December 10, 2003
In Memoriam: Robert L. Bartley
By Peter Brimelow
Robert L. Bartley, who
died December 10 at the tragically early age of 66,
was one of the greatest journalists in American history.
His discreet 1972-2002 direction of the Wall Street
Journal’s Editorial Page, which is in effect a
Little
Magazine piggy-backing on what for years was the
country’s only national daily newspaper, will be studied
as long the trade of opinion-molding matters—and as long
as Ronald Reagan’s twin triumphs,
winning the
Cold War and ending the world’s inflationary slide
to
socialism, continue to resonate.
Bartley and the Wall Street
Journal Editorial Page played a real role in those
triumphs. Unfortunately, he also played an equally
decisive role in the subsequent tragedy: the
degeneration of the American conservative movement
into
careerist Republican boosterism, curiously combined
with a
fanatical and
dishonest commitment to
mass immigration.
Why did this happen? Certainly
there was a sociological aspect. Bartley was the last in
a long tradition of
Midwestern executives at the Wall Street Journal.
He presided, apparently quite happily, over its
capture by the same urban, East-coast-oriented,
elite-educated types who run the rest of
U.S. Big Media. Under these circumstances, the
Editorial Page’s increasing
“neoconservatism” was the closest thing
available to its former, no doubt unfashionable,
heartland conservatism.
But also the failure may also have
been Bartley’s. I’ve told
before the circumstances—discreditable, I believe,
to him—in which Bartley came to observe to me that "I
think the nation-state is finished.” It’s
unfortunate that Bartley never engaged in public debate
on this vital, post-Cold War issue. I suspect that he
never really thought it through. For a journalist,
however, this shy and apparently gentle man was
surprisingly uncomfortable with argument.
Bartley played a key role in my
own career, asking me to come down from
Canada to be a summer “guest” on the
Editorial Page in 1978. At one time, I saw him regularly
in the small world of New York conservative journalism.
Yet at the end we had drifted so far apart that I
realized only very recently that he, like
my own family, was threatened by the terrible curse
of
cancer. I made a mental note to write him a letter
of commiseration. I bitterly regret that I did not.
Our condolences to his family, both
personal and—despite our grave
disagreements—intellectual.
Peter
Brimelow is Editor of
VDARE.COM
and author of
Alien Nation: Common Sense
About America’s Immigration Disaster
(1995), which the Wall Street Journal reviewer
