Becoming Ron Paul

By SARAH PALERMO

Monitor staff

Last modified: 7/31/2011 12:00:00 AM

Ron Paul tuned in on Aug. 15, 1971, as he did every Sunday night, to the financial news broadcast on his radio. But the report he heard that evening - that America would no longer back its currency with gold - was unlike any other.



Until then, Paul was a country doctor who read books on economic philosophy the way his peers might go golfing: for enjoyment. But that broadcast changed his life.



He hasn't changed much since then, except that the man who says he never wanted to be in politics has gotten pretty good at it, and he can't seem to imagine life without it.



Paul, a longtime Texas congressman seeking the Republican presidential nomination for the second time, will be 76 next month. Though born and raised near Pittsburgh, four decades of living on the Texas Gulf Coast have crept into his voice and stretched out his vowels.



His face and hands are deeply lined, but there's youth in his demeanor. It's partly due to his quick, high-pitched way of talking when he's expounding on his favorite topic, economics. He leans forward, eyes wide as words tumble out over each other.



It's also partly from the way he slouches in a chair, knees together and toes pointed in, once he's stopped paying attention to how he looks and concentrates on what he's saying.



But mostly, it's his eyebrows that reveal his youthful energy, as they bounce up and down with excitement.



He laughs easily, like when he says he watches the foreign markets open every



evening to see "whether people are panicking out of the euro, and why they're (chuckle), in spite of our weak currency (snort), why they still buy dollars."



His impish appearance belies the seriousness of his charges against the government. America has been on the wrong path for nearly 100 years, he said.



Paul has written books spreading his views, like almost everyone who has sought the presidency in recent years. But voters won't find the ubiquitous pre-election "how I found the right political path and all the good things I've done while on it" autobiography among the dozen or so he's written.



The closest he's come to writing a personal memoir is the three-page introduction to a short 1984 booklet on Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises.



In it, Paul wrote that he discovered Austrian economics while studying medicine at Duke, when he came across a copy of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. From there, he found lists of titles of other works, and would send away for them at 45 cents per paperback copy.



The writers clarified some details for him, but mostly, they confirmed what he "already knew," he wrote.



"I did not know how a free market accomplished its work . . . but, like many people, I did not need to be convinced of the merits of individual freedom. For me that came naturally."



Reflecting on that passage in a hotel lobby in Manchester earlier this month, Paul said he doesn't see anything remarkable in that feeling.



"I assume that everybody has that, that it's expressed by little kids, expressing themselves as individuals. I think teenagers like to express themselves that way to their parents. It always seemed very natural to me that I would extend that to running my own life, and the economy should be free and we should mind our own business.



"But systematically, society beats it out of us. . . . Eventually people lose it and they feel like they're alone and they have to go along with their peers in school."



Formative years



Paul's innate sense of individual rights was nurtured by the Austrian economists, but he can't pinpoint where it comes from, or why, after so long, he still resists going along with the crowd.



He avoids opportunities to describe himself as remarkable, and says those types of questions most annoy him on the campaign trails. He lived an ordinary childhood in Green Tree, Pa., where his father ran a dairy and all five of the Paul children went to work early.



He excelled in high school athletics, catching a state track title and the eye of the young Carol Wells. They married in 1957 and moved to North Carolina for his medical schooling at Duke, to San Antonio when he was drafted into the Air Force, and to rural Brazoria County, Texas, where he took over the town's only obstetrics practice. Along the way, they raised three boys and two girls.



He continued his study of economics, mostly out of curiosity.



"Some people like to go fishing, and some people like to read novels. I generally like to read more economic books," he said. "I was just trying to figure things out. I think some people have a greater desire to find out how, what makes the world work, what is the plain truth of things. That's what seemed to be driving me all the time, to figure out the truth from the fiction."



His collection of economic and political books were always available for his kids to read or borrow, but their use "depended on how much a kid desired it," said Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of his sons.



There was no family expectation or pressure for the children to follow their father into politics - so far Rand is the only one who has - or medicine, though there are three doctors among Paul's five children, and several among his grandchildren.



When he was at home, he wouldn't talk shop, but instead about "how they did in swimming, or how they did in baseball, what they had done that day and where they were going that evening," Paul said.



But dinner, Rand Paul said, often meant "intellectual arguments about important things: What caused the Great Depression, what we did right or wrong, and how that affected what we were going to do in the '70s and '80s. . . . To him (politics) was always very much an academic thing."



For a few years, life chugged along. Until Sunday, Aug. 15, 1971.



President Richard Nixon was facing inflation of almost 6 percent. He and a handful of advisers emerged from a weekend retreat at Camp David with a plan: They would temporarily freeze wages and prices to check inflation, and end the practice of converting dollars to gold, giving the government the power to print money regardless how much gold the national treasury held.



"Sunday nights were usually the nights when they made major monetary announcements. I guess it was a slow news night, so they put it out then," he said.



Slow news or not, what he heard sounded dire and dangerous.



"People are talking about a default now. That was a default, probably a bigger default. We basically said, 'Well, folks we promised you we'd pay our gold and the world trusted us, but we're not going to give you any more gold anymore. We're going to stiff you.'



"It was a big, big change in our monetary system that would usher in a change of big government, bigger than ever. It would be a world-wide phenomenon and . . . I thought it was time to speak out."



Two and a half years later, he told Carol he was running for Congress.



"He said, 'Well, I'm not going to win. I just have to get it off my chest. Because,' he said, 'if I know what is wrong in the country, and I say nothing, I'm just as bad as the people that are doing the wrong thing,' " Carol Paul said.



"When he says things like that, you just have to go along with him."



Paul said he "assured her (winning) wouldn't be possible because nobody would want to talk about what I wanted to talk about."



"I was convinced I would just run on a lark and that it would be over and done with," he said.



Special election



He did lose that first election, but when the Democratic incumbent resigned the next year for a post in the Ford administration, Paul won the special election to fill the term. At the time, he had the bemused approval of the state GOP.



"There was a total vacuum. It was a Watergate year, and Texas was a Democrat state, so they were just trying to get people to run as Republicans. They didn't care who ran. . . . They said 'That'd be great. At least we'd have a name on the ballot,' " Paul said.



He lost his first re-election campaign, but won the seat back in 1978. He served through 1984, when he ran for the Senate seat vacated by a retiring Republican.



Why would someone who says he's not very good at politics, who submitted Congress's first term-limits bill, run for higher office?



"I was looking for a convenient way to get out without saying I was quitting. That's the real truth," he said, laughing the giddy chuckle of a kid who's played a very good practical joke.



He shook his head dismissively at the thought of winning that election.



"I knew even then. . . . I was relieved because I knew I was going home."



He went back to Texas to keep delivering babies and raising his own family. He kept reading and studying economics, and promoting conservative and libertarian thinking through an investment and political newsletter.



In 1988, he ran for president with the Libertarian Party. By 1996, he decided the country's economic situation was dire enough that he should run for Congress again as a Republican.



"I never set goals to be in politics. Matter of fact, I was quoted as saying I don't really think I'm all that good at politics. I hope I'm better at economics than I am at politics," he said.



Still, he's made a number of shrewd moves over the years.



His supporters trumpet the unblemished voting record he's built in his two stints in the House.



He's never voted for a tax increase. He's never voted for an unbalanced budget. He votes against federal flood insurance programs, though his district sits on the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico. The National Taxpayers' Union calls him "the taxpayer's best friend."



"Everything he believes, every decision is based on his base philosophical principles," said longtime friend and congressional campaign manager Mark Elam. "He will not change, even when his advisers tell him it would be better politically to do so. . . . I've never tried to change his mind. I've tried to . . . encourage him to let us present an issue a bit differently, perhaps, but I wouldn't try to change his mind."



So why does Texas's 14th District keep re-electing this guy? Supporters say because his constituents respect his principled stands, because they've come to see the world his way, to see that "bringing home the bacon" is what corrupts congressmen and bankrupts nations.



But Paul does seek plenty of pork for his district.



In the last fiscal year, he's requested, among other projects, $10 million in federal funding for dredging and maintenance on a channel to Victoria; $1 million to expand the wastewater treatment plant in Fulshears; another $1 million for pedestrian improvements in League City; and $4 million to "construct transit shelters combined with visitor information stations, repair deteriorating sidewalks and ramps for wheelchair access and install landscaping around transit stops" in Galveston.



The bills with these earmarks pass even as Paul votes against them year after year. That's why he writes them. If the government is going to spend the money, his constituents' money, he might as well direct some of it back home, he has said.



Paul announced this spring he won't run for another term in Congress. His district borders are being redrawn, and he always said he believed in term limits anyway.



Carol Paul said the presidential campaign is a win-win. "If he wins, I know he'll do something good for the country, and if he doesn't win, I'll get him back home again."



As she happily considered the thought of her husband back in Lake Jackson full time, Paul looked off dreamily.



With a distracted smile, the man who insists he never wanted to be in politics simply said, "Well . . ."



(Sarah Palermo can be reached at 369-3322 or spalermo@cmonitor.com.)





