Mark Demoss

Hugh Hewitt: What I like is that he’s a voracious reader, not only your books, but things like The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, Mark Steyn’s America Alone. I think this is pretty rare these days, to find curiosity at that level, and at that sort of voracious appetite for information. What do you talk about with him?

VDH: Well, we talk about history just like you and I talk about. We talk about foreign policy, he talked about the plan or the effort to democratize the Middle East, the shortfalls, the problems, the liabilities, and you know what? He came to the Hoover Institution and got in front of 40 senior fellows. And in that room there were Nobel Prize winners, a lot of egos, too. And he held court with them, and there were a lot of hostile questions, and he went for an hour and a half, head to head, with these people. When he walked out of that room, I think everybody was impressed with him. He didn’t pull any punches, and he could argue and was as logical as any Hoover fellow, and I was more impressed with him than I was with my colleagues.