Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) (9 page)

Disappointment, of course, was to come in the future, but Washington, D.C., as a city did not disappoint; it far exceeded my expectations. I remember coming over a hill and seeing the horizon, and there was the capitol—and, honest to God, tears were streaming down my face. I had read all about Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, but actually seeing those places—there was nothing like it. We were admiring, up close, the three branches of government, the landmarks where our Constitution came to life each day. Or at least that was the hope.

And we got to see the Carter-Mondale inauguration, albeit from a great distance.

And the parties! We went to the Minnesota ball, where we got to meet two of Walter Mondale's children, Eleanor and Ted. That was a thrill, but what left an even bigger impression was the cornucopian richness of the parties. We went from party to party to party; free food abounded everywhere in the public buildings of the Capitol complex. To the dainty eater, tasty hors d'oeuvres and cute little finger foods beckoned; to the hearty eater, big stacks of deli meats, hunks of cheese, and those delectable little pigs in blankets were shouting, “Come and get it!” Because I brought a grand total of eleven dollars with me for food, transportation, and spending money, I was myself both types of eager eater. The heaping silver platters of huge brownies were like something I had never seen before. As I said, we came from a simple background; we'd never seen so much food at so many venues and at no charge. Giving away exorbitant goodies and we didn't have to pay for them—that was our introduction to Washington's ways!

But I remember thinking to myself,
Washington has surely gotten big
—and yet the rest of the country seemed actually to be shrinking. That is, Washington is a rich city, a permanent boomtown, while Minnesota and the rest of America had been suffering, all through the seventies, from slowing growth and rising prices; “stagflation” they called it, a wordplay on “stagnation” plus “inflation.” I remembered reading in history books that back in the nineteenth century American presidents had managed to do their jobs with the help of just a few aides. So, I wondered, what had happened since, as White House staffs had ballooned into hundreds, and then into thousands? I came to see what critics meant when they jibed about “palace guards” and “imperial presidencies.”

On the way back home to Minnesota, I continued to wrestle with what I had seen in Washington. It was a paradox: The public “servants” seemed to have more money than the taxpayer “masters.” And yet during that same time, as I had seen in the summer of '75, some areas of the nation—Alaska, for instance—were rich, holding great natural resources. Or, I should say,
potentially
rich, because most of Alaska's wealth was locked in the ground by federal bureaucrats, functionaries obeying the “zero growth” edicts of elitist environmentalists. Yet Washington, D.C., was obviously excessively rich, grown fat on federal tax revenues. Washington thrived, after all, on its Internal Revenue Service money spigot; in those days the IRS could take as much as 70 percent of someone's annual income. I myself was light-years from a high income, but such a confiscatory tax rate didn't seem right to me, even if few in positions of power seemed to object.

Then we were back home. And back to work. Marcus too was working hard, both on campus and back on the farm. In retrospect, it might have seemed like a long courtship from the time we first met, in early 1976, till the time we were married, in late 1978. But let me tell you, the time flew by, because we were both busy working and finishing our studies. During all of 1977, we were going steady, as you might say, but we didn't have nearly as much time together as we would have liked.

In the fall of that year, Marcus invited me to come meet his family in Wisconsin. We drove in an old Ford Pinto that he had borrowed from his brother; it featured a gaping hole in the back floor. Riding with Marcus through the rolling hills of Wisconsin, I thought to myself,
How beautiful this country scenery is!
Marcus was pointing out the trees that were bare and brown; the Wisconsin countryside, he said, was prettier in the winter, when all was velvety white, or else in the spring and summer, when everything was leafy green. But it was beautiful right now, I insisted. The stark trees looked like the romantic ruins of an old cathedral. And Marcus agreed. So here were two lessons for me: First, every season of nature has its own kind of beauty, and second, with the help of someone you love, you can see the world anew. Everything can be made fresh.

Arriving in Independence, Wisconsin, I instantly bonded with Marcus's parents. His father and I talked about cows and milk; his mother and I talked about baking bread. It was all so natural, so comfortable, so obvious.

Next it was Marcus's turn to meet my family. He drove up to Anoka to meet Mom and Ray. It was a Saturday, and Mom had said to come by anytime, so we did. When Marcus and I arrived, we found Mom and Ray scraping their wallpaper in the hallway. Marcus was eager to help, so that's what we did. Such gallantry might seem more practical than romantic, but let me tell you, it was both—practical
and
romantic. By pitching in so readily on a chore, Marcus made a good impression on my folks. Men, here's a lesson for you: Flowers and candy are wonderful for a girl, but if you really want to convince her that you're Mr. Right, it helps to be a handyman!

A few weeks later, unbeknownst to me, Marcus asked Mom and Ray for permission to propose to me. She told him he had to promise always to take good care of me, and Marcus promised earnestly to do just that. And so Mom and Ray nodded, and that was that. Marcus also called my dad, met with him, and asked for, and received, permission to marry his daughter.

But in the meantime, it was work, work, work. Neither of us had yet graduated from college; we were both still paying our way through school doing a variety of jobs. I was an intern at the state legislature, but my most satisfying job was as a nanny for a wonderful family. There I saw a positive vision of family life. For his part, Marcus's job was at a day-care center in downtown Minneapolis, a place called Soul's Harbor, where he taught employment skills to those who were down and out. But all that time turned out to be time well spent, because he enjoyed listening to people; he has always said that everyone's story has value. And then, of course, Marcus would do his best to help and minister, sharing not only his savvy about getting a job but also his ever more mature Christian worldview.

Marcus proposed to me on February 15, 1978. You may be thinking: Why not February 14? Well, Marcus wanted to be different. For all his Swiss precision, he can be quirky sometimes. And so he proposed at 12:01
A.M
. on the fifteenth, because, as he told me, he wanted our engagement to be unique! But as a hopeless romantic, I told myself it was still the fourteenth in Mountain or Pacific time.

We set the date for September, so that we could both graduate from Winona and then have plenty of time to prepare a grand wedding. So that May I graduated with a BA in political science with a minor in English, while Marcus earned his BA in sociology.

The wedding was on Sunday, September 10, 1978. A beautiful Wisconsin late-summer day! Marcus, always a good workman, had built a lovely stone altar on his parents' family farm, on top of the “horses' hill,” surrounding it with wildflowers. The scene was breathtaking, as was the temperature—ninety degrees and full sun! I wore a simple, long, white dress that I had bought off the return rack; it was ninety dollars. I also wore a floppy white hat—those were big back then. Marcus's mother had her silk wedding veil stored in the attic; never sentimental, she planned to rip it up into sections to tie her tomato plants. “Elma!” I said, “you can't do that. Let me sew the holes in the fabric and I'll use it as my veil.” And that's what I did. I spent five dollars on a pair of shoes at Payless, and if I do say so myself, the bride looked great!

For his part, Marcus wore a dark blue velour suit—hey, this was the seventies! I'll admit, incidentally, that I never liked the suit; I later gave it to Goodwill during a garage-cleaning frenzy without telling him. Two pastors, Dick Alf and Bill Hagedorn, presided over the ceremony; we pledged our troth using the beautiful words of traditional wedding vows, declaring before God and these witnesses that we would remain lifelong companions. And because this was a working dairy farm, the Holstein cows joined in—they made plenty of noise. I thought of the Bible verse “Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee.” I knew that God was with us on that blessed day, as He is with us every day, as His hand guides every living thing.

Because we had some four hundred people joining us, we had to borrow chairs and benches from a local church. Marcus's best man was his brother Peter, while my maid of honor was my college roommate and close friend Dana Primrose. My lifelong pal Barb Norbie had moved out to California by then, and sadly, she couldn't afford to come to the wedding. After the ceremony, we drove to our reception in Winona, where we offered M&Ms as party favors and served root beer and homemade chicken, mashed potatoes, and vegetables for our wedding feast—good food, prepared by local farm women, but nothing fancy. And the price was something like $1.25 per plate. My, how times have changed!

We spent our wedding night at the Schumacher Inn, a lovely old bed-and-breakfast in New Prague, Minnesota, which back then featured four-star Czech and German dishes.

For our honeymoon we flew to California, the first time that either of us had ever set foot in the Golden State. We flew to San Francisco, and from SFO we flew to Monterey, where we spent two weeks in the Carmel area. For two nights we stayed at the Gosby House Inn, a beautiful old Victorian perched on Lighthouse Avenue, overlooking the ocean in Pacific Grove. Those nights were a wedding present from my best friend Barb. Then Marcus and I stayed with Barb at the home she was renting with two other women. Barb gave us her bedroom; she slept on the couch. Then we drove down the coast, zipping along the curves of the scenic Pacific Coast Highway to the Hollywood Bowl, where we caught Steve Martin and John Belushi.

I must pause again to say how close I feel to Barb. After we came back from Israel, we promised each other not only that we would stay friends but that we would see each other at least once a year. She has lived out in California since the midseventies, but we have never missed a year. Over the decades, we have talked and prayed together about everything—from boyfriends and husbands to babies to politics. Both of us are ardently pro-life; Marcus and I focused on foster children while Barb became executive director of a pro-life center. She is godmother to one of our children, and she is Auntie Barb to all five. And I am godmother to her twins. For nearly forty years now, we have been with each other in times of joy and times of tragedy. But perhaps most of all, our friendship is built on the foundation of our faith.

Marcus and I still didn't have much money, of course, and so two weeks later, when we came back to Minnesota, we returned some of the duplicate wedding gifts, because we needed cash. For the next year, the new Mr. and Mrs. Bachmann stayed out on the family farm. Marcus worked the cows—what else?—while I got a job at a judge's office in Buffalo County, Wisconsin, just across the Mississippi River from Minnesota. I answered phones and did typing for Judge Schlosstein, and along the way, in little side moments, I learned a lot of practical things about the law, courthouse life, and our legal system. The judge would always take time to explain to me the finer points of law. I knew that this was how lawyers had once been mentored and trained; that is, aspiring lawyers worked for an experienced lawyer and thus were schooled by him. It worked for Lincoln! In fact, that system still would be good today, it seems to me, because too many law schools have become overfunded hothouses for avant-garde legal theorizing, as opposed to teaching the details and practicalities of the law itself.

Meanwhile, Marcus and I were trying to hold down our spending and build up our savings. I had zero debt when I graduated from college; Marcus owed fifteen hundred dollars. Our first paychecks went to pay off his student loan debt, and by Christmas, we were 100 percent debt free—and we liked it that way. Frugality and taking good care of the things we had—that's all in my blood. I can remember, when I was a child, my mom and dad bringing home a brand-new dining-room table and chairs made of hard-rock maple. I was ten, and it was the first time my parents had had a stick of new furniture. He said it had cost a lot of money, nine hundred dollars, so we weren't allowed to touch it—or even get near it! Dad made his point about the value of fine things, but in our own family, we mostly preferred secondhand furniture that the kids too could enjoy. And besides, there's a lot of good that you can do with polish and paint!

In that scrimping spirit, Marcus and I bought our first car, a used Datsun. Actually, it was more of a
wrecked
Datsun. It had been totaled and then restored—mostly. It ran, but it never quite ran right. We called it “the bomb.”

The first year of our marriage, 1978–79, was a happy time for us newlyweds. We lived in an old red farmhouse belonging to the Bachmanns, out there with the cows in the middle of the Midwest. In lieu of rent to Marcus's parents, we fixed the place up and gave his labor to the farm, working the crops and the cows. I sewed new curtains, and Marcus fixed up the rooms. But the main thing was that the two of us were together. Marcus, always analytical, kept saying that our most important task as a couple was to knit together as one. And that's what we did. We have been knitted together ever since, for thirty-three years.

Meanwhile, the larger world was steadily, scarily unraveling.

CHAPTER FIVE

Jimmy Carter and Me

WHILE Marcus and I were gelling our relationship as a couple together, back in the late seventies, the Carter administration was coming unglued. Marcus and I had both voted for Jimmy Carter, but it didn't take long for us to become disillusioned. I remember being appalled by Carter's energy policy; he was going on TV, telling us to turn the thermostat down and wear sweaters, and he also wanted the government to build giant “synfuel” plants. These proposals struck me as either an unnecessary sacrifice or an unnecessary boondoggle. After all, I had seen for myself the natural abundance of Alaska—although little did I know, as yet, about the untapped energy supplies abounding also in the lower forty-eight, both underground and offshore.

Meanwhile, as day follows night, Carter's bad policies were leading to bad results. In the late seventies, America was suffering from a severe gasoline shortage, all the worse because it was government created. Like so many other Americans, I remember sitting in my Rambler in a gas line for more than an hour, only to see the station owner come out and put up a “no gas” sign right in front me—he had run out. I was literally running on fumes by that time and wondered if I could even make it home after an hour of idling in line. The bureaucrats simply weren't allowing him enough gas. I thought to myself,
This is ridiculous. Off in fat and happy Washington, bureaucrats are toying with our lives and livelihoods—and then when they get it wrong, when they misallocate energy supplies, they're still no less fat and happy.
Working for the government means never having to say you are sorry.

And at the same time, during the Carter years, inflation was surging. The White House tried to blame inflation on everyone else, but the truth was, the Democratic administration was running big deficits while telling the Federal Reserve to print money without value behind it to make up those deficits. Do we see a recurring pattern here? That is, too much government spending, so government pays for its binge by firing up the printing presses. That means a reduction in the value and the soundness of the dollar; in other words, theft by government. So now, during these years, prices and interest rates were rising, and Washington seemed helpless, even complicit, in the foul-up. For his part, Carter kept trying to blame us, the American people, for his self-made problems. He didn't give any evidence that he understood either his contribution to hurting the nation or how he could turn the country around.

The pieces were now coming together for me: It was a case of ivory tower big government thinking versus the real people who, as Jimmy Stewart said in
It's a Wonderful Life,
the classic film, “do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.” So I wondered: Were we, the people, going to live with overspending, government-created inflation, high interest rates that only allowed home purchases by contract for deed, and gas rationing? Were we going to oppose this hapless embrace of big government? In 1978 I remember cheering as the voters in California enacted the property tax–cutting Proposition 13 by a nearly two-to-one margin. Prop 13, it turned out, was the opening salvo of a nationwide tax revolt.

And that tax revolt could not come soon enough for me. One summer, when I was still in college, I had an eye-opening experience proving that the federal government was capable of operating by both deception and force. Examining my modest paycheck from working a summer job as a reporter for a small local newspaper, I could see how much the government was withholding from my check. I was shocked. The income-tax bite was bad enough, but what was this about FICA taxes? I was, and am, all in favor of everyone having a safe and solid retirement, but I started to wonder if the current system was the best way to achieve that goal. As I dug around on the issue of Social Security, I learned about the illusion that each of us had his or her own Social Security account; we had no such thing. Uncle Sam had no account labeled, for instance, “Michele Amble.” Instead, all the money went into a big general fund, allowing the politicians to do whatever they wanted with it. And what have they done? They have raided the fund and left behind IOUs that the labors of generations of Americans, as yet unborn, will be required to repay. In other words, more governmental theft. In fact, according to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1960 decision in
Flemming v. Nestor
, we American citizens out in the provinces had no legal right to the Social Security benefits that were supposedly “ours,” even though we had paid all those FICA taxes. I was really fried, I must say.

I thought to myself:
I'm young, and I have my whole life ahead of me, and they're taking this big chunk out of my check. I'd rather take the money myself and put it in a savings account and watch it grow.
So I wrote a letter to the Social Security Administration saying I didn't want to pay those Social Security taxes. I'll take care of my own retirement, I added; just let me keep my hard-earned money, and I'll let you off the hook, thank you very much. The next thing I knew, I got an intimidating phone call from Washington, D.C. The caller on the other end of the line said this was coming from the White House! The man said, “We've received your letter, and we want you to know that you have to pay your Social Security. It's a crime not to; you will go to jail if you don't pay us the money.” I was shocked, but I argued anyway. But the man from the government was not there to help me or even to listen to me; he was there to put me in my place. After a few more moments of not listening, he curtly ended the call. Staring at the dead phone receiver in my hand, I thought to myself,
Wow, so this is how it is.
We have no choices over our retirement and how we fund it. There has to be a better way,
I thought to myself,
for the government to interact with the citizenry.
A little courtesy, a little respect, and a lot more candor—that's what we needed then and what we need now. I wanted to invest that money from every paycheck, not turn it over to the government. I would willingly save and invest that money by setting it aside. Instead, I later found out, the government wasn't investing my retirement money for my best interest; it wasn't even investing it at all. The government was taking my money and spending it on current recipients, providing no guarantee of return on investment.

If Carter's energy and economic policies were bad, his foreign policy was worse. In the late seventies, the shah of Iran—a friend not only to the United States but also to Israel—was in trouble, challenged from within by Islamic forces led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. You remember Khomeini: He was the man who called America “the great Satan.” So we saw a decisive fork in the road: Iran would be led either by the pro-American shah or by the anti-American Khomeini. The Carter administration seemingly couldn't decide what to do about it; the president talked about “human rights,” not seeming to notice that the Ayatollah had no intention of respecting anyone's human rights. Soon the shah was falling, Khomeini was rising, and still the Carter administration was dithering.

During those years, 1978–79, Marcus and I had Marcus's little nine-inch black-and-white TV from college that we set on the kitchen counter. Before I went to work in the morning, I always turned on the news, and I remember seeing that the shah had been forced to flee his country. Meanwhile, Carter kept just sitting on his hands. I couldn't believe it. Then I watched as the Iranian people chanted and shouted, eagerly welcoming Khomeini as he entered Tehran. I thought to myself, he is the scariest-looking person I have ever seen. I felt that I was looking at the face of evil.

I also thought that if past generations had been forced to confront the evil of Nazi Germany, then maybe this generation would be forced to confront the evil of Islamic fundamentalism, which led to radical jihadism in Iran. And that was before the new Iranian regime seized the American embassy in Tehran, holding our diplomats hostage for an agonizing 444 days. The hostage takeover—again, Carter seemed helpless—was a hinge moment for me and, more to the point, for all of America.

Looking back, we can see the results of Jimmy Carter's failure to confront the Ayatollah before he could take and consolidate power. Since then, the Middle East and the world have suffered a dramatic surge in Islamic radicalism and terrorism. And so now we have to live with the lethal jihad ideology that produced the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, the endless terrorism against Israel, the epic tragedy of 9/11, the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continuing terrorist threats around the world.

And here on the home front, airline travel is forever changed by the dehumanizing aspects of the Transportation Security Administration. The Israelis have the best airport security procedures I've ever seen. Why not pattern our security procedures after what works? The American people aren't guilty of terrorism, and we shouldn't all be treated as suspects when we travel on an airplane—I myself seem to get screened quite often. Let's have a little judgment so that ordinary Americans can move around the country unmolested. The way that the Israelis screen airline passengers includes screening everyone, of course, but they screen with a skilled professionalism that enables their screeners to quickly zero in on potentially dangerous individuals; there's a reason that El Al, the Israeli airline, hasn't suffered a hijacking since 1969 and that no airplane, ever, that departed from Ben Gurion Airport has been hijacked.

It's been said that liberals want a strong government and a weak country. Speaking for myself, I want a small government and a big defense. Even an unashamed apologist for free markets like me has to agree that national defense is the single most important function of government. And the father of free-market economics agrees: “The first duty of the sovereign,” Adam Smith wrote more than two centuries ago in
The Wealth of Nations
, is “protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies.” And that protection requires military force. Moreover, if we are going to have military force—and we must—we should have the best. During the seventies, I remember reading news reports about our military personnel being so underpaid that they were depending on food stamps to make ends meet. At that time, Uncle Sam was suffering from a “hollow military”—that is, not enough resources to protect America. And I must add, those concerns about a hollow military are reemerging ominously today.

In addition, a strong military requires a technological edge. In order to sustain the margin of safety needed to support a policy of “peace through strength,” the Pentagon needs top-notch scientists and engineers. Back in the seventies, the Soviets were busy building new weapons, and many Americans wondered if the United States was keeping up, to say nothing of staying ahead. During the Carter years, General Daniel O. Graham, retired from the U.S. Army, went on to lead a campaign to get Americans interested in the idea of missile defense. We should occupy the “high frontier” of space, Graham argued, so that we could launch satellites and deploy other devices to destroy attacking Soviet missiles. Graham's idea was so obviously sensible to me. It was foolish to depend on the nuclear doctrine of mutual assured destruction (aptly called MAD). Instead, we should figure out how to shoot down enemy missiles fired by the USSR or other potential enemies. Such a defensive capacity could save not only many millions of American lives but also many millions of Russian lives. It made good sense: You should be able to defend yourself. But to most adherents of the establishment's pseudotheology of arms control, missile defense was completely anathema. We shouldn't defend ourselves against the Russians, they declared; what we should do instead is negotiate with the Russians, because we can trust the likes of Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev. It made me wince to listen to the sophistries of State Department officials as they touched down in America long enough to write another anti–missile defense op-ed in the
New York Times
—before they jetted off to another round of expense-accounted “arms reductions talks” at a deluxe hotel in Zurich or Vienna. And speaking of Vienna, I was shocked that Carter would share a kiss with Brezhnev at the signing of an arms-control treaty. Or maybe by then I wasn't shocked.

So America's foreign-policy establishment united around the idea that General Graham's defense vision shouldn't even be considered. Sensing that their arms-control-talks lifestyle—the diplomatic equivalent of
la dolce vita
—was on the line, these diplomatic lifers could never admit that missile defense might actually be possible. And they were joined by leftist scientists who also insisted that missile defense could never work. Yet I knew that such deliberate fatalism about technological potential was ridiculous, because if antiaircraft weaponry could be made to work—as it had worked successfully as far back as the Second World War—so too could antimissile weaponry be made to work during the cold war. It was a matter of a can-do America making the effort and exertion, that's all. So here was the question: Did we want to defend the American homeland against a missile strike or not? Most conservatives said yes; most liberals said no. I was convinced that missile defense could and should be built.

Let's look at today's Israel for a moment: The Israelis are firm believers in missile defense. Confronted by thousands of missiles and Qassam rockets launched against them from beyond their borders, they are moving as fast as they can to deploy what they have poetically dubbed Iron Dome, so that they can protect their people from rocket assault. Indeed, the Kibbutz Be'eri, where I spent an inspiring summer nearly four decades ago, has come under repeated rocket attack from Palestinian terrorists firing from the nearby Gaza Strip. It's always been clear to me: The Jewish State of Israel has the right to exist, the right to self-defense, and the clear need to build up its defenses. And if they do so, they will be helping themselves and ourselves to perfect the technology to confront new potential threats from countries such as Iran. And we will benefit, too, as we confront potential threats from around the world.