There were two bills at National Review and in the conservative movement, two bills. Bill Buckley Concha a brilliant shooting star who lit up the sky and bill rusher, and never wavering northstar by which conservatives learned to chart their political course. Now many have written about william f. Buckley junior, irresistible renaissance man but no one until david frisk has given us an indepth portrait of the other bill, william a. Rusher among his other salutary played a pivotal role in the life of the National DraftGoldwater Committee and that was critical, because if there had been no Draft Goldwater Committee there would have been no president ial candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. And if there had been no candidate goldwater in 1964, there would have been no president elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. It was goldwater you see who approved reagans famous a time for choosing television address which made reagan a political star overnight and led to his running for governor of california and eventually president of these United States. David recounts how bill rusher shored up the Goldwater Committee when money ran short and spirits sagged. Skillfully guided Young Americans for freedom in its early chaotic days and in for some order of discipline on the spirit to read National Review, expanded the conservative movement through the tv program the epic its, his newspaper column and his lectures in champion Ronald Reagan when other conservatives were somewhat skeptical about the act there turned politician. Bill rusher loved american politics, rare wines, traveling to distant lands and National Reviews effervescent editor bill buckley of whom he once said quote the most exasperating people in the world are so often the most beloved, and he is no exception. Now david frisk has captured all of this and more in this splendid overdue biography of the other bill, bill rusher. Derf risk is a former awardwinning reporter who received his ph. D. From claremont and will be teaching this fall those lucky students at the Alexander Hamilton center in new york. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in getting a warm heritage welcome to dr. David frisk. [applause] thank you for that wonderful introduction of me and more importantly william rusher. Can everyone here all right . I suspect there is a very wide range in this room of familiarity and relative unfamiliarity with bill rusher who was the publisher of National Review for 31 years, almost from the beginning and it can also be said to have had a halfcentury long career in american politics with something of a privileged ringside or front row seat. He never ran for Public Office, never Held Public Office and never really founded anything on his own as a number of conservatconservat ive leaders did. Never controlled his own institution. He was, as i they put it in my introduction, william rusher and the conservative Movement Published last april, he was at the edge of the limelight. A lot of people knew very well who he was. A lot of people know a lot less about him. But as people became aware of william rusher, there was a general agreement among the whole fractured spec from of american conservatism. We have seen how fractious it can be just after this unfortunate election. There was a white agreement. Libertarians, traditionalist, purists, pragmatists that bill rusher really knew what he was doing. One of his great achievements was to give Movement Conservatives from i would say the early 1960s right up until the 1990s at which time he had semiretired, more confidence than i think he otherwise would have had that there really was a conservative movement and that it really was moving, if imperfectly. We have seen in recent years a lot of doubts about whether the conservative Movement Still exist anymore. Some people even doubt whether it deserves to exist anymore, whether its destroyed itself. Well, there are people all along who it said insight that. One of the things rusher stood for most prominently and enduringly was the belief that we can serve conservatives all had to pull together and all had to be together and keep it being together. He would would have put a partiy and more member of mike. Is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Not miss the forest for the trees. These are not the most innovating or exciting sort of messages but its very important to have a few people at or near the top of the conservative movements leadership who believe in and preach these things, and to ask people, asked their fellow activists and conservative intellectuals to remain focused on the need to win a majority of the American People and to govern the. National review as a very intellectual magazine throughout its existence and i think probably even more so in its early years in the 50s and 60s. A very much needed i think bill buckley managing editor and every other major person there acknowledge to that they very much needed a man just like bill rusher to serve as a lyrical eyes and ears, as a political counselor, as a link between National Review type people. As rusher tended to put it, the intellectuals and the practical politician. By politicians rusher didnt mean people aspired to Public Office but the mastermind of the Goldwater Campaign and the marshal of the Goldwater Campaign. White too was a politician and rusher was something of a politician. In other words if practitioner of actual politics. Russia placed tremendous value on these people, and he was always trying with some success to get the more philosophical conservatives. A classic example of course being buckley himself to appreciate that sort of career and that sort of individual and that sort of effort. A lot of what youll find in the book and im sure some of you have read it, is a good deal of back and forth between publisher rusher and also political counselor rusher who have full privileges by the way of speaking out on any issue officially and unofficially. Officially i mean the meetings they would hold what should be long and interesting. He had the privilege of speaking out on any editorial issue, anything involving National Reviews political, will its tone and what should cover and whats less important so he played an editorial role although he didnt have the vision and they listen to it. At times they got tired of listening to it. But remember any time, if you read about rusher or if you want to formulate a question about it remember that this is another world technologically and remained so until rusher retired from National Review at the end of the 1988. When he came right in right afterwards it was still operating in 1950s that is an 88 and 89 still operating in the 1950s with carbon paper and secretaries who were treated as secretaries. I guess that is a polite term for sexist and its not an important point. The more important point is carbon paper. Rusher would not have been keen on social media himself. Where he still alive and onto today he would have appreciated it. To get back to the point comp thats an important one. This was a year the year when people communicated on paper and they communicated at length on paper. It was a tremendous resource for my research of the Library Congress where rushers papers are. There has been sufficient evidence no excuse me sufficient interest in the rusher papers among scholars who were interested in the development of the conservative movement who i think more often than not are liberals. In the rusher papers they remove several years ago from the satellite location in suburban maryland to the actual James Madison building on the other side of the hill. That is how much interest there has been in the rusher papers although he it might be the only book about it and as far as i know it may be the only book about him. So they committed to each other in paper and that is a lot of what my book is about plus other people and significant interviews with mr. Buckley. They were very candid with each other. Rusher and buckley in particular. In their differing judgments about what positions National Review should take and what it should focus on. Dr. Edwards alluded to the importance of the Goldwater Campaign for the future of the conservative movement. I dont think there is time and perhaps isnt any need to stress that to this audience any further than it already has been. It was a very seminal event. Rusher was in the thick of it. More than anyone, he probably persuaded goldwater to at least remain open to the possibility of a candidacy and early 63 when he did not want to. He kept the Goldwater Campaign going went ahead of it his friend and associate was ready to give up for a variety of reasons including financial reasons. One of the great lessons of rushers career is that he didnt believe in giving up. Ever. There was always another bus coming along in 10 or 15 minutes. The sun would come up the next morning. And there was always something to do. One of the people who knew rusher well as a young conservative activists in the 60s rusher being in his late 30s or about 40 said that it seemed to him in his interactions with him in Young Americans for freedom and so juan, that rusher had an extra 10 hours a day. Someone else said that he seemed to be the most organized man in the movement. Now, it was a little easier for rusher to play that kind of very energetic and very focused role, always on all the time, always giving it his best, always looking good always speaking well and always dressing well. And if not always write, always persuasive, always somebody wanted to listen to. Its easier to develop that reputation perhaps if you dont have a family. He never married, never had children. Somebody suggested to me early in my research that rusher was married to the movement and i think there was a significant truth to that so there is only a limited number of people who would have that kind of a life and could play quite that kind of a role. The point is that rusher did it. Rusher had been he was a graduate of Harvard Law School graduated in 1948. He worked at a major wall street law firm now known as sherman in sterling, and old nature firm but he was really bored by Corporate Law practice. He described it in his first book which was First Published in 1968 and is not really an autobiography but an autobiographical chapter this quite interesting. He says while, there will be silent victories and defeats in these quiet conversations in these boardrooms of our law firm and he wanted more action than that. And he also, he loved left politics so much that he really had in some way shape or form he had to do it fulltime. So he walks away from his wall street offer in early 1956, comes to washington with lives just a few blocks south of here, somewhere near the russell or the dirksen building and of little apartment and he joins the very important anticommunist investigator named robert morris. Robert morriss and points in the anticommunist investigations of the 1950s was apparently so significant that Whittaker Chambers said to buckley, in a letter around that time, that morris really accomplished most of what joe mccarthy is credited with in terms of useful anticommunism that he is credited with on the right. Rusher was the course on the Senate Security subcommittee, the number two lawyer on that committee. Mccarthy was still alive. He knew mccarthy and believe believed that he had been buried apparently railroaded by the liberal establishment, very much along the lines of what stan evans later argued in his 2007 book. Rusher in other words was part of before he came to National Review, he was part of a cadre of very hard and professional anticommunists, and that is what really got them into the conservative movement. That is what caused him to transition from generic republicanism, which included what i described as a just when attitude in their something to sit be said for that. And attitude of being willing to lose even a president ial election if it was a constructive sort of lost that one could take pride in of goldwater 64. That had planted seeds for the future. Rusher did not originally think that way. In 1948 in 1952 it was just when paid me so he was all for doing. There are similarities therein the 1948 campaign and there are similarities in the 2012 campaign on our side and on the other side. Rusher sees that. In 52 he knows that eisenhower is going to be a great champion of conservative causes. Probably also knew that eisenhower would not be that an aggressive anticommunist but he wanted to win. Will, to keep this reasonably concise but to finish the thought because it is important, rusher believed that moderate republican at estrangement or Dwight Eisenhower who was president for eight years just wasnt ideological enough, wasnt anticommunist enough even at home are brought. Rusher believed there was a communist threat within the United States. More and more documentation of that has come out in the last 20 years after the opening of the exsoviet archives. Buckley also, a couple of years younger than rusher. All of you know probably that he wrote wrote god wrote god come command and yell which came out 19 in 1954 after he graduated from yale. He has to from yale and rusher was a graduate of princeton prewar and during the war. Buckley says yale is insufficiently respectful of religion despite its religious heritage and the heritage of most elite academia in america and also they dont present the Free Enterprise side of economics. They are too keynesian and quasisocialist. Rusher agreed with all of that, but i think the greater affinity with buckley can be seen and buckley and his brotherinlaw rent facelles 1954 book in which they say yeah mccarthy has been a little too rough. He has made some errors in judgment but that causes really, really important and he is being treated unfairly. That is exactly where rusher, thats exactly where russian is in 1954 and 55 and 56. In the years where he turns from generic young republican republicanism to hard movement conservatism. There was a bit of a conservative movement before buckley founded the National Review in 1955 that it was sort of, it was disorganized. The polite term might be entrepreneurial individualistic. Whittaker chambers had another way to describe it. He said it was people popping out like rabbits. You never knew where they were coming from or where they were going. You might see a little bit of this today now and then. Rusher is absolutely thrilled to hear that there is going to be a conservative weekly magazine. At the time it was weekly. So when he hears about National Review being in the works, in 1955 he becomes a charter subscriber even before it actually comes out. He meets buckley within a couple of months after the magazine starts. He spent a year and a half in washington on the Senate Internal subcommittee but remains in touch with buckley in that circle. He joins the magazine in the mid1957. He wasnt interested in the business side of the magazine which was technical and real responsibility. Keeping it afloat and finding more subscribers and getting more advertising and all that kind of stuff. They needed someone like that and he was pretty good at that. Although there is evidence that after several years or at least that he kind of neglected it because he was so into the political side. But, as i said he comes into National Review with a kind of writ from editor buckley that he will have full freespeech rights, free rights of argumentation and advocacy in the internal deliberations of the magazine. And that is a good part of the book, although i wouldnt say it was the majority of the but its a good part of the book and its very interesting. Rusher advising buckley and the other senior editors James Burnham, frank myers and so on. How we should deal with the John Birch Society issue, the extremists of the site, how it should deal with troubles with the Young Americans for freedoms a very important conservative and from a organization. Dr. Edwards was i believe the first or early editors of the newspaper back in the early 60s. He started very young and has known rusher for that long. Rusher would advise the National Review people and of course above all buckley who was the owner and therefore really the man they are, what was going on out there, and the conservatives, what the problems were in conservative politics, what the opportunities and challenges, what things were happening and what ought to be supported. Buckley though is very interested in maintaining developing and then maintaining a high reputation for National Review, a reputation as a thoughtful magazine. At one point he writes to his colleagues there and says, no, know it was an editorial. In 1960. He says to the readers, but he would have said it equally to his colleagues, our job is not to make practical politics. Its really to think and write and occasionally to mediate. That is, to offer to play something of a of a brokers role oman conflic