Human Events still strong voice of conservatism

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.

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.

Now, conservatives have a plethora of media outlets, and they are not always in step with one another. Buchanan and his followers came under sharp fire this year from various sources on the right, including radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and former Education Secretary William Bennett. The Weekly Standard, like Human Events a weekly aimed at the conservative movement, devoted two consecutive cover stories to denouncing Buchanan following the former Crossfire host's upset victory in the New Hampshire GOP presidential primary. (Later the Standard, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, would be the subject of a laudatory feature in the New York Times. Recently, liberal columnist Jacob Weisberg of Slate wrote in the New Yorker that the Standard had "in short order become the sharpest and most engaging of the conservative magazines.")

Obviously a number of influential figures on the right do not admire Jeffrey's former boss. The new Human Events editor seems unabashed. "I think it's very interesting that some of the same people who bashed Pat in the primaries are now bashing Dole in the general," says Jeffrey "I wonder, who are they for? I have admiration for people who get out in the arena and really fight and put themselves up in a position where they can possibly be ridiculed by people who never have the courage to do that sort of thing."

In late 1991, Jeffrey joined Buchanan's first presidential campaign as issues director following a stint as an editorial writer for the Washington Times. "There's no doubt that being able to participate in politics from the other side gives you a perspective you couldn't have unless you've been there," he says. What's more, his years with Buchanan convinced him that "there is a gathering populist conservative consensus among the grassroots activist core of the Republican Party I hope will be reflected in the sort of stories and the coverage that Human Events gives to what's going on in Washington."

In one of his first columns in Human Events, Jeffrey struck a decidedly populist note, criticizing Alcoa's current managers for "enlisting an old U.S. firm in the growing roster of multinational corporations that pledge allegiance to no nation, no people." This is out of step with some on the right who boost the global economy and universal free trade, but Jeffrey is unapologetic. "I don't think that corporate America is out of bounds for conservative journalism and criticism," he says.

"There are really two types of businesses operating in America today," he says. "There's the traditional capitalist enterprise that's run by people who have invested and risked and earned money and created jobs -- entrepreneurs. And then there are massive public-stock corporations that occasionally -- not always, but occasionally -- are run by managers who think they have transnational interests and operate their companies sometimes at odds with the national interests of the United States."

The proper conservative perspective should be to "put the interests of the nation and the interests of individual liberty above the interests of massive public corporations," he adds. "And there is no doubt at this point in American history there are conflicts."

But conflict and anger will not necessarily dominate. Traditionally Human Events, "perhaps better than any other conservative publication ' has managed to "point out all the people in this movement who are doing great and wonderful things, and to promote them and give them an outlet where there's positive coverage of what they're doing." This is in the spirit of the Buchanan campaign, he suggests. "I think everybody recognizes that Pat Buchanan dealt with the issues. He didn't get into personalities; we didn't run a negative campaign; we didn't run negative TV ads or anything else. We said, 'This is where we stand; this is what we believe in; this is where we're going to take the country.'"

That's something Jeffrey says he would like to accomplish in his new post. "This doesn't mean we won't be writing negative stories on occasion about people who are in opposition to those things. But there's a tremendous need for positive journalism."

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning