The staff at work and play.

In A while back the New York Times ran a piece about a venerable cigar store that was dropping its time-honored practice of storing its customers' purchases for them. Customers had been instructed to come and pick up their property for the last time. The reporter noticed a middle-aged man standing in the middle of the room, looking around disconsolately. Finally the man said to no one in particular, "I hate change, don't you?"

Those of NR's staff who are temperamentally as well as politically conservative know how he felt. Our last lustrum (to borrow a word from Cicero and Hugh Kenner) began with Priscilla Buckley's announcement of her semi-retirement-an event less noticed by the outside world, but with as big an impact on the editorial staff as the later departure of Bill Rusher as publisher, his replacement by Wick Allison, and the arrival of John O'Sullivan as editor. (Bill Buckley's announcement of his own semi-retirement hasn't sunk in yet. Ask us in five years.)

Priscilla had kept the department and (most of) its writers in order by the simple means of being the sort of person you just hate to disappoint. She was, as Frank Meyer eloquently put it, the grease in our crankcase. (The Washington Post, in writing about our 25th anniversary, helpfully corrected that to "the oil in our crankcase"; the Post knew a lot about cars, but not much about Frank Meyer.)

Mercifully for her successors-Rick Brookhiser followed by Linda Bridges-Priscilla is always available by phone and fax to fill in the myriad details we found we hadn't quite absorbed. Priscilla took the title of senior editor, joining Jeff Hart and Joe Sobran as the once-a-fortnight gang, coming in on the alternate Mondays and Tuesdays to confer and write editorials. Priscilla remarked that she would know semi-retirement had taken hold when she found herself sitting on a chaise longue in the afternoon with a novel and a box of chocolates. The last time we asked, the chaise longue was still in the attic, and Priscilla had embarked on the latest project, research for a documentary for the 35th anniversary party. n Change is in the air even before Priscilla's semi-departure. Kevin Lynch, father confessor to the editorial department, has left, after 15 years at NR, for Voice of America (he's now with Radio Free Europe in Munich), and has been replaced as articles editor and, if not quite father confessor, at least troop leader by Rich Vigilante, a young writer known to Rick as a colleague in the Party of the Right at Yale. (The possibilities for confusion are evident: the difference, spoken or written, between Rick and Rich is not enough to prevent havoc on the switchboard; but we survive, coming to sound almost like British public schoolboys in our use of surnames"Has anyone seen Brookhiser today?") Rick as managing editor, Rich as articles editor, and Linda as executive editor form the troika," as responsibilities are divvied up in the post-Priscilla editorial department. Rich has ambitious plans for the articles section, and finds himself quickly falling behind. Will VTFB let him hire an assistant? Creating a new post is not something we do lightly, but Bill agrees that it's warranted in this case, and so Maggie Gallagher comes aboard. Her first big piece is the lead article for the 1986 campus issue, about sensitivity" run amok.

* The outside world marches through our pages. Nineteen eighty-six begins with a cover story by Lewis Lehrman and Gregory Fossedal, "1986: The Year of the Space Shield." We fight manfully on the subject of SDI, requiring editors who were French or history majors to master enough scientific terminology to produce "SDI Watch," with the help of the experts at the George C. Marshall Institute. And indeed, we haven't given up on SDI, even if the Bush Administration has.

Since we are not a Catholic magazine but a conservative magazine many of whose top people happen to be Catholic, we are especially pleased when Bill Buckley persuades Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus to come to us as religion editor, much though we will miss Michael Novak.

We send Pastor Neuhaus to cover the Extraordinary Synod in Rome. The copy he sends back reflects so great a congruence with traditional Catholic doctrine that we're not terribly surprised, five years later, when Mr. Neuhaus reverentially takes off his Lutheran collar and popes.

That spring, Reagan bombs Qadcdafi, Chernobyl blows up (editorial paragraph: " The Soviet Union has finally contrived to give power to the people"), and the Philadelphia Society runs a conference on paleo-cons v. neocons (reported on for us by Jeff Hart). Summer assistant Paul Birnbaum has his hands full answering the letters on that dispute, which will be continued from then on, with Stephen Tonsor, Ernest van den Haag, Sam Francis, and numerous others weighing in.

* In September 1986 we launch a new column: Jeff Hart's Ivory Foxhole." Two months later, Wayne Dick is reinstated at Yale (he was the student who had the poor sense of self-preservation to satirize Gay-Lesbian Awareness Days). Chilton Williamson, who has been running the Books, Arts & Manners section since George Will's departure in December 1975, is made a senior editor. He is pleased by the recognition, but wishes he didn't have to come east from Wyoming quite so often. On the production side there is a general shift upward. Anna Lieber moves across the hall as art director following Colleen Lawlor Hartman's departure, and sets to work on some classy headings and house ads; Ione Whitlock moves to Anna's old job as production editor and begins a thorough study of printing processes, enabling her to do many things that associate publisher Ed Capano had had to handle before; Pete Garvey, a master of deadpan humor, comes upstairs from the circulation department to take Ione's old job as production coordinator.

The year ends with a whimper that will soon explode with a bang: the Republican defeat in the Senate, and the first rumors of Iran-Contra. That controversy leads to some fine pieces by Rick Brookhiser explaining that the Administration would not have been tempted by Ollie North's wild scheme if Congress had not been so feekless; but we would sooner not have had the mess, even if we would then have missed Rick's pieces.

* While Iran-Contra picks up steam outside, within these precincts an even longer and more acrimonious debate is going on. It had been set in motion by the death three years before of art director Jimmy O'Bryan. Jimmy had been designing our covers for as long as we had had covers designed-or rather, as he liked to put it, he executed the cover designs Bill Buckley scrawled out on a sheet of yellow copy paper. These covers were the photograph of a dead chicken hanging, head down, in front of a half-opened Venetian blind: fine photograph by Jan Lukas, with fine color treatment by Jimmy, but what was it supposed to mean as a magazine cover? Don't you understand? WFB? replied, raising not one but two eyebrows. That's not Israel, whose neck is not being wrung.

Nonetheless, these covers had a flavor that we missed. Various artists tried to recapture it-Colleen Lawlor Hartman, Richard Erlanger, John Donnelly, Anna Lieber, Charles Bork. They produced some fine covers along the way, but they just weren't Jimmy.

So matters stand when Wick comes aboard full time. He proposes, and Bill accepts, an experiment on a new tack. While attempting to keep the wit that distinguished the WFB/JO'B team, we will add a bit of mainstream slickness to appeal to newsstand buyers. A design company called Pentagram is hired, both for covers and to produce a radical redesign of the interior of the magazine. "Back to the future," we call it, since although type and art are chosen in accord with Eighties fashion, the essential outlines are taken from the early days of the magazine, c. 1959.

Pentagram produces some of our favorite covers: Ronald Reagan with his face blending into the map of Europe; V.I. Lenin behind a shattered pane of glass. But eventually logistic considerations lead us to put the covers into the hands of our new art director, Paul Hebert, who is that rarity, a fully qualified art-school graduate who is a conservative. Besides his expertness, Paul brings deep reserves of patience to cover conferences, as Wick, John, and Ed Capano put up and bat down suggestion after suggestion, often coming back and embracing the original idea after all.

* July 1987: Robert Bork is nominated for the Supreme Court. The office is a nest of Bork fans, and whenever we have a minute, we flip on the little television (a gift years ago to Priscilla from departing staffers Barbara Devlin and Vicki Marani) to watch the hearings, monitoring our blood pressure at regular intervals. We don't win the prophet-of-the-year award for our editorial prediction ("Robert Bork will be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, make no mistake about that"). As with Iran-Contra, the battle yields some fine analysis, particularly a cover piece by Rich Vigilante (beautiful cover portrait of Bork by Ken Marlow); and as with Iran-Contra, we would have forgone even that cover if we could instead have had Justice Bork on the Supreme Court.

* Nika Hazelton, coming to the office one day to meet Priscilla for lunch, happens to arrive just as gales of giggles emanate from three distinct areas on the second floor. (Everyone has just received a copy of Bill Rusher's memo explaining that we will not observe Presidents' Day, given our reservations about Mr. Lincoln, but we will observe Washington's Birthday on the same date.) Nika draws herself up and declaims majestically: "What is all this unseemly frivolity? When do you get any work done?"

But there is always sadness amidst the laughter, and one of our saddest announcements ever appears in that Bork issue: "James Burnham, R I P." There are other deaths these five years of people who mattered tO NATIONAL REVIEW-TO name just a few, Mabel Wood Naft, Clare Boothe Luce, Karl Wittfogel, Larry Beilenson, Bill Brady, John Kreuttner, Francis Russell, Alice-Leone Moats, Mary Gauerke, Roger Allan Moore, Fernando Valenti-requiescant in pace. But none of these deaths strikes as deeply at the heart of the magazine as Jim Burnham's. WFB had called Jim, in his tribute to him at our 25th anniversary dinner, "the dominant intellectual influence in the development of this journal," and we decide that we can do no less than devote an entire, longer-than-normal article section to him. Our one fear is that in the two dozen appreciations we have solicited, there will be too much overlap.

Not at all, as it turns out: whereas stories told about Willmoore Kendall, say, tend to be remarkably alike, different people's Burnham stories are each appropriate to the person telling them; he brought out the best, and the particular, in everyone.

* From late 1987 through 1988, NR sees its most concentrated shift of personnel ever. Rich Vigilante departs, winding up at the Manhattan Institute where he has just (October 1990) launched a new magazine NY. The City Journal). Maggie Gallagher becomes acting articles editor; editorial assistant Mark Cunningham, one of the last surviving Camel smokers, moves across the hall as her assistant; and Geoffrey Morris, recruited from Stan Evans's National Journalism Center, comes aboard in Mark's place. Lacey Washington, a former editorial assistant who is about to go to medical school (an NR first), comes back for a year as copy editor while we sort ourselves out. David Klinghoffer had arrived as our 1987 summer assistant, and will stay for two more years as Chilton's assistant, until the Washington Times starts noticing his byline and hires him away as a film reviewer. And early in 1988 Trish Bozell (a younger sister of Bill's and Priscilla's) comes aboard to supervise the special projects undertaken in conjunction with Russell Kirk's educational Reviewer; she will later take on a portion of our proofreading, by fax and FedEx from her Washington home.

Meanwhile, Rick has privately told WFB several months back that he finds he is writing less and enjoying it less; he intends to step down as managing editor-and thus to take himself out of contention as WFB's eventual successor. A search is quietly put in train, and turns up the name of John O'Sullivan. He will take the new position of editor, with Linda becoming managing editor. And at about the same time, Bill Rusher's long-threatened departure becomes imminent, and Wick is named to succeed him. But it will be August 1988 before John can pry himself away from 10 Downing Street, December before WAR hands over the reins to Wick. And lots is happening in the meantime. Cort Kirkwood (one of Rich's finds) writes a piece on Jim Wright, one of the first exposes of the scandal that will drive the Speaker out of town. And David Glasner submits a scary piece on the S&Ls; if his warning had been heeded then (April 1988), how many billions could have been saved? Priscilla Buckley goes to Hungary and returns with a report of writing his Right Data column; it takes a while to find its proper format but is now-to judge from our editorial mailbag-one of our most popular features. John Roche starts writing regularly for us, producing a slashing cover story on Bobby Kennedy. Neal Freeman returns as an offbeat Washington columnist, while John McLaughlin retains the regular Washington beat, and Chris Baldwin-in exile from Dartmouth for vexatious oral exchange"-handles the editorial end of the BuckPac campaign against Lowell Weicker. John O'Sullivan arrives, and is immediately whisked down to New Orleans for the Republican convention, where the NR party organized by Christine (Mrs. Wick) Allison is a tremendous hit.

* Returning to New York, John follows the old maxim, If you want a job done efficiently, give it to the busiest person you know. John unerringly picks Dorothy McCartney-research director for NATIONAL REVIEW, plus being personally in charge of Firing Line research, WFB's book research, WFB's column research, plus filling in for the indispensable Frances Bronson on the rare occasions when Frances takes a vacation-to be his administrative assistant. Dorothy is heard at times to sigh, "It's hard working O'Sullivan hours in the evening and Buckley hours the next morning" (there's about a three-hour time difference between the two-and that's irrespective of which continent they're on at the time). But she copes, with the help of Mary Edson-whose typing, proofreading, and reading of the JO'S and WFB handwritings are matched only by her sense of organization-and of the staff in the library: John Virtes, an expert on domestic politics; Russell Jenkins, who can come up with the call letters of the new Soviet submarine at the drop of an Exacto knife; and Micheal Flaherty, a recent Tufts graduate in history and English, replacing Joe Vetter, now at Fordham for graduate work in political science.

* One change, dreaded by some, devoutly wished for by others, is averted. The building in which NR has resided since 1958, a nine-story turn-of-the-century apartment building, is sold, and we're told we will have to move. Bill Rusher and the resourceful Rose Flynn, who has been our bookkeeper longer even than WAR has been our publisher, constitute the search committee, whose task is to find quarters no smaller and no more expensive than our current ones, and-very important, this-within walking distance of Paone's Restaurant.

Bill and Rose prowl around lower Park Avenue rejecting buildings-this one would be more suitable for Mike Milken before the fall; at that one, the secretaries' offices resemble the cachots of the Chateau d'If-when fate smiles and the new owner tells us he wants us to stay. The range of reactions is summed up when JO'S receives a visitor one day, an Englishman who has spent some time working in New York. The guest says, "Do you know, this is the first time I've ever been in a New York office that wasn't in one of those steel-and-glass monstrosities. You must keep this at all costs." Linda cheers, Dorothy sneers, and John laughs indulgently.

* The election is over; the results are in. For two or three issues thereafter, all editorial copy comes through rubber-stamped: BUCYPAC KILLS! One of our proofreaders grumbles: Mat clown is stamping all the copy?" Turns out it is MTB, in an access of antiWeickerian elation.

And incidentally, George Bush is elected President:

* The editors Of NATIONAL REVIEW heartily congratulate George Herbert Walker Bush on his ascendancy.... We respect Mr. Bush's accomplishments, admire his courage, and (where relevant) delight in his company. . . . But we remind the President-elect that NR's function, as a journal of opinion, is to attempt to speak the truth, to criticize as well as to encourage, reproach as well as applaud. The years ahead will be busy-for both of us.

See this issue's budget editorials, "The Week."

* President Reagan will soon be departing from Washington, and his favorite magazine wants to give him a nice sendoff. Wick wonders if John could invite Margaret Thatcher to write an appreciation; after due consideration, he does, she agrees, and the result is the cover story in a jampacked Christmas issue: Irving Kristol on why the public square shouldn't be naked (though exchanges in it should be tactful); Tony Lejeune on the decline of the detective novel; the annual Aloise Buckley Heath piece; . . . it is one of the staffs favorite issues.

Followed by what now appears to be our most prescient issue. The phrase "The Coming Crack-Up of Communism" was, like the Burnham title on which it was based, intended as a sort of hortatory statement. And the piece inside by Radek Sikorski, who had just been brought in by John as our roving correspondent, has been borne out more quickly than any of us imagined. "The Soviet empire," he wrote, will not come down in a big thrilling crash.... To be sure, the Soviet Union is an invalid . . . . but instead of a heart attack, it will perish of A-EDS or, more accurately, of leprosy, in which bits of the victim's body progressively fall away . . ."

That same issue reports on a bittersweet event: our going-away party for Bill Rusher. Perhaps because WAR used to complain so heartily when WFB insisted on holding an editorial dinner on his boat, it is decided to hold the party on-a boat. But this is a nice big boat that doesn't toss and pitch, every when we finish up by sailing out into the harbor to pay our respects to Lady Liberty.

We are sad to see Bill Rusher go, but he assures us he will stay in touch from the new C3 COMMand, control, and communications) center he is having installed in his San Francisco apartment. Bill went straight from handwriting his work for Claire Wirth to type, to manning his own word processor cum modem (a sample of the results appears on page 58).

The following issue has the staff wondering how much more editorial ingenuity it can take. This issue contains both nine pages of Advice to the President," most of it good, much of it untaken, from such as William Bennett, Paul Johnson, Charles Murray, Ed Koch, Vladimir Bukovsky; and the Social Climber's Guide to Washington-an extravaganza of almost-tootrue-to-be-funny social advice coordinated, and written in large part, by Tom Bethell. JO'S takes particular delight in the Up-and-Down the Rollercoaster game:

You are invited by Mrs. Bush

to chair a literacy panel. UP

Phyllis Schlafly is your co-chair.

DOWN or

Mike Wallace calls. UP

And he wants you to appear on

60 Minutes. Up

But he's evasive about

the topic. DOWN

He calls back: the camera crew

is outside your office.

GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL

* Perhaps the most pervasive change in our everyday lives is: meetings. Things that used to be decided in the morning phone call from WFB to Priscilla are now the subject of the Wednesday morning meeting (that's Wednesday morning O'Sullivan time -it's usually held Wednesday afternoon), which runs into the short-term meeting, which runs into the cover conference. Mark Cunningham, who has remained assistant articles editor under John, keeps track of the long-term list (all those articles we have accepted or are considering); Geoff Morris, who has been named assistant managing editor, keeps track of the short-term scheduling.

Meanwhile, Wick and Ed Capano are holding meetings to run their various promotion and ancillary activities. As a result, the third-floor conference room, which for twenty years has been a sleepy backwater except on magazine Monday and Tuesday, is now the scene of conversations like Are you here for our meeting.?" "I don't know which meeting is your meeting?"

On the other hand, not every gathering of two or more people is a meeting. Barbara Amiel, in town to finish the research for her essay "Feminism Hits Menopause" (Nov. 24, 1989), sticks her head into John's office and quickly retreats with a murmured, "Oh, I'm so sorry; I didn't mean to interrupt your meeting." John, Dorothy, and Linda chorus, "This isn't a meeting."

"It isn't a meeting?" she replies, looking from one to another of them.

"No, no," says John. "We're just working."

* In March 1988 a discreet little notice appears in "Notes & Asides":

THE EDITORS AND DEFTECTORS

ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE

THAT PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN

HAS AGREED TO SERVE

AS A MEMBER OF THE BOARD

OF NATIONAL REVIEW

JO'S and Linda decide to ask WFB if he thinks our newest board member would return Mrs. Thatcher's favor and write a piece on the occasion of her tenth anniversary as prime minister. WFB does; RR agrees, and delivers an article that makes it clear that a secure man, unlike the Pinterite wimps in the London intelligentsia, finds no contradiction between the Iron Lady's womanliness and her toughness.

* A new feature is inaugurated and an old friend returns. JO'S is planning to launch "On the Scene." As we're pondering the contents of the first section, Linda gets a call from John Coyne, who had been our staff writer back in 69-'70, before being lured away by Spiro Agnew. John hasn't written for us for some while, and he calls now to say that he would like to cover the Chicago mayoral election. JO'S gives him the go-ahead, and JC gets "On the Scene" off to a hilarious start with "A Wet Mayor or What?" -a disquisition on Richard Daley's "Chicago-speak," in which What you want is a mayor that" comes out as You want a what mayor," interpreted by the press as, You want a white mayor."

A couple of weeks later, John calls to say that if we still want the piece on Henry Regnery that he was assigned to write years ago, he's now eager to do it. Linda's whoop of delight (she can't wait to tell Bill and Priscilla) would have reached Chicago without the phone line. Three issues later "Henry Regnery: A Public Private Man" appears.

We restore our old practice, fallen into abeyance, of a Spring and Fall Books Issue. The first one includes reviews by Richard Pipes on glasnost, Hugh Trevor-Roper on the Third Reich, and Joe Sobran on Whittaker Chambers's pre-Hiss journalism, and an essay by lungsley Amis.

In one fortnight in June 1989, the news events include the first semi-free Polish elections in fifty years, the death of Ehomeini, and Tiananmen Square. We desperately want an "On the Scene" from China, but how to find someone to write it? Mark contacts friends of friends, and eventually comes up with the name of George Jochnowitz, who is over there studying and teaching. We are a bit nervous about contacting someone in the dragon's lair, but he and the article arrive home in one piece each, and we begin a pleasant association.

* Since Nora Wayson left her post as NR's receptionist and switchboard operator to go to nursing school, we had wandered through a number of shortlived successors. During this period we receive some memorable phone messages, like the one for Chilton saying that one of his reviewers wants to talk about evil and war. (Readers will find a book review by the late Mr. Evil & War in this issue, p. 125.)

Rose keeps on interviewing new prospects and finally comes up with Alison Schmertz, cheerful, competent, and frequently seen in the company of mail clerk Kevin Longstreet, a devotee of heavy-metal rock music (everyone has to have one flaw).

* Earlier in the year, when John McLaughlin announces that his television commitments will force him to step down as our Washington columnist, Wick and John hire Bill McGurn away from the Asian Wall Street Journal and upgrade the Washington office, making Bill a full-time employee with a small staff. They will contribute some hard-hitting material, including pieces by Bill and by Susan Mandel on Ted Kennedy's Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Clean Air Act, and other attritions of American liberty. If their warnings have not always been heeded, they will at least have a (gloomy) portfolio of we-told-you-so's. n One part of Wick's plan to put the magazine on a sound financial footing involves the installation of an extensive new computer system, in which the typesetting equipment will be linked to a network of PCs throughout the office, and, via modem, to our Washington bureau as well.

The project is put into the hands of Lisa Nelson, our new special-projects director, who knows little about computers but a great deal about how to get things done. Lisa is joined in her field trips by Linda (chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee to Send the Twentieth Century Back to the Factory, but who has taken a few bytes of computer knowledge in self-defense) and, as we come closer to a decision, by Ed Capano.

Eventually a system is chosen, bought, and installed-only seven weeks late, and nearly ready to go. Lisa is biting her nails. Linda, who has been through two previous computer installations, starts quoting illustrations of Stan Kelly-Bootle's "Law of Voltaire-Candide," e.g., This six-month delivery setback will allow us to refine our flowcharts and build a computer room."

* As freedom starts arriving in Central Europe, computers start arriving at 150 East 35th Street. The two Michaels-Michael Watkins, our 25year veteran, who started out as an editorial typist and has come through three generations of in-house computer typesetting, and Michael Ashton, who came on board as a temporary eight years ago-buckle down to learn the new commands, along with Paul, who will need the system for page makeup and design, and the editorial staff across the hall: Linda, Mark, Geoff, David, and our two summer assistants, Craig Lerner and Will Mount (son of longtime NR associate Ferdinand Mount).

Finally, the last piece of equipment arrives and it's all systems go. Only problem is, it's 11 A.M. of a Thursday, first pages are due at the plant tonight, and nothing has been dummied. It winds up taking Michael A. and Paul one hour and 45 minutes to dummy "On the Right," a task that the previous fortnight had taken art associate Pat Sarch ten minutes to do with paper, scissors, and straight pins. By 11 P.M., everyone is exhausted except John (for whom it is 8 P.M.). It takes only four more nights of this to produce the magazine-the ugliest and most typo-filled issue we have ever sent out. We apologize to the authors whose work we have presented so unappetizingly (Bill von Dreele has called to ask hesitantly whether his poems are always going to look that way in the new design), and settle down to take stock. Memos fly, meetings are held, and already the next issue looks better, the following one better yet. We decide we've survived. n But it is Brad Miner, not Chilton Williamson, who has to convey his colleagues' apologies to aggrieved reviewers. Chilton is finding it increasingly difficult to juggle his book writing with his administrative work for us; simultaneously he is approached by Chronicles' Tom Fleming to come and handle their book section.

Once again the search mechanism goes into gear. Wick and Ed already have it in mind that NR should launch a book-publishing enterprise; they are seeking someone who has both serious book-publishing experience and literary taste. That plus conservatism is not the easiest combination to find, but Brad Miner fills the bill. He comes on board for a leisurely apprenticeship, culminating in a trip out to Wyoming, where Chilton takes him on a horseback camping trip up into the mountains that leaves him gasping both from the altitude and from the beauty of that grand and severe country.

We will have Brad's undivided attention for all of, oh, six months where upon the book-publishing venture really does take off with the college guide (soon to be available). Brad's assistant now, replacing David Elinghoffer, is Matthew Scully. Matthew's experience is mostly in newspapers, but he picks up the niceties of magazine editing, and is able to take more and more of the load off Brad.

Meanwhile, now that Geoff is in charge of coordinating the editorial department's efforts with those of the art and typesetting room, we need someone to replace him on the letters-to-the-editor desk. Allen Randolph, a classmate of Geoffs from Hobart College, is the chosen victim; he is perhaps our only junior staffer ever who has had more than a summer's experience in the real world of business before joining our nearly academic halfway house. Of this semi-academic status, Craig Lerner kindly remarks that he has never before been among a group of wordsmiths who were so free of backstabbing and petty intrigues. Being told this in the middle of our computer conversion, John ruefully comments: "It may be that we're all too overworked to intrigue."

* There's much more to remember two symposia orchestrated by Milton Friedman; the flying trip through Central Europe and Moscow by two dozen NR editors, directors, and supporters this summer-but time and space have both run out, Geoffrey firmly announces, and so the account of another five years ends-but wait a minute, Wick wants to know if we shouldn't

. . No, says Geoffrey, this issue is closed.

And next issue we begin another five-year cycle, wondering if it can possibly be as full of incident and excitement as the one just ending. Father of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, accept, we pray, our gratitude for this magazine and for the devoted company of those living and dead who set its course through these 35 years. In humbling the pretensions of the worldly wise, prevent us from being puffed up in our own conceits. Constrain us, we pray, from the loveless truth that wounds and from the mindless love that deceives. And gift us with that lightheartedness of those who know that every cause of ours that is good is Yours before it is ours.

TOM SELLECK

You should know that the dinner you are about to eat has been very carefully selected by Pat Buckley. My informants tell me she has only a few rules, but they are very strictly applied. The first rule is that there are to be only three courses. The second rule is that the wine bottles should be left on the table: Pat Buckley has privatized the wine list. Her third rule is that the third course, the dessert, has got to be something you will enjoy so much that you will feel a little ashamed for having eaten it....

This is a celebration, all right, but it is a celebration of a very serious achievement, which is what NATioNAL REVIEW has given to the United States every two weeks for 35 years. I remember reading the first issue. I was two years old. It had an indelible effect on me. I grew a mustache after the second issue was read to me. There wasn't any other way at that age of frightening away all the liberals I was mobilized by NATIONAL REVIEW to guard against....

WICK ALLISON

We have heard from a number of people. As you know, things are getting rather hot and heavy in Washington [with the budget] but we start at the highest level: "I am delighted to send my warmest greetings to all those gathered in New York City for the 35th-annIversary celebration of NATIONAL REVIEW. It iS a special pleasure to congratulate its founder and my good friend Bill Buckley, as well as Priscilla Buckley, publisher Wick Allison, editor John O'Sullivan on this happy occasion. The course of public opinion and policy-making in America has been profoundly influenced by NATIONAL REVIEW. Fortunately, Bill Buckley has not pulled punches at any point in his distinguished career, and America is all the better for it. Barbara joins me in saying best wishes for an enjoyable evening and every future success. God bless you. George Bush."

And from Vice President Dan Quayle: "NATIONAL REVIEW demonstrates that it's possible to be serious and funny, complex and simple, reverent and iconoclastic, all at the same time, and it has managed to unite all these opposite principles while standing firm for conservatism and for articulating a distinctive vision. It's one of the indispensable journals of our time."

And finally, from Representative Henry Hyde, who is on the floor at this moment-the floor of the House, that is, not of this dinner: "I am mired in the slough of despond on Capitol Hill, trying to reach a budget agreement with those unruly creatures called Democrats. Turning water into wine would be easier. I have used the word lexultant' just once in MY life.... but permit me to say that I am exultant at NATIONAL REVIEW'S 35th anniversary. You and yours are indispensable to our nation."

JACK KEMP

Who would have thought that in the short five years since NR's thirtieth anniversary, we would have seen the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the collapse of socialism and indeed what Gorbachev said at Stanford was the end of the cold war? Mr. Gorbachev said at Stanford University in June that the cold war is over-it doesn't matter who won. Ladies and gentlemen, only a loser could stand in the locker room and say it doesn't matter who won. We won. It was not the arms as much as it was our ideas and our ideals. We must never forget that.... The mayor of Moscow wants to give the public housing to all the residents free and establish the right to private property in Moscow with a free-enterprise zone. I want to announce here tonight, I'll be damned if I am going to let the mayor of Moscow have a free-enterprise zone before we get one in New York. If we are to make the democratic capitalist ideal work in Eastern Europe, we've got to make it work in East Harlem and East L.A. and East St. Louis....

I've made some endorsements today. I've endorsed Newt Gingrich's plan to cut capital-gains tax rates to 15 per cent. I've endorsed David Duke's opponent in Louisiana. I hereby tonight endorse Herb London for the governor of the state of New York....

To me, this is not the time to say, "Come home, America." This is the time to say, Pax Americana." Not an empire based on conquests of territory, but the ultimate empire, an empire based on the ideas and the ideals for which the founders fought.

God bless NATIONAL REVIEW for seeing it all so clearly 35 years ago.

TOM WOLFE

After I finished four years at Washington and Lee University and went on to graduate school at Yale, I met my first Marxists, and I remember how often they talked about the "freight train of history." Now I should say these were not really Marxists. They came from out of what Jean-Francois Revel has called a "Marxist mist." Revel, who at the time was a socialist, came to this country at the heyday of the New Left movement. His American friends on the Left had been telling him for several years that the dark night of fascism was descending upon America. He returned to France and wrote a book called Neither Marx nor Jesus, in which he said, "In America, I discovered one of the great mysteries of astronomy. The dark night of fascism is forever descending in America, but it only touches ground in Europe."

Well, on November 9, 1989, a date that I think the children of the twenty-first century will be forced to memorize the way they do 1066, 1492, or 1776, the freight train pulled in. That was the day of the breaching of the Berlin Wall, and aboard that train, in car after car after car, was the intellectual and moral baggage of the folk who are in this room tonight. And I think a good half of that train belonged to Bill Buckley.

I happened to have been at Yale as a graduate student when Bill Buckley published God and Man at Yale. I was still at Yale when he founded NATioNAL REVIEW in 1955. It's difficult tonight as we are gathered in these magnificent halls to remember how Bill Buckley and NATIONAL REVIEW were regarded in the late Fifties and the early Sixties, and well into the Seventies. Bill was not called a conservative," at least within my hearing-that might have been used in print now and again. He was not even called an ultra-conservative or an arch-conservative. He was known as a reactionary. And the word reactionary meant a devil-figure.

I have never seen a more lonely soldier fighting harder than Bill Buckley-and, for that matter, his platoon. And it seemed like just a platoon at NATIONAL REVIEW. I think it is a tribute to what Bill Buckley and NATioNAL REVIEW have done to think of what the word reactionary means today. I am sure many people in this room found tremendous entertainment earlier this year when we saw the scene in Daniel Ortega's campaign headquarters when it became absolutely clear that Mrs. Chamorro had won and that the entire edifice of the last Marxist-Leninist paradise was coming crashing down around everyone's head. In that room were quite a few newspaper reporters from the United States. And a significant number-not all, by any means, but a significant number-in full sight of everyone, were crying into their bandannas. Now, when I say crying, I am not talking about a few tears, I am talking about snuffling, boo-hooing, hawking into these bandannas. Now, why bandannas? It was because the bandanna had become the symbol of the Ortega election campaign. For the purpose of the election campaign, Daniel Ortega became a peasant, a campesino. His symbol was the bandanna, and he was seen riding mustangs, bandanna waving in the wind, across the collectivized fincas of Nicaragua. And these young Americans, no doubt highly educated, were crushed. They were emotionally and psychologically destroyed by the phenomenon of this great figure, this great movement and this great cause, Marxism-Leninism, coming to absolute ruin on our own continent. And that was why we were treated to this hilarious spectacle of the antics of young reactionaries. And after all, what is a reactionary.? A reactionary is someone who clings desperately to an exhausted, outmoded, and discredited mode of life.

And so we can tonight look all around us, not in this room, but in the halls of journalism, wherever they may be, and see reactionaries at every hand: The Nation magazine, king and queen of the reactionaries; The Progressive, the New Statesman, The New Left Review. Just think of what it means that the world in 35 years has reached this remarkable pass, nudged in no small part by Bill Buckley and NATIONAL REVIEW tO spin toward this final course. Now, I should ask you, should we be here tonight gloating? Well, why not? I see no harm whatsoever in one fine night of gloating revelry in tribute to a man and a magazine that have done so much not only to advance but to safeguard the cause of individual freedom and the sanctity of the human soul.

At this point the documentary prepared by WFB and PLB is shown, with narration by voice-over artist and NR's Gimlet Eye, Keith Mano.

GEORGE F. WILL

It was a wonderful documentary. It needs a title. And the title should be, The Rebirth of a Nation. It has been well said that the dust made by exploded myths makes a beautiful sunset. We have all seen the sunset over the rubble of Communism. It came, it seemed, almost on little cat feet, and the collapse of Communism was so swift and so complete that the revisionists are already at work spreading the poisonous misunderstanding that the collapse was inevitable. That is not true. The Berlin Wall did not collapse of its own weight. It collapsed like a souffle under the weight of counterideas. It collapsed as part of Europe's second Reformation, a reformation this time without a Luther, without a charismatic and intellectual leader, a reformation brought about because certain ideas were in the air. Lech Walesa is a great man, doubtless a fine electrician; no Luther.

But the ideas were in the air because someone put them there. They were put there by Margaret Thatcher, they were put there by Ronald Reagan. But before they could be put there, they had to be argued and preserved, perfected and burnished, and that was the responsibility of writers. The more time I spend in journalism and in politics around the world of affairs, the more convinced I am not only that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas have lasting consequences. Another lesson of the extraordinary 12 months we have just lived through, a heartening one, is that people are not meat. The harder you pound them, the tougher they get. The entire totalitarian project, for forty-some years in Eastern Europe, for seventy-some years in the Soviet Union, was based on the premise that you could socialize consciousness, that you could nationalize mind. Again it turned out that even a nation of intellectual autarky is porous to ideas finely enough expressed, fervently enough advocated. And so after 45 years of trying to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe, it turns out that there were more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there were east of the Elbe River. Now, Harvard has its virtues, but I am a graduate of a more exacting school. I am a member of a rambunetious fraternity called the NATIONAL REVIEW alumni association. I could not mention all the members of that group-Dan Oliver, John Coyne, Kevin Lynch, Chilton Wilhamson-many have been mentioned here tonight.

It is, as I say, an exacting school, and one that is in its way humbling. What Henry Adams said of the succession of Presidents, from Washington, Adams, and Jefferson through Grant-that is, that it disproved the theory of evolution-could, I regret to say, as well be said of the succession of journalists from William Buckley through his professional children. Still it is the case that the American journalism profession has a social geology, layer upon layer of sediment, of people pulled into the profession by the attraction of careers worth emulating, and there are throughout America and beyond our shores-Ferdinand Mount on the Daily Telegraph is one example-people approximately my age, some a little older, many younger, who were pulled into the profession by the example of William Buckley. We were able to practice the profession as we did because we went to the Academy for Writing on 35th Street. It was an exacting academy where we learned that it was not only possible, it was tremendous fun to fuse passion and precision in our writing.

It wasn't always easy. You could often emerge from a meeting with the editors where your prose had been sliced and filleted and flayed, and you would feel much as the man did who emerged form church after a particularly censorious sermon on the Ten Commandments. He sighed and muttered to himself, Well, at least I haven't made any graven images."

But most of all, what we learned, I think, frOM NATIONAL REVIEW was that all society rests on opinion, which means all society rests on shifting and shiftable sands, and therefore there are no final victories. I think we all know that our agenda is still full. The world is a dangerous place, and the cultural and political problems of the United States do not recede.

But tonight is a night not for tomorrow's agenda but for taking stock and giving credit. And I would like to give credit where it is certainly due: to the little magazine that lit the little spark that became the huge explosion that produced the sunset. NATIONAL RVIEW is itself a thing of beauty-the flamingo in the farmyard of American journalism.

NATIONAL REVIEW was begun in 1955 as a candle in a gale. It's very hard to recapture the atmosphere of the 1950s today. In the 1950s an American was arrested in an American city for disturbing the peace. A witness testified that the gentleman arrested was, and I quote, "using abusive language, calling people conservatives and all that." In the 1950s a New York street gang, casting around for a particularly terrifying name, passed over such obvious choices as the Dragon's Teeth or the Avenging Angels and called themselves, with simple, bloodcurdling simplicity, the Conservatives.

It was not a propitious moment when NATIONAL REVIEW began its voyage on the choppy sea of American controversy. There were two books on the best-seller list at the moment NATIONAL REVIEW was born. One was The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, deploring the miasma of conformity in America. The other was The Power of Positive Thinking. It took an enormous act of positive thinking to challenge the sea of liberal orthodoxy into which NATIONAL REVIEW sailed, tacking at first into an extremely daunting wind. NATIONAL REVIEW, to the astonishment even of its friends and the terror of its opponents, changed the way the wind blew.

It is simply the case that NATIONAL REVIEW iS the most consequential journal of opinion ever. There is not, I think, a scintilla of hyperbole in that judgment. Think about it. For two generations it has been the beating heart of the movement that has transformed America. It has changed first the ideas and then the politics and ultimately the policies of the most important nation the world has ever known. And this change, this journey up from liberalism, was necessary to winning the most important war ever waged, the fifty-year war against the totalitarians. For that reason it is the most important magazine of opinion ever. Because history is the history of mind, and it will be impossible to write the history of the twentieth century of the modem world without dwelling at length and respectfully on the history Of NATIONAL REVIEW.

And so it is that as a citizen and as an alumnus, I thank the editors, particularly Priscilla and Bill, and I thank all those who write for it and all those who support it, but most of all, I thank all those from sea to shining sea who read it, for all that they've done to make this night and the next 35 years possible.

JOHN O'SULLIVAN

I gather that when Bill Buckley recruited an Englishman to come over to the United States to edit the principal conservative magazine here and indeed in the world, there were one or two people who were understandably somewhat concerned that I might give NATIONAL REVIEW tOO British a tone, spelling defense with a c and referring to Americans as them," calling for a worldwide imperial pax Americana, that kind of thing. Of course the British actually don't think calling for a pax Americana is a very British thing to do. They don't think it's an American thing to do either. They think that the American thing to do is having a pax Americana while calling for something else....

All I will say about any editorial influence that I will have in the next few years, as we celebrate the triumph of the ideas that NATIONAL REVIEW was founded 35 years ago to advance, is to quote the words of F. E. Smith: "There are still glittering prizes to be won by those who have stout hearts and sharp swords." Our hearts are stout and our swords are not returned to their scabbards. But I will now yield to the stoutest heart and the sharpest sword of all.

WM. F. BUCK= JR. There are too many men and women to whom I am indebted to make it feasible to enumerate them. So I won't even mention my sister Priscilla, nor pause to say that without her my 35 years at NATIONAL REVIEW would have been intolerable. You will be glad to know that I shan't mention any more people whom I intend not to acknowledge, with the exception of Henry Hyde: who else could simultaneously do in a short telegram the work of Bill Simon and Milton Friedman? And Jack Kemp, who rouses the cheerleader in me. And my old friend George Will, whom I revere even though I am the only living American who hasn't read his book on baseball. This was a conscientious decision, made only because aware as I am of his capacity to communicate, I simply can't afford to contract yet another enthusiasm: I just don't have the time. Not even in the days after the next issue Of NATIONAL REVIEW goes to bed, which will be the last issue I'll superintend.

I suppose that if there is a single occasion on which a professional will be indulged for speaking personally, it is when he retires. (If that isn't the case, then NATIONAL REVIEW will establish yet another precedent.) When my father first saw the offering circular with which in 1954 I traveled about the country attempting to induce American capitalists to invest in our prospective journal, my father spotted only one sentence that disturbed him. I wrote in the offering circular that I pledged to devote ten years of my life tO NATIONAL REVIEW. My father, who was very . . . formal about personal commitments, told me he thought this exorbitant: "Ten years is simply too long," he said. "Suppose you decide you want to do something else with your life?"

Well, the warning became moot, because there never was anything else around seriously to tempt me. For the fun of it I divulge that in 1970 I was approached by a very small delegation of what one is trained to call "serious people" whose proposal was that I should run for governor of New York, that I should expect to win the election and position myself to run for the Presidency. I was nicely situated to say two things: the first that anyone who had run for mayor of New York and got only 13 per cent of the vote shouldn't be too confident about winning an electoral majority in a general election. And I finally silenced my friends by adding that I didn't see how I could make the time to run for governor, given my obligations tO NATIONAL REVIEW. My friends couldn't understand my priorities. But I was very content with them.

Oh yes, I won't cavil on that point. The magazine has been everything the speakers tonight have so kindly said it was-is. It is preposterous to suppose that this is so because of my chancellorship. How gifted do you need to be to publish Whittaker Chambers and Russell lurk, James Burnham and Keith Mano? But yes, the journal needed to function. Somehow the staff and the writers had to be paid-if an editorial note is reserved for me in the encyclopaedias, it will appear under the heading, ALcHEmy. But the deficits were met, mostly, by our readers; by you. And, yes, we did as much as anybody with the exception of-himself to shepherd into the White House the man I am confident will emerge as the principal postwar political figure of this century, and he will be cherished, in the nursery tales told in future generations to young children, as the American President who showed the same innocent audacity as the little boy who insisted that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes at all, when he said at a critical moment in Western history-about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics-that it was an evil empire. It is my judgment that those words acted as a kind of harmonic resolution to the three frantic volumes of Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago told us everything we needed to know about the pathology of Soviet Communism. We were missing only the galvanizing summation; and we got it, in the Mosaic code: and I think that the countdown for Communism began then.

I owe you all an account of my exercise of my fiduciary authority in handling the journal you have sustained. I am, speaking now the language of corporate America, its owner: The stock Of NATIONAL REVIEW, which commercially is about as valuable as Confederate bonds, is mine. My resignation as chief executive officer will give me the opportunity to receive the magazine in the mail, as you do, with no specific knowledge of what I'll encounter between its covers, save for my own continuing editorial contributions in my new role as editor-at-large. It is my plan, at some point in the future, to deed my stock to a successor. The highest tribute I can pay to Wick Allison and to John O'Sullivan is that I am turning over to their management a property to the health and hygiene of which I have devoted practically the whole of my adult lifetime. It is inconceivable to me, having watched them in operation for over a year, that I have made a mistake. Still, I elect not to risk being designated at some point in the future as another King Lear. While I am still intact, I'll be there to judge the continuing performance of NATIONAL REVIEW, conscious that I owe, to all the readers who have sustained it, an obligation that cannot be lightly discharged, and won't be.

Since you were so kind as to ask about my personal plans, I disclose that I intend to continue to be active on other fronts. Early this week I performed a harpsichord concerto with the North Carolina Symphony, and resolved with the full acquiescence, I am certain, of the orchestra and the audience, that I will not devote my remaining years to performing on the keyboard. One month from today I will set out, with my companions, on a small sailboat from Lisbon, headed toward Barbados via Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde, 4,400 miles of decompression at sea, the cradle of God: inevitably, a book will come out of this. But on reaching the Caribbean, unlike the Flying Dutchman I will jump ship, to get on with other work. I have not scheduled the discontinuation of my column, or of Firing Line, or of public speaking, or of book writing. But these activities by their nature terminate whenever the Reaper moves his supernatural, or, for that matter, democratic hand, whereas NATIONAL REVIEW, I like to think, will be here, enlivening right reason, for as long as there is anything left in America to celebrate.

And, of course, it will always crowd my own memory: 2,750 fortnightly issues of NATIONAL REVIEW. The hour is late, nearing five in the afternoon of press day, and the printer's messenger is already there waiting, so we move into the board room, the only room at NATIONAL REVIEW in which more than four people can fit, and Priscilla reads out the editorial lengths, and I mark them down on the paleolithic calculator I bought in Switzerland in 1955, and Linda checks to see that I have got the right count. We have 1,259 lines of editorial copy but space for only 718. We absolutely need to run something on the subject of Judge Souter's testimony, but I see we can't afford the 78-line editorial I processed earlier in the day. "Rick, would you shorten this?"

"To what?" he asks, as matter-of-factly as a tailor might ask what the new waistline is to be.

The copy is spread about the room, occupying every level surface, and you walk about, counterclockwise, turning face down any editorial that can wait a fortnight to appear, and subtracting on your little calculator its line-count from the rogue total. I need to cut 541 lines. First your eyes pass by the editorials and paragraphs that deal with domestic issues, Priscilla having grouped them together; then those that deal with foreign countries or foreign policy; then the offbeat material. You look down at the calculator, having made the complete circle of the room and returned to where you began. It shows 854 lines, and so you start the second counterclockwise circuit, the killer instinct necessarily aroused: you have got to cut another 136 lines. Jeff, shrink this one by ten lines, okay?" At NATIONAL REVIEW the editors always say okay, when a deadline looms.

So it is done, down to line-length. And then you ask yourself-. Which paragraph is just right for the lead? The rule: It has to be funny, or at least piquant; directly or obliquely topical; engaging of the broader imagination. I remember one from years and years ago: "The attempted assassination of Sukamo last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room was killed except Sukamo." And, during the days we feuded almost full-time, "Gerald Johnson of The New Republic wonders what a football would think of football if a football could think. Very interesting, but not as interesting as, What would a New Republic reader think of The New Republic if a New Republic reader could think?" Last week there wasn't anything absolutely, obviously pre-eminent, but ever since it came up on the dumbwaiter at 2 P.m. from Tim Wheeler's fortnightly package, this one, about colors, had burrowed in the mind . . . Time is very short now. Okay, we'll lead with it. It reads,

* Iraq and the budget are as nothing

compared to the firestorm following the

retirement of maize, raw umber, lemon

yellow, blue grey, violet blue, green blue,

orange red, and orange yellow, and their

replacement by vivid tangerine, wild

strawberry, fuschia, teal blue, cerulean,

royal purple, jungle green, and dandelion,

by the makers of Crayola crayons.

Nice, no? Orson Bean used to say that the most beautiful word-combinations in the language were Yucca From Monsignor Clark's benediction:

Bless ... their intelligence and elegance and brilliance, saving their modesty by causing them to remember

the source of their every gift." Flats," and "Fernando Llamas"; although Whittaker Chambers, along with Gertrude Stein, preferred Toasted Suzie is my ice cream.

And then you need the bottom eyecatcher, the end paragraph, traditionally very offbeat; usually non-political, but not necessarily. You knew which would be the end paragraph the moment you laid eyes on it, early in the day-another by Tim, whose reserves of mischief are reliable-and now you find it and designate it as such. It reads,

* This week's invention is a sort of miniaturized

bug zapper, battery-powered, to

be inserted in the cervix for contraception

and, the inventor hopes, prophylaxis.

If you aren't shocked by this, you

will be.

The editorials are now in order, and the line-count is confirmed.

Another issue Of NATIONAL REVIEW has gone to bed; and you acknowledge-the thought has ever so slowly distilled in your mind-that the time comes for us all to go to bed, and I judge that mine has come, and I leave owing to my staff, my colleagues-my successors-my friends, my muses, my God, an unrequitable debt for having given me so much, for so long. Good night, and thanks.

EUGENE CLARK

As You have said, Lord, we cannot change a hair or add a cubit, but to our delight, You create and You enhance. Thank You, Lord, for what You have created and magnified in our cherished magazine, the ideals and insights that have led to its many successes.

Bless our founding father and all whom he loves, his sometime associates now in Your hands, the whole complement Of NATIONAL REVIEW 1990. Let readers and young leaders notice, if you will, the intelligence and elegance and brilliance and high-mindedness of Your servants at NATIONAL REVIEW, saving their modesty by causing them to remember the source of their every gift. Bless the nation and those in arms and bless tonight's good company of properly grateful friends. Amen.