Personal Dislike of Exercise
“Exercising may make your day; it would assuredly ruin mine.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography
Roy Cohn’s Alienation
“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.”
Source: Special Counsel (1968)
Keywords: biography,law
Aftermath of Political Defeat
“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.”
Source: The Rise of the Right (1984)
Keywords: movement-building,elections,remembrance
Spy Scandal Irony
“General Taylor, we have all enjoyed your witty remarks on the vicissitudes of ‘our party,’ and the medal you evidently feel Senator McCarthy has earned for his recent [improved] behavior. To keep the record in balance, though, I thought it would be well to recall that the last time your party was in power the Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs of the Department of State was a Russian spy, and the Deputy Chief of the Presentation Division of the Office of Strategic Services was a secret Communist, and the secretary of the National Labor Relations Board was a secret Communist. And I was just wondering, General, what medals you are handing out for that performance, and whether you have anything witty to say about it?””
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: law,foreign-affairs,national-security
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
Conservative Gratitude for Reagan
“Conservatives had better be grateful for Ronald Reagan, for my guess is that he is unique. We shall not see his like again.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: conservative-leadership,biography,tribute
Cyclical Nature of Politics
“Don’t worry; there’s a yin and a yang to politics.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: governance,political-strategy
Buckley’s National Impact
“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.”
Source: The Rise of the Right (1984)
Keywords: biography,conservative-leadership,movement-building
Parties as Vote Machines
“Both major parties, as presently constituted, are simply highly efficient vote-gathering machines. It is pointless to upbraid such a machine for failing to concern itself with principles—just as it would be pointless to reproach a pear tree for failing to bear plums.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: elections,governance
Communists in U.S. Government
“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.”
Source: Special Counsel (1968)
Keywords: foreign-affairs,national-security,policy
Confession and Betrayal
“A break with Communism, and an offer to “tell all,” is fundamentally inconsistent with a determination to avoid naming names…”
Source: Special Counsel (1968)
Keywords: law,foreign-affairs
Media Bias Perceptions
“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.”
Source: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988).
Keywords: media,public-discourse,culture-wars
Pain of Changing Belief
“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.”
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: debate,public-discourse
Party System Satire
“A moribund heap of chronic losers, serving a highly selective set of economic interests and little else … if the Republican party didn’t exist the Democrats would have to invent it: seldom have so many owed so much to so few.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: political-strategy,governance,elections
Corrosion of Political Morality
“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.”
Source: Special Counsel (1968)
Keywords: governance,political-strategy
Political Honesty Defined
“An honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: public-discourse,governance
Reagan’s Unique Qualifications
“As for Reagan, I think that you are underrating the man. Essentially, there is no really good preparation for the Presidency, save perhaps being born into a family that somehow manages to endow its children with character.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: conservative-leadership,biography
Weaknesses of Communism
“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.”
Source: Special Counsel (1968)
Keywords: foreign-affairs,national-security,social-change
Burden on Democratic Voters
“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.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: public-discourse,economics,governance
Expertise and Authority
“”The world’s foremost authority on widgets” or “the world’s foremost authority on anything.””
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,conservative-leadership
Crusading Against the New Deal
“[He] prosecuted the New Deal as though it were a criminal, piling up irresistible mountains of logic, lancing it with swift strokes of sarcastic humor, annihilating it with cavalry charges of oratory. Under his spell Republicans felt the thrill of the chase again—they lifted their heads high as they had not done for older and more experienced leaders in years.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: conservative-leadership,movement-building,biography
Goldwater vs. Kennedy and Johnson
“… 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.”
Source: The Rise of the Right (1984)
Keywords: elections,campaigns,biography
Understand Opponents for Debate
“… 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.””
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: debate,public-discourse