Skousen was his own eager taskmaster

As senators in Washington debated whether Samuel Alito is qualified to safeguard the U.S. Constitution as a Supreme Court justice, and as moviegoers in Utah debated whether Larry H. Miller had the right to drop "Brokeback Mountain" from his theater, it was somehow poetic that Cleon Skousen should quietly pick this week to pass from this life.

Perhaps the greatest private defender of the Constitution and individual rights the state of Utah has ever seen died on Monday just 11 days from his 93rd birthday.

His death followed several months of illness after an otherwise healthy life. Son Paul Skousen remarked, "Dad was ready to go; he was exhausted. He fought a hard fight."

Harder than most. Few have expended more energy in their allotted years. "The rest of us, when we get tired, we turn on 'Seinfeld' and make some popcorn," said Paul Skousen. "He didn't do that. When he got tired, he'd study something else. He'd just bounce from value education to value education. That was Dad's recreation."

I never personally met Cleon Skousen, but I can read a resume, and reading this man's resume is enough to make me turn on "Seinfeld" and make some popcorn.

At various stages of his life, in addition to being a husband and father to eight children, he was a law student, a college professor, an FBI special agent, the Salt Lake City police chief, the founder of the Freemen Institute, an editor, a lecturer and an author. He wrote hundreds of pamphlets and magazine articles and 46 books on subjects ranging from religion to politics to raising children. His book "The Naked Communist," published in 1958, sold well more than a million copies and is still in print nearly 50 years later.

The remarkable part about all this industry is that almost all of it was self-assigned. No one ordered Cleon Skousen to be Cleon Skousen. He did it on his own.

"The Naked Communist" is a case in point. As Paul Skousen recounts, his father was an administrative assistant to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover during World War II when he heard Hoover talking about the need for people to educate themselves about the dangers of communism.

"Dad heard that and took the initiative on his own," said Paul Skousen. "He did the research and came up with all the material that became 'The Naked Communist.' And that became the bible for everyone engaged in that fight. His book was the only material during the early days of the communist movement."

As Paul remembered it, no one in the Skousen household ever had to question how the patriarch of the house wrote all those books.