Remembering Michael Uhlmann

I was shocked to learn of the passing of Mike Uhlmann on October 8. He was 79, but so young. As a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute four years ago, I came to think of “Father Mikey,” as friends called him, as the epitome of the conservative gentleman — witty, dapper, hearty, kindly, self-effacing, full of anecdotes and bonhomie. Uhlmann was a brilliant professor at the Claremont Graduate School as well as lawyer, aide to WFB’s brother Senator James Buckley and President Reagan, raconteur and writer. He knew a great many people and seemed to be loved by everyone.

Some of those who knew him much better than I did provided their recollections in the most recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books. It’s no surprise at all to learn that he used to spend Thanksgivings doing menial chores for nuns. It is surprising to learn that his life was marred by considerable personal travails. He seemed to live an effortless, polished existence of elegance and grace. At a closing-night party for the Lincoln Fellows, I learned he had studied English at Yale so I brought up the sacred shibboleth of the Yale English department: “Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . . ” He smiled and replied mischievously, “Great, can you do the rest?” Yale English majors are required to begin their training by memorizing the prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. I duly learned it in fall of 1985, then duly forgot it in the fall of 1985. Mike recited the whole blessed prologue, more than half a century after he’d learned it. He had a ready stock of Shakespeare, Eliot, Wordsworth and Auden as well. Mike lived more fully than most of  us.

D. Alan Heslop writes, that Mike — a Catholic Irishman living under cover of that Nordic surname — “made friends, one by one, with a word of thoughtful praise or a small gift (carefully chosen, neatly wrapped), or a book inscribed in his beautiful penmanship with a a perfectly apposite message.” To speak with the man was to be beguiled: “his conversation, with or without whiskey or wine, always sparkled.” He was full of “the robust laughter of a man at ease with his world.”

Wilfred M. McClay recalls how Mike sparkled even in the process of writing a book called Last Rights? Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia Debated. “He carried the burdens of his life with an air of quiet but immense dignity,” McClay says, citing Mike’s “immense and visceral gratitude to God for the sheer privilege of existing — in this time, this place, this country.”

“Christmas,” writes Jean M. Yarbrough, “figured prominently in Mike’s calendar as it gave him the excuse to practice generosity on a wide scale,” dispensing gifts and good will. When  Yarbrough’s husband Dick Morgan lay dying, Mike sent some Gregorian Chants on CD with a note: “It is the true music of the spheres, and I cannot think of anything more comforting as the bell tolls. Put one of these CDs on, pour yourself a drink, and let the prospect of eternity warm you. Be not afraid.”