William A. Rusher, who died on April 16, was one of the leading conservatives of the past 50 years. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School and an Air Force veteran of World War II, he served as publisher of National Review magazine from 1957 to 1988. He wrote a syndicated column, “The Conservative Advocate,” from 1973 on. He was the author of several books, including The Making of the New Majority Party (1975) and The Rise of the Right (1984). He was instrumental in launching the draft of Barry Goldwater for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, a campaign widely seen as the first step leading to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

"Rusher the Churchillian"

Churchillian? If we mean by that a man who had a natural ear for good words in prose and poetry, committed them to memory without seeming effort, and recalled them on the right occasions, then Bill Rusher was Churchillian.

If we mean by that a man who distilled a wide reading into truths that could be remembered and applied to his own choices, then Bill Rusher was Churchillian.

If we mean by that a man who learned from Churchill all his life, who saw into his character as a gentleman would see, then Bill Rusher was Churchillian.

If we mean by that a man whose wit was biting but never unkind, whose sense of humor was hilarious to the place of danger on formal occasions, then Bill Rusher was Churchillian. You would know this if you had traveled to Asia with him, for on that trip he would read the Buddha, and spout his aphorisms until they made a theme sometimes wise, more generally strange and funny. I can hear Bill at this moment, intoning to explain some odd sight: “Change is the fate of all compound things, quoth the Buddha.” Or I can hear him reciting Longfellow as we strode across a Japanese formal garden. He had an ear not only for the noble, but also for the incongruous.

There are differences between Bill Rusher and Churchill. Churchill would not, if he offered you a drink in his home, hand you a printed menu, accurate as to inventory, that he had prepared himself. Churchill did not have his bookcases built with spaces shaped for the specific books and other objects that would be in them, right down to ungainly Sony Betamax (a device from the Paleolithic age). Churchill, said his wife, was a “sporting man, who liked to give the train a chance to get away.” Rusher would speak sharply to Churchill about that, as he did to me.

I never got to work at National Review, but I went there plenty. After I worked with Bill Rusher, I did not think it was Bill Buckley who gave the place what tidiness it had. The two Bills collaborated rather on its wisdom, its principle, and its wit.

Like Churchill’s work, that of Rusher lives because it gives us a model and a chance today. We owe him a debt, to be paid in love and memory.