Yale’s Party of the Right

Dessert is removed, and a young man gavels the meeting to order. He looks no different from any other presiding officer, except that around his neck he wears a three-hundred-year-old golden medal, struck in honor of Charles I.

In the last weekend in January, some half a hundred people, including the chairman of the Harris County Republican Party (Houston), the former research director of the Reagan campaign, a legislative counsel for the Senate GOPolicy Committee, and the former Executive Editor of Libertarian Review, met in New Haven, Connecticut. An editor of Arlington House, the nation’s leading Tolkien scholar, and M. Stanton Evans sent their regrets. They had been invited, not for a junior-varsity seven days in May, but to attend the 25th annual banquet of the organization of which they were all members— the Party of the Right.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

Dessert is removed, and a young man gavels the meeting to order. He looks no different from any other presiding officer, except that around his neck he wears a three-hundred-year-old golden medal, struck in honor of Charles I.

In the last weekend in January, some half a hundred people, including the chairman of the Harris County Republican Party (Houston), the former research director of the Reagan campaign, a legislative counsel for the Senate GOPolicy Committee, and the former Executive Editor of Libertarian Review, met in New Haven, Connecticut. An editor of Arlington House, the nation’s leading Tolkien scholar, and M. Stanton Evans sent their regrets. They had been invited, not for a junior-varsity seven days in May, but to attend the 25th annual banquet of the organization of which they were all members— the Party of the Right.