On the paucity of good orators, the dereliction of Lloyd Austin — and the immortality of William A. Rusher.
The next time you get a chance to meet your favorite author, don’t go out of your way. Writers tend to have a gift for writing but not for gab. Kurt Vonnegut tells the story of a writers conference — in Iowa, of course — where he introduced his American writer-friend Nelson Algren to his Chilean writer-friend José Donoso. After a moment to gather himself, Algren said to Donoso, “It must be nice to come from a country that long and narrow.”
• I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this sad fact, but nobody can make a good speech these days. There’s plenty of pettifogging, plenty of raging at imagined offense, plenty of half-vast self-aggrandizing. But public declamation? It’s a lost art. To address this problem I set up a speakers’ program and, after booking George Will and two or three other honorable exceptions, I confirmed that nobody can make a good speech these days.
• It’s been my good fortune to know three great men in my life, one of whom was named William F. Buckley Jr. What WFB did for me and a few dozen other young people was to teach us how to pierce the media fog and see things for what they are and what they mean. That was his journalism.
• He would then invite us to join him in improving some of the things we had seen. That was his vocation.
• Buckley’s journalistic skills were of such a high order that he was frequently mistaken for a journalist.
• Saul Bellow, possibly the only Nobel Prize winner ever to publish a book about a National Review editor, once gave sound advice to those like me and the missus packing up for an out-of-state move. Save it all — the files, the photos, the letters. As was his habit, Bellow said it perfectly: “We all need our memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”
• No, the NR editor wasn’t me. Bellow, for some reason, settled for Willmoore Kendall.
• The Lloyd Austin story continues to astonish and dismay. With wars at high flame in Ukraine and Israel, and a third rub-point striking sparks in the South China Sea, the nation’s top military official had what he later described as elective surgery. (I’ve had that surgery and I can tell you that it was “elective” in the sense that I could either have the surgery or I could die.) After overnight recovery, Austin left the hospital and returned home. It was soon discovered that the surgery was complicated, or botched, and Austin returned to the hospital for further treatment. His condition deteriorated and he was sent to the intensive-care unit where he spent at least three days. (I’ve been to the intensive-care unit, and I can tell you that, if you’re there for “at least three days,” you’re in no condition to serve as the nation’s top military official.) In the two weeks following his December 22 surgery, Austin never contacted his boss, the commander in chief, who “was informed” about Austin’s incapacity on January 4. Tennessee Williams put it clearly: “There is a time for departure, even when there is no certain place to go.”
• It is probably not a firing offense, but it is no less astonishing that during the fortnight when a European ally was locked in tank battles with the Russian army, and when a Middle Eastern ally was fighting house-to-house against Islamic terrorists, and when American forces were conducting retaliatory strikes in Iraq and Syria, our commander in chief did not once feel the need to confer with the man standing next to him in the chain of command. We are left to believe that the commander in chief, after immersing himself in tactical detail, personally crafted and then directed America’s global response? Right.
• I spent much of the past year helping a friend save a European bank he chairs. What did I learn? I learned that banks occupy large, stone-and-steel buildings to create an impression of strength and solidity.
• The departure of Wayne LaPierre from the National Rifle Association is bigger news than it may appear to be. It announces a transformational change in national politics. For four decades, gun owners have been a potent and reliable partner in America’s right-center coalition. There have been multiple elections, many of them statewide, a few national, that conservatives could not have won but for the NRA. The only coalitional loss of comparable significance in recent times was the epochal change in medicine, begun by Hillarycare and finished off by Obamacare, whereby American doctors were converted from small businessmen to nonprofit managers.
• Which reminds me of an observation from the great Tom Sowell: “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”
• One of the underappreciated founding fathers of modern conservatism was NR’s longtime publisher, William Rusher, who performed multiple functions for the magazine and the movement. (I used to refer to him, to his occasional enjoyment, as the head of NR’s provisional wing.) Rusher’s most lasting contribution, perhaps, was as a mentor to the “second generation” of conservative leaders. A case in point: In December 1968, Patrick J. Buchanan and I were offered White House jobs by the president-elect. Pat and I had the same thought: We should seek counsel from Bill Rusher. At a quickly arranged dinner at the University Club in New York (where, predictably, Rusher had seized total control of the Wine Committee), he quizzed us about the job offers — Pat to be a speechwriter, me to be the press secretary. Having assembled the facts, Rusher sat back, sipped his wine (finding it, one guesses, amusingly pretentious), looked at each of us in turn and then said, “Men, you should be flattered by these offers.” (That was a stretch. We were boys.) “But mark my words. If you go to work for Richard Nixon, he will one day break your heart.” I marked Bill’s words. Pat did not. We agreed later that we had both made the right decision, thanks in part to Bill Rusher.
• More than a decade later, I received a reassuring note from my friend Chuck Colson: “You realize, I’m sure, that if you had come on board back in 1968, you would be out of jail by now.”
• And this just in from the social-conservatism desk. . . . In just a few weeks, the irrepressible Jane Freeman and her besotted husband will celebrate their 58th wedding anniversary. Take that, you declinists.