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As NR was observing its twentieth anniversary as a magazine, I was observing my tenth as its reader. I was a college student in 1965 when I picked up my first copy of NR, and awoke from my dogmatic slumber. Though naturally of a conservative disposition, I had been taught to think that enlightened political opinion was, as one of my teachers had discreetly told me, “a little bit pinkish.” I had accepted this as one of those oppressive facts of life, and left the whole subject of politics to those possessed of that strange appetite for banality, while I frolicked away my youth in the embrace of Shakespeare.

How liberating, then, to find this little magazine, so bright and literate and pungent, speaking of politics, and even of politicians, as if they were interesting. And by the mass, they were interesting! What a shock to find the subject treated in something besides the familiar bland editorialese, that monotonous incantation of the Great Sect of our time, whose high-minded votaries are so soothing in their indignation, so alarming in their reassurances. No, here was prose full of real anger and laughter, both fused in wit, softened by charity and self-mockery. Who but NR’s editors would begin the first issue after Kennedy’s murder by announcing, regretfully, that their patience with President Lyndon Johnson was exhausted? How restorative; how gracious.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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As NR was observing its twentieth anniversary as a magazine, I was observing my tenth as its reader. I was a college student in 1965 when I picked up my first copy of NR, and awoke from my dogmatic slumber. Though naturally of a conservative disposition, I had been taught to think that enlightened political opinion was, as one of my teachers had discreetly told me, “a little bit pinkish.” I had accepted this as one of those oppressive facts of life, and left the whole subject of politics to those possessed of that strange appetite for banality, while I frolicked away my youth in the embrace of Shakespeare.

How liberating, then, to find this little magazine, so bright and literate and pungent, speaking of politics, and even of politicians, as if they were interesting. And by the mass, they were interesting! What a shock to find the subject treated in something besides the familiar bland editorialese, that monotonous incantation of the Great Sect of our time, whose high-minded votaries are so soothing in their indignation, so alarming in their reassurances. No, here was prose full of real anger and laughter, both fused in wit, softened by charity and self-mockery. Who but NR’s editors would begin the first issue after Kennedy’s murder by announcing, regretfully, that their patience with President Lyndon Johnson was exhausted? How restorative; how gracious.