William Allen Rusher (July 19, 1923 – April 16, 2011) was an American lawyer, author, activist, and conservative columnist. He was one of the founders of the modern conservative movement and was one of its most prominent spokesmen for thirty years as publisher of National Review magazine, which was edited by William F. Buckley Jr.
Early life
Rusher was born in Chicago in 1923. His family had not been especially political; his parents were moderate Republicans, and his paternal grandfather had been a socialist.
In 1966, Rusher together with Max Yergan became co-chairmen of the American-African Affairs Association (AAAA), which lobbied the United States to recognize Rhodesia. A major theme of the publications of the American-African Affairs Association was the black opponents of Rhodesia were controlled by either the Soviet Union or China, and to allow majority rule in Rhodesia would thus allow Communism to be established there. In a letter to the editor of The Nation in 1967, Rusher admitted that an overlap in topics and themes expressed by the AAAA and the Rhodesian Information Office was due to the fact that AAAA shared the same offices at 79 Madison Avenue in New York as the public relations firm of Marvin Liebman Associates, which had been hired by the Information Office to improve Rhodesia's image in America. As a part of his efforts to assist Rhodesia, Rusher introduced Kenneth Towsey, the head of the New York office of the Rhodesian Information Office, to various media personalities where Towsey made his case that Rhodesia, which was often pillared in the United States for its white supremacist policies, was just being misunderstood by the American media.
Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing well past his retirement from National Review at the end of the 1980s, Rusher was a very active public speaker on college campuses and in other forums, where he defended and advocated the conservative position. In the early 1970s, he was the main conservative representative on a PBS television debate show, The Advocates, which also featured the later governor of Massachusetts, Michael S. Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee. Rusher was also a commentator on ABC-TV's Good Morning America in the late 1970s and a regular radio commentator in the 1980s. Throughout Rusher's career, he was known as an aggressive and exceptionally skilled debater. However, in a 1971 debate, Rusher faced formidable opposition in linguist and prominent anti-war activist MIT professor Noam Chomsky; Rusher repeatedly interrupted Chomsky, who calmly and assertively answered his questions.
In the middle 1970s, Rusher was among the most prominent advocates for a conservative third party, or as he called it "new majority party," that would replace the Republicans; he was also involved heavily in efforts to organize such a party. Despite its public claim to be working independently of Rhodesia, the American-Rhodesian Association worked closely with the Information Office of the Rhodesian government. Rusher also wrote about the status of political prisoners that "about four thousand Allende sympathizers were prosecuted and convicted of specific crimes after the 1973 coup", of which all "but a dozen were sent into exile abroad or were jailed". Finally, he argued that even if the Pinochet regime had violated human rights, it did not matter because the regime was "creating a powerful and truly sinewy Chilean economy" and "sacrifices to this end are very much worth making".
Retirement
Rusher retired from National Review at age 65 at the end of 1988.