NR’s First 70 Years

‘Always carry champagne,” Napoleon Bonaparte, man about Europe, is supposed to have said. “In victory you deserve it, in defeat you need it.” What did National Review win and lose in our first 70 years?

The great victory was the defeat of Soviet communism. In August 1991, I was on my way to a vacation in Egypt when Soviet Communist Party hard-liners made their move to oust Mikhail Gorbachev. Only days later I opened my hotel door in Cairo to find a copy of that morning’s International Herald Tribune with the headline, “communism collapses.”