On a sunny day in Alexandria’s historic Parker-Gray neighborhood, I knock on the door of a large brick house painted yellow with green trim.
“You’re right on time,” says R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. His home is less than a mile from the banks of the Potomac River and only a few blocks from the offices of The American Spectator, the magazine Tyrrell founded in 1967.
Dressed in khakis and brown tassel loafers, the pocket square a silken plume rising from the breast of his navy-blue blazer, Tyrrell motions past the sitting room to his library, where a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln hangs above the fireplace mantle.
“This was a gift to my great-great-grandfather, a secret service agent in Chicago,” Tyrrell says, his boyish voice recalling Chet Baker. “Lincoln was our greatest president. Well, it’s between Lincoln and Washington, at least.”
We take our seats in the library — along with Marina, a two-year-old chocolate labrador who curls up at the foot of a tall column of books. There is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire nestled among heavy volumes of history, politics, and political biography. I notice a healthy collection of novels by William Faulkner, and works by Tyrrell’s friends Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, whose picture also hangs in the hallway alongside photographs of Tyrrell with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Though his own 14 published books are all nonfiction, Tyrrell has read and enjoyed novels since his boyhood in Chicago and college days at the University of Indiana, where he swam the 1500 meters for the men’s swim team. He shared swim lanes with friends who went on to compete in the Olympics, but his own career veered toward politics and journalism during graduate school.
In the spring of 1968, Bobby Kennedy arrived on Indiana’s campus early in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president.
“[Kennedy] was polished,” Tyrrell remembers. “He was au courant. He reached out to the throng with an infectious sense of urgency.”
Exiting the stage of the auditorium, a confused Kennedy by chance confronted Tyrrell and asked: “How do we get out of here?”
Though their politics differed, Tyrrell’s Midwestern courtesy prevailed on him to lead Kennedy to a car waiting on the street and, before parting, drop a “Reagan for President” button into Kennedy’s outstretched hand, which made Kennedy smile. Seven weeks later, Tyrrell watched on television as Bobby Kennedy lay dying on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
“Over the next decades,” Tyrrell writes in his outstanding 2023 memoir How Do We Get Out of Here? (Bombardier), “America attempted to sort it all out: the drugs, the sex, the demonstrations for random causes—some noble, some not.”
Driven by the athlete’s desire to compete – not for medals and victories, but for the vindication of his ideals in the arena of national politics – Tyrrell planted his flag at a Bloomington farmhouse, and set to work on The American Spectator.
He harvested support from generous Hoosiers, including broadcast pioneer Sarkes Tarzian, inventor and entrepreneur Harold Ransburg, and Mrs. Eli Lilly of the global pharmaceutical company. As he honed his attacks against hypocrites, liberals, and various schemes designed by central planners, Tyrrell’s sprightly journal became a gathering place for eclectic thinkers and emerging writers of various conservative persuasions, people with outsized ambitions and style to spare.
American writers George Will, Andrew Ferguson, William Kristol, Bill McGurn, and Greg Gutfeld cut their teeth at American Spectator. International writers such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Luigi Barzini, and Jean-Francois Revel left their mark, too, building the magazine’s reputation for unmasking frauds, charlatans, and other buffoons of the Left while retaining a youthful madcap that kept at bay the starchiness of other conservative journals.
By the late 1970s, the country experienced episodic chaos brought on by economic pressures and confrontations abroad, both made worse by what Tyrrell calls the “goofball” presidency of Jimmy Carter. Yet Tyrrell found success with readers, and acceptance among the elite. He befriended former president Richard Nixon, bonding over an appreciation for writers and the give-and-take of ideas. He began a syndicated weekly column on the suggestion of Meg Greenfield, then-editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page. His annual budget grew to include trips to Europe (including a hefty fund for wining and dining), all part of Tyrrell’s strategy to get tongues wagging and “lure the European intelligentsia” onto the pages of his magazine.
By 1980, both Nixon and Tyrrell shared the belief that Carter, once the wonder boy of liberal politics, would lose to the chronically underestimated Reagan, the man Tyrrell had supported in the Republican presidential primary 12 years earlier. Tyrrell sensed that the actor-turned-politician, someone more artist than sophister or economist, recognized a fundamental truth – that culture is more important to politics than politics is to politics.
Tyrrell lunched with Reagan in the Cabinet room and, over the course of eight years, was in and out of the Oval Office. The president reciprocated, too, joining the Tyrrell family for dinner at their home in Northern Virginia, where the White House bartender prepared the commander-in-chief’s preferred cocktail, a screwdriver.
But the glory of the Reagan Revolution faded with the election of Bill Clinton and the so-called “suit-and-tie radicals,” which brought on another period of chaos in the body politic. Tyrrell blames the end of the conservative revolution that remade domestic and foreign policy on the coterie of “assistant presidents” who surrounded the great man and stymied his loftier and more lasting ambitions to kick off a conservative countercultural movement. Like so many factory-setting Republican operatives, the “assistant presidents” feared what they couldn’t understand, Tyrrell says. Their flagging political libidos were no match for the animal spirits summoned by the Left.
Being a good member of the Left, Tyrrell writes, is less a matter of principle or beliefs – in “healthcare for all,” or “free college,” or “affordable housing,” whatever that means – than conformity to an “exacting, if ever-changing etiquette” dictated by bosses at our jobs and on our televisions. He writes of the merger between the ideological world and the cultural world, which began with FDR’s New Deal and evolved in fits and starts through LBJ’s Great Society and George McGovern’s New Politics, embedding alien beliefs about race, class, sex, and identity into our system of education, corporate boardrooms, and government bureaucracies.
The ultimate effect has been Kultursmog, a German word that literally translates to “culture smog” but which Tyrrell views as the pollution of American culture by Left-wing political ideas.
By this point in our conversation, a jackhammer is pounding through the concrete outside our window, and my host is ready to move into the dining room for sandwiches. As we end our conversation, I ask about the final chapter of his memoir, titled “Life is Short, But Eternity is Forever.” The pages arrive as a sort of answer to the “how do we get out of here” question posed more than 50 years ago by Bobby Kennedy.
“God,” says Tyrrell, a lifelong Catholic. “It’s the best answer I have.”
His next book – his best, he hopes – will be about faith.
John J. Waters is author of the postwar novel River City One. Follow him at @JohnJWaters1 on X.
