Robert L. Bartley
Wall Street Journal readers and writers lost a friend, a mentor and an inspiration yesterday with the death at age 66 of our columnist and Editor Emeritus Robert L. Bartley. We take it as more than a little consolation that he was the most consequential editor of his era and left the world both better and freer than he found it.
One of Bob's charms was that he would never have said this about himself. A quiet man born and raised in the Midwest, he preferred to be called a "newsman," which reflected his conviction that even editorial writers should break stories and report on the world as it is. The editorial staff and pages he presided over for 30 years until 2002 were no ivory tower of opinion. One of his highest compliments was to return a published article or editorial with the one-word scribble, "News!" He once said his proudest boast was that he ran a rare editorial page that actually sells newspapers.
These instincts naturally led him into the major controversies of our times. In today's political world, Bob and these pages are sometimes described as "conservative." But he often told us he preferred the term "liberal," in the 19th-century sense when that word stood for free markets and democracy.
In remarks upon his retirement as editor, Bob described his own intellectual odyssey over the course of his 40-year career at the Journal. Hired as a reporter in Chicago in 1962, he was at first reluctant to join the editorial page because he thought he might not be conservative enough. In 1964 he voted for LBJ over Goldwater, but he was persuaded by Vermont Royster to join the page in 1965.
We don't think Bob changed so much as the world changed around him and the rest of us. He took the helm of the editorial page in 1972, at a time of turmoil in American foreign and economic policy, politics and culture. Instead of falling for the fashions of the day, he tried to understand what was happening and why.
That searching led him time and again to sources and minds who challenged the status quo. On the rule of law, to the Yale scholar Alexander Bickel. On security issues and arms control, to Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter. And on economics, Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer. Their ideas, among those of many others, were nurtured in the pages of the Journal because of Bob.
His many crusades have been chronicled by others: The promotion in the 1970s and 1980s of what became known as "supply-side economics"; the critique of detente and arms control with the Soviet Union; the campaign against the Clinton Administration on ethics and the rule of law; and for school choice, faster approvals for AIDS drugs, and welfare reform. But what we as his colleagues recall most is the courage he showed in pursuing these causes.
For all of his personal soft-spokenness, Bob was the kind of editor you want with you in a foxhole. We learned this firsthand as he defended us against the Singapore government or some political official or corporate advertiser we had criticized. One consequence of making an editorial page influential is that the editor faces much more pressure to trim his sails or follow the pack. Bob always had the nerve to resist intellectual fads and political pressure.
The other seminal Bartley character trait was his optimism. In his 2002 valedictory remarks, only a year after the terror attack that demolished our New York offices, Bob counseled his audience "that things could be worse; indeed, they have been worse," going back to the intellectual confusion of the 1970s.
Bob championed immigration and free markets, despite the disruptive change they sometimes cause, because he had supreme faith both in the American system and in the human capacity to adapt and prosper. "What I think I've learned over three decades is that in this society, rationality wins out, progress happens, and problems do have solutions" he said last year.
Bob received many awards over the years, including the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing and only last week the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bush. But his greatest achievement is that, through the power of his own mind and pen, he helped change the world.