Debra Burlingame

A visit with Debra Burlingame, voice of the Take Back the Memorial movement, here.

Excerpt:

This is the woman Messrs. Bernstein and company dismissed as a hausfrau. How they did so is baffling: She has the facts at her fingertips, the confidence of a person at ease with authority, and the rhetorical skills of one at home with the language. How could they have believed that she would just go away? "They were ambitious," Ms. Burlingame replied, "and myopic. Bernstein is an ideologue, a true believer. He told me that he was prepared to dedicate the next 10 years of his life to the center." They patronized her: By her account, Mr. Bernstein said, "Debra, we're calling on people from all sides of the political spectrum . . . very balanced . . . people who are very dignified." To which she responded, "Oh really! Tell me who you have that's conservative. And he replied, 'Fareed Zakaria' [editor of Newsweek International]. I squinched my face up and said, 'He's not conservative,' and Bernstein goes, 'Naah . . . he's not, yeah, you're right, he's not.' "

This gets to the heart of the problem: The Freedom Center's progenitors were convinced--utterly and adamantly--of their own reasonableness. In an inversion of the usual conditions of passion, the Forces of Rage--here, led by Ms. Burlingame--had an impressive clarity of vision; by contrast, the self-styled Forces of Reason were blinded by their own certitudes. (Ms. Burlingame insists that the blind include the editorial page of the New York Times, which twice attacked her by name--describing her, even, as "the Governor's Proxy"--yet did not consider it important to print a letter from her in response. The page's editor, Gail Collins, would not, it seems, take her calls. "A very, very snotty assistant said to me, 'Let me take your information.' Ms. Collins was 'busy,' 'unavailable' . . .")

Finding interlocutors on the telephone wasn't always this hard for Ms. Burlingame. After her op-ed appeared in the Journal in June, she received calls from political players in Washington, asking her to drop her opposition to Mr. Bernstein's project. She is prepared, only, to name John Bridgeland--a former director of the Domestic Policy Council in President Bush's White House, deputy policy director for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, and, after 9/11, the first director of the USA Freedom Corps Office. He called twice "to discourage me . . . no, not discourage, to 'explain what was actually going to be happening [at the Freedom Center],' and that I'd 'got it all wrong.' I said to him, 'Are you aware of some of the exhibits that they're talking about?' " He wasn't. "Here's a man who didn't know what was happening, yet he was picking up the phone and trying to effect an outcome."