William A. Rusher - National Review and Political Activism

National Review and Political Activism

In mid-1957, William F. Buckley, Jr. hired Rusher as publisher of National Review. At the magazine, he oversaw the business operations, but more importantly served as a link to the world of conservative and Republican politics. He held the rank although not the title of senior editor, and as such was a full participant in its internal deliberations. At National Review, he advocated that the magazine develop and maintain a leadership role in the conservative movement. In doing this, Rusher sometimes disagreed with Buckley and senior editor James Burnham. In his philosophy of conservative politics and his belief in the urgent need for an active and unified movement to pursue conservative politics, he was especially close to another senior editor at the magazine, Frank Meyer.

Rusher was an early mentor of Young Americans for Freedom, founded with his assistance in 1960. He helped to found the Conservative Party of New York State in 1961, and the American Conservative Union in 1964-65. He was a mentor to young conservative activists from these early years into the 1990s.

In 1961, Rusher worked with Clif White and Congressman John Ashbrook to form the nucleus of what became Senator Barry Goldwater's campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1963, known as "Draft Goldwater". Goldwater's victory in the bitterly-fought nomination contest over New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the previously dominant moderate or "liberal" establishment in the Republican Party was the first stage in the conservative movement's rise to national power.

Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing well past his retirement from National Review at the end of the 1980s, Rusher was a very active public speaker on college campuses and in other forums, where he defended and advocated the conservative position. In the early 1970s, he was the main conservative representative on a PBS television debate show, The Advocates. He was also a commentator on ABC-TV's Good Morning America in the late 1970s and a regular radio commentator in the 1980s. Throughout Rusher's career, he was known as an aggressive and exceptionally skilled debater.

In the mid-1970s, Rusher was among the most prominent advocates for a conservative third party, or as he called it "new majority party," that would replace the Republicans; he was also involved heavily in efforts to organize such a party. He repeatedly and unsuccessfully urged Reagan, whom he had known since the late 1960s, to lead this effort agree to accept such a party's nomination.

Although he was a "fusionist" conservative who believed in both small-government and socially-conservative positions, Rusher was greatly concerned with unifying the movement and keeping it unified. He believed that Ronald Reagan, whom he promoted as a possible presidential candidate as early as 1967 and in whose reluctant campaign for the Republican nomination in 1968 he had some involvement, was the ideal leader for this purpose. Rusher also believed that the Reagan presidency was the conservatives' greatest political achievement.

In terms of issues, he was heavily motivated by anti-communism throughout his career, was an outspoken opponent of the 1960s counterculture, and took a special interest in what he considered pervasive liberal bias in the news media. As an adult he was baptised and became a Traditional Anglican, although his religious views rarely entered into his political discourse.

Rusher wrote five books: Special Counsel (1968), a memoir of his time on the Internal Security Subcommittee; The Making of the New Majority Party (1975), in which he advocated the establishment of a new conservative party to replace the Republicans in the post-Watergate period; How to Win Arguments (1981), a primer of debating techniques; The Rise of the Right (1984), a history of the conservative movement from the 1950s to the early 1980s, re-released in 1993 with an appendix covering more recent developments; and The Coming Battle for the Media (1988).

Rusher doubted the GOP could ever be converted to true conservatism, and spent much of his career unsuccessfully trying to jump-start a conservative third party.