William A. Rusher was the publisher of National Review from 1957 through the magazine’s glory years. He died on April 16, 2011. In his honor NR published a symposium online and a fitting set of reminiscences in the magazine. The editors also published an old toast by William Buckley upon Rusher’s retirement from his post at the magazine.
For years Mr. Rusher held down the conservative side of the terrific PBS debate program The Advocates, where he routinely mopped the floor with the hapless liberals the program served up to him. He told me that the Ford Foundation had quit funding the program when he regularly won the mail-in votes on the debates.
When I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth I had seen him debate the colorless Massachusetts liberal congressman Michael Harrington in 1971 or 1972. I remember nothing of what was said that night but for Rusher’s stirring conclusion. For his conclusion he recited a poem by William Butler Yeats that he had committed to memory.
I met Mr. Rusher over lunch on August 6, 2005, at a Claremont Institute conference in Aspen. Seated next to him, I asked if he could remind me what the poem was. He instantly recalled that it was Yeats’s “The Leaders of the Crowd.” Written in 1904, it’s one of those poems with a political theme that Yeats raised to a level of generality sufficient to make it timeless. Here it is:
They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no Solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
Today the poem seems not only timeless but also timely.
