The Final Column

William Rusher
3/3/2009

I began writing these columns 36 years ago and have come to the conclusion that it’s time to bring them to a close. It’s certainly not a problem of lacking subject matter. It’s simply that I am 85 now, and the energy and creative juices are just not what they used to be. Anyone in that age bracket will know what I mean.

Happily, I am not ending the column with a gloomy conviction that America is heading to hell in a handbasket. On the contrary — barring all the usual problems with which I have had to deal in these paragraphs — I think the country, on the whole, is in reasonably good shape. Certainly, 36 years ago there was nothing like the panoply of conservative activities that confronts the eye today. In the 1950s, there were plenty of resolute individual conservatives but very little that could seriously be described as a conservative “movement.” In the late 1950s and 1960s, however — owing in large part to Bill Buckley and a handful of other early spokesmen — conservatives began organizing themselves institutionally. Magazines sprang up, and conservative organizations of various sorts were founded.

The story continues …..