Over the weekend we lost a good man.
Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC) died on his birthday, at age 76, after complications from a fall.
I first heard about Jones’s passing not via the news, but in The Tom Woods Show Elite, my notorious private group. Back on January 27 someone posted that Jones had been placed in hospice care, a development that took me completely by surprise. And then the truly terrible news came via a group post yesterday.
Jones was best known for his very public and profound change of heart on foreign policy, after having been an enthusiastic supporter of war against Iraq. It was he who sought to have the French fries in the congressional cafeteria renamed “freedom fries,” in response to French opposition to that war.
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Plenty of people, with a change in the political winds, have said in retrospect that their support for that war was a “mistake.”
Wow. Big whoop.
Their belated recognition of that “mistake” never seems to have affected their enthusiasm for future interventions, of course.
Jones was the exact opposite.
“I have signed over 12,000 letters to families and extended families who’ve lost loved ones in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,” he said, “and that was for me asking God to forgive me for my mistake.”
Elsewhere he added: “I did not do what I should have done to read and find out whether Bush was telling us the truth about Saddam being responsible for 9/11 and having weapons of mass destruction. Because I did not do my job then, I helped kill 4,000 Americans, and I will go to my grave regretting that.”
Since then, Jones has been at the forefront of extricating American troops from foreign conflicts and blocking further military interventions. He became an original board member of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
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He told a gathering of Young Americans for Liberty: “Lyndon Johnson’s probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney.”
Jones, who represents a heavily military district, stood to gain nothing from his change of heart. He lost his seniority on the Armed Services Committee, where he could have become chairman. The Republican Party began throwing serious primary challengers at him, though he managed to parry them all.
But he did it.
He didn’t brush off his support for the war as a “mistake” that people shouldn’t bother him with.
He spent the rest of his life atoning for it.
I met the man only once — in Ron Paul’s office, where I was giving a presentation to a dozen or so congressmen about how Federal Reserve policy had caused the financial crisis of 2008.
Afterward, I approached Rep. Jones and told him how much I respected his courageous change on the war issue. “You honor me, sir,” he replied.
Later this year I’ll be releasing a free eBook on how the warfare state, contrary to the standard claims that it benefits us economically, actually deforms the economy. I’ll dedicate it to Walter Jones.
