PUBLIC NUISANCES
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. Who is Bob Bartley? WASHINGTON MY FRIEND BOB BARTLEY, editor emeritus of the Wall Street Journal, died at 9:35 Wednesday morning, Dec- ember 10. I knew...
...He was confident of the rightness of the positions he arrived at, and understandably...
...FEBRUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63...
...In the 1970s Bob, once something of a liberal, became a Cold Warrior and foresightedly opposed arms control and Mutual Assured Destruction...
...His longtime friend, the investment banker Ed Yeo, believed that along with all Bob's other talents this student of economics and commerce also had a stupendous aptitude for business...
...In his weekly Wall Street Journal column, written in a fluent style employing lucid English spiced with an occasional dash of folksiness, he ranged widely across problems recognized by the nation or not yet recognized by it...
...Despite illness and all his other obligations he presided over the magazine's redesign, encouraged new emphases appropriate to the changing times, and took a look at the business side...
...And he often broke his silence with another unforgettable mannerism...
...He did...
...He knew how the world works...
...Markets are recognized...
...Communism is gone...
...By the turn of the century the Cold War had ended peacefully with the Soviet Union in history's dustbin, Reaganite prosperity flourishing, and President Bill Clinton impeached...
...Mencken's angers are not what we admire in a thinking person...
...Watching him attend to the myriad details of journalism was an illuminating experience that I know I shall never experience again...
...Bob had moved on to champion the Bush Doctrine, which he with his keen sense of history recognized as a demarche as significant as 1947's policy of containment...
...He was glad for that call and when a few days later he died he did so knowing that he, an old artillery officer, had left formations in the field...
...PUBLIC NUISANCES R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...T O THE LAST THERE WAS A TWINKLE in his eye, at times a mischievous twinkle...
...Watching him attend to the myriad details of journalism was an illuminating experience that I know I shall never experience again...
...Any force endangering the heart of Bob's philosophy of "free men and free markets...
...43rd president was ushering in a New Establishment to replace the jejune and rancorous liberal establishment...
...Moreover he was deeply yet quietly religious...
...During that time he grew from being a quiet slightly enigmatic Midwestern reporter in the Journal's Chicago bureau to being the most powerful editor of the most powerful editorial page in the country—powerful, that is, if ideas change the world, and his did...
...At the revitalization of The American Spectator he prevailed on me to set the record straight on our great iconoclast, H.L...
...And he has left The American Spectator and the New York Sun, founded by Bob's pal Seth Lipsky...
...Then came the cancer, which he fought gamely and treated matter-of-factly...
...Retiring the editorship of the Journal in 2002, he found himself busier than ever, doing television which he relished, his column, speaking widely, and planning long-term intellectual projects to keep the nation's intellectual debates vigorous...
...His judgments were too coolly arrived at for hate...
...He knew how the world works...
...Integrity, the rule of law, and limited government are admired, at least in America...
...Usually he recognized the requisite policy for dealing with them...
...Only those who have worked with him and the historians who will eventually chronicle his times can appreciate Bob's genius for seeing history's challenges coming across the horizon...
...That was not enough...
...His ideas of tax reduction and economic growth had replaced statist economics...
...The recognition came over the years, for the evidence is inescapable...
...For over 30 years he was rarely wrong...
...Bob had a beatific smile, and I never heard him express anger against anyone...
...How he knew all this is a mystery, genius is a mystery...
...He usually saw them before the rest of us had a hint of what was coming...
...Some of his critics in the Clinton years lumped him in with what they called the Clinton-haters...
...Bob's ideas of a strong military and a vigilant foreign policy had replaced accommodation...
...And the Clinton administration was increasingly seen in lurid hues, the Democrats' equivalent of the Harding administration though without the innocent consequences...
...Bob's knowledge was incomparable...
...Bob favored the values of a gentleman...
...In the 1990s he led an even smaller band of journalists who recognized the Clintons as reckless abusers of power and serious threats to the rule of law...
...When the White House got word that his life was in peril, the Presidential Medal of Freedom for which he had been nominated was immediately announced after the president gave Bob a call...
...Bob left that philosophy ascendant...
...By the 1980s he was one of the small band formulating and promoting Supply-Side Economics...
...And one other point: he was that rare public intellectual who arrived at his eminence not by self-promotion but by the quality of his work...
...The Wall Street Journal advancing Bob's vision is as formidable as ever...
...All have their guns trained on the enemy...
...Bob Bartley was a great man...
...Who are the enemy...
...I knew him for over three decades...
...Mencken...
...That is the challenge he leaves for all thoughtful libertarian conservatives to take up...
...He was a quiet man, punctuating conversation, whether social or editorial, with long pauses, which doubtless puzzled some people, but his friends understood: Bob was thinking about the topic at hand...
...Bob's knowledge was incomparable...
...By the end of the first half of the current Bush administration Bob was speculating that the 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 R . EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...He encouraged me to revitalize The American Spectator...
...He would roll his head left and right while uttering a particularly emphatic judgment in his flat slightly nasal voice intoning the unaccented idiom of the Midwest, his native region in which he took immense pride...
Vol. 37 • February 2004 • No. 1
