I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Richard W. Wilcke 375
desperate to declare my political allegiance. My mother, who was born in Brooklyn, had
kindly explained that we were Dodger fans rather than Yankee fans, and I now wanted to
know whether we were Dewey fans or Truman fans. But my father was a family physician
who was still building his practice in our city. While his attitude changed markedly in a
few years, at that time he still kept his politics private. He imagined, I suppose, that my
classmates would run home saying, “Wilcke is for Dewey!”
In 1952, we spent hours of a family vacation in the mountains listening to the national
Republican Party convention on the radio of our station wagon. My family was in favor of
Taft, but I am sure we were not upset by the nomination of Eisenhower. I had learned by
then that my father had voted Democratic only once in his life, when he cast his first-ever
presidential ballot for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, a fact that he, like H.L. Mencken,
always regretted. By the time Ike was running for president in 1952, my father had openly
declared his political affiliation. In fact, he even had a GOP “I like IKE” campaign poster
hanging in the waiting room of his office. Apparently, he had enough patients by then that
he no longer was worried about offending local Democratic sensibilities, which were pretty
deep-seated in our mill and factory town of upstate New York. In school, we soon divided
ourselves by party, but it was never as important to us as our endless arguments about the
relative talents of Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider.
Thanks to my family, I survived the 1950s with a strong identity as a Dodger fan,
a Lutheran, and a Republican. I read everything I could about the Dodgers, and, thanks
to Sunday school and confirmation class, knew quite a bit about being Lutheran. But
there was no substance to my political identity until 1959 when my father brought home
two issues of Human Events. They had been given and recommended to him by a patient
who had urged him to study the lengthy profiles of U.S. Senators John F. Kennedy and
Barry Goldwater. My father, unless he were on vacation, never had much time for reading
non-medical material, although he did own many books, including some favorites by
John T. Flynn. I cannot imagine what impelled me as a high school junior to read these
papers, but the ideas of individual freedom in the laudatory essay about Goldwater
appealed to me. From that moment on, I was a self-aware conservative and, to the extent
that I understood it, a believer in individualism. In adolescent pretentiousness, I immediately
informed my father that I was interested primarily in ideology, not in blind
allegiance to the GOP.
During the 1960s, as the saying goes, I forgot nothing and learned nothing. I went to
Kansas State University and joined Collegiate Young Republicans, a huge club on that
campus, hence a wonderful place to meet girls. In 1962, I joined the Marine Corps and
endured a summer-long Platoon Leaders Class (PLC), the initial step toward becoming a
Marine officer. My platoon mates and I were shocked to discover that, while we had assumed
America was at peace, the Marine Corps was actively preparing to send many of us to
Vietnam, a place we knew nothing about. Over the next 18–24 months, of course, that
southeast Asian country emerged as a foreign-policy crisis area. Although I graduated with
excellent scores from the PLC, my new goal became to attend college in California. Therefore,
I resigned my chance at a commission and opted to become an enlisted reservist. By the
fall of 1964, I was going to school at San Luis Obispo, where I volunteered for the Goldwater