We deprive ourselves of true connection when we’re unwilling to bond with people across the political aisle.
We deprive ourselves of true connection when we’re unwilling to bond with people across the political aisle.
M y friendship with Bill Rusher seemed unlikely. It began as a formality. I was Rick Brookhiser’s girlfriend (later wife), he was Rick’s publisher at National Review. Beyond that, we seemed to have little in common. I am a psychoanalyst, whose politics incline liberal. He was a professional conservative partisan: founder of the Draft Goldwater movement, debater on a TV show called The Advocates, author of a book entitled How to Win Arguments. How could I get through to such a person?
But over time, we found we had more and more things in common. He was hospitable: He enjoyed taking Rick and me to dinner at the fine restaurants where he was a regular. In return, I made dinners for the three of us at our apartment. He would always bring the wine and explain it. When he planned to bring a Sauternes, he told me not to make a dessert with chocolate because the two do not mix. On another evening, he brought vintage port, in honor of the fact that both Rick and I were born in good port years.
He loved to travel, and to talk about his travels. He was like a professor — a favorite, popular professor. He would tell us about the fractured English in posted hotel notices around the world. We liked to travel in those days, and he arranged to meet us in Taipei, capital of his beloved Taiwan, where we toured the National Palace Museum together and attended a banquet where the centerpiece was a melon carved with Chinese characters.
He would talk about politics — not as an arguer or an advocate, but as an analyst of long-term trends. He believed the course of civilization would pass through America and over the Pacific, to climax in East Asia. His admiration for the Chinese was almost boundless, and his hatred of Chinese Communism equally great. Although he had often been to Hong Kong, then still a British colony, he never went to Portuguese Macau because doing so required passing through Communist Chinese customs.
These were interests he shared with many people: He had a traveler’s competition with NR director Tom Bolan to see who could go to the most places. Bolan was always ahead, though Bill got to Easter Island, 2,000 miles off the coast of South America, which Bolan never did.
Other qualities of his were more special. He loved poetry: Shakespeare, of course (we watched Olivier’s Richard III on his Betamax player). His particular favorites were A.E. Housman and George Santayana. He recited one Santayana sonnet to us in the library of the University Club, which expressed his stoical philosophy:
And being so much kinsman to the dead,
I walk contented to the peopled grave.
Most importantly, I felt he opened himself to us. He was not an easy man to know, yet he thought of both Rick and me as related to him. I sensed a loneliness in him, behind the political activity and the socializing. He had a lifelong interest in psychology, though he had never formally studied it, and I was a practicing psychoanalyst. On occasion, he shared dreams with me — he wanted to learn from my reactions, and he trusted that they would be understanding and honest.
He loved his favorite spots in Manhattan, and his apartment on Murray Hill. When he retired from National Review and moved to San Francisco, we continued to see him, though less frequently.
Bill has been dead for 15 years now, but I think of him often. Our friendship highlights a tragedy of modern American life. A recent study by two academics at the University of California, Irvine found that 37 percent of Americans have ended a relationship with a colleague, a friend, a family member, or a partner because of political differences. If Bill and I had been part of that 37 percent, we could never have known each other. Staying in your partisan tribe deprives you of unusual experiences — and of hidden unexpected similarities.