WASHINGTON 2002
The Magazine of Restoration Washington
National Journal's combination of hard-won fact and original thought seems to work in the post-9/11 era
Washington, after a decade of bimbology and two decades of antigovernment passion, has regained some measure of respect. “Inside the Beltway” used to be synonymous only with being out of touch. Now, to be inside Interstate 495 is to be where 189 people lost their lives in the Pentagon attacks. It is to be close to the public servants who will either figure out how to protect the rest of us from fanatical mass killers, or die alongside us. In this new world, the power fiefdoms of the nineties are in deep quaver. Corporations hire criminal defense attorneys. Wall Street worries. Silicon Valley slumps in the distance.
The magazine of Restoration Washington is the National Journal. Its values, like those of Augustan Rome or Dryden’s Britain, are intelligence, lucidity, moderation, good taste. Its virtues unite partisans from Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts (“enormously helpful and useful”) to Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (“must reading . . . comprehensive and fair”). It is true that few outside a thirty-block radius of the White House and Capitol Hill see the National Journal. Its circulation is only 10,000. But it is a platinum coterie of men and women who make decisions that affect millions. Congress, the White House, federal agencies, the lobbyists who chase them and the media that cover them — all read the National Journal. “They’re a luxury good,” says Jodie T. Allen, former editor of Outlook, The Washington Post’s opinion section, and now a top U.S. News & World Report editor. “They’re very, very strong.”
At the Delta and US Air shuttles, you often find foot-high stacks of The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, and other magazines for free. The National Journal is never gratis. Subscribers pay $1,499 a year. In the marketplace of ideas, the National Journal is akin to a new Mercedes in a used-car lot. Sometimes, that has led people to dismiss it as excellent but staid. As Howard Kurtz, who covers media for The Washington Post puts it, “The National Journal does some very high-quality work, but it’s rather low on the buzz meter because of its limited and costly circulation.”
Buzz, contrary to popular belief, does not translate into money. The National Journal Group’s revenues, profits, circulation, advertising, and staff have doubled since a below-the-radar Washingtonian named David G. Bradley bought it for $11 million in 1997. Bradley now presides over a staff of 200 and annual revenues of $30 million. “While everyone else’s strategy was cut, cut, cut,” says publisher John Fox Sullivan, “we took the opposite one — invest, invest, invest.”
The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, both generators of buzz, have lost money for years. This past summer, two blocks from Sullivan’s offices, The Weekly Standard’s lean staff of twenty-seven was having its editorial meeting around a conference table that owner Rupert Murdoch salvaged from Mirabella, his defunct fashion magazine. Six blocks east at The New Republic, owners Martin Peretz and the New York businessmen Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt shrunk; much of the staff voluntarily took a 10 percent salary cut.
“The last time I was in Washington, I was shocked by how little conversation centered around the opinion-driven weeklies,” said David Carr, who covers the media for The New York Times, speaking only for himself. “There seems to be kind of an era of postpunditry where people are seeking data rather than opinions about data. The reason the National Journal lands the way it does, which is with quite a bit of impact, is the utility. I think there’s been a loss of altitude in terms of what one person thinks about what another person thinks.”
The National Journal was founded in 1969 by two New Yorkers, an investment banker and a lawyer, who wanted to create a publication that would be to the executive branch what Congressional Quarterly was to Congress. “It went through a ton of money, a gazillion people and lots of turmoil,” says publisher Sullivan. In 1975 the investment banker bowed out, leaving only the lawyer, who hired Sullivan from Newsweek. Sullivan helped invent the concept that holds today. The new team abandoned the White House-only approach. It made all of federal government its playground.
“We decided this is the highest-stakes, most interesting game in the world,” Sullivan explains. “The magazine that covers this game should be nonpartisan, nonideological. But not encyclopedic — we would pick and choose. We would be forward-looking — not what happened last week, but what might happen next year, the next ten years. We would write about issues in depth. But we would never say who should win this game. At most we would write about who was behind it, and what their strategies were.”
By 1986, financial stability, Sullivan said, had proved elusive; the founding lawyer was ready to sell, and Times Mirror was ready to buy. Under Times Mirror ownership, Government Executive, a monthly magazine for senior federal managers, was purchased. And the National Journal Group started a twice-daily news service covering Capitol Hill called CongressDaily. When the General Mills executive Mark H. Willes took over Times Mirror to cut costs, he famously killed New York Newsday; a less noticed move was his decision to sell the National Journal Group.
The new owner, Bradley, continued selectively buying properties to add to the group. Today, his media Liechtenstein includes the original Times Mirror purchases; The Hotline, a daily log of news on politics and campaigns; Technology Daily, a news digest on information-technology politics and policy; American Health Line, a daily briefing on health-care politics, policy, and business; The Capital Source, a directory of Washington organizations, and The Federal Technology Source, a directory of the federal technology community.
Where does this media principality fit into the United Nations of political weeklies? Right- or left-leaning opinion was verboten at any National Journal publication, until Bradley. He decided to recruit columnists whose writing was creative and whose politics were unpredictable. Jonathan Rauch, openly gay, wants gay marriage legalized but gay hate crimes left to criminal statutes. Tish Durkin has a wickedly trenchant perspective on political culture, its ideology under constant reconstruction. Stuart Taylor Jr. has ecumenical brilliance on legal affairs.
These untrammeled minds take up the front of the magazine. The rest of the book offers extremely smart reporters, under no duress to follow the herd, writing pieces saturated in insight based on hard-won information. First come the features — three pieces up to 4,000 words each on topical issues such as terrorism, or in-depth takeouts on national security, the economy, lobbying, and other issues. “Hardball,” for instance, (July 6) reported on the opening of a political fund-raising arm by Major League Baseball; “Drugs on Trial” (August 3) presented detailed recommendations to the Federal Drug Administration for improving clinical drug trials. Then come the “Sections” — Congress, Administration, Issues & Ideas, Lobbying & Law, Politics. Readers find White House, congressional, and other beat reporters summing up the week or delivering stories the dailies overlook — a profile of Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s most trusted aide or a look at how a measure backed by the pharmaceutical industry got attached to a bioterrorism bill. Readers also get condensed reports from CongressDaily and Hotline. The Issues & Ideas section features the highly regarded media critic William Powers. The magazine closes with analytic political columnists such as Charlie Cook and William Schneider.
There is something about the uncertainties and urgencies of post-9/11 Washington that makes the combination of reported fact and original thought potent. And there isn’t another political weekly that approaches politics this way. The closest might be The New Republic. Founded in 1914, today’s New Republic has nurtured an identifiable signature piece, the strategy of which is to upend a previously unexamined, prevailing idea. This piece, done well, guarantees surprise, and sometimes delivers enlightenment. And to the extent it has writers who can pull it off without contrarian artifice, the magazine embodies intellectual agility and flex. Among some of its best counterintuitive pieces have been Jonathan Chait’s “This Man Is Not a Republican,” the first to cast John McCain as a heretic among the party’s right; Michelle Cottle debunking the Democratic Louisiana Senator John Breaux’s reputation as a dealmaker; and Rob Walker on the overrated acumen of General Electric’s Jack Welch.
The New Republic’s pro-Israel advocacy too often confines it to a hermetically sealed foreign-policy universe, with new ideas rarely getting in or out, and predictability the necessary result. Its circulation has been flat at about 85,000, its financial losses perennial. Last year, owner Martin Peretz sold part of the magazine to two New Yorkers who are also funding the start-up of the New York newspaper The Sun. The none-too-cosseted staff was moved to cheaper quarters.
National Review, founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr., has a 150,000 circulation. Although editor Rich Lowry is a regular on the political talk-show circuit, the magazine, partly because it is based in New York, is less than hot in Washington. That designation belongs to The Weekly Standard, founded in 1995 by William Kristol, John Podhoretz, and Fred Barnes. “It became an important Washington player almost immediately,” says Kurtz. “It announced its independence from the Republican establishment by ticking off Bob Dole and George W. Bush.”
Since September 11, the magazine has articulated positions on foreign policy that the Bush administration has come around to supporting — using full force in Afghanistan after early tepid going, invading Iraq, and democratizing Palestine. “Where Bush has gotten is where we have been,” Kristol says. “Since 9/11, there’s a feeling here, ‘You’re in a real debate that’s consequential.’” Barnes, who in 2000 supported Bush while Kristol supported McCain, has been unafraid to scold the administration despite his pro-W leaning. A recent piece of his praised Bush for what is called his principled stands on big issues like taxes, cloning, the Kyoto treaty, the war on terrorism, missile defense, and federal judges, but was critical of his “shamelessly pragmatic” straying on smaller issues — supporting farm subsidies and campaign finance reform, folding on vouchers and protectionist trade measures, and opposing ethnic profiling and arming pilots.
There is a dynasty-making flavor to the Standard — in its short existence, it has become a better-than-average spotter of young talent. Among its discoveries are David Brooks, Christopher Caldwell, and Tucker Carlson. Still, taking on Republican orthodoxy and finding great writers has not increased circulation or profit. Funded from the start by Murdoch, its circulation is about 60,000, maybe “down a tad,” says Kristol, since 9/11. “And it’s still losing money,” he adds.
This fall Patrick Buchanan, backed by the Greek shipping magnate Taki Theodoracopulos, is scheduled to introduce a new Washington biweekly called The American Conservative. The magazine is expected to challenge The Weekly Standard, particularly its support for free trade and internationalism.
On the left, The Nation, founded in 1865 by abolitionists, has had little relevance in Washington for the last decade. Interestingly, after September 11, The Nation says its 102,000 circulation has climbed closer to 118,000. The American Prospect, a biweekly founded in 1990 by Robert Reich (later Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor), editor Robert Kuttner, and the Pulitzer-winner Paul Starr, has grown since 2001, jumping from 27,000 circulation to 47,000. It calls itself “resolutely liberal”; an August 26 article, for example, typically urged Democrats to take more advantage of President Bush’s handling of the economy. Among its contributors are Molly Ivins, Lani Guinier, Jane Mayer, Sissela Bok, Ralph Nader, and Amartya Sen.
Although he denies it — every media profile dwells on his soft-spoken self-effacement — The National Journal would not be where it is today without David Bradley. And it took him a long time to get to it. Born in 1953 in Washington, Bradley was, in his own words, “a deeply disagreeable young person. A little Curtis LeMay.” He set his sights, “insufferably,” he says, on running for the Senate by the time he was thirty. He was a Republican at fifteen. At eighteen, he earned $60 a week working for the infamous Committee to Re-Elect the President.
He earned his B.A. in political science at Swarthmore, his MBA at Harvard, and his law degree at Georgetown. In 1979 he started a research firm whose flawed and soon-ditched objective was to conduct research on any question for any company in any industry. “It was just awful,” Bradley recalls. “People talk about the joy of the start-up years. It took fifteen years to work.” His Senate plans waited, and waited. Bradley’s come-to-Jesus moment happened when he was forty, on a thirteen-hour flight to Vietnam. For the first time in years, Bradley says, he had a day alone to think. He realized he had become older. “I looked older. I was living in D.C., which had no elected senators. I wasn’t a Republican anymore. I was never going to be a senator.” On the same flight, he decided to buy a magazine. Perhaps his interest in politics could be realized through journalism. “If I couldn’t take the course,” he thought, “then at least I could audit it.”
Back home, he called an investment banker, Rick LePere, a Washington magazine broker, to see if he could buy his favorite magazine, The New Republic. Owner Peretz informed LePere that Barbra Streisand had just offered $25 million, way beyond Bradley’s price range. When Times Mirror’s Willes decided to sell the National Journal, Sullivan contacted LePere about finding a buyer. Bradley paid $11 million for a 5,000-circulation property that was modestly profitable.
“Times Mirror had been managing it principally on the cost side,” Bradley said. “We needed to attract a caliber of talent who would not even consider working with us.” Peretz did Bradley the favor of firing Michael Kelly the week Bradley bought the National Journal. Kelly agreed, grudgingly, to meet with Bradley. “The look on his face,” Bradley said. “It wasn’t hostile. But a deeply disturbed look of ‘Why am I here?’” After a seven-hour conversation, Kelly knew why he was there, and was hired as a columnist. Eventually, he became editor. Currently, he is the magazine’s editorial director. Bradley’s financial wherewithal exploded two years later, when he sold half of his business in an IPO that netted him $142 million. He poured more money into the National Journal, and bought The Atlantic Monthly from Mort Zuckerman for about $10 million. Now, with Kelly as its editor, he is shoveling money into the Atlantic.
Since September 11, the generalities that govern The O’Reilly
Factor, CNN Crossfire, The Beltway Boys, and the rest of the punditocracy
have not really penetrated the particular and specific task of
reimagining our national security. To prevent another 9/11 requires
not just opinions, but ideas. And those ideas, more than ever,
have to be born from actual-reported and unflinchingly observed
fact, not assumption. The National Journal’s current editor
is Charles Green, who worked at the Knight Ridder Washington bureau
for seventeen years. Such declines in quality as that tenure saw,
he is not one to mention. His stewardship of a less-than-buzzy
weekly is the unspoken rejoinder, not only to his former cost-cutting
bosses, but to an industry addicted to double-digit profit margins,
and the layoffs, low pay, and hiring freezes that come with them.
But Green isn’t satisfied. “I don’t want people
to think we can coast,” he says. “We could be better
at the quality of our insight and the strength of our analysis.
We could be better-written. This is about keeping getting better.”
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