57th Street

It seems like every publication is putting ample space aside to commemorate the death of William F. Buckley, the founder of the magazine National Review and a widely respected conservative. So I figured we at 57th Street might as well do the same.

Nobody here knew Buckley personally. We didn’t go to school with him. We weren’t friends with his parents. We didn’t write a mocking column about him which eventually got us a job. He was never our editor. Hell, I had no idea who he was until he died and both liberal and conservative media outlets wrote obituaries on him. I don’t think my ignorance is unique. The closest link I have to him is that JadedHack/Ben goes to the University of Chicago where Buckley spent his undergraduate years. I’ve also lived in Chicago for a number of years, within spitting distance of the U of C campus and never heard about Buckley. So I’m still trying to figure out what the world has lost. From what I’ve ascertained so far, the loss isn’t small.

Yesterday night, while reporting on a Michigan Student Assembly meeting for The Michigan Daily I picked up a copy of the National Review lying around. Lately I’ve been in search of new reading material to accompany The New York Times, The New Yorker, a number of blogs (some of which are from the previously mentioned newspaper and magazine) and sometimes the Chicago Reader. So I was open to the Review, especially because of a certain imbalance of political bend toward liberalism among my periodicals. I flipped through it and admit, it wasn’t bad. The issue was of course a commemoration to its founder, Buckley, and I really didn’t feel like reading too much on him. Still, I was somewhat impressed by the magazine. Nice column lengths, nice writing style, nice design. I say somewhat because it probably won’t make my list of regular reads. Earlier today (or yesterday because it’s almost 2 a.m.) I was checking out The New Republic’s site when I saw a little something from its editor, Franklin Foer. Foer is one of the three Foer writers, a rare family of extraordinary journalists and authors. I haven’t read his brother —Johnathan Safran Foer—’s book Everything Is Illuminated but I’m going to. So I figured my increasing stack of school work could bare another 20 minutes of inattention and read Foer’s piece. Guess what it was on? That’s right, Buckley. But like this blog post, it wasn’t a reminiscence of that time Foer and Buckley were at the old boy’s club smoking cigars and doing…whatever. It started out with a problem Foer has at TNR: the abbreviations are the same as the National Review’s.

I, for one, have never gone out of my way to compound this misapprehension by posing as a writer for the National Review. But I haven’t always disabused the impression that I work for the other TNR, either. It can be a great boon while reporting. When interviewing the grassroots of the conservative moment at, say, a Christian Coalition Road to Victory conference or a gathering of the College Republicans, I’ve found myself occasionally swept into the sweet embrace of comradeship. “Oh, what’s David Frum really like?” When I reply that I consider him to be a gentleman, the filters that might normally preclude honest conversation with representatives of the mainstream media are lifted.

Also unique to the many pieces of Buckley, Foer reveals that

The rap on Buckley’s magazine was that it served as a self-promotional vehicle on the road to television, a quixotic mayoral bid, and the creation of a persona, or, to put it less charitably, a personality cult.

I agree with Foer. It’s a fair magazine. It doesn’t quite suit my palette but I wouldn’t openly scoff at the idea of my friends reading it —actually I’d probably adore them because a subscription to the National Review is very anti-establishment at Michigan. I also empathize with Foer, the name thing is always an issue. I have to admit, I’m still a little unsure about part of 57th Street’s name. If we just shortened it to 57th Street as it’s bound to be called, it might get confused with the bookstore or the actual street. But what should go instead of ‘Company’? Should it stay ‘The 57th Street Company’? What’s in a name? The last thing anyone really needs is yet another name change because of me.

It turns out that back in the day, The New Republic and The Nation magazine had so much in common that the prospect of a merger was given some serious thought. Foer writes

During the early ’50s, The Nation and The New Republic seriously considered merging, there was so little space between them. The new magazine would have been ponderously and unpromisingly called The Nation and New Republic.

The idea was eventually tabled of course and TNR remained TNR sharing much with The Nation but also something significant with a deeply conservative magazine called the National Review.

I guess the outcome of my little exploration of the Review resulted in an admiration for The New Republic. I’m very impressed with Foer’s column and I’ve seen the magazine on friends’ desks lately. So Buckley’s death has affected me too. Because of him, I now have an growing interest in The New Republic. I hadn’t touched it before actually, because the movie Shattered Glass will forever stay associated to the magazine in my mind. That movie is about Stephen Glass, a journalist who fabricated stories while working at The New Republic. I can overlook that though. After all, raging liberals overlooked the wide expanse in political outlook when commemorating Buckley.