CNN is reporting they’ve uncovered the transcripts of a 1995 speech in which Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie advocated a “Lost Cause” view of the Civil War in which the Confederates were tragic heroes. “Today marks the 187th anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis; planter, soldier, statesman, President of the Confederate States of America, martyr to ‘The Lost Cause,’ and finally the gray-clad phoenix,” Wilkie said at an event organized by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. “An exceptional man in an exceptional age.”
Wilkie linked the politics of Jefferson Davis with contemporary conservatism, saying, “America is searching for a better way. Walker Percy urged us to look South to recover community, stability, and sense of place in God’s order which we have regrettably lost. That is a tall proposition but it is certainly one Jefferson Davis would understand and certainly one for which he would fight.”
The event took place at the statue of Jefferson Davis, who Wilkie describes as having “contempt for the radical abolitionists of the Republican Party” because “they would violate any law and abridge any freedom to impose their idea of the just society on others.” Wilkie seemed to share those views since he characterized the radical abolitionists in Congress as being as “mendacious as the Jacobins of Revolutionary France.”
During his confirmation hearings Wilkie distanced himself from neo-Confederates, saying their events had become “part of the politics that divide us.” He added that he no longer attended them and his critics were focused on events that happened 25 years ago. Wilkie spoke to a division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans as recently as 2009.