WHEN WE LAUNCHED THE WEEKLY STANDARD 10 years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d never actually worked on a magazine before. But I’d grown up watching my father edit a couple of them. I’d read lots of magazines. I had a great many friends in the business. What’s the problem, I figured? How hard can this be?
Today, almost 500 Weekly Standard issues later, it’s long since become clear to me how comically naive this must then have seemed to any number of interested observers–including to my experienced colleagues who, thankfully, did know what they were doing (and still do). But back in September 1995, I had high-falutin’ hopes. I thought we’d carefully plan each issue of the magazine, ensuring an ideal balance of subject matter–between the topical and the longer-range, between politics and arts, between foreign and domestic policy.
Don’t get me wrong: We have tried to do that. On balance, over time, I rather think we’ve succeeded, in fact. But the day-to-day reality of opinion journalism, up close, doesn’t look nearly so serene or neat.
Among the most important lessons I’ve learned, blindingly obvious though it might at first appear, is one I think applies with equal force not just to Washington journalists but also to the people we write about–and to our readers. It concerns a central, chronic misunderstanding of modern political life. Let’s call it “the fallacy of hidden design.”
Men and women in public life are nowadays constantly confronted–much to their exasperation, as I recall from my own past life in government–by reporters who have trouble believing in the possibility of a news story whose deepest meaning isn’t in some sense a secret. It cannot be, so these reporters suppose, that the president has made his most recent pronouncement or decision simply because he thought it, on balance, the right and timely thing to do. At least it cannot mostly be that. There must also be some strategy afoot–probably a cynical or selfish one related to some interest group, polling demographic, or whatnot.
But the president’s aides would tell you–correctly, in my experience–that top-level, behind-the-scenes Washington doesn’t actually work like this. It can’t: People are too busy, there are too many competing agendas to juggle, there’s not enough time, in-boxes and calendars are too full, and five big things still have to get done by 6 o’clock whether you’ve perfected them or not. Under the circumstances, then, the best and much the safest thing a politician can usually hope to do is play it straight, with minimal calculation. Generally speaking, the clearest and most reliable expressions of a public figure’s intentions are his own words and deeds. Put another way: The most accurate and intelligent interpretation of the news tends to be the one that best concentrates its attention not on some imagined, backstage Wizard of Oz, but on what’s happening in front of the curtain, for all to see and hear.
And as I’ve discovered these past 10 years, it turns out that much the same is true where interpretations of the news media are concerned. A magazine editor gets mugged by that reality on a regular basis. Certain articles you’ve commissioned never materialize. Others show up but prove to be unusable. Halfway through the week, some unexpected occurrence in the world will inspire one of your writers to dash off a dazzling, must-publish piece, and all of a sudden, the “ideal balance of subject matter” becomes an unobtainable mirage. You’re left, instead, with five different articles–each of which is a good, strong, just-right-for-The Weekly Standard piece, but all of which happen also to be about, say, developments in the Middle East.
There’s no avoiding it sometimes. And, while I’d hardly make a claim for it as a landmark insight into human nature–life is messy; problems and opportunities pop up out of the blue; all you can do is try your hardest; often there is less on view than meets the eye–the fact remains, I think, that surprisingly few people seem able to remember these truths. It was more common in the magazine’s first few years, I suppose, but it still happens all the time: Some not insignificant number of people always assume that The Weekly Standard isn’t really published in English, but in code–that its contents are designed to advance a surreptitious political agenda.
The Weekly Standard is a conservative magazine, of course. We make no bones about it. And ours tends toward a particular kind of conservatism; our pages are its home, we like to think. But that’s the point: The distinctive point of view in question has been worked out–and is still being worked out–on paper, in public, over the long haul. And it’s also the case that in these very same pages we have routinely run authors who manifestly don’t agree with one another. I often get asked: “Why are you printing this particular argument about that particular subject at this particular time?” And just as often the honest answer is that someone’s recently offered us the article in question and we’ve decided we like it. Simple as that. Sometimes a magazine is really just a magazine.
And sometimes a magazine about the news is driven by the news. Much that’s happened at The Weekly Standard we never–and probably couldn’t have–expected. On Labor Day 1995, when we were just getting underway, Washington’s “Gingrich Revolution” was still in full swing. Already in our first issue we were spotting weaknesses in the speaker and his footsoldiers. But overall, we were fairly enthusiastic about them, just the same, and the cover of that premiere issue carried a picture of Newt Gingrich as a martial, confident Tarzan–under the soon-to-be-laughable headline “Permanent Offense.”
Two months later, history will record, Gingrich and the congressional Republicans were on permanent defense, having alienated the country with an ill-conceived government shutdown. And a few weeks after that, President Clinton decided (belatedly in our view) to launch a military intervention in Bosnia. One of our contributing editors, Charles Krauthammer, thought and wrote that Clinton was wrong to do so. But the magazine editorially supported the president, in that same issue and subsequently–for which sin a not-insignificant chunk of our original subscribers immediately canceled out on us.
So it has gone over the subsequent weeks and months and years. Once upon a time, I see from an early cover article, we apparently believed it possible to “Smash the Internet!” Oops. One of us, who shall remain nameless, argued in late 1995 that Colin Powell might make a fine president. Some of us thought the Republicans should nominate John McCain in 2000; others of us thought the McCain idea was nuts. And in each of these and dozens of other instances, lots of readers got irked with us. Early in the magazine’s history, I remember mentioning to a friend that I seemed to have made more enemies in one year at The Weekly Standard than I had during my previous 10 years in government and politics combined.
Then came 9/11, the ultimate in unexpected developments. Not everyone was taken entirely by surprise, it’s important to note–and here I would refer you to “A Cowering Superpower,” an eerily prescient Reuel Marc Gerecht essay on Osama bin Laden that ran in our July 30, 2001, issue. But I think it fair to say, at the very least, that before the fact of 9/11, my colleagues and I would never have anticipated that The Weekly Standard’s pages were soon to be so thoroughly and persistently dominated by coverage of a global-scale war on Middle Eastern terrorism and despotism. And since 9/11, I don’t suppose any of us would think we had much serious choice in the matter.
Which ultimately speaks–if I may be forgiven a pseudo-Platonic moment–to the weekliness of weekly journalism. A weekly comes out every week. A weekly has to come out every week.
Early on, back in the “Permanent Offense” days, I remember lamenting aloud at an editorial meeting that there was one article in the otherwise terrific issue we’d shortly be printing that was okay, but wasn’t really at the highest level of quality. Fred Barnes immediately set me straight about this. Perhaps it wasn’t the best imaginable piece of writing, Fred said of the essay in question. But the best imaginable piece of writing, in this case, did not exist, he pointed out. And the piece we had in hand, by contrast, possessed what Fred considered among the most important journalistic qualities: “the quality of doneness.”
Here’s to 10 years of doneness!
-William Kristol
Adapted from the foreword to
The Weekly Standard: A Reader, 1995-2005, just published by HarperCollins
