William Rusher

William Allen Rusher was born in Chicago on July 19, 1923, the son of Evan and Verna Self Rusher. His father, a Republican businessman, moved the family to the New York area when William was a boy. He attended schools in Great Neck, on Long Island, and New York City, graduated from Princeton in 1943, served in the Air Force in India in World War II and earned a law degree at Harvard in 1948. He worked at the New York law firm of Shearman, Sterling and Wright from 1948 to 1956, and was associate counsel of the internal security subcommittee of the United States Senate in 1956 and 1957. When he joined the National Review as publisher, vice president and a director in 1957, the magazine was a small conservative ship in a sea of liberal journals. For years, it leaked deficits of $100,000 or more, kept afloat largely by Mr. Buckley’s earnings from speeches and television appearances. Mr. Rusher took active roles in the Young Americans for Freedom, founded in 1960 at Mr. Buckley’s Connecticut estate, and the American Conservative Union, founded after Mr. Goldwater’s landslide loss to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Both organizations promoted conservative ideas and candidates. Mr. Rusher, who never married, left no immediate survivors. Mr. Rusher joined the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in California, in 1989. He ended his syndicated column in 2009.