Who Is Robert Bartley?

WHILE COVERING platform and rules committee hearings in Detroit during the week preceding the 1980 Republican national convention, I put together an informal dinner party of about a dozen politicians and journalists. Clarke Reed, the longtime Mississippi Republican leader, was excited. Bob Bartley would be at the dinner, and Reed wanted to be seated next to him. “He’s my hero,” said Reed, a senior member of the Republican National Committee and a national mover and shaker in the GOP for the previous two decades. Robert L. Bartley was only 42 years old but had been the Wall Street Journal’s editor (actually, editor of the editorial pages) for eight years already and was to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. By then, he had become an authoritative figure for Reed and other conservative activists.

The summer of 1980 was a time of high excitement for these activists. Not only was the Republican convention prepared to nominate Ronald Reagan, but it also was drafting a robust conservative platform calling for a militant foreign policy, tax cuts, and limitations on abortion. The dinner table conversation that night in a Detroit restaurant was intense and heated, with everybody participating–except Bartley. He was silent, and Clarke Reed was disappointed.

Bob Bartley was then what he was on December 31, when he retired as the Journal’s editor after 30 years: a shy, soft-spoken Midwesterner whose voice is usually the softest in any crowd. “I’m not a very flashy guy,” he has said. Not a familiar face on the television talk show circuit, he has let his keyboard do his talking–in a very loud voice indeed.

John Tebbel, professor emeritus of journalism at New York University, called Bartley “the most influential editorial writer of my time.” That was in 1982, when Bartley had been in charge for 10 years. In the 20 years since then, he arguably established himself as the most influential editorial writer of any time.

Newspaper reporters always have held a low opinion of editorial writers, typified by a vulgar joke that I first heard about 50 years ago: Why is writing an editorial like urinating in a blue serge suit? Because it gives you a warm feeling and nobody knows what you’ve done. That clearly is not true of Bartley, for two very good reasons.

The first reason was set forth by Bartley’s weekly column in the Journal December 30, marking the end of his tenure as editor (but not, thankfully, as a columnist): “Journalistically, my proudest boast is that I’ve run the only editorial page in the country that actually sells newspapers.” Indeed, people who are uninterested in markets or even business read the Wall Street Journal because of the pages under Bartley’s domain. For years I have noticed Journal readers on morning airline flights turn first to the editorial page.

The second and more important reason is his enormous impact on public policy. Without Bartley and his newspaper, supply-side economics would have been stillborn. His muscular foreign policy sounded the death knell of isolationism on the right. His relentless assaults on Bill Clinton’s ethics set the standard for Republicans. He has not permitted conservatives to forget such unpleasant issues as tort reform and school choice.

That has not made Bartley a popular figure with journalism’s predominant left wing. Michael Kinsley, once a liberal columnist for Bartley, has accused him of “Stalinist tendencies” and called him a “central cog in the vast right-wing conspiracy” as well as “irresponsible and intellectually dishonest.”

While editorial page editors normally comprise a band of brothers who never criticize each other, whatever prominent colleagues say about Bartley is invariably negative. John Oakes, the former editorial page editor of the New York Times, talked about “Bartley’s hallucinatory ideas of the facts.” Anthony Day, who ran the Los Angeles Times editorial page, called Bartley’s page “humorless, zealous and doctrinaire” (the second two indictments, but certainly not the first, bearing some validity).

Remarkably, staffers on the news side of the Journal, who have no connection with Bartley and his staff in the newspaper’s “church and state” division, have spoken critically of Bartley on the record. In 1982, veteran political reporter James Perry said Bartley engaged in “name-calling.” Alan Murray, when he was the Journal’s deputy bureau chief in Washington, said a state of “enmity” existed between Bartley and the rest of the paper.

Actually, the Journal’s editorial page was winning awards when the Journal was a relatively low-circulation newspaper still concentrating on accurate market and corporate reporting. Two of Bartley’s predecessors, William Grimes and Vermont Royster, won the Journal’s first two Pulitzers. Vermont Connecticut Royster, a North Carolinian who as a young reserve officer commanded a U.S. Navy destroyer in World War II, was a journalistic stylist, producing a literate, slightly old-fashioned editorial page that was true to the Jeffersonian tradition, from limited government to free trade. When I was a reporter for the Journal nearly 40 years ago, my liberal colleagues in the Washington bureau joked about “Roy” as an old fogey conservative, but they would never have dreamed of saying so publicly. Nor would his colleagues on other newspapers.

Always on the alert for new talent, Royster spotted Bartley as a young reporter in the Journal’s Chicago bureau (where he was hired in 1962 at age 24). Growing up in Minnesota and Iowa as the son of a professor of veterinary medicine, Bartley studied journalism at Iowa State University and edited the school newspaper. He was no conservative then. Indeed, when Royster asked him to come to New York in 1964 to work on the editorial page, Bartley at first resisted on grounds that he wasn’t conservative enough. After all, he voted for Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.

By the time that Royster dispatched Bartley to Washington in 1971 for a taste of life in the capital, he found no difficulty in writing conservative editorials. It was unpleasant for everybody. The bureau’s liberal reporters called Bartley a right-wing “kook,” and it was made clear to him that he was not a bona fide member of the bureau. It was hardly unreasonable that Bartley, naturally shy, reacted to such treatment by becoming a loner. When Royster’s successor suddenly and unexpectedly died in 1972, Bartley was given the title of editor (who traditionally supervised only the editorial page) at age 34. I was the only “conservative” in the Washington bureau in 1958-63 (and really not all that conservative), but nobody talked of a “church and state” division in those days. Indeed, I wrote for the editorial page more than I did for page one, and liberal reporters occasionally contributed.

Such practices ended under Bartley. Indicating doubt that the big and growing Washington bureau could supply the information he needed, he did something no other edit page editor in the country has attempted before or since. Building a staff that approached 50 people, he in effect established a parallel universe performing its own reporting–a newsgathering operation operating independently of the rest of the newspaper. Bartley was breaking news in his editorials.

The Washington bureau did not like that much, and it resulted in a shouting match over dinner at Washington’s Madison hotel between the bureau and Bartley. He made clear that he felt no compunction to reflect a diversity of views on the edit page. As early as 1982, Bartley’s former mentor had joined the critics. “When I was writing editorials,” said Royster, “I was always a little bit conscious of the possibility that I might be wrong. Bartley…is not conscious of the possibility that he is wrong.” Nevertheless, Bartley’s page exerted more influence than Royster’s ever attempted.

That was partly because of one of Bartley’s early hires. While losing out to the Washington Post for a brilliant young congressional staffer named George Will, Bartley did lure Jude Wanniski away from a sister publication of the Journal, the now defunct National Observer. At the Michael 1 restaurant in New York’s financial district, Bartley and Wanniski met with two free-market economists–Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell (a future Nobel laureate)–to cook up supply-side economics.

By 1994, Bartley and Wanniski were no longer collaborating. Today, they do not speak, disagreeing on many things but particularly U.S. policy on Israel and Iraq. Wanniski left the newspaper in 1978, but as late as 1981 Bartley was saying: “Jude had a tremendous influence over the tone and direction of the page. He taught me the power of the outrageous.” Wanniski also convinced Bartley of the power of tax cuts, and the Wall Street Journal became the communications engine of the supply-side movement, as it never could have been under Royster.

When the Reagan administration or Republicans in Congress deviated, the Journal’s editorial page struck. Senate Budget Committee chairman Pete Domenici, resisting tax cuts, was attacked for Keynesian deviationism in the memorable editorial “John Maynard Domenici.” Bartley debunked traditional fixations over budget and trade deficits, culminating in a book-long defense of Reaganomics: “The Seven Fat Years.”

Beyond economics, Bartley was the quintessential cold warrior. He was an intrepid fighter for freedom dedicated to the collapse of the Soviet Union who relentlessly editorialized against the arms-control mentality, including Henry Kissinger’s anti-ballistic missile treaty, and exposed chronic cheating by the Kremlin. He was a regular at anti-Communist meetings throughout Europe, where Western journalists and Eastern dissenters plotted the overthrow of the Soviet imperium.

I attended one such conference in Prague in 1990–organized by the late hardline guru Albert Wohlstetter–where Bartley was obviously enjoying himself immensely. Responding to claims by Wanniski and others that a Wohlstetter “cabal” had hijacked U.S. foreign policy, Bartley claimed membership. “I’m a member of long standing in the ‘cabal’ now under attack,” he wrote recently.

In another column, he said: “I attended Mao-Tse-tung’s funeral with the cabal’s high priest, Richard Perle; the improbable delegation was led by James Schlesinger. In 1979, I sat on the banks of the Bosporous eating grilled fish with Paul Wolfowitz, the cabal’s current point man, and legendary Pentagon visionary Andy Marshall. In 1984, I attended a conference on the Riviera’s Cap Ferrat entitled ‘Fault Lines in the Soviet Empire,’ examining the chance that Communism would splinter on ethnic lines, as famously happened five years later.” As on most great issues, Bartley was no mere journalistic observer but a passionately involved player.

Since the Soviet collapse, Bartley and the “cabal” have turned to a robust foreign policy directed against terrorism and Iraq and uncompromising support for Israel. Bartley has, however, hastened to disassociate himself from Woodrow Wilson’s idealism, or what he calls “the ‘national greatness’ crusade of a couple of editors at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.”

Bartley has always marched to his own drummer. During the Watergate crisis, the Journal defended the sacking of Archibald Cox as special prosecutor but ended up calling for Richard Nixon’s impeachment. Bartley was lonely in defending financier Michael Milken from rapacious prosecutors and the Journal’s own reporters. Bartley’s fierce stubbornness was perhaps best exemplified in his long struggle against the ethically challenged Clintons.

I would like to close on a personal note. In 1962 when I was the lead Wall Street Journal correspondent covering Congress (and Bartley was starting out in the Chicago bureau), Vermont Royster came down to Washington to take me to dinner at his favorite French restaurant and offered me a job on the editorial page. I was only 31 years old, and the way Roy laid it out, it seemed I might just end up as editor some day.

I declined, telling Royster that I really loved reporting in Washington. There was also a matter of ideology. Like the young Bartley, I thought the Journal was a little too conservative for me. After all, like Bartley, I would vote for LBJ over Goldwater. The next year, I left the newspaper to join Rowland Evans in a syndicated column.

If I had taken Royster up on his offer, there surely were no guarantees that I would have succeeded as Bartley did. Certainly, I never could have come close to matching Bob Bartley’s performance as the most influential editor of his time, indeed, as an American journalist who truly shaped his times. There never had been one quite like him before, and there may never be again.

Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist and CNN commentator.