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Gordon Allott’s loss was journalism’s gain.

History-minded Coloradans might recall the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1989/01/19/ex-senator-gordon-allott-colorado-republican-dies/063790ab-d403-4df4-b9e9-e5b64e3ad451/" target=_blank>three-term Republican U.S. senator</a> from the prairie crossroads of Lamar. Running for a fourth term in 1972, Allott faced a former Republican named Floyd Haskell, a state legislator from Denver who switched parties over President Richard M. Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. Haskell bludgeoned Allott with the increasingly unpopular war in Southeast Asia.

Nixon felt little of this. He was an incumbent president matched against a weak foe and had strength that Allott could only envy. Yet the president wouldn’t lend his coattails. Nixon was on his way to a massive landslide; a single appearance with his loyal Republican ally could have made the difference in a race rocked by Nixon’s own decisions.

The president flew right over Colorado on his last campaign swing, but he didn’t bother to land. Allott lost by <a href="https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/Results/Abstract/pdf/1900-1999/1972AbstractBook.pdf" target=_blank>fewer than 10,000 votes</a>.

This lack of loyalty, of respect, was unforgivable to a young intellectual on Allott’s staff — and unforgettable. When George F. Will left the defeated senator’s office to become a writer, he had taken the measure of the president’s character. As Nixon’s fortunes rapidly sagged and Will’s explosively soared, a compelling new voice on the Washington scene poured enfilading fire on the Watergate White House from the president’s right flank.

“A year ago the reigning philosophy was survival of the fittest, and Mr. Nixon and his agents were feeling remarkably fit,” Will wrote in 1973 as a columnist for National Review, the conservative bible. “Today, Mr. Nixon has all the friends he has earned and deserves.”

And the extraordinary career of George F. Will, columnist, had begun.

Courtesy of George F. Will

Will’s ensuing half-century of columns is a remarkable feat in journalism history. The Post is commemorating the achievement in this special section for much the same reason that Major League Baseball took heightened notice of a game between the Orioles and the Angels on Sept. 6, 1995. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/09/07/history-embraces-ripken/67b96b07-c74c-488e-aa72-208720751639/" target=_blank>Baltimore shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. on that day</a> trotted to his familiar station between second and third for the 2,131st time without a miss — breaking the seemingly invincible record set by the great Lou Gehrig.

Journalism careers are not quantified with the passion and precision of baseball seasons. No one knows who holds the column-writing record, or even how such a record might be defined in a world of gossip columns, advice columns, sports columns and opinion columns. What can be said with confidence is that Will is the Iron Man of America’s op-ed pages as surely as Ripken was the Iron Man of baseball, and for many of the same reasons: native talent, self-discipline, devotion to craft, conscientious preparation and enthusiasm for the contest. Some people are born to do something and content to keep doing it. For Ripken, that was fielding and hitting a baseball; for Will, it is thinking and writing about things that matter.

Though credentialed as an academic with a Princeton PhD, Will taught only briefly before feeling the tug of his true calling after Allott’s defeat. Like many conservative writers before and after him, he sought out William F. Buckley Jr., proposing to write a regular column from Washington for National Review. The weekly handbook of the respectable right, Buckley’s magazine was feeling its way painfully through the Watergate debacle, in which a Republican president who had never been entirely trusted by conservatives fought for political survival against a Democratic Congress and the liberal press.

Will’s independent course caught the eye of Washington Post deputy editor <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/05/14/editorial-editor-meg-greenfield-dies/06b7b7e3-53b1-4f66-970c-580de9773aa3/" target=_blank>Meg Greenfield</a>, the rising power of The Post’s editorial pages. At Greenfield’s invitation, Will began publishing twice weekly through the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicated his columns to newspapers around the country.

Craig Herndon

Karl Schumacher

From the beginning, he confounded <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaiah-Berlin#ref700060" target=_blank>philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s</a> famous taxonomy of thinkers. According to Berlin, foxlike thinkers know many things. Hedgehog thinkers know one big thing. Will is a crossbreed, neither and both. The many things he knows about — baseball, the Federalist Papers, Supreme Court jurisprudence, Bruce Springsteen, Joan of Arc, gerrymandering, criminal justice, macroeconomics, “the pleasure … of dry martinis at dusk” (really, the list seems endless) — march smartly through his copy thanks to the one big thing that organizes his ideas. He knows that Thomas Jefferson was onto something essential when he wrote that individual humans have certain unalienable rights, and that James Madison was uncommonly astute in constituting a government to protect and serve those rights. With a dollop of <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/" target=_blank>Heraclitus</a> mixed in (“Nothing is permanent except change,” which Will sometimes pares down to “nothing lasts”), the essential point emerged. America’s birth of freedom is in eternal tension with the threat of too much government. To preserve the former, one must resist the latter.

“Conservatism has always been defined by its insistence on limits to the claims the collectivity — the public sector — could make on the individual,” Will wrote in his magnum opus of 2019, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Sensibility-George-F-Will/dp/0316480932" target=_blank>The Conservative Sensibility</a>.” “Contemporary American conservatism was born in reaction to the New Deal and subsequent excessive enlargements of the state.”

Having seen the salience of his philosophy wax under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s — a period during which Will became an informal White House adviser and a national celebrity — and wane steadily ever since, he concluded: “Today, this conservatism is a persuasion without a party, a waif in a cold climate.”

“The Conservative Sensibility” returned Will to his roots. At more than 500 closely reasoned pages, it is, as political journalist Matthew Continetti put it, “a definitive statement, a summation of his remarkable career in journalism and politics.” Where many venerable commentators write memoirs full of anecdotes and famous names, Will’s summing up was a work of philosophy. He is a journalist for whom ideas come first.

<a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Will" target=_blank>Born May 4, 1941</a>, in Champaign, Illinois, Will was literally a child of philosophy. His father, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40320776" target=_blank>Frederick L. Will</a>, was a professor at the University of Illinois who came up in the distinctively American philosophical tradition known as Pragmatism. Son George followed his father into the family business, <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/~alco/CTNAT/2009/will.html" target=_blank>pursuing advanced studies</a> in political philosophy at Oxford University and Princeton. He received his PhD in 1968 <a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/14643887" target=_blank>with a dissertation</a> on the tension between guaranteed individual rights and the power of democratically elected lawmakers. He never lost interest in the question.

For purposes of the doctorate, he unpacked the landmark 1943 Supreme Court opinion in which <a href="https://www.roberthjackson.org/opinion/opinion-of-the-court-west-virginia-state-board-of-education-v-barnette-319-u-s-624-june-14-1943/" target=_blank>Justice Robert H. Jackson defended</a> the right of Jehovah’s Witness children to sit quietly while their classmates saluted the flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. The West Virginia Board of Education had made such behavior grounds for expulsion from school and fines — even jail time — for parents. “The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy,” <a href="https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/319/624.html" target=_blank>Jackson wrote</a>, “to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.”

In other words, freedom is a birthright, not a grant from government. A corollary followed close behind: Free people are more likely to improve themselves than to be improved by government initiatives.

Will traced this principle to the English philosopher John Locke and his disciples among the American Founders. Their philosophy — he called it “classical liberalism” in “The Conservative Sensibility” — “is the distinction between the public and the private spheres of life. On this distinction, freedom depends.” Strong and independent courts — another of Will’s foundational commitments — are necessary to defend private life against the whims and excesses of elected branches of government.

The first question for every self-described conservative is: conserving what? This was a hot debate when Will was starting out and is still disputed now. Flavors of conservative thought in the 1960s ran from the hierarchical — even authoritarian — conservatism of a bygone Catholic Europe, to the populist and cultural conservatism of white nationalists. Will chose the libertarian strain of conservative ideas associated with <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/barry_goldwater_of_arizona.htm" target=_blank>Barry Goldwater</a>, the Arizona senator whose failed presidential bid in 1964 was the fire from which Reagan’s phoenix arose in 1980.

Ferd Kaufman

Will rejected the vaguely royalist conservatism epitomized by Russell Kirk and Whittaker Chambers, early influences on National Review, as “throne-and-altar, blood-and-soil nostalgia.” Describing himself as “an amiable, low-voltage atheist,” Will felt government could respect religious faith without preferring religious faith. The conservatism of populists like Patrick Buchanan was even less viable. Populism, Will wrote, was about emotions and movements, which tend to be antithetical to individual human rights.

“The primary purpose of American conservatism,” Will asserted, is “conserving the principles of the Founding.” He is open-eyed about the hypocrisy of enslavers extolling liberty, and the misogyny of a society in which women could not vote. At the same time, he valued the seedbed planted by the Founders with the ideas of equal dignity and equal access to an upward path of one’s own choosing.

Will has consistently contrasted his conservative philosophy with the progressive tradition in American politics, with Woodrow Wilson — another Princeton man — as the epitome and spokesman. Will’s ideal government has limited powers, and those limits are enforced by constitutional checks and balances. Wilson’s ideal government, by contrast, required expansive powers to fill an ever-greater role in the lives of the people. Will champions a nation of individuals pursuing their own happiness; progressivism, in his view, seeks to create a government that defines happiness and then provides it.

What Wilson began, Franklin D. Roosevelt supercharged with his New Deal, which “encourage[d] actively the conception of government as deliverer of material well-being,” as Will put it.

Readers of Will’s columns have never been required to know the philosophical design behind the chugging factory of his prolific output. But the fact that he has had, from the start, a carefully thought-out view of life and politics is essential to his originality and distinction. Most columnists start with the news and go from there. Will starts with ideas, which he embraced early and never abandoned, and finds in the news opportunities to illustrate them.

His philosophical consistency is married to a consistency of style that gives Will his distinctive writer’s voice. Countless readers over the years have found the huge vocabulary of his columns and his seemingly bottomless supply of apt quotations remarkable and a bit intimidating at the same time. But there is more to Will’s signature than Bartlett’s plus Roget’s.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/progressives-rejoice-at-a-stunning-gift-the-right-to-pump-their-own-gas/2018/01/12/70135ed0-f6ea-11e7-b34a-b85626af34ef_story.html" target="_blank">A January 2018 column</a> examined an Oregon law requiring that gasoline in cities be pumped by service station employees; self-service was permitted only in rural areas. This classic example of a special interest (full-service gas station owners) using government to block competition was dressed up in a comedy of high-flown justifications — the first of which, Will reported with a written eye roll, was reducing the hazard of fires.

“This presumably refers to the many conflagrations regularly occurring at filling stations throughout the 48 states where 96 percent of Americans live lives jeopardized by state legislators who are negligent regarding their nanny-state duty to assume that their constituents are imbeciles.”

Chosen nearly at random from decades of work, this sentence contains many distinctive markings of Will’s writing style. It is long.  It contains unexpected words (conflagrations, jeopardized, negligent) that are precisely correct for their settings. It puts the reader’s brain to work cooperatively with the writer’s brain. When he refers to “the many conflagrations regularly occurring at filling stations,” Will invites his reader to think: wait — hang on, what? I’ve never seen a gas station fire outside a Hollywood movie.

The solemn tone continues until Will tips his hand with the slightly sneering phrase “their nanny-state duty.” From there it is a short road to the final gut-punch: “imbeciles.”

Like tens of thousands of others, this sentence shows that Will writes as a grandmaster plays chess, with the end in view from the opening move and each intermediate step thought out. He is never feeling his way through a column, never thinking out loud. His path might twist or turn, but it always leads somewhere, and typically announces its arrival with a snap or a bang.

It is a lofty style, a columnist’s equivalent of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. We’re not meant to think of the painter alone on his back atop the scaffolding. (Although for Will, the hard, lonely hours that go into the illusion of effortlessness are very much the point. “Cezanne, after putting a subject through 115 sittings for a single portrait, said, ‘I am not entirely displeased with the shirt front,’” Will once <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1992/07/26/the-foundation-of-happiness/e44966d7-1bbf-4489-b70d-06705c0db475/" target=_blank>recounted in a column</a>, adding: “That is how to paint, and live.”) We’re meant to behold the completed work after all signs of effort have been hauled away.

The possibility of such an elevated slightly antique, voice in the postmodern age appeared to Will as a student in 1958, when he opened a copy of the New York Post and found columnist Murray Kempton inside. “One reason I became a columnist is that, long before I did, I had in my mind’s eye a ‘role model,’” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/05/05/murray-kempton-columnist-and-hero/f07d82bf-72ce-4f80-ab7a-75fe69f78eb7/" target=_blank>Will once wrote</a> of that moment and of Kempton.

New York Daily News Archive

How to describe Murray Kempton? Maybe by analogy: Glenn Gould was a piano virtuoso who played everything differently from everyone else. In another musician, that would be to say that he played everything wrong. But in Gould’s case, different wasn’t wrong; it was genius.

You might say Kempton was the Gould of column writing, which he did differently from everyone else. Aristocratic in bearing, conservative in faith, he traversed New York by bicycle, hawk-nosed and regal with a faint Virginia drawl. Arriving at the courthouse or political protest or boxing gym, the scion of Episcopal bishops unclipped his trouser legs and readied another column as poet laureate of the city’s scoundrels, rogues and prizefighters. If you wanted a writer who might start a sentence with Suetonius or the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and end up 150 winding words later at the blood-soaked scene of a Mafia hit, Kempton was your man.

Stylistically, he was right out of the 18th century, when <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Addison" target=_blank>Joseph Addison and Richard Steele</a> invented the newspaper column around 1710 and Samuel Johnson perfected its original form while writing <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Rambler" target=_blank>twice a week from 1750 to 1752</a>. Kempton saw no need for further updates.

A Kempton column was not a garish marquee over the Vegas Strip, begging for a reader’s attention. Nor was it admonishment from the Church of Proper Policy Prescriptions. It was a seduction, a dance of veils ultimately revealing a glimpse of naked insight — but only to the patient and carefully attentive reader.

Will’s contribution to this oldest of journalistic legacies, his conscious connection to the earliest columnists, has been to preserve the sinuous structures and slow-building rhythms of Addisonian prose, along with the erudition and surprise of Kemptonian essays, but to prune everything back for television-age readers. Creating gardens rather than jungles, he has defended the idea that reading is more satisfying — and more edifying — if the reader has skin in the game.

His success has vindicated that belief. Will has never condescended to his readers, never pre-chewed his ideas for them, never put the bowl down where the dogs can get to it, as the saying goes in politics. He respects his readers; he knows they can keep up.

Jesse Dittmar

To do what Will has done — to write two lively and original essays per week for more than 2,700 weeks — one must have talent enough to get spotted in one’s 30s and health enough to keep going into one’s 80s. But it’s more than that. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/13/donald-trump-elon-musk-federal-spending/" target=_blank>In a recent column</a>, Will noted a fact about the world that is especially apparent to people whose jobs require them to watch it closely day after day.

“Life is not one damn thing after another,” he wrote, “it is the same damn thing over and over.” The secret ingredient to Will’s longevity is his imperviousness to boredom, his inexhaustible curiosity, his ability to find something new to say about the same damn thing, something fresh in the familiar.

That capacity is fed by Will’s bottomless appetite for reading. “I am struck by how much I am now writing about books,” he observed in the introduction to his 1994 collection of columns, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Levelling-Wind-Politics-Culture-1990-1994/dp/0029344387" target="_blank">The Leveling Wind</a>.” “History is the history of ideas, and the more journalism I do, print and broadcast, the more convinced I become that books are still the primary carriers of ideas.”

His reading is deep and broad, a bit heavy, perhaps, on the history and public policy side, but extending to biographies, memoirs and novels new and classic. (“In one of his Palliser novels, Anthony Trollope says …”) Not to mention think tank papers, magazine articles and journal reports, all on top of his daily immersion in the news.

From the start of September this year, until the middle of November when this is being written, Will has shared his gleanings from: “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Indispensable-Right-Free-Speech-Rage/dp/1668047047/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zJVfGOutoAIv5mm2X_q2_wfYctmWXrV2uFOyKHziA62k6BpQf-HH_VFLysvt1Ql-IJPW4cMBzcONc-7SSzXzPIgTy5-1-ArhpayCxiKDfStY-LhwBuifxGyz5WWHKXYyyQXXKg5yehh6oTWOsCwfkyXCwHzlZIF2wxG_76eYZjkXzk1j4ELpdGNWdEiEZD78K9P8v51fsAkYdH4vWPXTqtmOVU-NDcXdoHh4uSE3Sq0.cZO7BjQcPWNcafc13ZFTMiMvJtdjKxlFKS3q3hUqxrU&amp;qid=1725980098&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank">The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage</a>,” by Jonathan Turley; “<a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-everything-became-national-security-drezner" target="_blank">How Everything Became National Security</a>,” an article in Foreign Affairs by Daniel W. Drezner; “<a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/new-bioweapons-covid-biology" target="_blank">The New Bioweapons</a>,” also in Foreign Affairs, by a science professor and two Rand leaders; “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Light-Battle-Eisenhower-American-Superpower/dp/0358682371/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.A9cE2MLs84DDxZvMmPpZq6AVjdzVqeGxwdFkilVsmwQy_7YW30RkbVi9HnUZ6ue2Y--xunOs6NZYCmpY7m4sDOXl55N6IWEeNvJ3VLQYDHvlHfdgTz3kT60hG8AEGaGEF4pgcfiiTv8wTgQoOV0JnNibHTlgT7yBMxQRi6M9O-yykaWuF6OtsODmCKmpkGtR6xU0J72fshqEDj8tsv_Cq8CnEXLG6J1tH2HHuJCWRAY.QBJbrhp14ixTVfD6y1RCkX-5KxYeyNYZxQyqdMAtFgs&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;hvadid=695458436310&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvexpln=67&amp;hvlocphy=9007531&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvocijid=18296773950481788831--&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvrand=18296773950481788831&amp;hvtargid=kwd-2295238911823&amp;hydadcr=22538_13531263&amp;keywords=the+light+of+battle&amp;qid=1726173487&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank">The Light of Battle</a>,” by Michel Paradis; “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/New-Leviathans-Thoughts-After-Liberalism/dp/037460973X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=" target="_blank">The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism</a>,” by John Gray; another <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/how-wars-dont-end" target="_blank">Foreign Affairs essay</a>, this one by Margaret MacMillan, <a href="https://alumni.utoronto.ca/news/margaret-macmillan-appointed-order-merit-king-charles" target="_blank">great-granddaughter</a> of British prime minister <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/david-lloyd-george" target="_blank">David Lloyd George</a>; “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/07/26/hot-dog-money-guy-lawson-marty-blazer-ncaa-scandal-review/" target="_blank">Hot Dog Money: Inside the Biggest Scandal in the History of College Sports,</a>” by Guy Lawson; an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/09/navy-nuclear-submarines-shortage/" target="_blank">article by Jerry Hendrix</a> on nuclear submarines in American Affairs; a think-tank paper on workforce training; another article from Foreign Affairs, <a href="https://img.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/23/nicholas-eberstadt-demographics-united-states-immigration/" target="_blank">by Nicholas Eberstadt</a> on the topic of falling global population; a post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/25/biden-harris-artificial-intelligence-regulation/" target="_blank">on artificial intelligence</a> from the blog Grumpy Economist; a report from the Economic Innovation Group on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/30/government-entitlement-spending-medicare-medicaid-social-security/" target="_blank">transfer payments</a>; and “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Price-Power-McConnell-Mastered-Changed/dp/1668005840" target="_blank">The Price of Power</a>,” a biography of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) by Michael Tackett.

And once Will reads something, it stays read. “Who, besides Bill Clinton and George Bush, is responsible for Ross Perot’s remarkable political rise?” <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/barefoot-billionaire-198840" target=_blank>Will asked during the 1992 presidential campaign</a>. “Owen Wister is. Ninety years ago this week he published a novel, ‘The Virginian.’ It pioneered a literary genre, the Western; it invented the cowboy of popular imagination, and it defined a region, the West, as a repository of American yearnings and regrets.”

Who knows how many years he kept Wister’s book handy on the shelf of his well-stocked mind, waiting for the events that it would perfectly illuminate?

Mary Ann Fackelman

He gives no hint of slowing down. Quite the opposite. New columns are constantly arriving. Sometimes they stack up on the Opinions department schedule like United flights at Dulles. Many longtime fans recall Will’s most popular book, the 1990 smash bestseller “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Men-at-Work-Craft-Baseball/dp/0061999814" target=_blank>Men at Work</a>,” in which he put his love for baseball on exquisite display. But it was not just the game he loved; the book celebrated the fierce dedication and austere habits of his chosen subjects; it is an ode to hard labor. At 83, Will lives the message — just last month, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/09/navy-nuclear-submarines-shortage/" target=_blank>he was on the scene</a> at the shipyards of Newport News, Virginia, to report on the condition of the U.S. submarine fleet. (Not good, he opined.)

Still wearing the traditional blazers, neatly knotted neckties and schoolboy haircut that have made him look eternally ready for the class photo at a prep school in 1957, Will would seem to be the refutation of his own maxim that nothing lasts. Yet this anniversary finds him changed in a way no one could have imagined when he won the <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1977" target=_blank>Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977</a> on his way to the Reagan era. He is thoroughly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/george-will-exits-the-republican-party-over-trump/2016/06/25/2b6cdcaa-3b09-11e6-9ccd-d6005beac8b3_story.html" target=_blank>estranged from a Republican Party</a> in thrall to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a>.

This is a man who was so thoroughly associated with the Reagan Revolution that the defeated incumbent president, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/jimmy-carter/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Jimmy Carter</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2005/08/11/briefing-book-baloney/1244a4f0-7456-441c-8162-c23cb3441cfd/" target="_blank">wrongly accused Will</a> of stealing Carter’s <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2009/10/new-book-pins-debategate-on-dem-028317" target="_blank">debate prep book</a> and leaking it to Reagan. (Carter later apologized.) His persona, in print and on television, was so well-known that he became an occasional target of cartoonist Garry Trudeau in his widely syndicated strip “Doonesbury.” In July 1986, <a href="https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1986/07/08" target="_blank">Trudeau introduced</a> a new character, young T. Hamilton Tripler, who was thrilled to be interning for “Dr. Will” as “quote boy.” Tripler’s supervisor, sitting at a Victorian desk with a quill pen, explained: “We provide the flourishes of erudition so indispensable to a George Will commentary.” By 1990, Will was sufficiently famous to have comedian <a href="https://snltranscripts.jt.org/89/89qsportsmachine.phtml/" target="_blank">Dana Carvey lampoon him</a> on “Saturday Night Live.”

Readers at more than 450 news organizations — an average of nine per state — have enjoyed Will’s syndicated column (or been infuriated by it). For many years, he also wrote for a nationally prominent weekly magazine, Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Co. He has been a fixture on television news roundtables and is a favorite of documentary filmmakers, knowledgeable and well-spoken on a catalogue of topics. Few Americans in recent generations have lived beyond reach of his written or spoken voice.

<a href="https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1894529_1894528_1894518,00.html" target=_blank>As Reagan said</a> of the Democrats, Will can say of his Republican tribe: I didn’t leave the party. The party left me. He has proof — millions of words of proof.

We mark this milestone fully aware that Cal Ripken Jr., after celebrating his record, <a href="https://www.mlb.com/news/featured/cal-ripken-s-streak-25-years-later" target=_blank>continued to play</a> at shortstop and third base for the Baltimore Orioles in an additional 501 consecutive games. May it be thus with George F. Will.

See how artist Wayne Brezinka created the <a href="https://www.waynebrezinka.com/george-f-will" target=_blank>portrait collage of George Will</a> at the top of this piece.

Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America

David Von Drehle is a deputy opinion editor for The Post and writes a weekly column. He was previously an editor-at-large for Time Magazine, and is the author of four books, including “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year” and “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.”

David Von Drehle

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George F. Will, the Iron Man of America’s op-ed pages

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Wayne Brezinka

Based on a photo by Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post

Wayne Brezinka for The Washington Post

ONE-TIME USE ONLY illustration for OP-DVD-WILLFIFTIETH

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