The Quotable Bill Rusher Part 2: From His Books

Special Counsel (1968)

“… a steady diet of political infighting tends to coarsen, and ultimately to cheapen, most participants. They approach politics as reasonably honorable citizens, and by imperceptible degrees it sucks them into its vortex. The plainly right shades into the nearly wrong; the inexcusable slowly becomes the barely permissible. At last the best of men become very nearly the worst, and behave—usually in the name of some long-forgotten virtue—in ways that would shame a pain-crazed rattlesnake.
But here and there, now and then, some individual defies the pattern, and succeeds in the teeth of the seemingly universal Gresham’s Law of politics. A Taft, a Goldwater, a Bracken Lee makes the truth pay off, for a change, and gladdens the hearts of millions who supposed that honesty could never again win an election.”—from a 1960 National Review article on his friend and colleague Bob Morris, chief counsel to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (ISSC) when Rusher worked there in 1956-1957 investigating American communism. J. Bracken Lee, governor of Utah from 1949 to 1957, was notable for his staunch fiscal conservatism and opposition to the income tax.

“Certainly it is possible to overstate the role that Communists in government have played in perverting America’s policy during the past thirty-five or forty years, but it simply will not do to argue that they have played none at all. Every American soldier who died in Korea, or who has died or will die in Vietnam, or who must yet die elsewhere before Communist China is tamed at last, is in one sense a victim of the high-ranking Americans who served the cause of Communism in the Treasury Department in the years 1943-45.”—one of the most important parts of Special Counsel is Chapter 4, “The Termites in the Treasury,” which discusses “the deliberate ruin by Communist agents … of our attempt to support the currency of Nationalist China in 1944-45. It was the subject of a remarkable staff study by the ISSC in 1956.” The most prominent of the “termites” Rusher discussed was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the treasury.

“… a break with Communism, and an offer to “tell all,” is fundamentally inconsistent with a determination to avoid naming names …
… every man feels a natural distaste for exposing others whose crimes, however great, seem after all no greater to him than the crimes of the one doing the exposing—and were done, moreover, in complicity with him, and in the bond of mutual trust and secrecy. The short answer is that, in this highly unsatisfactory world, we are not granted the luxury of placing our obligations to our friends on a level equal to, let alone higher than, our obligation to the society that shelters both them and us; and when we join with them in a conspiracy to destroy that society, and then break with them, our obligations to them and to it are fundamentally inconsistent—and the obligation to the society … is paramount.”

“Few appointments were ever better calculated to arouse resentment on all sides. Everybody over 26 resented Cohn’s youth. Everybody less clever … resented his undeniable intelligence. Republicans resented Cohn because he was a Democrat, and a noisy one at that. Democrats resented him for “selling out” to a Republican. Many of his fellow Jews resented him because they were tremulously convinced that the whole so-called “Communist issue” contained the seeds of a native fascism and a concomitant anti-Semitism … Many hard-shelled rightists around the country, whose innermost hearts contained a trace (or more) of anti-Semitism, resented him for being a Jew. Finally, it must be conceded that Roy Cohn’s personality is no threat to, say, Bing Crosby’s. Personally wealthy, addicted to flashy clothes, block-long limousines, and dizzy blondes, with an abrupt air that struck many people as intolerably overbearing, Cohn would have been a thorny problem in image-improvement for even the best PR firm; as counsel to the McCarthy committee he was a sort of Abominable-Snowman-in-Residence.”—Cohn, later a prominent New York lawyer and political mentor to Donald Trump, was hired by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953 as chief counsel to McCarthy’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee.

“It is not too much to say … that Witness is the beginning of wisdom for those who would truly understand the problem of American Communism. It is almost impossible to read those simple, eloquent pages and disbelieve the man who wrote them. Those who wish to persist in other views are best advised to leave the book unread.”—Whittaker Chambers’s classic memoir of communism and anti-communism, published in 1952, was a major inspiration to Rusher and many conservatives.

“… it is entirely proper to remove an employee from a government job if he is demonstrably a security risk, without requiring the government to prove that the employee has already committed a crime. Life, liberty, and property are rights, not to be taken away without meeting a heavy burden of proof of wrongdoing; but government employment is a privilege, and doubts concerning fitness for it should properly be resolved in favor of the government.”

“ … because it is based on a fundamentally inadequate and mistaken concept of man’s nature, I
believe it is doomed to final failure—for the same reason that the proposition that two and two make five is doomed to final failure.
It does not follow, however, that the free world … will necessarily prevail in its present mortal struggle with Communism. Free men are divided among themselves, and profoundly unsure of their course. When God is “dead” in the hearts of many good men, and Science is our king; when even conservatives find it difficult to synthesize and express in modern terms the traditional wisdom of the West … it is impossible to feel that the prospects for the victory of free men are very bright, still less that their victory is inevitable.
But … since the real problem is not our adversary’s strength but our own weakness and irresolution, the remedy lies within us. Communism’s absurd and primitive scientism could not possibly prevail against a free world sure of its own meaning and destiny. That is why I agreed so thoroughly, from the very first, with the basic contention of National Review: namely, that what America has most to fear is not the Communists either at home or abroad, but our own good-hearted, well-meaning fellow citizens of the liberal persuasion, whose unintended effect has been to sap the survival powers of free societies everywhere.”

The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)

“Social conservatism, like economic conservatism, can at times become an offensive caricature of its best self. Cultural pride can freeze into bigotry; a forgivable hostility to “big guys” can degenerate into a mere envious hatred of rich or otherwise successful individuals. The all too human desire for better material circumstances can be warped, by a really artful demagogue, into such dangerous claptrap as Huey Long’s famous slogan, “Every man a king.”
But social conservatism can also serve to moderate the near-Puritan severity of traditional conservative economics without undermining its basic structure. And that is a contribution almost beyond price.”

“There is no sadder chapter in the whole history of American conservatism than that which describes how Richard Nixon, in whom the majority of Republican conservatives at Miami Beach in 1968 had so incautiously placed their faith, systematically and cynically abandoned, between 1969 and 1972, most of the conservative principles that justify participation in politics … One may regret, on many grounds, the end he came to; but no conservative who trusted him can ever easily forgive, let alone forget, the betrayal he committed.”—“Miami Beach” refers to that year’s Republican convention, where Nixon nearly failed to win nomination on the first ballot. Had he come up short, the nomination might ultimately have gone to Governor Ronald Reagan. Rusher later said that the fact this didn’t happen was a “tragedy.”

“Watergate teaches us, too, the virtues of having politicians, rather than mere managers and technicians, operating the levers of ultimate power. Men such as Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman were not intrinsically evil, whatever their critics may say; but neither were they “politicians” in the best sense of that word. A municipal bond lawyer, an advertising account executive, and a real estate lawyer, they brought to the service of Richard Nixon impressive administrative skills as well as total personal loyalty; but they never understood the necessity for compromise that lies at the heart of politics, or grasped the great truth that not even the best intentions can justify wronging one’s fellow citizens.”

“No one can effectively lead or even work for the Republican Party today, because no one can possibly say what it stands for.”

“Of course, nothing worth while is ever achieved without sacrifice, and the formation of the coalition I have described will entail losses as well as gains—though the gains will far outweigh the losses. The principal loss will be among the upper-class WASPs concentrated in the Northeast … These voters, while presently still registering Republican in fair numbers, were largely educated in the liberal-dominated academies, are heavily influenced by the liberal media, and thus are already all but lost to one or another political manifestation of liberalism … They are culturally a world away from the ethos and concerns of social conservatives, and indeed represent much that the latter instinctively oppose. It will be no very wrenching experience to bid them a firm farewell.”

“Most of the hopes vested in the UN were absurd from the start; virtually all of the rest have been destroyed, one by one, as it has increasingly fallen (with our entire consent and even complicity, by the way) into the hands of the so-called “Third World” bloc of ex-colonial countries, few of which seriously merit the name of “nation.” ”

“If this is one of the truest indicia of character—a temperament so balanced and serene that it can almost command its environment—then character is bound to be rare among politicians, even the best of them, for they naturally tend to reflect rather than command their environment. But we see evidences of precisely this quality in America’s very greatest presidents—Washington and Lincoln—and I do not hesitate to set it down at the very top of my own personal list of requirements.”—Although Rusher is not, in this passage, explicitly endorsing anyone as the best nominee for his proposed “new majority party,” Reagan was definitely Rusher’s preference for this role, and the comments describe one quality he found especially impressive and distinctive in Reagan.

“ … Goldwater’s personal style, while ruggedly honest, was somewhat astringent and doctrinaire. In this connection, he was also badly served by his speechwriters, many of whom apparently regarded his candidacy as a golden opportunity to bring home a series of long-overlooked and highly unpleasant “truths” to the American people. It was—as it so often is—not so much what Goldwater said as how he said it.”—a comment on the 1964 general election campaign.

“It is a fact of human psychology that there are types of personalities simply incapable of participating in a collective effort, especially if that effort requires them to subordinate their own preferences in any serious degree. Worse yet, there are individuals who are simply unable to endure the experience, or even the prospect, of victory: people … for whom the thrill of political action lies, not in the possibility of success, but in the struggle itself, or even in defeat. There are large unconscious elements of sadism and masochism in such personalities, and their impact upon healthier forms of political action can be (and historically often has been) catastrophic. The Independence Party should avoid like the proverbial plague their predictable efforts to use it to serve their self-defeating purposes.”—Rusher tentatively suggested “Independence Party” as a name for his proposed new party. The book includes substantial discussion of how such a party should be organized, and what its messaging and tone should be.

“Politics … is a serious business—for its regular practitioners a true profession—and experience acquired in it, in managerial as much as in candidatorial capacities, is a precious asset. What issues should be emphasized; what compromises should be accepted; what needs to be done to mount an effective campaign—these are all questions concerning which the opinion of an expert, or for that matter of anyone having a little practical experience, is usually worth far more than the intuitions of unseasoned amateurs.”

“The untested assumption required us to suppose that such an electorate, or at least a majority of its members, would be capable of exercising the discrimination, the self-restraint, and where necessary the self-denial, that characterized previous successful examples of democracy. One of Athens’ ten thousand citizens, after discussions with his peers, might plausibly be able … to resist the blandishments of some demagogue who was trying to persuade the voters that he could make silk purses out of sows’ ears. A property-owner in early 19th-century England or America was certainly no easy mark for such a proposition. But in America, as the 20th century nears its end, we are relying for similar skepticism and restraint on a potential electorate of at least 140 million voters, ranging in age from 18 to senility, large numbers of whom have no identifiable vested interest whatever in the prevailing social system (quite the contrary), and many of whom are functional illiterates as well.
There is nothing wrong with the heart of a society that takes such a gamble; we may even borrow Herbert Hoover’s description of Prohibition and call it “an experiment noble in purpose.” But it is nonetheless an experiment, and there is no blinking at the mounting evidence that the experiment isn’t going very well—either here, or in the Western European democracies that have tried it too.”—thoughts on the “untested assumption” and “gamble” that giving nearly everyone the right to vote was a good idea.

“Being a voter these days is no bed of roses; the quality of public debate has declined shockingly since the days of Lincoln and Douglas. Bombarded on all sides by alleged experts uttering flatly contradictory advice on (say) economic policy; bewildered by the intricate ballet of such terms as “inflation,” “stagflation,” and “slumpflation”; knowing for sure only that he and his family are feeling the pinch—is it reasonable to expect even comprehension, let alone self-restraint, from such a voter?
Yet that is the leaky vessel in which 20th-century democracy has set sail … The mechanisms of borrowing and inflation have been used and abused by a series of profligate administrations until the interest alone on our national debt exceeds $30 billion every year … The day of economic reckoning is very near, and is bound to be painful.”

How to Win Arguments (1981)

“… people often have other reasons for arguing: unacknowledged or even unconscious reasons that have little or nothing to do with “prevailing” or “winning.” We ourselves are more subject to irrational impulses than we usually realize or care to admit. And even if we personally never argue for any but the most pressing and justifiable of reasons, we assuredly live in a world where plenty of other people do. In order to prevail over our adversary, it is important to understand his real reason for arguing—a reason of which he himself may be wholly unaware.”

“… it is a waste of time to squander a lot of heavy logic on situations that are simply not designed to respond to purely logical treatment.”

“What do we mean by “winning”? If the objective is to achieve some quick result—to induce a particular action, or even simply rouse an immediate sense of approbation and identification—then the competent arguer will say and do things that will cause him to be liked by his opponent or the audience, even at the technical expense of his argument. He may omit certain points because they might be offensive to some … he will carefully avoid ridiculing even the patently ridiculous … All this is quite proper. But pulling one’s punches may also have the side effect of letting falsehood off too easily for the audience’s (or even the opponent’s) long-range good. One may win an argument today by exciting personal admiration or gratitude or even sympathy; but arguments “won” in this way tend to get lost retroactively.”

“A genuine change of mind on a subject important to us … is often—perhaps usually—accompanied by pain. Do not, then, expect to see real progress on such a front registered by the presence of enthusiasm … The ego needs time to marshal its defenses—either to try to restore the toppled idol, or to come to terms with the toppling, or (at the very least) to regain its own shattered composure.”

“The argument from consequences … tends on the whole to be somewhat weaker than the argument from analogy … precisely because it lacks the stiffening of plausibility which a reasonably apposite analogy provides. The prediction has to fly on its own, as it were; and it flies, or falls, depending on the target audience’s (often biased) perception of its likelihood.”

“… it will often be desirable to understate one’s point slightly, provided it is clear to the audience that it is being understated and the audience can be depended on to enhance it appropriately themselves. They will credit the arguer with a scrupulous concern not to exaggerate, and like him the better for it.
But this would be a poorer world without overstatement, and it has … a valid place in argumentation. Provided, above all, that the audience recognizes the exaggeration as deliberate but not malignant—i.e., not intended to deceive—it can highlight a point without injuring it in the least.”

“Rhetorical devices are nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, they are indispensable tools serving … to enhance and enrich the plodding words that necessarily form the basic substance of human communication. They are only unfair—and if so perceived, dangerous to the user—when those in the audience feel they are being used manipulatively.”

“No matter how competent an arguer may be, the time will inevitably come when he makes a mistake … Back away, quickly and completely. Do it unostentatiously if possible, but above all do it. No matter how disagreeable the immediate effect of such a retreat may be, it is infinitely preferable to trying to defend a position that one knows, deep down, is indefensible against an adversary who usually knows it as well as you do.”

“the competent arguer won’t adopt a position in the first place unless he is absolutely sure it is defensible.”

“While mistakes ought to be admitted as promptly and economically as possible, care ought to be taken to fill the resulting hole in the line of argumentation. A faulty analogy should be replaced by a valid one, an erroneous quotation by an accurate one …”

“… I have made it a point to understand my opponents’ arguments just as well as I possibly could—the better to combat them. And for that purpose there is simply nothing quite like “putting yourself in your opponent’s shoes.” ”

“If you ever have to choose between solid substance and mere flashy style, by all means choose the substance …”

The Rise of the Right (1984)

“Bill Buckley’s emergence onto the national stage … in the 1950s, and the impact of his striking personality … caused a lesion in the self-confidence of many liberals that materially influenced the attitudes of both conservatives and liberals thereafter, as well as the ultimate outcome of their long struggle. Buckley was to become far better known during the 1960s and nationally—even internationally—famous during the 1970s. He is today a truly national figure by any standard … But his truly seminal contributions to the conservative movement occurred in the decade of the 1950s, and although the founding of National Review is indisputably the greatest of these, I would not hesitate to put second the impact … of his own remarkable personality.”

“… Goldwater’s popularity as a conservative candidate stemmed in very substantial part from the sharp contrast between his personal and political qualities and those of John Kennedy. Time, and the poignant fact of Kennedy’s subsequent assassination, have softened and sanctified our memories of the man; but two decades ago he was a living, breathing politician, not an icon, and a great many people were prepared to consider an alternative in 1964. Kennedy was from … the Northeast, and connoted many qualities associated with it: Harvard, great wealth, sophistication, and political liberalism. Goldwater hailed from … the opposite and newest corner of the nation, the Southwest, and personified most of the human characteristics associated with its people: a sort of rugged, earthy, manly innocence …
Kennedy’s sudden replacement by Johnson, therefore, was little short of a disaster for Goldwater’s hopes of election … Instead of confronting a northeasterner, with whom he could contrast spectacularly and perhaps to advantage, Goldwater would now be pitted against a fellow southwesterner … from a background not merely less opulent than Kennedy’s, but dirt poor. Worst of all, Johnson, despite his political origins in FDR’s New Deal, was identified, and rightly, with the relatively conservative southern wing of the Democratic party … Goldwater and his managers would never be able to persuade most Americans that Lyndon Johnson represented any of the new tendencies in the country which so many of them feared and opposed.”

“The importance of the 1964 campaign as a recruiting device … must not be overlooked. Most presidential campaigns are mechanical affairs, their demonstrations of popular support staged and phony. Goldwater’s campaign, in terms of human beings recruited and despite his subsequent heavy defeat, was a political tsunami.”

“The discussion lasted an astonishing three hours and ended … only because both Buckley and I had other appointments. I remember being particularly struck by the way in which almost every imaginable subject had, in Nixon’s estimation, two sides. “On the one hand,” he would begin, outlining the case for one view. “On the other hand,” he would then continue, pressing his palms together and flipping them over like pancakes—and go on to state the other side of the question. He seemed fascinated by this dual nature of the universe.”—Rusher’s recollection from a private meeting at Nixon’s Manhattan apartment in January 1967, in the early stages of his 1968 campaign.

“Reportedly Nixon … regards the détente with Peking as the principal jewel in the notoriously underdecorated diadem of his administration, but the benefits to the United States are hard to perceive. Certainly those visions of Communist Chinese sugarplums that danced in the heads of many a greedy American businessman gave gone glimmering: Mainland China is so poor and primitive that not even lavish loans can prepare it for all the things American businessmen are eager to sell it … And Peking’s chronic hysterics over our continuing arms trade with Taiwan certainly suggest that we have merely substituted for concern over a flaccid enemy an equal or worse preoccupation with a fat and pouting “friend.” ”

“Occasionally … Goldwater shoots from the hip; it is at least possible that he hated himself the morning after that interview …
But it is more likely, I am sorry to say, that Goldwater’s grip on conservative principles just isn’t (and perhaps never was) the absolutely dependable thing we believe it to be … he endorsed Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1968 … It is an open secret that Goldwater is in Ford’s camp today, ready to endorse him … when it will do the most good. He said publicly in November 1974 that Rockefeller would be “acceptable” to him as Ford’s choice for Vice President. And now he proclaims that Rockefeller “would be a damn good president”! Every dog is entitled to one bite, they say—but four?”—from a column in early 1976, referring to the close contest between Reagan and President Ford for the Republican nomination..

“For me personally, the most painful … aspect of the immediately ensuing weeks was a fair amount of good-natured ribbing by conservative friends … who had predicted all along that the project would fail. I had known very well, however, the odds against success and had taken the gamble with my eyes wide open. If 1976 had been the year a new major party appeared on the national scene (as the Republican party itself had done, swiftly eclipsing the Whigs, in 1856), we would have been hailed as prophets. Since the attempt failed, we were fair game for scoffers and critics.”—a reflection on the failure of Rusher’s conservative third-party (or “new majority party”) project. The “immediately ensuing weeks” were the ones after the 1976 election, in which the American Independent Party nominee, segregationist former Georgia governor Lester Maddox, received just one-fifth of 1 percent of the vote. Rusher, conservative fundraiser Richard Viguerie, and other new-majority party advocates had attended the AIP convention in hopes of getting it to nominate a better candidate. Before leaving the convention, Rusher stated to the media that the AIP had “turned inward, backward, and downward” by nominating Maddox.

“My own guess is that what makes the critics of the religious right obscurely uncomfortable about its views is not that it “tries to impose them on others” (it doesn’t, save by the perfectly legitimate processes of evangelism and ordinary political lobbying) but that it harbors moral views at all—i.e., takes morality seriously, as a guide to personal conduct. Many Americans, and not merely liberals by a long shot, tend to deal with morality in very gingerly fashion—keeping it at a comfortable distance, applying it in extremely abstract ways, and taking swift refuge in a pious “refusal to judge” whenever a moral issue is raised in a concrete manner or context.”

The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988)

“The Op-Ed page of the New York Times … is allegedly intended to afford space for the expression of a large variety of views on public questions, including views at variance with the opinions of the Times itself. In practice … it has tended to become increasingly a sort of Hyde Park Corner for various leftish and liberal opinions for which the Times doesn’t care to take responsibility.”

“Precise what metamorphosis do the Dotty Lynches of contemporary Washington undergo on the short trip from Senator Hart’s headquarters to CBS? And just how did the versatile Wally Chalmers manage to shed his identity as a member of Ted Kennedy’s staff and purify his soul for service at CBS News, then smoothly resume his role as a Democratic apparatchik, fit to become executive director of the Democratic National Committee? Or do such people in fact simply remain, and behave as, liberal Democrats while working for CBS?”

“a conviction that the media in general are biased against liberalism is simply not to be found in liberalism’s general set of beliefs as it is in that of conservatism, and also of the harder Left. On the contrary, liberals are usually quick to praise the media, deny that the media are biased, and defend the media’s claimed prerogatives against all challengers.
For them to do otherwise would be ingratitude indeed.”

“Where, in the case of the Kennedy presidency—the apotheosis of an imperial clan if there ever was one—was the media’s alleged “inherent bias against the establishment”? Where was the media’s famed “appetite for bad news”? (Or did the Kennedy White House simply not generate any bad news?)
The truth … is that American liberals lost effective control of the Johnson administration and its agenda in or about 1966, when Johnson’s Great Society programs … began to be overshadowed by his increasing commitment to the war in Vietnam … It is no coincidence whatever that the liberal media elite’s “inherent bias against the establishment,” and therefore against the presidency, dates from precisely the same period. Since then, there has not been a president in the White House, Republican or Democrat, of whom liberals wholeheartedly approved, and the fact that the media have in general attacked all of them does not … disprove, but in fact demonstrates, their knee-jerk liberalism.”

“Grudgingly, in partial explanation of their failure to damage Reagan seriously, the media adopted his admirers’ enthusiastic description of him as the Great Communicator. On November 6, 1984, he proved his right to that title by winning reelection 49 states to 1.
At that point, a good many conservatives were beginning to suspect that the media—and for that matter the liberals generally—had been overrated as adversaries. Granted, Ronald Reagan was clearly something pretty special when it came to winning the hearts of the American people; but it no longer seemed quite so impossible to win national elections, even with the major media solidly in the opposition’s corner. To many conservatives, it was a blessed relief to know that there were at least some things the media couldn’t always do.”

“When the media win a court case, we all hear about the victory; when they lose, “the issue” (in the words of the New York Times upon one such melancholy occasion) “remains unresolved.” ”

“There is evidence that liberals … may themselves be preparing to enter the lists of those who monitor the media. According to [an item in the Christian Science Monitor], “Ralph Nader is launching a media newsletter this fall.” If his purpose is to contend that America’s major media aren’t liberal enough, he must be insatiable indeed.”