Re: Mark Hatfield, RIP

Lew, I can well remember going to see the great Mark Hatfield speak on the campus of Oral Roberts University, the buckle on the evangelical Bible Belt. As an off-campus covert interloper from the University of Tulsa, I was bedecked in bell bottomed jeans and shoulder-length hair, not the standard attire of an ORU clean-cut Christian clone. After the senator delivered his powerful remarks I stood in the line of persons seeking to ask him questions. When my turn arrived, suddenly the Q&A period ended. Undaunted, I approached Hatfield, who was now surrounded by fawning admirers and showed him this issue of Murray N. Rothbard’s Libertarian Forum. Hatfield’s eyes suddenly lit up and glowed, and he began to treat me as his long lost prodigal son (to the bewilderment and dismay of the ORU crowd). For that brief moment we shared something really special which I will never forget.

UPDATE: Check out this nice little piece at Reason which further outlines the Mark O. Hatfield-Murray N. Rothbard connection. But ignore the squalid comments by willfully ignorant and stunted readers consumed with envy and bile towards these two great men which they never knew — very sad.

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2:47 pm on August 8, 2011