Throughout the half-century, NR has engaged in a variety of causes, some of them successful, some less so--all worthy. Below are summaries of six of them, written by associate editor Anthony Dick.
ENDING THE SOVIET UNION
THE fall of the Soviet Union marked one of the greatest victories for human freedom in history. For NR, it was the culmination of a vigorous, nearly four-decade-long crusade against what Ronald Reagan rightly labeled "the evil empire." In January 1989, ten months before the Berlin Wall came down, the magazine's cover announced "The Coming Crack-up of Communism." Inside, Radek Sikorski wondered how long the USSR--the "sick man of Eurasia"--could stave off collapse.
The liberalizing reforms of glasnost had allowed the widespread discontent of the Soviet citizenry to ferment, shaking the very foundations of the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev was stunned, as NR's editors wrote in February 1991, that "the new freedoms he had conceived as limited proved explosive." Uncertainty swirled, as various constituent republics declared sovereignty and made moves toward independence. In April of that year, David Satter could write in NR, "The Soviet Union is clearly at a turning point in its history, and what happens in the next few months will affect not only its own future shape but the shape of the world. Most Moscow intellectuals expect that there will be a crackdown."
An attempted crackdown of sorts came in the August coup of 1991, when an anti-Gorbachev faction placed the leader under house arrest and briefly seized control of the government. But the putsch ultimately failed after only three turbulent days, leaving Boris Yeltsin the leading man in Moscow. On September 23, NR's cover pictured a sullen, shrugging Gorbachev, along with the mischievous caption, "Vladimir Ilyich Who?" In The Week, NR quipped, "Lenin would never have believed this. And Walter Duranty wouldn't have reported it." By year's end, the brutal Bolshevik experiment would be officially consigned to the dustbin of history.
In his Notes & Asides of September 23, 1991, WFB reflected on the decline and fall of the Soviet empire: "In the first issue of NATIONAL REVIEW, published on November 19, 1955, we announced that we were 'irrevocably' at war against Communism, and that we would oppose any substitute for victory. Thirty-six years later, Communism was banned within the Soviet Union.... [O]n bended knee, we give thanks to Providence for the transfiguration of Russia, thanks from those of us who lived to see it, and thanks to those, departed, who helped us to understand why it was right to struggle to sustain the cause of Western civilization."
Amen.
THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE
ON March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan delivered his now-famous speech introducing the concept of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The logic behind the proposal was this: With thousands of Soviet ICBMs poised to annihilate our cities at the touch of a button, we ought to have some capability to protect ourselves--by intercepting and destroying incoming missiles--if that button were ever pressed.
But Reagan's political opponents were unmoved. In April 1983, NR's editors identified the strange public-relations plight faced by the SDI proposal: "It is difficult not to believe that if such a defensive effort had been proposed by, say, Kennedy or Mondale, it would have been received very respectfully--would indeed, quite probably, have been hailed as courageous, progressive, humane, pioneering. President Reagan's proposal that we pursue a serious nuclear-defense effort met, instead, with a chorus of instant rejection and ridicule."
This chorus quickly focused on two distinct anti-SDI themes that would resonate through the coming decades. Writing in an NR cover story in May 1983, Walter A. McDougall took up both of these objections and explained to Reagan's detractors why they couldn't have it both ways: "Either [SDI] is a huge waste of money, or it is a serious threat inviting attack, but not both."
As the years went by, NR was there to show how the case for SDI was only growing stronger--from both a technological and a strategic perspective. On February 22, 1999, NR devoted an issue to SDI, which nicely updated the situation: With the onset of the Information Age, computer-guidance technology had improved dramatically, making missile-defense systems more realizable than ever before. Additionally, with the Cold War over and the U.S. standing as the sole remaining superpower, there was no longer any argument for maintaining a "delicate strategic balance" with a powerful nuclear rival.
Post-Cold War, the remaining nuclear-missile threat comes from unpredictable rogue states, weakened old enemies, and emerging new powers. In that 1999 issue, Mark Helprin put it bracingly: "To the question of how the United States would deal with a desperate, accidental, or renegade Russian missile launch, or with a future Iranian or North Korean attack arising from inexplicable though not unexpected madness, or with nuclear brinksmanship from a confident and aggressive new China with fleet ballistic missile submarines and MIRV'd ICBMs, the answer is that it would do nothing because it could do nothing."
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, NR urged him to abandon the outdated Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty--a "dusty embarrassment to proponents of arms control," in the words of Richard Lowry. By the end of that year, the Bush administration had announced its intent to withdraw from the treaty, and would do so six months later. By July 2004, the first ground-based interceptor had been installed in Alaska, marking a concrete triumph for the supporters of missile defense.
As NR's editors wrote in 2001, a new era of national security has begun: "The task of defending the U.S. against possible missile attack becomes less an intellectual challenge and more an engineering and budgetary one.... The letters that missile-defense supporters have to fear now are not ABM, but OMB."
SUPPLY-SIDE TAX CUTS
AFTER Reagan's inauguration, the success of his agenda was anything but certain. NR's editors fretted that Beltway politics might "gum up the works" of the ambitious supply-side machine that was ready to roll through Washington. "Will supply-side economics be perverted into yet another rationale for increased government interference in the economy?" they asked. "Stay tuned."
But the magazine was determined not to let that happen. In May 1981, Michael Novak laid out "The Moral Case for Reaganomics." He wrote, "A politics of economic and moral vision trusts the intelligence and creativity of all its people, whether rich or poor, in the hope that all together will create goods and services never imagined, for the greater good not only of our own nation but of all mankind."
In August 1981, the Reagan tax cut happened. The top bracket fell from 70 to 50 percent, leading NR to trumpet "Reagan's tax-cut triumph"--and the triumphs would multiply.
Five years later, with the deficit mounting and pressure for higher taxes rising, NR's editors described the 1986 State of the Union address as a "pleasant refresher course in the radicalism of Ronald Reagan." The president had "built a wall of moral principle against tax increases," they wrote. "It can no longer be presumed ... that in a conflict between the government's budget and the family's, the family must give way."
A break had appeared in the taxpayer-soaking storm clouds that lingered over Washington, allowing NR to call for yet another tax reduction in June 1986, in order to stoke the nation's wealth engines once more.
That fall, another round of tax reform did come, pushing the top individual tax rate down to 33 percent. In October, NR reviewed the overall reform as a "hardly perfect" measure, but one whose flaws were "more than offset by the sharp reductions in marginal tax rates, both individual and corporate." The editors pointed out that it marked a continuing trend from 1964, when the top bracket had been set at a veritably Swedish 90 percent. Thanks to Reagan, that number had plummeted farther and faster than anyone had expected.
As the Gipper himself might have said, not bad for government work.
WELFARE REFORM
THE drive for welfare reform has always sprung from the very core of conservative principle. In the pages of NR on September 14, 1992, Lance Izumi described just how dire the welfare situation had become: "The massive growth in welfare rolls suggests that more and more people have surrendered at a basic psychological and moral level, allowing government to relieve them of those responsibilities that come with adulthood and that buttress genuine maturity. Welfare reform is necessary not merely to ease the burden on taxpayers, but to make it less easy for those who don't need welfare to take it, at the cost of their self-respect."
Public support for serious welfare reform had reached such a height in the early 1990s that even Bill Clinton campaigned on the promise to "end welfare as we know it." After his election, conservatives did their best to hold him to that promise, keeping the idea of welfare reform alive in 1994's Contract with America. Writing in the May 6 issue in 1996, David T. Beito stipulated that any successful welfare-reform program must "create an environment in which Americans will once again be motivated to engage in mutual aid and self-help."
Clinton initially demurred, twice vetoing the welfare-reform bill sent to him by the Republican Congress. Some conservatives--including some of ours!--urged GOP congressmen to back off of the issue temporarily, so that Bob Dole could hammer Clinton in the presidential election for his inaction on welfare. But Congress forged ahead, and Clinton--spurred by Dick Morris's shrewd political advice--finally signed a welfare-reform bill in August 1996. There commenced a great wailing and gnashing of teeth from liberals, who prophesied Calcutta-like masses of poor people starving in the streets.
But in its February 21, 2000, issue, NR ran a story by Stephen Moore. It began, "The results are in: Welfare reform is one of the greatest public-policy successes of modern times. There are now only half as many families on welfare as there were in 1994. Some states, led by innovative GOP governors, have shrunk their rolls by more than 80 percent. And almost everyone now agrees that the former welfare recipients have moved upward into the labor force, not downward into bleaker poverty." As vindications go, this was a big one.
DEFEATING CLINTONCARE (ALTERNATIVELY, HILLARYCARE)
ONE of Bill Clinton's first moves on taking office in 1993 was to appoint his wife head of the new Task Force on National Health Care Reform. By May of that year, the disturbing thrust of "HillaryCare" had become sufficiently clear to warrant a cover-feature rebuke from NR. By the September 6 issue, the shape of the plan had congealed enough for Grace-Marie Arnett to observe: "The carrot of healthcare reform that President Clinton used to tantalize the electorate during the 1992 campaign now looks more like a stick that would be used to whip consumers, physicians, and businesses into shape." In an October 4 editorial, NR blasted HillaryCare as "an underfunded, over-bureaucratic system, severing patients from doctors and offering a slush pile for the major insurance companies."
After the plan was announced in its final form in the fall of 1993, NR devoted its November 1 cover to "Clinton's Monster Health-Care Package." Inside, John O'Sullivan portrayed the looming "disaster" that HillaryCare represented. It threatened to drive up costs, degrade the quality of treatment, flatten pharmaceutical research, and subject American citizens to a gauntlet of state-rationed health services.
Another NR cover feature on the Clinton proposal came on December 13. In that issue, former American Medical Association president Edward R. Annis argued that the president had "ignored the problem that most needs to be corrected": "government policies that insulate patients from their health-care bills." Stressing the need for free-market reforms instead of more bureaucracy, Annis concluded, "While the President promises more for less, the truth is we would all get less, and pay a whole lot more."
The steady drumbeat of criticism took its toll. By June 1994, NR's editors could write: "After a solid month of intense presidential glad-handing and speechifying, nine months of White House war-rooming and spin-doctoring, and almost two years of general Democratic chest-beating, the Clinton health plan has ebbed to 36 per cent support in the polls. Rarely have so many given so much for so little."
On September 26, HillaryCare was finally pronounced dead by Democratic Senate majority leader George Mitchell. NR celebrated in the October 24 issue, writing: "By thwarting the attempted Clinton coup against the health-care system, the Republicans effected their most complete and significant (even if negative) legislative victory since the 1981 Reagan tax cuts." Goodbye to HillaryCare ... for now.
'BUCKPAC KILLS!'
LOWELL WEICKER, the one-time Republican senator and perpetual liberal gasbag from the state of Connecticut, was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1970. He met his Waterloo in 1988, when the September 2 issue of NR announced the formation of "Buckleys for Lieberman." The impromptu association's stated purpose was "to generate support for the defeat of Lowell Weicker" by endorsing his challenger, Joe Lieberman. Lieberman, it was explained, "is a moderate Democrat, and it is always possible that he will progress in the right direction." There was, on the other hand, "no such hope for Lowell Weicker."
The group (which came to be known simply as "BuckPac") contained several vital organs, such as the precisely named "Horse's Ass Committee," the purpose of which was "to document that Lowell Weicker is the Number One Horse's Ass in the Senate." This was accompanied by the "Degasification Committee," which was "engaged in attempting to clean up the quality of public thought," as well as in demonstrating that "the bombast, murk, and pomposity of Lowell Weicker's public declarations are a threat to democratic ecology." Every issue of NR leading up to the election featured a "Weicker Watch," heralding the latest in the anti-Weicker crusade.
When BuckPac was first launched, Weicker held a 17-point lead over Lieberman in the polls. By November 2 that lead had vanished, and Weicker was toppled. "BuckPac Kills!" proclaimed the December 9, 1988, issue of NR. "By the mere act of pointing at the nudity of the emperor, the searing point was made. Namely that Mr. Weicker was an arrogant, bigoted bore and that the Republicans who, as galley slaves, had voted for him should feel free to vote for the Democratic alternative ..." That alternative, Lieberman, still occupies Weicker's Senate seat, attending our 50th-anniversary gala in October. We continue to regard him as a marked improvement over Mr. Weicker. A woman with a plan