MEMORIES AND TRIBUTES
2 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 FRED BARNES THE FIRST TIME I SAW The American Spectator in the late 1970s I didn’t know what to make of it. It was a funny size—too...
...But I was thinking of the Spectator...
...I won’t ever forget the Spectator, and when my turn comes to join my parents at the Jewish cemetery in Falls Church, I hope and pray Bob will be there to throw on the first and the last spadefuls of dirt, and Wlady is there to offer wisdom and counsel, and then to meet me on The Other Side...
...Still, I’ve always wondered: What is a Kapellmeister...
...But it was Tyrrell’s drive and determination that transformed a capricious idea into a tangible and ongoing forum...
...The American Spectator has actually drawn blood with its investigative journalism into the left...
...Was Bob Tyrrell really as good at handball as he suggested—and, by the way, what the hell was handball, anyway...
...Now, it is 34 years later...
...memories and tributes memories and tributes A 40th Anniversary Symposium H H H H H H H H STEPHEN M. DAVIS THE ALTERNATIVE TO WHAT...
...The sprightly magazine from Bloomington helped us grow confident in our movement, energetic in pursuit of our goals, and optimistic about the ultimate outcome of the struggle...
...I was amazed at the feedback my pieces got...
...Funny, irreverent, smart, and tough, The Alternative gave campus conM E M O R I E S A N D T R I B U T E S 2 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 servatives that most precious of commodities...
...Not a bad achievement for a 40year-old just entering its prime...
...He wanted me to write movie reviews...
...That was the response from many at Indiana University as I hawked the first issue of the magazine in September 1967 for 15 cents...
...It was a funny size—too big—and came from an unlikely place, Bloomington, Indiana, where I’d never been (still haven’t...
...Nope, I must have just spotted the Spectator at a newsstand and picked it up out of curiosity...
...At the time I was based in Hong Kong as managing editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal...
...My recollection is that he offered to pay me $40 per column...
...The Spectator had a small circulation in those days but what mattered was its large number of readers...
...The Spectator and Bob have been incredibly good to me...
...I did not become a regular reader until the 1980s when the conservative renaissance had begun under Ronald Reagan...
...Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform and author of the forthcoming book Leave Us Alone...
...I met Bob Tyrrell in the spring of 1967 at a Young Americans for Freedom meeting in Bloomington, Indiana...
...It published material that could not see the light of day elsewhere, including my diary of ten days in Central America in which I jabbed at the Reagan administration for then being insufficiently alarmed by Communist penetration...
...I have been with The Alternative, now called The American Spectator, all of that time...
...He was a grad student in history and I was more interested in the debauched side of Western civilization...
...I have been the host of many a Spectator dinner...
...And I grew up...
...They put Wlady in my life, an astounding gift...
...I particularly remember articles about Taiwan...
...It is easy to whine about the perceived failings of one’s own team...
...So I found myself back in Bloomington living with Tyrrell in a 1950 vintage trailer...
...In their pages, we met Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson and so many other outstanding thinkers...
...Bob Tyrrell did not just do it symbolically but pitched spadeful after spadeful of dirt on Mom’s coffin, sobbing as he did it...
...H H H H H H H H BEN STEIN ONE NIGHT IN 1973, I was sitting in an old armchair my parents had cast off in a little tiny house I was renting in Georgetown, D.C...
...I accepted...
...Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist and a commentator for Fox News...
...The Spectatorwas conservative, for sure, but there was something else about it that appealed to me...
...But there was a ray of iconoclastic light from, of all places, Bloomington, Indiana...
...What I have most appreciated in the Spectator is its obvious belief that the observation of political life will be too grim to bear if not leavened with a lightness of spirit...
...M E M O R I E S A N D T R I B U T E S DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 2 9...
...Heck, the SDS, not the CRs, sponsored the freshman dance the first week at the U. Admission: 25 cents...
...And it is a great deal of work for an ideological publication to criticize its opponents in a way that transcends name calling and alters the correlation of forces in American politics...
...I was at the nowfamous dinner, hosted by our friend and mentor, Robert Bartley, at whose table another friend, George Gilder, who had kept TAS afloat through one of its crises, offered the magazine back to Tyrrell, and at which Tyrrell, without a nickel in the bank, accepted it in one, but only one, of the acts of journalistic courage that we celebrate this season and which I join so many in saluting...
...In America today The American Spectator is almost alone as a serious movement publication...
...Before the Spectator, my biggest magazine assignment had been writing a piece on the Supreme Court for Playboy...
...By Jewish custom, all of the mourners throw a spadeful of dirt on the lowered coffin...
...They are nasty, shrill, brutish, and probably short...
...That embodied Bob Tyrrell: fearless and indispensable in exposing the left and mobilizing the right...
...He said he had read my op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the N.Y...
...The Clinton administration proved a golden time for the Spectator...
...Seth Lipsky is editor of the New York Sun...
...Nor do I recall anyone ever saying to me, “Hey, Fred, you’ve got to read this magazine these guys from Indiana are putting out...
...But he also said he thought that since my mother and father were so smart, I would probably be smart, too...
...It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship...
...I’d lived in Washington most of my life and worked there as a newspaper reporter for a decade, and I could tell the difference...
...What kind of expert witness flies coach...
...To name just a few: Could I get a summer clerkship at Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short (the magazine’s alleged law firm...
...Those were the days before e-mail, when it took two days to book a telephone call to New York...
...Tyrrell kept the Spectator alive...
...I played a small part, with (in collaboration with my daughter, Zelda) a profile of Webster Hubbell, typical of the Clinton years as a corrupt though tragic figure...
...It was Bob Tyrrell...
...he asked, and from then on it was always first class to Ireland...
...Having had an older roommate who had served in Nam, 101st Airborne, war dangers were eclipsed by his tales of R&R in Bangkok...
...We’ve all heard the joke about the pol who not only thinks he’s the most important person in the room, but the most important person ever to have been in the room...
...I soon came to realize that TASand its editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., had broken one of the great stories of his generation: that liberalism had become laughable...
...H H H H H H H H ROBERT D. NOVAK THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR celebrates its 40th birthday at a low point for conservatism...
...Politics of its nature takes itself too seriously...
...In the wake of the fall of Free Vietnam, something surprising, at least to some, was becoming clear—namely that in the great debate over whether Communism or capitalism was going to prove the better engine of development for what was then called the Third World, capitalism was emerging as the winner...
...No, not beer, but hope...
...I had never heard of it...
...He assured me that with my help we could do it...
...And so I did, but only after my first article (on the 1980 presidential campaign) was rejected...
...When I glanced through it the first time, reading bits and pieces of the articles, I was floored...
...We were an army of two arrayed against the militant left on campus, SDS...
...The Selective Service put “1-Y” on my card and denied me that...
...Maybe I shouldn’t say “cast off...
...How they never backed down when faced with a grand jury indictment...
...Politics today is one other thing as well: humorless, save for the comedians, those specialists in irony, who condescend to our politics...
...Daniel Henningeris deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...Think Animal House...
...Most such ideological magazines find it easier to attack friends rather than enemies—they are closer...
...He wanted me to write for The Alternative...
...I couldn’t make the 40th anniversary one this year...
...Wlady has been the author of some of the best advice I have ever gotten...
...Or maybe it’s a memoir and not a novel, but I think it’s a novel...
...Republican politicians are racing for the ideological exits...
...It was, and remains, a guidepost for many of us...
...The American Spectator has chosen to relish the inevitable madness, illogic, and dull pomposity of politics...
...High praise from one’s class enemies...
...One noticed with bemusement across the years that the magazine’s legal counsel remained the same: “Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish & Short...
...But Pat had gone to bed and I was up reading John Gregory Dunne’s great novel, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season...
...Easier than working...
...Those introductions were priceless—and the benefits endless...
...I mean that in a favorable sense, obviously...
...H H H H H H H H DANIEL HENNINGER FROMTIME TO TIME, it has been my habit to check out The American Spectator’s masthead, to see which luminaries of conservative writing (yes, writing, not mere opinionizing) had lashed themselves to the magazine’s energetic monthly voyages...
...I’d never heard of the people who’d started the magazine and I can’t remember recognizing any of the writers either...
...The left was hip—and conservatives were not...
...By total coincidence, I was speaking that night at Indiana University, where Bob founded the Spectator 40 years ago...
...Audacious...
...Was Wlady Pleszczynski simply a made-up name to embellish the masthead (and increase subscriptions from Polish Americans...
...How they gave me the best party of my life when I turned 50, how they publish my whining and my boasting and my fixations...
...H H H H H H H H SETH LIPSKY IT WAS IN THE 1970S that I began reading The American Spectator...
...The American Spectator is unique in our time, which is to say the past 40 years of its existence, in that it has never lost a tempering sense of humor...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard and co-host of The Beltway Boys on the Fox News Channel...
...The left had energy, excitement, the cool causes, the trendy professors and, most importantly, the best-looking girls...
...In response, the left has attacked The American Spectator because of this unusual success...
...Compare this magazine’s personality—pungent, agog, subversive, smart—with that of the websites today of its adversaries over the left edge of the political spectrum...
...I can still recall his strong back as he honored my mother thus...
...So I opened negotiations with Whit Stillman that resulted in the Asian Wall Street Journalreprinting some of the TAS dispatches...
...I did need to grow up...
...Karl Rove is former White House deputy chief of staff...
...At some point TAS began arriving in my mail, full of articles that sketched all this in a lively, cheerful spirit...
...An Irish subway construction man, with a brain, but still that strong Irish back...
...But I got my start at the Spectator...
...I envisioned a band of Happy Warriors living in a beat-up dump near the IU campus...
...I did not even know about the Spectatoruntil after the Nixon political collapse, followed by the 1974 elections that produced a 145-seat Democratic majority in the House of Representatives...
...I lived in that little house with my girlfriend Pat...
...The first issue brought attention and attracted more volunteers...
...My father used to say the Army would make a man of me...
...It was the sure knowledge there were others like us out there—except they were cooler, hipper, and with access to enough money to publish one whacked-out magazine that cheered our hearts by trashing our enemies...
...Sure, I read magazines, but Bob was talking about making one from nothing...
...The Alternative and then The American Spectator offered readers—many stuck in beleaguered quarters in academic precincts across the country—the generous gifts of ideas and inquiry...
...H H H H H H H H KARL ROVE EVEN AT THE MOSTLY mainstream University of Utah, where I found myself in the fall of 1969, it was lonely for those of us on the right...
...But the ideological climate was not friendly in 1967 when the magazine was born, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s election...
...Ben Stein is an actor, lawyer, economist, and writer...
...Why was Ben Stein always flying into Coeur d’Alene...
...It was a good question...
...They spent their hours laughing, writing, arguing, plotting, drinking, and entertaining all those attractive co-eds drawn by their wit and rakish charm...
...I knew instantly I wanted to write for the Spectator...
...After the semester I decided it was time to enlist in the military...
...Soon, I left the newspaper business for the New Republic (in its better days) and now the Weekly Standard...
...This picture didn’t cause envy...
...And when I got home from my tour as a foreign correspondent, I made the trek to DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 2 7 Bloomington to meet R. Emmett Tyrrell...
...H H H H H H H H GROVER G. NORQUIST FOR 40 YEARS The American Spectator has grown up with the American conservative movement...
...When my mother died in April of 1997, we buried her in the Jewish Cemetery in Falls Church, Virginia...
...In 1994, I asked him if I should fly coach or first class to Ireland to be an expert witness in a trial...
...They published my diary for the last 20 years or so...
...Both have increased in size, power, and depth...
...Editors of other magazines read the Spectator and asked me to do freelance pieces for them...
...Then Bob Tyrrell asked me to write a book review, which I did, and I wrote a few more articles before taking over the Spectator’s Presswatch column...
...I was delighted by this saucy, irreverent magazine from out of the Midwest—by its wit, insights, and intellectual integrity...
...Nixon’s administration confirmed Lyndon Johnson’s massive expansion of big government, sought détente on the assumption that a Cold War victory was not possible, and conducted a scandalous administration whose greatest accomplishment was recognizing Communist China...
...But anyway, the phone rang...
...Then, as now, conservatives needed an American Spectator...
...But the Spectatorwas no uncritical cheerleader for anybody...
...The conservative movement, in low morale, is desperate for a leader...
...Many other publications, right and left, have devolved into sectarian bickering trying to redefine the movement they once promised to give voice to and to strengthen...
...2 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 FRED BARNES THE FIRST TIME I SAW The American Spectator in the late 1970s I didn’t know what to make of it...
...It wasn’t the product of a weary East Coast sensibility...
...It was confirmation that the world was full of possibilities, even for conservative nerds with acne and bad social skills...
...The Alternative (in time to be renamed The American Spectator) was born over that summer...
...Writing for the Spectator was, for me, a giant step up, for which I am deeply grateful...
...Was Tommy real—and how could one father dote on a child so much and so sweetly...
...An entrepreneurial newspaperman myself, I became a great admirer of the verve and tenacity with which Mr...
...Stephen M. Davis is a co-founder and former managing editor of this magazine...
...Times and liked them...
...Each month one turns to the Current Wisdom and reads, with astonished awe, that it has yet again taken the most earnest excerpts of liberal political opinion and transformed them into hilarity when set against a few droll lines of introduction...
...They generously gave it to me...
...Thank God it was never published...
...We had very little money and lived very modestly...
...Nasty, brutish, and short would be an apt description of American politics nowadays...
...Each issue raised questions about what was really important, as well as some not-so-important things...
...It was the magazine’s Arkansas Project that unveiled the corruption inherent in Clinton politics...
...It was a time of transition, not only personally, but for universities, politics, and the nation...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
