I love hearing from National Review readers. I always have and I always will. I enjoy when I’m on the road giving a talk and someone makes a reference to the “Star Trek ban” or other longtime NRO inside jokes. (If you are in the NR Plus Facebook posts, the issue is now the ecumenicism of toasters — believe me, you had to be there. . . .)
I enjoy hearing about when someone first picked up a copy of — often their father’s — National Review. So, naturally I enjoyed this post I noticed from longtime National Review reader Kate Pitrone on our beloved Jack Fowler’s Facebook page, in discussion of Bill Buckley’s 100th birthday. She told me I could share it here:
In 1974, I was a transfer student at Columbia University. In Butler Library, needing a mental break from study, I picked up a magazine with an unpretentious cover and started reading. Somewhat pretentious inside, it was also fascinating because it seemed so much about human liberty. I was interested in liberty. People arguing, too, about history, current events, everything, in the letters section, but also in the articles. Real, cogent arguments, intelligently put, not just strings of cliches and tropes, as in so many magazines of opinion. I was intrigued and when I got home to our apartment, told my husband about it. When I mentioned the name, he went into a rant about elite fascists that made no sense given what I’d read. He was an acolyte of Michael Harrington and DSOC at the time, but had been involved in radical politics back in Cleveland. But the thing was, we talked about freedom all the time. I mean all the time. Personal freedom, freedom for the masses, democracy and the people; what could be so wrong with a publication that was about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? The gist of my husband’s rant was, on no account was I to read that magazine again. It was pollution of the worst sort. So of course I did, going back first to hunt for evidence of fascism. When I couldn’t find that, I settled in to enjoy the arguments and often elegant writing. There’s more, naturally, including conversion for both of us and a subscription to National Review within five years. Thank you, Mr. Buckley.
She also shared with me this blast from the past:
To perpetual subscribers, you are an extended community. Yet one doesn’t like to presume. In the early days of the Internet, the WWW, I think back when we had a green screen without pictures, Mr. Fowler had a presence online in a chat room. My oldest son got involved at age eleven or twelve, and all those wonderful adults let him. At some point, he was in New York with my husband and they went to the National Review office just to say hello. Again, kindness and welcome to the subscribers. the boy was born in 1978, so that might have been around 1990.
A friend whose name you’d recognize has said to me few times now: Someday soon, people are going to look around for who stayed sane during these years. He believes people will be thankful for National Review for doing what it has always done: Holding the line on basic principles of conservatism. Not falling into celebrity worship or whatever that was at the Trump Cabinet meeting today, as secretaries tripped over one another to give the president the most honor. She was kidding, but Brooke Rollins even said that Trump had stopped the hurricanes from coming this year.
We need to be adults about politics again. I’d like to think we have been here and will continue to be, and Bill would be happy about the stewardship of the conservative house he built in extremely challenging times on many fronts.
If you care about this place, pray for those in leadership, both editorially and financially. We can’t do the first without the second. I’m just a pretentious writer, so I put it in the order I did. Of course, there’s no point to a budget if there is no writing!
Do consider supporting by subscribing to the magazine in one of the various ways you can or by donating to the National Review Institute. Among other things, I’m blessed at NRI to make use of some of the many contacts I’ve made in my years at National Review to convene people on critical matters of life and religious freedom and civil society more generally. I can’t tell you how grateful people often are for the opportunity to meet leaders doing similar things they had never met before, or just to have a platform with the heft and credibility of the name of National Review. None of it is possible without your support.
No one put me up to this post. I just saw dear Kate’s post and am feeling intensely grateful for WFB. After a number of events in different cities I was involved in in recent weeks, including at the University of Dallas and the Franciscan University of Steubenville, I’m honestly still meditating on this moment. On the patrimony and what we are stewards of, on the milestones of the 70th anniversary of National Review and the centenary of Bill Buckley’s birth.
Conservatism has miles to go here in the United States, turning a young 250 soon. Help us help her. Help us keep hope alive, to borrow a term. Help National Review keep keeping on, leading with a real sense of the responsibility of the name and the time.