May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 28

The Special Relationship – William A. Rusher 1923-2011

He told us how an all-American boy, growing up in the 1930s, found in a distant English voice crackling across the ether,  the hero of a lifetime.

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By Richard M. Langworth and Larry P. Arnn

Bill Rusher came to our aid in a pinch. Back in the Nineties, we were striving to “balance” our political speakers, and the 11th Churchill Conference in Calgary and Banff was the conservatives’ turn. We had welcomed the Liberal Roy Jenkins on our Scottish tour that summer, and had lined up Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and William Manchester to address our 1995 Boston conference. So to Banff we invited Milton Friedman, to explain why Churchill was right (yes!) to put Britain back on the gold standard in the Twenties.

Alas, Dr. Friedman took ill, and we scratched around for another conservative who could take his place on short notice. Milton Friedman’s own home town, San Francisco, produced Mr. Rusher, longtime publisher of National Review and friend of William F. Buckley, Jr. “After all,” I told the organizers, Randy Barber and John Plumpton, “his initials are WAR, so nobody can think him a peacenik.” Bill duly arrived and delivered a charming speech, excerpts of which are on the next page. All of it can (and should) be read on our website.

We held a Q&A at Banff because we wanted to ask Mr. Rusher why his friend Buckley wrote such dreadful things about Churchill in 1965. We were actually trying to get Buckley to address a Churchill conference but he was resisting. And so we cornered his colleague. “You will have to remember,” Bill Rusher replied in his crisp staccato, “that the Buckleys were America Firsters before the war; a streak of libertarianism always ran through them. They were not fans of European entanglements. And of course, as you know, they were Irish!”

But lo, with the help of Larry Arnn, we actually did get Buckley, in Boston, though alas we couldn’t get both him and Arthur Schlesinger together on the same night!

In remembering the learned, charming man that was Bill Rusher, Finest Hour can do no better than to quote Larry Arnn’s tribute to him in National Review, which described him as “Churchillian”:

“If we mean by that a man who had a natural ear for good words in prose and poetry…then Bill Rusher was Churchillian. If we mean by that a man who distilled a wide reading into truths that could be remembered and applied to his own choices, then Bill Rusher wasChurchillian. If we mean by that a man who learned from Churchill all his life, who saw into his character as a gentleman would see, then Bill Rusher was Churchillian. If we mean by that a man whose wit was biting but never unkind, whose sense of humor was hilarious to the place of danger on formal occasions, then Bill Rusher was Churchillian….

“There are differences between Bill Rusher and Churchill. Churchill would not, if he offered you a drink in his home, hand you a printed menu, accurate as to inventory, that he had prepared himself….Churchill, said his wife, was ‘a sporting man who liked to give the train a chance to get away.’ Rusher would speak sharply to Churchill about that, as he did to me.

“Like Churchill’s work, that of Rusher lives because it gives us a model and a chance today. We owe him a debt, to be paid in love and memory.”