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Human Events still strong voice of conservatism - Terry Jeffrey becomes editor of weekly newspaper

Insight on the News, Nov 11, 1996 by Michael Rust

The long-standing Washington weekly newspaper of the Republican right has survived three wars -- World, Cold and culture. Now a new editor has arrived from the Washington Times and the Buchanan campaign.

Being Patrick Buchanan's campaign manager would be more than enough controversy for most people. But after nearly five years of association with the commentator-turned-presidential-campaigner Terry Jeffrey recently became editor of Human Events, the Washington-based conservative weekly newspaper.

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As editor, the No. 2 editorial position, Jeffrey will supervise news coverage for the venerable tabloid, the oldest continuously published organ of American conservatism. He replaces Alan Ryskind, who has been a fixture of Washington conservatism for three decades and who will continue to serve as an editor at large. Editor in Chief Thomas Winter will continue at the helm.

The appointment of Jeffrey may serve notice that followers of Buchanan--virtually frozen out of the GOP convention in San Diego-will continue to make their presence known in conservative circles. "There's no doubt that I'm a Buchanan conservative," Jeffrey tells Insight. "I share Pat Buchanan's views on virtually every issue I approach things with the same fundamental principles and values."

Buchanan seemingly was persona non grata at the San Diego conclave, where convention officials refused to allow his name to be put in nomination. The former White House aide to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan has become a lightning rod on the American right because of his outspoken social conservatism, his opposition to international organizations, his hostility toward the North American Free Trade Agreement and (above all) his challenge to the free-trade orthodoxy of Washington's conservative circles.

This shouldn't be a problem in his new post, says Jeffrey "There's a broad spectrum of conservative opinion on the staff at Human Events. And historically, anyone who's followed Human Events knows that this is a no-holds-barred conservative publication; it has never been unwilling to take on any force -- intellectual or political -- that is contrary to the fundamental principles and values of the conservative movement."

If Buchanan's campaigns hearkened back to an "Old Right" that existed before the Cold War, Human Events is a natural voice for that tradition. When it was founded in 1944 as a weekly broadside, with a circulation of 127, it was a voice for the muted minority opposed to both statist economics and interventionist foreign policy-not a popular position in the middle of World War II. "I don't know if they ever strayed very far from those roots," says Paul Gottfried, a historian at Elizabeth town College and author of The Conservative Movement. The weekly always was to the right of most other conservative journals, "and they always had ties to the Catholic right," he says. Human Events also "always had ties to Republicans who were not flawless conservatives," such as current Republican vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp, he adds.

Human Events is part of Eagle Publishing, which has produced many conservative newsletters, including Kemp's. The company, owned by conservative publishing magnate Tom Phillips, also owns the Regnery publishing house and partial interest in the Conservative Book Club.

Actually, in its early days, Human Events was subjected to some of the early strains of the nascent conservative movement -- which, particularly regarding foreign policy, would resemble some of the American right's more recent fissures. Cofounder Felix Morley was described by historian George Nash in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 as "a classical liberal, antimilitarist and anti-imperialist." This philosophical makeup came crashing up against the emerging Cold War sensibilities of the late forties, climaxing when Morley resigned as an editor of Human Events in 1950 after frequently quarreling with cofounder and coeditor Frank Hanighen about foreign policy and the proper position to take toward the Soviet Union.

Hanighen and William Henry Chamberlain, another Human Events cofounder, parted company with many of their Old Right cohorts, who believed that the Soviet Union did not pose an immediate threat to the United States -- among them libertarian and cofounder Frank Choderov. Hanighen and Chamberlain sided with a new generation of conservatives, who would coalesce in the mid-fifties around William F. Buckley's National Review and who believed that the Soviet Union inherently was expansionist and a threat to America's national security.

In the sixties, Human Events became a leading voice for the conservative movement which rallied to the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. "Under the editorship of Thomas Winter, Human Events grew rapidly in prestige in the late 1960s," writes Nash, "and became in the Nixon years perhaps the most influential conservative journal in the Washington political community." At the time, op-ed pages had not become standard features of daily newspapers around the country, and Human Events was the only place in which many conservatives could read their favorite columnists.

Human Events still strong voice of conservatism - Terry Jeffrey becomes editor of weekly newspaper

Insight on the News, Nov 11, 1996 by Michael Rust

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