Karl Hess, R I P.

IN HIS seventy years Karl Hess, who died on April 22, had been a junior-high-school dropout, pilot, would-be arms smuggler, motorcycle racer, urban fish farmer, reporter, metal sculptor, assistant to corporate tycoons, consultant to the Black Panthers, resident scholar at the right-most think tank of the 1950s and the left-most think tank of the 1960s, anarchist, tax resister, welder, and, most famously, Barry Goldwater's speechwriter in the 1964 campaign--the man credited (incorrectly, Karl always insisted) with "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Karl became a libertarian folk hero in the 1960s when he declared that he would pay no federal taxes, and then again in the 1970s when he moved to West Virginia to live by barter. He came to laugh at himself--the IRS made life miserable for him, and he found that living by barter didn't work. But if he laughed at himself, I wouldn't say that he regretted either decision. Karl was not given to regretting.

The size of his oeuvre is modest. Like Thomas Jefferson, he never got around to spelling out his political philosophy in one magisterial work. Karl was more attracted to the parable than to the syllogism. He was downright dismissive about elaborate, icily logical libertarian systems, and he liked to let his mind sprawl over the whole messy range of problems that the human condition presented. He was always flatteringly attentive to what the other fellow had to say. Then he would pick up on it, saying, "It strikes me that..." and off he would go, spinning out an idea that often seemed aimless at first and then, suddenly, dazzlingly, made a great deal of sense. I may very well write my next book around one of Karl's insights, one that would never have occurred to me on my own. He did that sort of thing for many.

A devout Catholic as a boy, he had as completely rejected the idea of God in adulthood. Pressed, he would acknowledge that the universe is not only stranger than we know but stranger than we can imagine, and yet this man who was always ready to take another look at every other idea seemed determined not to rethink his apostasy. I doubt that it made any difference. Karl Hess was a profoundly good man by any standard, and, apart from that, I can't imagine that the Lord would be willing to deprive Himself of the pleasure of Karl's company.