David B. Frisk - If Not Us, Who?: William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement

The Most Underrated Major Conservative Leader

Untold stories can place the familiar ones in a new light. William Rusher was a centrally situated conservative leader and wise man who advised his colleagues, at National Review and elsewhere, on how they might respond to the challenges facing the conservative movement. As publisher of the Right's leading magazine from 1957two years after its foundingall the way through 1988, Rusher was not mainly an executive or manager, as his title suggests. He was a political intellectual, tactician, and strategist who also held business responsibilities there.

When Rusher was away from the job, he was still on the job as he understood it: meeting with fellow movement leaders, speaking to a conservative conference or a liberal college audience, debating, attending a Republican national convention. At work he shared his news, his reflections, and often his recommendations. When he wrote to editor William F. Buckley Jr. or the senior editors, his usual topic was either current political opportunities and anxieties or how NR could best aid and influence conservatism while remaining a healthy magazine. I don't think there was ever a situation in which I felt myselfincommunicado from his thinking, Buckley recalls. In the first place, he didn't prefer that to happen.

Rusher had a major although not exclusive theme. Year after year, he urged Buckley and others to consider themselves the leaders of a movement, and to ensure that NR maintained and cultivated its activist side. This position was not always received favorably. But the insights behind it were welcome, for colleagues especially valued Rusher as an analyst of the political world.

Bill knew a great deal more about the insides of politics than most of the rest of us did, and it was much more important to him, says Priscilla Buckley, whose time as managing editor overlapped closely with his thirty-one years as publisher. He added a tremendous amount of political sophistication to [our] analysis of what was going on in this country, and could do that because he kept in touch with political events and the people behind them.

Without Rusher, NR might have reviewed the nation and era from a less political, more intellectual, more ideologically inclusive perspective. That was the approach urged by his frequent opposite, the more scholarly senior editor James Burnham. Buckley respected Burnham enormously and felt drawn toward his position. Yet Rusherallied with another senior editor, Frank Meyer, until the latter's death in 1972 and carrying on thereafterkept up a constant counterpoint in the spirit of the maxim attributed to Ronald Reagan: If not us, who? If not now, when?

He prodded his colleagues to make the magazine helpful to political causes and insisted it seize such opportunities. He argued that it should be the leader, or a major leader, of conservatismnot just an example of it or a spokesman for the Right's ideas. In regard to public policy and candidates, Rusher believed the magazine should uphold a strongly although not rigidly ideological position. With Buckley's permission from the start, he insisted on sharing his views in memos and the many editorial meetings. He had the privilege of speaking out on any subject. Armed with a wealth of knowledge and a powerful wit, Rusher expressed himself frequently and memorably. With two exceptions, he conceded little to the editor, founder, and owner. Those exceptions were his belief that Buckley was an indispensable conservative leader, and his recognition that Buckley was the indisputable boss at NR.

Bill Rusher is every bit as vital to National Review as I am, Buckley told the audience at the magazine's twentieth-year celebration in 1975. Tonight he has been trenchant, which he always is; and diplomatic, which usually he isn't. In contrast to his generous performance tonight, at National Review he

Among the NR leadership, it was Rusher and Meyer who cared the most about immediateelective and practical, not necessarily short-termpolitics. It was Rusher who knew the most about immediate politics and also had the most experience and contact with the Republicans and conservatives who were building the movement so it could (through Ronald Reagan in 1980, as it turned out) take significant political power. But like Burnham and Meyer, and unlike Buckley, he stood at the edge of the limelight. In the growing number of books on modern American conservatism, Rusher is never considered at length or even fully described, although he is usually an acknowledged player and some of his actions and advocacies are recorded.

In reality, he was more important than that. Bill was a character, Buckley recalls, and anyplacethat gave him license to establish his character ended up reflecting him in part. So I think that a lot of whatever can be deemed as the success of National Review is attributable to his contributions to it. In addition, he was of great help to NR in an operational sense. Rusher is, according to Buckley, an important figure in the evolution of the right wing at several levels.

William Rusher's political career began long before he came to NR, and it continued well after he retired from the magazine. In the Young Republican National Federation in the 1950s, he helped Clif White to build, coach, and deploy internally a large cadre that won the organization's national conventions for years. Many of its members became dedicated conservatives, some of whom would form the nucleus of the Draft Goldwater campaign. Rusher was central to the Goldwater driveeven helping start it in mid-1961although White, by then an established political consultant and presidential-campaign veteran, was in charge. In addition, he helped to found and guide Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and the American Conservative Union (ACU) in the 1960s. He attained wider fame in the early 1970s on a successful public-television debate program, The Advocates, compiling an impressive record of victories in its viewer ballots.

Rusher was central to post-1964 conservative organizing. Nobody, but nobody, was more at the heart of this, says Richard Viguerie, active in the movement since the early 1960s and the main developer of direct-mail fund-raising on the Right. Rusher's fingerprints were everywhereand not just involved, but you get a feeling that he was pulling an awful lot of the strings.

At the thirtieth-anniversary