Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: An editor, a blogger, and a future vice president of the United States walk into a black-tie cocktail reception. None are wearing tuxedos.
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Here the punchline becomes more of a style question: Do dark suits count? When I was editing another magazine, this was the situation the conservative journalist Rod Dreher, then-author JD Vance, and I found ourselves in as we settled in for a panel discussion preceding a gala event.
On hand to provide an answer to this question was Dan Oliver, a man of considerable style, wit, and charm. He quickly made plain that he was to be put down as an emphatic “no.” In a video that periodically circulates of this event as opposition researchers scour it for evidence of Vance’s heterodoxy, you can see Dan smartly dressed in proper black-tie fashion. But his immense contributions to the conservative movement were not limited to sartorial wisdom.
Daniel Oliver was born on April 10, 1939, in New York City. He was a graduate of Harvard University and Fordham Law School who went on to join the Army. Oliver died at age 87 of leukemia at his summer home on Buzzards Bay on June 26, surrounded by family and having surpassed the initial prognosis offered by his doctors. He is survived by his wife, Anna Louise Vietor Oliver; their children, Louisa, Daniel, Andrew, Susan, and Peter; and his grandchildren.
Oliver was a great benefactor to conservative causes, including involvement with the Philadelphia Society, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Pacific Research Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Education and Research Institute. But he came up from the ground floor, so to speak, as a conservative activist. Oliver met William F. Buckley Jr., who later described him as “fresh from law school, volunteering his time at the lick-envelope level,” during the latter’s 1965 campaign for mayor of New York City.
This began an enduring friendship between Oliver and the Buckleys. He would also serve as a campaign researcher for James Buckley, WFB’s older brother, during his initial Conservative Party run for Senate from New York. Jim Buckley would go on to serve a single term as senator, sandwiched between the liberal Republican Charles Goodell (father of the NFL commissioner) and liberal Democrat yet occasional fellow traveler of conservatives Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
In the early 1970s, Oliver served as executive editor of National Review. He was later a trustee and chairman of the magazine, long a friend to many who devoted their lives to that venerable conservative institution. He rose to Bill Buckley’s defense one last time when he reviewed Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of the conservative icon for the New Criterion.
“Sam Tanenhaus is critical of Buckley from the very beginning of his new biography, Buckley, picking apart this, that, everything: his time at Millbrook and Yale, his dealings with Senator Joe McCarthy, and on and on,” Oliver writes. “Buckley fans have been dreading this book, fearing it would not be flattering to this amazing man. But at the end, the very end, Tanenhaus acknowledges Buckley’s greatness.”
The man’s loyalty here was no surprise. I once lunched with Oliver to discuss a project of mutual interest. But when I showed up at the Metropolitan Club to meet him, he was most animated (and not at all amused) by a contrarian piece a young writer had penned about Buckley.
Oliver went to Washington, D.C., after Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. It was a time of great triumph for the conservative movement. He would serve as general counsel of the Department of Education (which Reagan, like President Donald Trump, hoped to abolish), general counsel of the Department of Agriculture, and, with greatest distinction, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. He knew how to defend free markets, and how to make headlines, such as when he signed off his Christmas Eve denunciation of the New York milk cartel with “fleece Navidad.”
I knew Oliver primarily through the conservative dinner circuit — the American Spectator’s Saturday Evening Club and a long-running gathering of fusionists ably led by fellow Reagan revolutionary Don Devine, which doubled as a way to introduce older conservatives irritated with the direction of the movement to younger conservatives irritated with the direction of the movement. It was not uncommon for him to pick up the tab.
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Oliver was an improbable combination of patrician manner, indomitable cheer, and mordant humor (though I cannot imagine calling him “Danny,” as Priscilla Buckley does in her book Living It Up With National Review). He was deeply interested in, though occasionally annoyed by, conservative magazines, a gifted writer, and a rare person who recognized what is authentically conservative about the often hopelessly liberal Episcopal Church.
I’ll remember this fine gentleman, in appropriate attire.
W. James Antle III (@jimantle) is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
