Richard Lowry is an American author who is the editor of National Review, an American conservative news and opinion magazine. Lowry became editor of National Review in 1997 when selected by its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., to lead the magazine. Lowry is also a syndicated columnist, author, and political analyst who is a frequent guest of NBC News and Meet the Press. His most recent book, The Case for Nationalism: How it Made Us Powerful, United, and Free, was released in November 2019.
Life and career
Lowry was born in Arlington, Virginia, the son of a social worker mother and an English professor father. He grew up in Arlington. After graduating from Yorktown High School in Arlington, Lowry attended the University of Virginia, where he studied English and history. He was editor of the Virginia Advocate, the school's conservative monthly magazine. After graduating, he worked for Charles Krauthammer as a research assistant, and later worked as a reporter for a local newspaper in northern Virginia. In 1992, Lowry joined National Review, after finishing second in the magazine's young writers' contest. In the summer of 1994, he became the articles editor for National Review and moved to Washington DC to cover Congress. In November 1997, Lowry became editor of National Review at the age of 29, taking over from John O'Sullivan who succeeded Buckley in that position ten years earlier. At the time, Buckley said of Lowry, "I am very confident that I've got a very good person." Lowry writes a syndicated column for King Features and is an opinion columnist with Politico. As a political commentator, he regularly appears on various cable networks, including FOX News Channel, and is a weekly guest on KCRW's Left, Right & Center. He frequently appears as a panelist on Sunday shows, including NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, and FOX News Sunday. , March 8, 2014 Lowry has written three non-fiction books. His New York Times best-selling book, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years is a polemic about President Bill Clinton, whom he characterizes as "Navel-Gazer-in-Chief". In June 2013, he published the political biography Lincoln Unbound. In November 2019, he published The Case for Nationalism: How it Made Us Powerful, United, and Free. In a review in Foreign Affairs, Georgetown University Professor of Government, Charles King, an expert on nationalism, criticized the book, arguing that Lowry's definition of a nation is vague, ahistorical and contradictory, "few of Lowry's statements would pass muster with historians", and Lowry's assertions about the unity, homogeneity and fixity of units such as Ancient Egypt, Korea, Japan and China "should be an embarrassment" to "any serious thinker." Carlos Lozada was harshly critical of the book in a review for the Washington Post, describing the book as an attempt to sanitize PresidentDonald Trump's variant of nationalism and "part of a larger effort on the right to create an after-the-fact framework for Trumpism, to contort the president’s utterances and impulses into a coherent worldview that can outlast him — a sort of rescue mission for the conservative movement." During the coronavirus pandemic, Lowry praised Florida governor Ron DeSantis for his hands-off approach to the coronavirus in a May 2020 column titled "Where does Ron DeSantis go to get his apology?" In the weeks that followed, coronavirus case numbers would surge in Florida. In 2009, Lowry and Keith Korman wrote Banquo's Ghosts, a political thriller. The plot revolves around a nuclear-armed Iran and an inebriated leftist journalist.
