Bill Buckley, Bill Rickenbacker, Bill Kristol, and the Billionaire’s Newsletter.
I may have overreacted. I was a new employee, and it was my first time. I was sitting in Publisher Bill Rusher’s office when Editor Bill Buckley burst in and, without preamble, announced that he’d just received sobering news from our accountant, on the basis of which we would be obliged to cancel a number of pending activities, which Editor Buckley then proceeded to enumerate at impressive length.
I try not to become overly self-involved in professional settings, but it did occur to me, on that first brush with the fiscal realities of conservative publishing, that I was working for an insolvent company and that my rent was due a week from Tuesday. To borrow a phrase from America’s greatest lyric poet, I began to itch like a man on a fuzzy tree.
We rushed to battle stations, each man and woman to his or her assigned cubby-role. (I had the impression that my colleagues were not executing this drill for the first time.) As the new guy, of course, I was given the job nobody else wanted, which was to explain to major creditors why our payments — backed firmly as they were by the full faith and credit of America’s leading journal of opinion, and much to everybody’s astonishment, and due to a clearly aberrational and one-off development — well, they might not be arriving with their customary and metronomic regularity. Or something like that. The creditors, some of them salty New Yorkers, responded predictably. I did not even try to do some of the things they suggested I do to myself.
Over the next two weeks, with the veterans plugging away calmly and the new guys flailing frantically, we made it through the storm and — to extend the kind of maritime metaphor to which Editor Buckley was so deeply and improbably attached — if not all the way to safe harbor then at least to light air and a patch of manageable current. After which, with receivables shoved back into rough realignment with payables, Editor Buckley convened us all for a celebratory dinner at Paone’s, his favorite restaurant, where he uncorked a few cases of our host Nicola’s best Barolo and ran up a tab that pushed us most of the way back toward the financial abyss from which we had just escaped.
Other than the warming assurance that I would receive my full salary of $110 the following week, I remember nothing from that triumphal evening but one of the many well-meant but, most of them, ill-wrought toasts. It was a gem from Senior Editor Bill Rickenbacker.
I have written frequently about Rick. I do so because nobody else does. Buckley, Rusher, Meyer, Burnham, et al. — all of them have been celebrated, eulogized, biographied. They were all NR lifers, while we all knew that Rick was just passing through. My point is that, while he was among us, Rick was a force, a potent force, and just when the conservative revival needed him to be one.
In one of his many earlier lives, Rick had been an investment analyst and, only partly in jest, he took the floor at Paone’s to break down our financial situation. NR was, in Rick’s analysis, a manufacturing business, using truckloads of paper, barrels of ink, and a highly inefficient distribution network. Our customers were widely scattered and difficult — that is to say, expensive — to identify. And our advertisers: Well, they were frequently hassled and, too often, intimidated into becoming former advertisers.
This was not a sustainable business model, Rick asserted. He had a better idea. (Rick always had a better idea.) We should buy paper by the sheet rather than the truckload, ink by the bottle rather than the barrel. We should cut distribution costs to the price of a single postage stamp. And we could forget about the advertisers altogether. We should, Rick proposed, publish a new publication, to be called the Billionaire’s Newsletter, and sell a single subscription for the price of $1 million per year. The profit margins, Rick projected, would be more than satisfactory.
His colleagues reacted to Rick the way we always did. Some of us laughed heartily, some of us mused heavily, some of us did both. Manifestly, over the past 50 years, as longtime readers will have noticed, NR has approached the Rickenbacker model slowly but asymptotically. The seemingly irreversible trend has been toward less paper, less ink, fewer print customers.
Some years after that dinner at Paone’s, I voted for Editor Buckley’s motion to elect Bill Kristol to the NR board. I did not know Bill well, but I revered his father, Irving, with whom I had served on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It is recorded somewhere in the corporation’s archives that at six consecutive meetings of the program committee, the board had voted to endorse the staff’s proposed slate of production grants by a margin of 13–2, Messrs. Kristol and Freeman dissenting. Talk about a bonding experience. I know it’s not possible, but it seemed that not a meeting passed without the staff proposing to cut a six- or seven-figure check to somebody promising to exonerate the Rosenbergs. (I should note here that it was only later that the conservative movement began to splinter and Irving consolidated his reputation as “the father of neoconservatism.” During our time together in public broadcasting, he was just a fountain of good judgment.)
During his days on the NR board, Bill Kristol absorbed, and dispensed, much wisdom. He then went off to start his own print magazine and, after wrestling heroically with its obdurate balance sheet for more than two decades, now appears to be living happily ever after publishing his own version of the Rickenbacker model. The Bills have much wisdom to offer.