Reagan as Fighter
“Like a skillful club boxer, Reagan moved into the attack, landed his punches, backed off, shifted his weight, parried, and attacked again. I came to feel that I was watching a protagonist who knew precisely what he wanted, enjoyed battling for it, and firmly intended to get it in the long run.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,conservative-leadership
UN and Lost Hopes
“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.””
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: foreign-affairs,policy,governance
Politicians’ Insincerity
“Most politicians … are pretty adept at sensing when to stop riding an issue … When it stops paying dividends, when on straight pleasure-pain principles it ceases to yield a sufficient return in praise, all but the most exceptional politicians will quietly drop it. McCarthy wouldn’t … [It] was a strange and ultimately fatal innocence.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: campaigns,biography,identity
Damaging Political Personalities
“in theory you had to ask their permission to set foot there, and I didn’t think they had the right to grant permission. So I would just wait until they were thrown out, and then I would go … I remember saying to Buckley, at one point, that I would no more go to the Soviet Union on vacation than I would, if Hitler had permitted it, have skied in the Austrian Alps during World War II.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: foreign-affairs,biography
Nixon’s Political Dilemma
“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.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: biography,elections,public-discourse
Preferring Foreign Policy
“I know very little about economics and dislike what little I know. Why not assign me to talk on some aspect of the Communism question?”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,economics,foreign-affairs
Rusher’s Razor on the GOP
“I made up my mind years ago that salvation for America, if it is to come at all, will not take place through the medium of the Republican Party. The individual form of this dictum is embodied in what has come to be known as Rusher’s Razor: ‘No one, today, can be simultaneously honest, informed, and successful in the Republican Party.'”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: governance,biography,political-strategy
Intellectual Discomfort and Thinking
“I recently read … a little homily to the effect that, if a person makes us think we’re thinking, we love him; but if he makes us think, we hate him. Take your choice—and then make up your mind to take the consequences.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: public-discourse,debate,identity
Accusing Opponents on TV
“I’ll make a little date with you, Mr. Sorensen … we’ll come back on this program and hear where and when National Review advocated racism, and perhaps you can show it to me; and if you can’t, at that point I’ll call you a liar … You may think you’ve been in New York long enough to be a viable candidate for the United States Senate, but on the basis of your hysterical showing this evening you wouldn’t make a viable candidate for dog catcher of New York City.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: debate,media,public-discourse
Presidential Character Rarity
“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.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: biography,governance,identity
Choose Substance Over Style
“If you ever have to choose between solid substance and mere flashy style, by all means choose the substance.”
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: debate,public-discourse
Generational Mandate
“In the great systole and diastole of events, we are about to witness … a profound surge forward and upward, deriving its impetus from ancient and powerful truths that Liberalism has forgotten. And the highest (as well as politically the soundest) function we can perform—indeed, our moral obligation—is to spend our lives bringing this to birth and giving it a healthy political expression.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: social-change,movement-building,policy
Amoral Political Operator
“He was an interesting man, and a complex man—and not in any sense of the word an evil man. I think he was, however, rather devoid of any moral appreciation of politics. I think he regarded it all as a tremendously complicated game. To me it was not a game.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,governance,identity
Rockefeller’s Ambition
“Here’s a guy born with umpteen million dollars—and as collateral to that, all women fell over backwards at his approach. What the hell do you do to prove yourself, if you want to accomplish something, if you want to test yourself against the world? … I think it’s greatly to Rockefeller’s credit that he didn’t just spend his money and go after his women. That he really went after the governorship, and the presidency of the United States.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,identity
Reforming Without Experience
“How can you have a reasonable agenda for redesigning the Environmental Protection Agency, when no conservative has ever served there? Reagan has been like Columbus. He has led us ashore on a continent many of us have never seen or been on.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: environment,governance,policy
Self-Reflection on Arguing
“I am a born interrupter—not, I hasten to say, because I want to be discourteous, but because my mind has raced ahead … to some crushing response that I find it unbearably difficult to delay … I have probably … lost or damaged more arguments in this way than in any other.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,debate
Liberation through Individualism
“I began doing and saying what I wanted to do and say, and immediately experienced a great sense of liberation.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,identity
The Bureaucracy’s Drift
“I guess it is inevitable that most posts in government will be filled by the type of seaweed that drifts in and out with the tides of politics.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: governance,political-strategy
Political Hopefulness amid Doubt
“I honestly don’t know whether there is still time to turn this country around, but I do know that the man America will elect on November 4th intends to try.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: elections,public-discourse
Goldwater’s Campaign Messaging
“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.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: campaigns,biography,public-discourse
Media’s Reaction to Reagan
“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.”
Source: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988).
Keywords: media,elections,conservative-leadership
Closing Reflections on America
“Happily, I am not ending the column with a gloomy conviction that America is heading to hell in a handbasket. On the contrary … I think the country, on the whole, is in reasonably good shape.”
Source: The Conservative Advocate,”The Final Column” (March 3, 2009)
Keywords: public-discourse,remembrance
Motives Behind Foreign Aid
“Certainly the motive cannot be frugality; Congress is capable of squandering ten times $222 million in a single afternoon. Nor is there even any pretense that our Cambodian allies seek anything but their freedom, and the peace in which to enjoy it. It is shells provided by the Soviet Union and Red China that are slamming into the market-places of Phnom Penh, ripping open the bodies of children whose parents made the unbelievable mistake of trusting the United States.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: foreign-affairs,national-security,policy
The Party’s Conservative Heart
“Conservatism should be the beating heart of the Republican Party, but the party must also reach out to incorporate people who are not necessarily ideologues but are sympathetic to conservative views in a general way.”
Source: The Conservative Advocate,”The Final Column” (March 3, 2009)
Keywords: conservative-leadership,movement-building,political-strategy