Posted on 07/06/2007 6:51:27 AM PDT by RedRover
On July 8, in the year of our Lord 2006, I will celebrate my 39th birthday – for the 41st time. I wrote about this last year when I turned 79, and earlier, when I reached 78, and what I recounted then is still relevant and worth updating.
I don't expect my birthday to evoke widespread national interest since most people have a lot more important things on their minds than my advancement into my 81st year. (Yeah, that's right – I'll be 80 years old, having completed that many years in this vale of tears, but from 7-8-06 onward I'll be working on my 81st year. Pointing this kind of fact out used to drive my late wife nuts – "You're always making everybody a year older," she'd grumble.)
But the day has some meaning for me because I never expected to be around to observe a birthday marking the passage of that many years. As someone once said, "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself."
But would I have?
For more than 40 years I smoked seven cheap, foul-smelling cigars a day, and unlike Slick Willie, I inhaled. Do I regret it? Heck no! I miss chewing on those stogies, especially after eating. A cigar put a period at the end of a meal. Without that period, the culinary sentence runs on and on. As a result, the waistline also runs on and on.
During my 12 years in Washington, I spent a lot of lunchtimes at Johnny Mandis' Market Inn, eating those great three-pound lobsters (three dollars a pound) and swilling his patented birdbath martinis. I have since discovered that the three dollars a pound I thought was outrageous at the time would be now considered a great bargain.
Although I have also learned that martinis, birdbath or normal sized, are really poison, at the time they sure went down smoothly. And they helped make sense of what was going on around that madhouse on Capitol Hill, where I worked when I wasn't eating three-pound lobsters and drinking birdbath martinis.
As I reflect on my past, I realize my whole life has been a series of leaps into the unknown, taking one risk after another, which in retrospect appear to have been exercises in madness. I wonder how I could ever have taken the outrageous chances I took – and I thank God I did. What a bore life would have been otherwise.
In 1943, at the tender age of 17 and having reached the point where I could no longer tolerate the discipline imposed by my parents and my Jesuit teachers at Brooklyn Prep, I took what I thought was the easy way out – I joined the Marines, seeking a less rigid, more relaxed routine. It took about 15 minutes at Parris Island boot camp to disabuse me of that rather bizarre notion.
I thought at the time that I'd made a colossal mistake, but it was probably one of the best things I ever did. I grew up in a hurry. And it's true, once a Marine always a Marine. And there are a lot worse things to be.
Last November 5, I went up to Norfolk, Virginia, to be the guest of honor at the Marine Corps Birthday Ball hosted by Marine Air Control Squadron-24. It was, to the day, the 62nd anniversary of my entering the Corps. My brother Jim, a retired Marine major, and his wife, Rita, joined me, and that's appropriate because Jim was also with me on November 5, 1943, when I went over to Manhattan to begin my journey to Parris Island and boot camp.
We stood and talked that morning until it was time for me to climb on the bus that was to take me and the other recruits to the train station. We said goodbye, and as I watched him slowly disappear down Lexington Avenue, taking my life as it had been up to then with him, it suddenly struck me what was happening and I thought, "My God, what the hell have I done?"
When I got out of the Marines I took a lot of silly so-called "entry-level jobs," got rudely, and justifiably, fired from most of them, finally found a great job working for a steamship line, got married in 1949, and promptly lost my job when the company went out of business.
I did a little better when I went to work in the insurance industry, but I continued to believe that I was not cut out to work in the business world. Writing and working in politics were my goals.
In 1956, at the age of 30, married and the father of two sons, I uprooted my family, sold our house in Blue Point, Long Island, and bought a 38-acre place outside Fredericksburg, Virginia. To put into perspective just how much things have changed since then, that lovely eight-room plantation house with outbuildings, sitting majestically on top of a hill surrounded by eight acres of lawn and all that other sprawling acreage, cost exactly $18,900. I'd guess that it would go for well over $1 million today.
I didn't have the vaguest idea of what I was going to do for a living, but it seemed like a great idea and, naively believing that I might be able to make some contribution to the commonweal, I wanted to get involved in national politics, having been heavily involved in local politics back on the Island. The fact that I had absolutely no qualifications worth mentioning didn't deter me for one second. It's true: Fools do rush in where angels fear to tread.
Besides, I liked Washington, having been stationed there at the end of World War II, and figured I'd find something or other to do in the seat of all wisdom, 50 miles north of our Fredericksburg farm.
Amazingly, I did. With no background whatsoever in the publicity field, I landed a key job working as a PR man on the Washington end of the Alaska statehood campaign, for the sum of $50 a week. Helping to add a star to Old Glory led to other things, some of them memorable, gave me a chance to write and a start in a career that would put me in the company of some very great Americans, and in the midst of some great events during the era of the Cold War.
Looking back now, I realize just how lucky I was. What could have been a disaster turned out better than I could ever have hoped.
Having no journalistic experience of any kind whatsoever, I accepted an offer to write a Washington column for Bill Buckley's National Review magazine under the Cato byline (I couldn't use my real name because the House GOP leadership I then worked for wouldn't allow it). The column was widely read in Washington and, incredibly, I lasted three-plus years, and I got a jump start in a writing career that has never ended.
In the course of my 12 years in Washington I worked on Capitol Hill, got involved on the intelligence side of the Cold War, edited a political magazine, worked for Dick Nixon, did work for Dwight Eisenhower, helped organize what became the Goldwater movement, organized and co-managed the GOP Truth Squad in '64 for Barry, traveling some 50,000 miles in six weeks, ran a couple of congressional campaigns, and did a lot of other interesting things.
In 1964, having outgrown the Fredericksburg house, we moved to a 14-room house on three terraced acres on the Severn River a mile upriver from the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Cost: $50,000. Value today? Maybe $3.5 to $5 million.
Four years later, in 1968, I did it again, this time hauling my family, now grown to seven children, two dogs and a cat, to Boca Raton, Florida. I had absolutely no prospects in sight. Once again, against all odds, it worked out. And I haven't had to shovel snow in 36 years. Luckily, the National Enquirer soon moved to Florida, took me on and taught me how to write simply and clearly, made me an assistant editor, and taught me how to manage reporters and stringers.
That's the way it's been. I realize now that I took a lot of risks, following my impulses without having the least idea of where they would lead me. I entered a lot of dark tunnels, but thanks to a loving God – and a saint of a wife, who supported me even when the idea terrified her – I always found the light at the end.
Looking back now, I understand that what I was taught by those hard-nosed Jesuits, that, informed by your faith, if you do what you believe is the right thing to do and leave everything else up to God, everything eventually works out.
Stonewall Jackson said it best: "Duty is mine; consequences are God's." In 1976 my son Freddy was killed in a car crash, and my beloved Barby died 15 years ago, and 43 magnificent years of being part of a "we" came to an end. Now I'm just a me. It still hurts after all these years, but life goes on, simply because it has to.
She died in 1991, of Lou Gehrig's disease, a terrible, wasting affliction that in the end left her almost completely paralyzed, unable to do the most simple of tasks, and often in terrible pain.
The ordeal of frequent childbirth also left her with a host of physical disorders, yet she never once complained about what motherhood had cost her. She was proud of her children and loved and cherished them – and that to her was well worth the price she paid for bearing seven children. Being the mother of this great host of rambunctious children was her proudest achievement ... she reveled in it.
When one of our sons died in a car crash on a remote, dusty road in East Texas, she recoiled under the blow – the harshest any mother can endure – but then tucked her grief away in some private place where she could suffer it alone and in silence, picked herself up and went on with the job of being a wife and mother – jobs she performed with grace, style and perseverance to the very end.
Nowadays, women are supposed to bear the titles of wife or housewife with barely concealed revulsion. For Barbara Bourne Brennan, a member of one of America's oldest and most distinguished families, they were titles of honor, meant to be more cherished than the familial heritage from which she took neither pride, nor sought advantage. On our wedding day she took the name of Brennan, and from that moment on, that's what she was – a Brennan.
In the nearly 43 years we were married, she never once removed the symbol of her marriage, her wedding ring. Even on her deathbed she fought off nurses who attempted to remove it for one or another alleged medical reason. It remained on her third finger, left hand to the final moment of her life, along with another ring that bore two diamonds and five emeralds – precious stones as symbols of what was most precious to her – her five sons and two daughters.
I wish she were here now. I wish she could look at her six surviving children and feel the pride I feel at what they have all become – mirror images of their beloved mother. Fine upright men and women, now fathers and mothers themselves, good and thoughtful sons and daughters who are the joy of my life – the precious gifts she gave me at such great cost to herself.
At her funeral I ended a brief eulogy with these words: "She was the greatest and most beautiful of ladies, the greatest and most loving of mothers, and the finest wife any man ever had."
If anything, that was an understatement.
For eight years after she died, I worked as sacristan at St. Joan of Arc Church while continuing to write. Nowadays, I write for NewsMax, which keeps me very busy, and I also edit my friend Michael Reagan's nationally syndicated column, continuing my relationship with his family that began when his sister, the late Maureen Reagan, worked for me in Washington.
A couple of years ago I watched "Lonesome Dove," one of the finest miniseries ever produced on American television. Toward the end, one of the main characters, a grizzled old legendary Texas Ranger, Gus McCrae, lies dying. He looks up at his longtime comrade in arms and, with a twinkle in his eyes, says quietly, "It's been quite a party, Woodrow, hasn't it?" It's been quite a party for me, too. And it's still going on.
______________________________________________________________
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.
Freepers: Join the party! Leave Happy Birthday wishes for this Marine of "Greatest Generation I" ("Greatest Generation II", as we know, is currently in Iraq).
Wish we could drop by Phil's table at the Stork Club. Hope this thread can be the next best thing.
PING!
Happy Birthday Mr. Brennan! Thank you for all you have done for the Marines.
Happy Birthday, Phil.
As a man and a former Marine you have much to be proud of.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Brennan.
Semper Fi!
Happy Birthday Phil! You are a treasure!
Just one correction there, jaz! That’s “dormant” Marine! ;)
Good point, Red. :-)
Happy Birthday and Semper Fidelis!
fontman
Happy Birthday, Marine. May you have many more. Semper Fidelis, Gunner03
Happy Birthday Phil. The Sharratt family would like to thank you for your support during our current ordeal. Our lives have been blessed knowing you.
Semper Fi
God Bless Our Haditha Marines
Darryl
Happy Birthday Phil and may you have many, many more. Our family would like to thank you for being so supportive of the Haditha Marines. God Bless You.
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