Little magazine, grown up.

IN NATIONAL REVIEW'S first issue, dated November 19, 1955, had a print order of 7,500, and was sent to a total of two thousand subscribers. How the members of this little band were signed up prior to the appearance of the magazine is lost to history. Bill Buckley claims he visited with at least two or three thousand people in order to raise the money for his new publishing venture, so most of them must have written checks for subscriptions as the less expensive of the two alternatives. To this day we receive mail from charter subscribers, people who have been with us since Volume 1, Number 1; they were a hardy as well as a perspicacious lot.

I've just finished re-reading Chairman Bill's speech at the fifth-anniversary dinner in 1960 (printed in Rumbles Left and Right, 1963). By then circulation had leaped to 44,000; the little magazine had hit a nerve. Bill told his audience it was because NATIONAL REVIEW iS "organically American, rooted in the nation's deepest traditions, and beyond that even, in the deepest roots of our civilization

. . those certitudes and intuitions that most of us here in this room aim to serve such certitudes as that there is a religious base in life, and therefore a transhistorical meaning to the human experience."

How exhilarating it must have been that night to know that a little magazine devoted to such a standard had not only survived (miracle enough!) but was beginning to galvanize the public debate. In attendance at the dinner was an assistant professor at Yale named Robert Crunden. Ten years later he would be a full professor at the University of Texas, looking skeptically across his desk at a particularly argumentative student. He would assign that student a full year of reading in classic conservative works and contemporary polemics (including Rumbles Left and Right) and later oversee his senior thesis on American conservatism. These are the connections that can only be seen in hindsight, from a fifth anniversary to a 35th, which we celebrate with this issue and which Professor Crunden's student superintends as NATIONAL REviEw's publisher. n It was my bad fortune to become publisher of the country's major conservative magazine just as the pundits were pronouncing last rites over the conservative movement. The news analyses and op-ed pieces predicted first) that conservatism would crack into a thousand shards without the charismatic glue of Ronald Reagan to hold it together, (next) that conservatism would dissolve into thin air without anti-Communism to give it body and form, and (next, panting now from the effort) that conservatism would be permanently severed into traditionalist and neo-con camps by the effort to define America's place in the postcold-war world. All this in the space of 18 months.

While the commentators continued to revise their obituaries, our circulation continued to grow: to 150,000 by late summer. Not one of the reporters or pundits stopped to throw in a sentence along the lines of, "In complete contradiction to my thesis that the conservative movement is dead as a doornail, NATIONAL REVIEW, the nation's leading conservative magazine, has reached in the last 12 months the highest circulation in its history." n The negative stories are wishful thinking, of course. Never have conservative principles animated so many people around the world. The "certitudes and intuitions" that inspired the founding of this magazine are being rediscovered in places we could not have imagined only a scant year ago. For our part, at NATIONAL REVIEW we intend to keep this little light burning, this candle that once shone in the dark, which has become a beacon to free peoples and to those who are still groping their way.