Political strategist W. Rusher
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - William A. Rusher, 87, a conservative strategist for more than 50 years who helped engineer Barry Goldwater's nomination as the Republican candidate for president in 1964, died Saturday in a nursing facility in San Francisco after a long illness.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - William A. Rusher, 87, a conservative strategist for more than 50 years who helped engineer Barry Goldwater's nomination as the Republican candidate for president in 1964, died Saturday in a nursing facility in San Francisco after a long illness.
Mr. Rusher's influence was felt on decades of U.S. politics, from the 1961 stirrings of the "draft Goldwater" effort to opposing Richard M. Nixon's overtures to China in the 1970s to advising Ronald Reagan's administration in the 1980s.
Mr. Rusher also helped shape the public debate through syndicated columns in newspapers around the country. He spent 31 years as publisher of the National Review, the magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr. that was a postwar cornerstone of anticommunism and American conservative thought.
"There wasn't an active candidate or a politician who wasn't familiar with his work," said Brian Kennedy, president of the Claremont Institute, a conservative public-policy think tank in Claremont, Calif. Mr. Rusher joined the institute as a distinguished fellow after leaving the National Review in 1988.
Sal Russo, a Sacramento Republican operative who is the chief strategist for the Tea Party Express, said he developed a friendship with Mr. Rusher when Russo was working for then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in the 1960s. Buckley and Mr. Rusher laid the groundwork for the conservative agenda, he said, that would be personified by Reagan as president.
"He has really been somewhat of a hidden giant of the conservative movement," Russo said. "He was there at the very beginning, when they came up with the idea of what has become the modern conservative movement."
Russo said that while Buckley was the face of the conservative movement, Mr. Rusher worked hard behind the scenes to pull the coalition together. "Bill was a crucial person in that whole process. Buckley, of course, was full of ideas, but Rusher was very organized, fastidious, and he provided all the organizational heft and played a big role in the Young Americans for Freedom."