John R. Coyne Jr. has died. The world is a bit less generous, a bit less loyal.
John was the only man I ever met (and the only person anybody ever met in the media world) who accepted to his core the desktop injunction, “It’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
At National Review, in addition to the occasional long article, John wrote hundreds of unsigned editorials — those short, always pungent, frequently hilarious paragraphs up front in the print magazine — and countless columns under various pseudonyms (coined, of course, to suggest a large and widely dispersed NR reporting staff). He went on to write galvanizing mission statements for up-and-coming organizations, needle-moving op-eds for corporate chieftains, uplifting reviews for overlooked books and films, and memorable speeches for political figures including at least two presidents. (I say “at least” because you had to pry out of John the reluctant admission that he had been the author of a well-received speech. In D.C., well-received speeches tend to have a thousand fathers.) John peeked out from behind the arras for only one client, a man who, unfairly in John’s hard-Irish view, had been denied a fair shake to speak for himself: Spiro Agnew. Whatever the opposite of a front-runner might be, that would be my friend, John Coyne.
R.I.P., brother.