God and Man in Bloomington

One day in 1966, National Review Editor William F. Buckley Jr. opened his mail to find a check for $264,000. The sender was R. (for Robert) Emmett Tyrrell, a graduate student about to launch the Alternative, a right-wing campus newspaper at Indiana University. Tyrrell had perhaps $27 in his bank account at the time, but he liked Buckley's magazine and was stirred by a notice to subscribers that the weekly was $264,000 in debt.

Buckley never cashed the check, but he made the acquaintance of his whimsical would-be benefactor. When Tyrrell decided to go national with his paper in 1970, Buckley lent advice and encouragement and, before you could say Edmund Burke, the Alternative had become one of the nation's most energetic and sprightly journals of opinion. Though its subscribers number only 15,000, they include such influential citizens as Ronald Reagan, former Treasury Secretary William Simon and current Energy Czar James Schlesinger.

Liveliest Prose. For $10, the faithful receive ten times a year a 40-page compendium of essays, satires, diatribes, as well as acid-etched reviews of books, movies and saloons (recent recommendation: Delisa's Bungalow Beer Garden in south St. Louis). The Alternative's list of contributors reads like a Who's Who of the American right and center. Among them are Buckley, Public Interest Co-Editor Irving Kristol, Harvard Government Professor James Q. Wilson, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Social Theorist Sidney Hook. The masthead is a Who's Who of their children: Senior Editor William Kristol (Irving's son), Art Adviser Elliott Banfield (son of Urbanologist Edward), Managing Editor Adam Meyerson (son of centrist Educator Martin), Contributor Benjamin Stein (son of Economist Herbert).

In appearance the Alternative might be taken for a Department of Commerce bulletin printed on white bread, but its opinions are couched in some of the liveliest prose since the passing of H.L. Mencken. Tyrrell's own monthly column seethes with Menckenesque malice toward such figures as Playboy's Hugh Hefner ("the Lutheran philosopher"), Fanne Fox ("the Washington socialite") and Mao Tse-tung ("perhaps the greatest statesman since Adolf Hitler assumed room temperature"). Tyrrell's view of the Inauguration: "A new Government took office in Washington, not via bayonets and tanks as is the custom in some of the world's capitals [but] in the Democratic Way ... via hyperbole, sham, melodrama and public-spirited mendacity." To Tyrrell, "few pols have ever been more banal, more tedious and more stupendously uninteresting" than Jimmy Carter, whom he has dubbed "a grinning dunce."

In recent issues, the magazine has argued that school busing is inherently racist, that the Red-hunting of the McCarthy era was justified and that criminal court judges are overawed by psychiatry. The Alternative's Harold Robbins Award for the worst book of 1976 was bestowed on Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time (previous winner: Theodore H. White's Breach of Faith). Yet the magazine has also discoursed with a minimum of polemic--though sometimes at unnecessary length--on NATO, the guaranteed annual income and the separation of church and state. In fact, if the Alternative has a guiding philosophy, it is little more than a disgust for hypocrisy, Utopian social engineering and bad writing. Says Tyrrell: "We are not after the right-wing yahoos or the left-wing zealots."

Still in Bloomington, Ind., the site of the university, Tyrrell, 34, and his seven-member staff occupy a closet-sized office above an Indian import store overlooking the Monroe County Courthouse. The editor's office is guarded by a life-size papier-mache statue of (who else?) H.L. Mencken, a gift of Timothy Moynihan (Daniel Patrick's son). Tyrrell, whose wealthy grandfather was the manufacturer of Crown gas ranges, plays vigorous handball each afternoon and commutes by red Mercedes the two miles to his rambling eleven-room house, where he lives in country-gentleman comfort with his wife Judy, their son Patrick Daniel (named after Senator Moynihan), 3, and a bulldog called Irving Kristol.

Ultimate Delusion. Unlike other modestly successful editors, Tyrrell has no plans to widen his magazine's audience. "We aim to be read intensively, not extensively," says he. "No little magazine alive is financially viable unless it is trash. I successfully deluded myself into thinking I would get good writers and the readership of intellectuals. No use going for the ultimate delusion that we could make money." Little danger of that: the magazine, which was subtitled An American Spectator in 1974 in admiration of Britain's conservative Spectator, loses about $150,000 a year. The Alternative's tiny readership is so loyal, however, that annual deficits are met through periodic appeals to subscribers, and it is not impossible that some sympathetic young reader may some day be moved to mail Tyrrell a check for $150,000.

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