In the magazine business, survival is the ultimate test of success. Carey McWilliams, who edited The Nation from 1955 through 1975, once observed, "It is precisely because The Nation's backers cared more about what it stood for than what it earned that the magazine survived where countless other publications with circulations in the millions have gone under."

There is, in my judgment, another reason for the survival of this cultural treasure, founded by the great Anglo-Irish journalist E.L. Godkin the year the Civil War ended. Over the years its stewards have shared the vision of its founders. The Nation's original prospectus in 1865 promised that the new weekly "will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body." It was going to be a conscience, a gadfly "to wage war upon the vices of...exaggeration, and misrepresentation."

In studying Nation transitions past, I have come to believe that, important as what one does when one is on the job is, more important is what happens after one moves on.

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