A slice of Charles personal history; most interesting... Charles C. Johnson, on the passing of Harry Jaffa -- I remember exactly where I was when I first read something by Harry Jaffa. I was in my final year of high school and I had been admitted to Claremont McKenna College. I couldnt afford the plane ticket to see the campus so I read the works of Claremonts professors, including Harry Jaffa. Im glad I did. I had won the Forbes Museums Lincoln essay three years running and felt that I had a handle on Abraham Lincoln but Jaffa understood him like a contemporary and knew that the slavery question was alive and well in a regime grounded on Aristotelean natural equality. I would later become a student of Jaffas. John-Clark Levin & I did an independent study with him and so became his last students. We studied statesmanship and read every book he recommended on Lincoln and Churchill. It was in these discussions that I first decided to write a book on Calvin Coolidge. I had Jaffas encouragement and blessing. It was Jaffa who introduced me to the Purple Bible and to the political side of Shakespeare and to Allan Bloom. To my mind Jaffas criticism of the Closing of the American Mind is one of the greatest pieces of writing on the right. I became a West Coast Straussian and remain so now. I attended several of the Strauss conferences funded by Peter Thiel and saw first hand that famous Jaffa disputatiousness. Well into his 90s Jaffa could be impatient with the speed with which younger minds didnt catch up even if those younger minds were tenured professors. Nowadays Jaffas students walk the halls of power and are some of the most influential minds on the right. The Claremont Institute has advanced his mission and continues to produce the best periodical on the right, The Claremont Review of Books. Toward the tail end of his life Jaffa worried about what we would call the neoconservatives or East Coast Straussians not quite understanding the importance of the principles that made America unique. He regarded the Iraq war as a mistake. When I asked him what could be done with the neoconservative influence, he said that he couldnt save all of the Republic and that there would be other fights for younger men. The ancients believed in three forms of immortality: having children (accessible to all of us), studying the forms, and great works (like Alexander the Great). Jaffa was very much in the studying the forms camp. He lives forever in the minds of his students. Im proud to be in their number. Live forever, old teacher.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 02:24:49 +0000
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