Begun in 1967 as a student enterprise at Indiana University, TAS became a kind of junior National Review, and then grew into something more exciting than its foster parent. With its tabloid format and fine print in four columns, long articles were possible. Style was appreciated, bombast encouraged. Writers from Buckley's stable were published alongside younger Neoconservatives and Straussian professors, including future staffers of the George W. Bush administration, ones wanted alive today, by liberals, for hanging at The Hague. More impressively, in the early 1980's the list of better-known writers appearing in its pages included:
Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Muggeridge, Raymond Aron, Jean-François Revel, Hugh Kenner, Taki, Anthony Haden-Guest, Kenneth Minogue, Luigi Barzini Jr., Manfredi Piccolomini, George Will, Thomas Sowell, Thomas Szasz, Eric Hoffer, Bryan Griffin, Joseph Epstein...
The readers also had stature. The magazine of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., was on its way, it seemed, to becoming a conservative Harper's. Things I wrote for TAS were reprinted elsewhere. It was honor, exposure, training, and even a little bit of money. (I am grateful that I had the opportunity to write articles on subjects that would be impossible to place now, such as monarchy; perhaps the fact that the managing editor was born in Eastern Europe helped in that department.)
So Tyrrell was more than a resuscitated H. L. Mencken sinking his teeth into Jimmy Carter's ankles, a Mencken without the antisemitism. Tyrrell had done well, and he won himself a Vanity Fair profile in 1985.
It's unimaginable now. How many writers who've made their reputations since then would want to admit that they started at TAS, other than the Bushies?
In 1985, TAS left its bohemian student squalor in Bloomington and relocated to the Imperial Capital, seeking the Big Time. Tyrrell transformed himself into a Republican Party Reptile, riding to hell in a black Mercedes, popping blown-up condoms at Washington banquets. The magazine was gradually downsized, both physically and mentally, for the Age of Clinton, which was also the Age of Limbaugh, and got a full-color glossy cover for newsstand sex appeal.
Throughout our ongoing national degradation, Rush Limbaugh has furnished many hours of emotional relief to people in all walks of life, including the cream of TAS's circa-1980 audience, and he provides entertainment as well as basic political enculturation for people who haven't even taken the high school civics course that was still required in the 1970's. He is a mostly benign demagogue and is loved even with his faults. He helps the cause when he draws attention to greater intellects than his own, instead of simply perpetuating the hysterical stand-off of the daily political false issue cycle. Republican politicians may yet crawl back into office over the corpses of apoplectic liberals who collapsed in rage while listening to Rush's parodies. Even so, in the absence of a new Buckley, the conservative side of American politics is in a deep hole if Rush is its most significant spokesman. It was a sign when Tyrrell began advertising TAS in 1992 on Rush's short-lived television show.
It all worked just fine for Rush. It did not work in the long run for Tyrrell.
Rush's listeners do need to read something. Meanwhile the rest of us still need a magazine.
When the Soviet threat no longer served as the conservative reality principle, TAS shrank right along with American political mentalities: the Islamic terrorists got little notice, the economy grew, and Clinton's unimpeachable sex addiction dominated political life. TAS did not resist—if I am permitted the understatement.
The story has been told many times. Richard Mellon Scaife came to Tyrrell with million-dollar checks for detective work in Arkansas. Clinton deserved his Inspector Javert. The thing was worth doing right, and one felt that Tyrrell must be doing the thing right when one saw on the evening news how the Clinton goon squad regularly burglarized TAS's offices. It is, nonetheless, a test of character when millionaires come offering money in exchange for your services. You can say no. In 1997 the point finally came when Tyrrell had to. At the cost of his magazine.
In 1994, whenever The New York Times Sunday Magazine did a feature profile on someone you'd heard of but didn't really know, it usually turned out that the fellow was now a happy homosexual. When the NYT mag did its piece on Tyrrell, with a lurid portrait in exercise gear and a red-white-and-blue sweat band, I thought, "Oh no, not him too..." Well, that wasn't the point of the article, and he wasn't, after all, although one of his pet muck-rakers was, who soon turned liberal as well. The NYT piece revealed Tyrrell the egoist sinking into the maelstrom.
In the sequel, Tyrrell went broke and gave the mag to George Gilder, who went broke, and then Tyrrell took possession again. The post-Gilder TAS is not all bad. The cultural pieces by Roger Scruton, which give glimpses of his analysis of the age, are the best thing. Rush's listeners would do well to read the policy analyses by Angelo Codevilla. I suppose that Ferris Buehler nostalgiacs enjoy reading the diaries of Ben Stein. But the magazine as a whole is still an anti-climax. The renowned conservative writers who once served as elderly foster uncles to the student founders are gone; now the founders are their own elderly foster uncles.
It's a surprise how pro-Catholic and pro-life TAS has become. I remember how the managing editor yelled at me (the lone exception in an otherwise supremely polite relationship) when I inserted a reference to abortion in a commissioned piece for the bicentennial of Samuel Johnson's death. That piece was spiked. Was their avoidance of the issue at the time determined by their financial backing? Richard Mellon Scaife venerates the memory of Margaret Sanger.
In imitation of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Tyrrell would be entitled to say, "I am big. It's the politics that got small."
The fellow has a sense of humor. I suddenly recall how, in a 1982 column, Tyrrell confused the great early conservative critic-scholar Paul Elmer More (1864-1937), whom he mustn't have read, with the sexually omnivorous liberal Anglican bishop of New York, Paul E. Moore, Jr. (1919-2003)—and conflated their names most comically. Tyrrell is to be forgiven for not knowing everything. He took the correction well.
Doffing our hats in respect, let us remember better times. At the nearly ideal magazine.
