It is altogether fitting the Committee for the Republic bestows our Defender of Liberty Award on Chas Freeman. Chas was a founding member in 2003 and served as Chairman and brightest ornament until last year when health considerations intervened.


During his long tenure spanning nearly two decades, Chas presided over Board meetings with the skill and flair of Toscanini. His voice was firm but invariably judicious. His store of knowledge awed and his command of language mesmerized.


Listening to Chas is like receiving an unsurpassed, sparkling tutorial on diplomacy and international relations in all their moods and tenses punctuated by follies and misadventures. It is no accident that his presentations command larger audiences by orders of magnitude.

Chas did not succumb to the sin of growing old without growing wise. Indeed, Chas grew wiser by the day with his razor-sharp mind, an amazing breadth of reading, and a rare aptitude to see things in their true proportions.

What has made Chas legendary is not his storied career as a diplomat. It is his uncommon intellectual and moral courage to speak truth to power when the chips are down.

Chas is uniquely long-headed. He foresaw that once the Declare War Clause was airbrushed out of the Constitution by both political parties celebrating endless presidential wars, nothing was safe from constitutional vandalism, especially separation of powers -- a structural bill of rights to protect the people from tyranny.

Chas was the Committee’s five-star general in opposing unconstitutional presidential wars to be answered by impeachment and removal from office. He repeatedly witnessed first-hand James Madison’s apercu that war is the nurse of executive aggrandizement; and, that the strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast -- ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame -- are in the President all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

Chas recognized, as did Abraham Lincoln, that if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Chas is one of the few living Americans who would have been welcomed at the constitutional convention to contribute to its wonderful handiwork, and would have signed the Declaration of Independence without hesitation risking his life, his fortune and his sacred honor.


Chas has honored the Committee much more than we can ever honor him.


https://chasfreeman.net/