How the Right Rose

Rich Lowry

WHILE other students at Harvard Business School were plotting their ascents into corner offices at Fortune 500 firms, the future head of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), Grover Norquist, had his mind on something else: how to organize the troops. “I wrote a paper,” the anti-tax activist recalls, “on how to reorganize the Republican National Committee, and specifically how to organize College Republicans so that all the power would flow from the grassroots.” That, Norquist reasoned, would force the organization to be more activist and, hence, more conservative. “A top-down organization run by four people out of Washington could be a Bush Republican operation,” he explains. “But a mass-based college-student organization where all the power was in the hands of the people who organized it guaranteed conservative control.”

About the Author

Rich Lowry

Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Rich Lowry

WHILE other students at Harvard Business School were plotting their ascents into corner offices at Fortune 500 firms, the future head of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), Grover Norquist, had his mind on something else: how to organize the troops. “I wrote a paper,” the anti-tax activist recalls, “on how to reorganize the Republican National Committee, and specifically how to organize College Republicans so that all the power would flow from the grassroots.” That, Norquist reasoned, would force the organization to be more activist and, hence, more conservative. “A top-down organization run by four people out of Washington could be a Bush Republican operation,” he explains. “But a mass-based college-student organization where all the power was in the hands of the people who organized it guaranteed conservative control.”