The Operation of Grace by Wolfe Gregory;

Author:Wolfe, Gregory; [Wolfe, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498273541
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2016-01-19T08:00:00+00:00

Conservative Elegies

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

—William Wordsworth

Within just a few weeks of each other, America recently lost two of its finest sons—William F. Buckley Jr. and E. Victor Milione. One was known to millions, while the other preferred obscurity, but both were seminal figures in the modern revival of political and intellectual conservatism. I eulogize them together not only because of their shared convictions, but for a simple reason: they were my first two employers. They literally gave me my start in life.

In the summer of 1980, I could be pardoned for feeling like William Wordsworth at the time of the French Revolution: a new dawn was breaking and I was an idealistic youth ready to become an ardent herald for that sunrise.

I was not yet twenty-one, and yet I had a strong sense of the historic nature of the moment. My father had left a lucrative career in advertising to become a pioneering member of the conservative movement; he was sitting in the room in 1953 when the young William F. Buckley Jr. came to pitch the idea of a new magazine, to be called National Review, to a group of movement leaders.

By the time I graduated in May from a college known for its close association with conservatism, Ronald Reagan had wrapped up the Republican nomination for president. The hostage crisis in Iran was dragging on, and President Carter’s doleful moral earnestness was faltering in the face of Reagan’s buoyant wit and actor’s poise.

Like the son of an exiled king, I looked forward to Revolution and Restoration.

As the heat waves shimmered off the sidewalks of Manhattan, I had a ringside seat at National Review—Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine—where I had won the summer internship gig. The atmosphere in the cluttered offices on East Thirty-fifth Street was electric, and never more so than at the biweekly editorial meetings, when outside contributors would come to New York and join the regular staff, and the editorials for the issue to come would be assigned.

The summer intern at NR might have had to sort the mail, but he or she was also allowed to submit paragraphs for the unsigned editorial section at the beginning of the magazine. That meant I got to sit in on the editorial meetings. When Bill Buckley was in town he would chair these sessions. He sat at one end of the conference table, rumpled of shirt, aquiline of nose, sporting the trademark grin that seemed to stretch his face a bit too tight. His limbs always seemed akimbo—he would prop his legs up on the table and lean over to one side, achieving configurations that would have made a circus contortionist proud.

I sat through these gatherings, transfixed and more than a little intimidated. I might have been a big man on my college campus, but in the editorial offices at NR I felt out of my depth. Writing those editorial paragraphs was almost more than I could handle: you had to be witty, droll, knowledgeable, and politically savvy, all at once.

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