35th anniversary gift idea

In A while back the New York Times ran a piece about a venerable cigar store that was dropping its time-honored practice of storing its customers' purchases for them. Customers had been instructed to come and pick up their property for the last time. The reporter noticed a middle-aged man standing in the middle of the room, looking around disconsolately. Finally the man said to no one in particular, "I hate change, don't you?"

Those of NR's staff who are temperamentally as well as politically conservative know how he felt. Our last lustrum (to borrow a word from Cicero and Hugh Kenner) began with Priscilla Buckley's announcement of her semi-retirement-an event less noticed by the outside world, but with as big an impact on the editorial staff as the later departure of Bill Rusher as publisher, his replacement by Wick Allison, and the arrival of John O'Sullivan as editor. (Bill Buckley's announcement of his own semi-retirement hasn't sunk in yet. Ask us in five years.)

Priscilla had kept the department and (most of) its writers in order by the simple means of being the sort of person you just hate to disappoint. She was, as Frank Meyer eloquently put it, the grease in our crankcase. (The Washington Post, in writing about our 25th anniversary, helpfully corrected that to "the oil in our crankcase"; the Post knew a lot about cars, but not much about Frank Meyer.)

Mercifully for her successors-Rick Brookhiser followed by Linda Bridges-Priscilla is always available by phone and fax to fill in the myriad details we found we hadn't quite absorbed. Priscilla took the title of senior editor, joining Jeff Hart and Joe Sobran as the once-a-fortnight gang, coming in on the alternate Mondays and Tuesdays to confer and write editorials. Priscilla remarked that she would know semi-retirement had taken hold when she found herself sitting on a chaise longue in the afternoon with a novel and a box of chocolates. The last time we asked, the chaise longue was still in the attic, and Priscilla had embarked on the latest project, research for a documentary for the 35th anniversary party. n Change is in the air even before Priscilla's semi-departure. Kevin Lynch, father confessor to the editorial department, has left, after 15 years at NR, for Voice of America (he's now with Radio Free Europe in Munich), and has been replaced as articles editor and, if not quite father confessor, at least troop leader by Rich Vigilante, a young writer known to Rick as a colleague in the Party of the Right at Yale. (The possibilities for confusion are evident: the difference, spoken or written, between Rick and Rich is not enough to prevent havoc on the switchboard; but we survive, coming to sound almost like British public schoolboys in our use of surnames"Has anyone seen Brookhiser today?") Rick as managing editor, Rich as articles editor, and Linda as executive editor form the troika," as responsibilities are divvied up in the post-Priscilla editorial department. Rich has ambitious plans for the articles section, and finds himself quickly falling behind. Will VTFB let him hire an assistant? Creating a new post is not something we do lightly, but Bill agrees that it's warranted in this case, and so Maggie Gallagher comes aboard. Her first big piece is the lead article for the 1986 campus issue, about sensitivity" run amok.

* The outside world marches through our pages. Nineteen eighty-six begins with a cover story by Lewis Lehrman and Gregory Fossedal, "1986: The Year of the Space Shield." We fight manfully on the subject of SDI, requiring editors who were French or history majors to master enough scientific terminology to produce "SDI Watch," with the help of the experts at the George C. Marshall Institute. And indeed, we haven't given up on SDI, even if the Bush Administration has.

Since we are not a Catholic magazine but a conservative magazine many of whose top people happen to be Catholic, we are especially pleased when Bill Buckley persuades Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus to come to us as religion editor, much though we will miss Michael Novak.

We send Pastor Neuhaus to cover the Extraordinary Synod in Rome. The copy he sends back reflects so great a congruence with traditional Catholic doctrine that we're not terribly surprised, five years later, when Mr. Neuhaus reverentially takes off his Lutheran collar and popes.

That spring, Reagan bombs Qadcdafi, Chernobyl blows up (editorial paragraph: " The Soviet Union has finally contrived to give power to the people"), and the Philadelphia Society runs a conference on paleo-cons v. neocons (reported on for us by Jeff Hart). Summer assistant Paul Birnbaum has his hands full answering the letters on that dispute, which will be continued from then on, with Stephen Tonsor, Ernest van den Haag, Sam Francis, and numerous others weighing in.

* In September 1986 we launch a new column: Jeff Hart's Ivory Foxhole." Two months later, Wayne Dick is reinstated at Yale (he was the student who had the poor sense of self-preservation to satirize Gay-Lesbian Awareness Days). Chilton Williamson, who has been running the Books, Arts & Manners section since George Will's departure in December 1975, is made a senior editor. He is pleased by the recognition, but wishes he didn't have to come east from Wyoming quite so often. On the production side there is a general shift upward. Anna Lieber moves across the hall as art director following Colleen Lawlor Hartman's departure, and sets to work on some classy headings and house ads; Ione Whitlock moves to Anna's old job as production editor and begins a thorough study of printing processes, enabling her to do many things that associate publisher Ed Capano had had to handle before; Pete Garvey, a master of deadpan humor, comes upstairs from the circulation department to take Ione's old job as production coordinator.

The year ends with a whimper that will soon explode with a bang: the Republican defeat in the Senate, and the first rumors of Iran-Contra. That controversy leads to some fine pieces by Rick Brookhiser explaining that the Administration would not have been tempted by Ollie North's wild scheme if Congress had not been so feekless; but we would sooner not have had the mess, even if we would then have missed Rick's pieces.

* While Iran-Contra picks up steam outside, within these precincts an even longer and more acrimonious debate is going on. It had been set in motion by the death three years before of art director Jimmy O'Bryan. Jimmy had been designing our covers for as long as we had had covers designed-or rather, as he liked to put it, he executed the cover designs Bill Buckley scrawled out on a sheet of yellow copy paper. These covers were the photograph of a dead chicken hanging, head down, in front of a half-opened Venetian blind: fine photograph by Jan Lukas, with fine color treatment by Jimmy, but what was it supposed to mean as a magazine cover? Don't you understand? WFB? replied, raising not one but two eyebrows. That's not Israel, whose neck is not being wrung.

Nonetheless, these covers had a flavor that we missed. Various artists tried to recapture it-Colleen Lawlor Hartman, Richard Erlanger, John Donnelly, Anna Lieber, Charles Bork. They produced some fine covers along the way, but they just weren't Jimmy.

So matters stand when Wick comes aboard full time. He proposes, and Bill accepts, an experiment on a new tack. While attempting to keep the wit that distinguished the WFB/JO'B team, we will add a bit of mainstream slickness to appeal to newsstand buyers. A design company called Pentagram is hired, both for covers and to produce a radical redesign of the interior of the magazine. "Back to the future," we call it, since although type and art are chosen in accord with Eighties fashion, the essential outlines are taken from the early days of the magazine, c. 1959.

Pentagram produces some of our favorite covers: Ronald Reagan with his face blending into the map of Europe; V.I. Lenin behind a shattered pane of glass. But eventually logistic considerations lead us to put the covers into the hands of our new art director, Paul Hebert, who is that rarity, a fully qualified art-school graduate who is a conservative. Besides his expertness, Paul brings deep reserves of patience to cover conferences, as Wick, John, and Ed Capano put up and bat down suggestion after suggestion, often coming back and embracing the original idea after all.