Robert L. Bartley, 1937-2003
KRISTOL, IRVING
Robert L. Bartley, 1937-2003 Remembering one of the most influential journalists of the 20th century. BY IRVING KRISTOL BOB BARTLEY first entered my life in the late 1960s. He was then a young...
...Bob and I were allies in the debate on "supply-side" economics, having been converted by Bob's colleague, Jude Wanniski...
...Reagan agreed that the traditional Republican strategy of "saving the country from bankruptcy" by cutting spending—which no Republican administration had ever succeeded in doing—while leaving the programmatic initiatives in the hands of Democrats, was self-defeating...
...And on foreign policy, Bob helped cure the Republican party of its isolationist virus, while maintaining a healthy contempt for the United Nations and its offshoots...
...Though Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, et al., all have distinguished financial papers, none has ever had the influence of the Journal...
...He was then a young journalist on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and he wanted to interview me about The Public Interest, of which he was, he said, an avid reader...
...once, when my wife complained about a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Bob expressed puzzlement that she bothered to read that publication...
...It made the Wall Street Journal a politically influential newspaper, well beyond the confines of the business community...
...Thus the convert converted the nation...
...years...
...The name "supply-side" was almost certainly a mistake...
...Bob's article, when it appeared on the Journal's editorial page, was entitled "Irving Kristol and Friends," and its point was that a new group of thinkers had emerged who were making an original contribution to American political thinking...
...Irving," Bob queried gently on the phone, "are you hinting that the president of the United States has gone bonkers...
...It is still the only paper of its kind in the world...
...I was amazed...
...In due course, if he himself did not read it, he did come to appreciate that the culture represented by the New York Review had to be taken seriously, and he saw to it that the Journal did just that...
...But cutting tax rates turned out to be a highly popular idea...
...The subscriptions rolled in—at least 20 of them, as I recall...
...I took thought and toned down the language a bit...
...Petty passions were simply foreign to him...
...When a few years later Bob became editor of the Journal editorial page, I began contributing a monthly column, and continued doing so for almost 25 Irving Kristol, the author and essayist, was a longtime member of the Wall Street Journal's Board of Contributors...
...Certainly none has ever dreamed of reshaping a major political party, as the Journal has done...
...Apparently my column suggested that President Nixon's state of mind, in the handling of Watergate, was less than rational...
...Bob Bartley was one of the most influential journalists of the 20th century...
...Bob may have been the only journalist in America who was a subscriber to this largely academic publication...
...only once, in all that time, did Bob propose an editorial change...
...It took me a couple of years to figure out what it was, although Jude explained it patiently more than once...
...And he really read it...
...In the years that followed, Bartley began to focus on foreign policy and even on the "culture wars...
...The latter, of course, was (and to some degree still is) the economic theory of the bulk of American conservatism and of the Republican party, so the odds of winning that debate were close to nil...
...Even his political opponents came to respect his intelligence, his integrity, and his great good nature...
...I say "even" because Bob had, to begin with, a Midwesterner's suspicion of intellectual quarrels...
...Converting the Republican party to the new economics was Bartley's finest hour...
...And Jack had the ear of an aspiring Republican presidential candidate named Ronald Reagan...
...But a political accident intervened...
...Had the prefix "neo" been available, most of our contributors (with the exception of Nisbet) could have been better described as "neo-liberal...
...We were thrilled, of course, at such exposure, even recognition...
...The magazine, then edited by Daniel Bell and myself, had been founded in 1965, and by that time had perhaps a circulation of 2,000...
...Jack Kemp, a congressman who had been campaigning in favor of "capital formation" as a cure for our economic ills, was persuaded by Jude and Bob that supply-side economics was a superior version of his theory...
...The term "neoconservative" had not yet been invented...
...It would have helped if we had simply said that we were committed to the economics of growth instead of the economics of equilibrium and stability...
...He was also a most admirable human being...
...Although his controversial opinions, strongly expressed, made him enemies, he himself had no enemies...
...He was interested in such writers as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer, and Robert Nisbet, who were among our featured contributors to those early issues...
...But a friendship and an alliance had been formed...
...So Reagan became a convert to supply-side economics—for a while our only convert...
Vol. 9 • December 2003 • No. 15
