The Magazine

'New Leader' Days

Can you have a political magazine without politics?

Sep 18, 2006, Vol. 12, No. 01 • By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
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Sometime earlier this year the New Leader magazine, after 82 years in business, ceased publication. Not all that many people could have known of the magazine during its existence. The tag line in a full-page ad that it once ran in the New York Times Book Review seeking new subscribers, as I remember it, was "Habitual coupon clippers please don't clip this one." The ad went on to say that not everyone read the magazine and cited a statistically infinitesimal number of people who did--only the intellectually best people, to be sure. John F. Kennedy read it, Hubert Humphrey read it, T.S. Eliot read it, and I forget the other rather rarefied names who did. In its house ads, the magazine used to carry a blurb from Eliot that went (again, I'm quoting from memory): "Of all the journals that cross my desk, the one I should most sorely miss is the New Leader."

I worked as a sub-editor for the New Leader for nearly two years, 1962-63. If that ad were to have been re-run later, it could not have said that Joseph Epstein reads it, because for more than 40 years I scarcely glimpsed it. Now that the magazine is gone, I suppose the best I can say is that I shall miss not missing it. But my brief adventures there, I have always known, were of considerable significance, to me if not at all to the rest of the world.

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