William Rusher strengthened the conservative movement as an energizing leader, a formidable debater, an incisive columnist, and an engaged mentor who made things happen. His success in these multiple roles makes his career a rich lesson in political effectiveness even now, long after his death in 2011, and he will continue to offer such lessons in the future. Activists can sharpen their game by learning more about how he played these roles, both strategically and stylistically. They can also take inspiration from the character traits underlying his successes—especially his perseverance, which kept him in the arena for half a century. That, too, will make them more effective.
The value of getting to know William Rusher is clearest from two permanent realities in politics. Much of the action occurs at a fast pace, requiring serious players to think quickly and seize the moment. Yet major political change tends to build slowly. Rusher had a remarkably patient side—blended with a certain impatience. He believed in holding faithfully to a chosen course even if there was no immediate success, but also in seizing opportunities and wasting no time. Although fast-paced and a doer, he balanced those traits with an acceptance of the reality that much in politics is beyond our control—and that some of what his fellow conservatives sought might take decades. His understanding of the full depth and breadth of the conservative movement’s mission gave him a long-term perspective on its progress, thus obligating him to a long-term commitment. In an interview for my biography of Rusher, movement veteran Lee Edwards captured his sense of the conservative movement’s appropriate time horizon: “This is not a 100-yard dash. This is a marathon.”
Rusher combined high-level and highly relevant experience outside of conservative politics, acquired in the years before he joined “the movement,” with the perseverance Edwards would note—plus a young man’s zeal, undimmed by all that experience yet tempered by a mature discipline. Along with his experience and its lessons, he was outspoken, in public and when doing political business, intensely voicing opinions in matters large and sometimes small. Yet even among colleagues who often heard them, this seems not to have unduly limited his influence. Rusher could say even unpopular things to them thanks to his widely conceded knowledge plus his wit, good manners, and sheer sincerity.
As the movement’s great direct-mail fundraising pioneer Richard Viguerie recalled even from his first experiences with him in the early 1960s: “People would defer to Bill Rusher, and they had confidence in him.” At one and the same time, he had a distinctive “gravitas” and was willing to “roll up his sleeves and slug it out” in intramural conflicts on the right. The two sides of Rusher—“gravitas” and rolling up his sleeves, even slugging it out in a sense—worked well together. One reason they combined well may have been his disciplined adherence to whatever he viewed as the tasks at hand, a discipline that included briskly moving on to the next task. David Franke, one of the most active leaders in the newly formed Young Americans for Freedom in these years, got the impression he was “the most organized man in the movement.” Edwards, looking back, stressed Rusher’s commitment to “preparation … marshaling all of your facts and figures … all the various elements of a particular situation … you don’t leave anything to chance.”
Another reason why Rusher could be a fighter with gravitas was his impressive voice. Early YAF leader Bob Bauman would remember how crisp, to-the-point, and emphatic he sounded. Indeed, for that reason alone, people usually “sat up and took notice” when first hearing him conversation. And behind such immediate impressions was a man who matched them. In Bauman’s recollection, Rusher was “a guy who means business” and seemed to have an extra ten hours a day. He also showed an obvious emotional commitment to the conservative cause and the political positions and work it entailed. Barry Farber, an early and longtime talk-radio host, recalled his many shows with Rusher over the decades as “the best of my best broadcast days,” due not only to his quick wit, but also his towering excellence “in feeling, preparation, energy.”
Along with this formidable set of qualities, Rusher developed a less colorful yet at least equally fundamental trait: a high degree of team spirit and selflessness. John Kurzweil, who founded and edited the conservative monthly California Political Review when Rusher lived in San Francisco after retiring from National Review in 1989, appreciated his consistently “very positive and optimistic” attitude at a time when many on the right “were down in the dumps” after President Reagan left the White House. The optimism was no occasion for complacency, though, even in his late sixties and seventies.
Neither was Rusher’s great stature as, by then, an elder statesman of American conservatism an excuse to rest on his laurels or avoid smaller-scale involvement. Having spent most of his career among the leadership of a national publication, he gladly continued to help the state-level journal, doing “a great deal to make himself available” and making sales pitches to donors at events. “He was no young man anymore, and he was tired,” Kurzweil recalled. “But he always came, and he always had some very pithy and useful, interesting and absorbing comments to make.” Rusher “wasn’t one of these big-ego guys.” He did much of his work “out of sight, and without getting a lot of plaudits … and that didn’t seem to bother him in the least.” Similarly, National Review founder and editor William F. Buckley Jr., for whom Rusher worked as publisher and served as a kind of two-way political ambassador for more than 30 years, would appreciatively cite, among other characteristics, “the time he’s prepared to give to other people to help solve common problems.”
Shared political problems come in many forms. Very important among them is the problem of morale—which is most effectively addressed by someone with exactly Rusher’s personal qualities and task-oriented yet patient approach. In response to people’s frustration or disappointment, he was good at credibly advising focus and hopeful persistence. When a California YAF official in the weeks before the state’s crucial, hard-fought 1964 Goldwater-Rockefeller primary told of “one complete foulup after another,” an alleged purge of right-wing people from a major Goldwater committee, the removal of the best precinct organizer in another large community, and the presence of two “fishy” people and one “boob” in the campaign, Rusher responded to the young man’s heartfelt litany briefly but thoughtfully—with a skillful blend of respect, mild rebuke, and good cheer: “I hope you won’t feel that this short acknowledgement means that I didn’t pay much attention” to your letter, he wrote. “I certainly did, and I will pass along your comments to the appropriate authorities.” He then added: “I would counsel you against spending too much of your time and energy on these matters of internal politics. Just put forth the very best effort you possibly can in the primary itself, and there will be glory and reward for us all.”
Four years later, when a spirited campaign on behalf of Ronald Reagan wasn’t enough to deny Richard Nixon the 1968 Republican nomination, Rusher addressed young Reagan supporters at the Miami Beach convention with a combined pep talk and analysis: “explaining everything,” future national YAF chairman Ron Docksai would recall, “and saying why … this would mean great things in the future.” To other young Reaganites there, Donald Hodel, Diarmuid O’Scannlain, and Don Pearlman, who had worked together on the Oregon campaign, Rusher pointed out that political wins could sometimes prove to be “illusory” disappointments—then, encouragingly: “It is well to remind ourselves that defeat, too, is deceptive.”
Even the most personal and seemingly secondary kinds of characteristics—Rusher’s renowned meticulousness in the sense of correct manners, formal dress, and high standards in food, wine, and matters aesthetic—played a role in his credibility and ability to influence others. It was partly a matter of temperament and taste, but partly too, I think, reflected a choice to uphold the old standards he believed cultured people had a responsibility to maintain, for their society and for posterity. It may also have reflected a determination to be taken seriously at all times and by everyone, even decades after attaining that status: again, not getting complacent. In any case, Rusher had an acute sense of the conservative project’s civilizational or cultural dimension—and his elegant self-presentation made him an especially credible articulator of it, in addition to cementing the high stature he had earned in substantive ways.
Patience and meticulousness take self-discipline, and self-discipline requires a belief that something else is more important than how one feels at the moment. A part of us would rather take the easy route—would rather not dress up that often, speak with careful accuracy, learn all the tedious or complicating facts of what we’re talking about. But public life of any kind, if one intends to be taken seriously, means being conscientious about things that many would shrug off as peripheral, as not obviously important. We also tend to want results now, and in politics that often doesn’t happen. None of these shortcomings are terrible. But they fall short of the first-rate engagement in the public arena that Rusher exemplified. In contrast, the incentive today is to chase after “clicks” or “hits” without considering the quality or impact of these contacts, to rush written work along with little or no editing, cut corners in the supposed drudgery of building a full case, lighten up about grammar and complete sentences, and wear almost anything when appearing before an audience.
There is much in today’s right-of-center activism and advocacy that Rusher would respect, even enjoy. He wanted active conservatives to be bold, steadfast, and undeterred in conflicts with the other side. He not only disliked laziness, but had a great appreciation for energy and drive. He liked it when people moved quickly on political opportunities and responded vigorously to attacks. It was foreign to Rusher to get bogged down in doubts, or wait until the moment seemed perfect. Whatever a person’s stature or achievements might be, weakness in any of these respects disappointed him.
But he also had a keen nose for cocky optimism and unrealistic dreaming. As a Harvard Law School graduate with several years of corporate legal work at a major Wall Street law firm in his store of experience—and, just as relevantly, as a veteran of well over a decade of machinations and planning in Young Republican politics—he benefited from these demanding environments’ lessons in precision, teamwork, and operating within hard, accepted limits. He started out in the YR trenches, as a practitioner of systematic political organizing far removed from the fleeting attention span of today’s social media “influencer.” And he remained systematic, serious, and restrained, never becoming a self-absorbed celebrity or a smash-mouth provocateur. His debate antagonist on the PBS program “The Advocates” in the 1970s, attorney Howard Miller, would recall with warm appreciation that Rusher never tried to land a low blow and was truly a “rational debater on the merits. He didn’t use diversions … didn’t use humor to deflect … never ran away from dealing with the substance.” This substantiveness, like Rusher’s other qualities as this essay describes them, can be seen in “The Advocates” programs available on our website.
The balance of qualities in Rusher’s skill set, personality, and public presence that I have described was well-suited to the political enterprise to which he devoted himself. Although the conservative movement was a long-term project, with few expectations of immediate gains, it also pulsed with energy and a sense of urgency. The ideal form of leadership in such a movement is one that embodies all of this, which is a tall order. Real conservative leaders, and no doubt all real leaders who aim to change politics, must seize opportunities but pursue them in a disciplined way—and stick with them. It’s also extremely useful, perhaps indispensable, to look and sound good, and persuasive.
Times and circumstances do change. Rusher rose to major stature, then maintained it, in the highly institutionalized, more stable age of what the political analyst Michael Barone has called “big unit America.” His career coincided with the second half of the 20th century, the time of the Big Three television networks and mega-influential newspapers, both with a dominance they have now lost.There was also a certain stability and institutionalization—even a “scriptedness”—in a political advocate’s interface with the public. Opinion writing and dissemination were slower: columns a few pages long, typed by the columnist or a secretary, then sent to newspapers by a syndication service for paper-and-ink printing as soon as possible—and one’s competitors among columnists were doing the same thing, at the same pace. Rusher lived to see only the beginnings of today’s highly entrepreneurial, individualistic, attention-getting opinion journalism—with posts flashing on our screens at all hours, fast-paced and disorderly, constant quick hits by others that the poster should know about before making his or her own. Today, knowing what happened in the world over the last month and week is no longer enough.
Even so, Rusher’s success in column writing, highly structured, long-form debate on “The Advocates,” and focused, one-on-one guest appearances on talk radio and television would likely have translated into success on a platform like X, while a podcast with one or two other people does not seem essentially different from a more traditional media chat. In any case, all of Rusher’s traits and attitudes, and his fund of experience as I have described it, would drive him toward quality communication and quality work, delivered at a timely pace. And it would likely have the same good results. When people in and around politics look for quality, the wisdom of experience, and trustworthiness—as those with the most potential always will—those things, or a deficiency thereof, will be evident. Influence matters most, and lasts longest, when it is based on earned respect.
