“The publisher of NR and I often met for breakfast on Saturday.”
Would that have been William Rusher? I met him at a small NR event in Orange County CA in the early 1990s. I brought up the serious immigration problem already impacting SoCal and received a blank look of complete disinterest in return.
This was in the heat of the Prop 187 campaign and there is no way that the NR crew couldn’t have been aware of it. But like the RNC leadership they couldn’t care less about the transformation of the country that was occurring with California being ground zero.
“I once shook Bill Buckley’s hand. It was an honor meeting him. I was a NR subscriber for 25 years.”
I had the chance to meet Buckley too... I was impressed at the time but that faded as the years passed. I subscribed to NR from 1977 until maybe 1991. By then most of the writers that I respected had left or been cut loose.
What’s interesting to ponder is that in all of the years that I read NR, Buckley never wrote one article of substance. He basically acted as a host for the writers who made the magazine important.
I’ve heard that the really important presence at NR had been his sister, Priscilla Buckley, who acted as managing editor. The decline of NR paralleled her retirement from that role.
Jack Fowler became the NR publisher in the Lowry era. He was a neighbor of mine in Milford Ct. We fell out when NR turned against the tea party. I cancelled my subscription when he put out the never Trump edition. It became very clear to me that NR owed its existence to the establishment so they catered to it.