Richard John Neuhaus gave brief background in his The Public Square column on The First Five Years, First Things, March 1995.
Readers who were present at the creation will remember that this project was originally the Center on Religion and Society and was affiliated with the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois. Under those auspices we published a monthly newsletter, The Religion and Society Report, and a quarterly journal, This World. In May of 1989 we went independent and reconstituted ourselves as the Institute on Religion and Public Life, combining what was done in the earlier publications in a new monthly journal that made its first appearance in March 1990.
Father Neuhaus elaborated on the "raid" in the While We're At It section of The Public Square, First Things, June/July 2003
“I respect and admire the French, who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs.” That is Thomas Fleming, editor of a paleoconservative magazine called Chronicles, cheering France’s anti-American turn this past March. It serves as the epigraph to David Frum’s long article in National Review of March 19, “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” In response to inquiries: Yes, Frum gets right the story of the emergence of paleo sectarianism when, in May of 1989, the Rockford Institute of Illinois, publisher of Chronicles, forcibly ejected us from the offices of the Center for Religion and Society here in New York. We had established the Center in 1984 and I became increasingly uneasy with what was understandably viewed as the racist and anti-Semitic tones of Chronicles under the direction of Fleming, its then new editor. I was preparing to break the connection with Rockford and go independent when one rainy Friday morning Rockford executives showed up, fired the entire staff, put us out on the street, and changed the office locks. We could have done without the melodrama, but every May 5 we have a gala staff luncheon to celebrate the occasion. As for the Rockford Institute and Chronicles, it is perfectly understandable if you never heard of them until now. It is just as well. (Some day I may get around to writing up my notes on the possibility of morally licit Schadenfreude.)
Mr. Frum's article notes that that Leopold Tyrmand had started Chronicles as Chronicles of Culture, intending it to "serve as a conservative alternative to The New York Review of Books". Mr. Fleming has directed Chronicles elsewhere.
No one magazine serves as an alternative NYRB. First Things is one of several that serve part of that role, if secondarily to its being "A journal on religion, culture and public life".
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