
...He had just returned from one more visit to the hospital, and was very weak...
...Keith and MaryAnn Eiler would attend the Mass at St...
...Her fellow workers eventually grew to know and love this meek, reticent figure, hovering in the background...
...Still unmarried, he lived in a small apartment near the Library of Congress, in Washington...
...I can't remember our first meeting, but it was probably in 1987, at St...
...The family l ~ +~ were tenant farmers who moved frequently in search of arable land and better conditions for their livestock," a funerary memorial relates...
...In discerning sanctity, the Catholic Church no :x r ctity is uncommon, surely, but it is likely to be inconspicuous as well, because saintly people don't draw attention to them, . selves if they can avoid it...
...We slowly became acquainted...
...The Protestant saint," they called him...
...longer employs a devil's advocate, but the quality described by the Latin word hilaritas was said to be essential for sainthood...
...After the war he became aide-de-camp to General Mbert Wedemeyer, who by then commanded the Sixth Army at the Presidio in San Francisco...
...Charles Palm, formerly the Hoover Institution Archivist and a good friend of Keith's, told me that he had much the same experience...
...seems in retrospect that we would hardly say anything at all...
...Sanctity is uncommon, surely, but it is likely to be inconspicuous as well, because saintly people don't draw attention to themselves if they can avoid it...
...They were married in 1984, in Washington...
...T 1 ~ E WAS BORN IN 1920, in Monowi, Nebraska, ~ - - - + | the second of nine children...
...Keith had it, I think, although in him it was always quiet and subdued...
...Keith was so quiet and unassuming that he was not likely to make much of a first impression, and indeed I don't have one...
...But he became sidetracked by a big book, Mobilizing America: Robert P. Patterson and the War Effort, 1940-1945...
...The phrase "an officer and a gentleman" fit him precisely...
...Selfabnegation comes with the job description...
...Ann's Chapel in Palo Alto...
...Keith's book won an award at Hoover, but it cost him a lot of effort...
...A less martial figure it would be hard to imagine...
...The older children would walk almost five miles to school except in the depths of winter...
...He retired from the Army in 1965 and obtained a Ph.D...
...His choir also sang at the Requiem Mass for Keith, at the cathedral in San Francisco...
...Patterson, who became Secretary of War shortly after the end of the war, was offered the position of the first Secretary of Defense, but turned it down...
...And to his great discomfort, the Wedemeyer biography was never finished...
...General Wedemeyer and Keith, both strong conservatives, became good friends...
...But I was t always happy to be in his company and he didn't 5~L even have to say anything...
...But he was always reluctant to talk about himself and did so only in short bursts...
...Ann's, and then the congregation would assemble in the garden for refreshments, provided courtesy of the eminent scholar and Frenchman Renfi Girard, and his wife Martha...
...Being in his companywas just the greatest pleasure in itself...
...He went to the University of Nebraska and then to West Point...
...Recuperating in England, he attributed his survival to penicillin...
Vol. 39 • February 2006 • No. 1
