[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 132 (Tuesday, October 18, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2110-E2111]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  50TH ANNIVERSARY OF NATIONAL REVIEW

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. CLIFF STEARNS

                               of florida

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, October 18, 2005

  Mr. STEARNS. Mr. Speaker, 50 years ago next month, a new periodical 
entered the marketplace and American history.
  That publication was National Review, its founder and editor was 29-
year-old William F. Buckley.
  From the beginning, Buckley's magazine stood ``athwart history, 
yelling `Stop,' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have 
much patience with those who so urge it.''
  And for five decades, it has bravely and effectively espoused 
conservative values and ideas, with both humor and intelligence.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit the inaugural Publisher's 
Statement of November 19, 1955, for the Record.
  It is no surprise that since its inception, we've witnessed 
Republican victories in eight of eleven Presidential elections, the 
revolutionary Republican Class of 1994, America's victory in the Cold 
War, and widespread acceptance of conservative positions like economic 
freedom, limited government, individual responsibility and traditional 
values.
  Obviously, Bill Buckley and National Review did much more than stand 
athwart history--they helped shape it. America and the world are the 
better for it.
  There is no more influential and popular opinion journal in the 
United States than National Review, with 155,000 paid subscribers and a 
readership of over 310,000. The Internet version of National Review, 
NRO, is just as popular and well written.
  It is well known that Ronald Reagan--who was a Democrat in 1955--
started to read National Review when it first came out, and it played a 
significant role in his personal and political development.
  This publication has influenced at least two generations of young 
conservatives, and will assuredly have a positive impact on many more 
lives in the future.
  No doubt there are young men and women here on the Hill, and all 
across America, who are reading National Review, perhaps for the very 
first time, and whose lives will be transformed.
  In addition to the 50th anniversary of National Review, William F. 
Buckley will also soon be celebrating his 80th birthday.
  Buckley, who served in the U.S. Army, worked for the CIA, and 
graduated from Yale, has had a very busy and productive life.
  In addition to editing National Review up until last year, he has 
written 47 books, including 18 novels, some 900 editorials or other 
articles in National Review, 350 articles in other periodicals, more 
than 4,000 newspaper columns, and for 34 years he hosted the tremendous 
talk-show ``Firing Line,'' where he had over 1,400 televised debates 
with people ranging from Muhammed Ali to Margaret Thatcher to Noam 
Chomsky to Mother Theresa.
  He famously ran for Mayor of New York City in 1965 as the 
Conservative Party candidate.
  Although he predicted be would receive only one vote, Buckley in fact 
won 13 percent, and to this day his race is considered one of the 
City's most rollicking and interesting campaigns ever.
  Buckley counted as his friends conservative and intellectual giants 
such as Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, L. Brent Bozell and Claire 
Luce Booth. The conservative movement he helped nurture and flourish 
gave us Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan.
  Mr. Speaker, it was Buckley's younger brother Reid, I believe, who 
best summed up the philosophy that guided William F. Buckley and his 
life's work. He noted that:
  ``We learned from our parents to prefer the good man to the brilliant 
man. It is a sacred humanity in people we respect. Our compassion is 
earned in the quality of the human condition. People are surprised to 
realize that we, princelings of Dame Fortune, as they feel us to be, 
tread the same hard interior landscape. And it may be this that comes 
through, that fascinates, because we do not presume, `Come, let us lead 
you,' but, instead, petition, `Come, our philosophy is your way, the 
human way, and it is you who will and must lead yourselves. . .' ''
  I offer a most sincere ``happy birthday'' to Bill Buckley, and 
``thank you'' for his wonderful creation, and I congratulate the family 
at National Review for 50 years of fine work, with hopefully many more 
yet to come.

[[Page E2111]]

                [From National Review, January 03, 2005}

                 Standing Athwart History, Yelling Stop

                      (By William F. Buckley, Jr.)

       There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. 
     Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for 
     National Review. But since it will be the policy of this 
     magazine to reject the hypodermic approach to world affairs, 
     we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is 
     not unconfined.
       Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible 
     that did National Review not exist, no one would have 
     invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal 
     of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of 
     conservatism at first glance looks like a work of 
     supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly 
     within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of 
     course; if National Review is superfluous, it is so for very 
     different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, 
     at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much 
     patience with those who so urge it.
       National Review is out of place, in the sense that the 
     United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New 
     York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out 
     of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected 
     conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. 
     Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United 
     States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates 
     having to do with the meaning of existence, with the 
     relationship of the state to the individual, of the 
     individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the 
     enabling documents of our Republic.
       ``I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater,'' said the 
     benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell 
     Holmes, ``but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos 
     does.'' We have come around to Mr. Holmes' view, so much that 
     we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of 
     capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of 
     champagne to ditchwater--of anything to anything. (How 
     curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is 
     whether, at the margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!) The 
     inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not 
     so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close 
     to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has 
     happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic 
     social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded 
     over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual 
     imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the 
     ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply 
     walked in and started to run things.
       Run just about everything. There never was an age of 
     conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like 
     the Liberals'. Drop a little itching powder in Jimmy 
     Wechsler's bath and before he has scratched himself for the 
     third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have denounced you in a 
     dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish will have 
     written ten heroic cantos about our age of terror. Harper's 
     will have published them, and everyone in sight will have 
     been nominated for a Freedom Award. Conservatives in this 
     country--at least those who have not made their peace with 
     the New Deal, and there is a serious question of whether 
     there are others--are non-licensed nonconformists; and this 
     is a dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor 
     of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars. 
     Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting 
     time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or 
     mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated 
     by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose 
     ignorance and amorality of never been exaggerated for the 
     same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.
       There are, thank Heaven, the exceptions. There are those of 
     generous impulse and a sincere desire to encourage a 
     responsible dissent from the Liberal orthodoxy. And there are 
     those who recognize that when all is said and done, the 
     market place depends for a license to operate freely on the 
     men who issue licenses--on the politicians. They recognize, 
     therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself 
     impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient 
     getting and spending. And back of all political institutions 
     there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or 
     defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry 
     run on large, general principles, on ideas--not by day-to-day 
     guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go 
     into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium 
     of such exchange is the printed word. A vigorous and 
     incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is--dare we say 
     it?--as necessary to better living as Chemistry.
       We begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of 
     experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the 
     intransigence of the Liberals, who run this country; and all 
     this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness 
     of the practicing Communist, with his inside track to 
     History. All this would not appear to augur well for National 
     Review. Yet we start with a considerable--and considered--
     optimism.
       After all, we crashed through. More than one hundred and 
     twenty investors made this magazine possible, and over 50 men 
     and women of small means invested less than one thousand 
     dollars apiece in it. Two men and one woman, all three with 
     overwhelming personal and public commitments, worked round 
     the clock to make publication possible. A score of 
     professional writers pledged their devoted attention to its 
     needs, and hundreds of thoughtful men and women gave evidence 
     that the appearance of such a journal as we have in mind 
     would profoundly affect their lives.
       Our own views, as expressed in a memorandum drafted a year 
     ago, and directed to our investors, are set forth in an 
     adjacent column. We have nothing to offer but the best that 
     is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment 
     will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn't enough. 
     But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we 
     offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old 
     under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a 
     position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a 
     generation of Ph.D's in social architecture, unattenuated by 
     a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure 
     groups uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. 
     And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the 
     hottest thing in town.

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