WASHINGTON — The New Republic has made a specialty of viciously skewering Democrats over the years, and few have endured tougher jabs than Bill Clinton.
But at a black-tie gala on Wednesday night celebrating the bastion of liberal contrarianism’s 100th birthday, Mr. Clinton, who delivered the evening’s keynote address, was in a forgiving mood.
“No, I don’t hold it against them,” Mr. Clinton said to a reporter amid the photo-snapping scrum that surrounded him during the cocktail hour. He adding jokingly: “They’re under new ownership now.”
While the mood among the 400 guests gathered at the ornate Andrew W. Mellon auditorium was celebratory, there was intense whispering about the future direction of that magazine under that new owner, the 30-year-old Facebook multimillionaire Chris Hughes, who bought it from a consortium including the magazine’s longtime owner, Martin Peretz, in 2012. In September, Mr. Hughes hired Guy Vidra, a former Yahoo news executive, as the New Republic’s chief executive officer and installed him on top of the masthead, prompting a report in Politico the morning of the party speculating that Franklin Foer, the magazine’s top editor, might be on the verge of departing.
Hendrik Hertzberg, who edited the magazine in the 1980s and is now at The New Yorker, compared the evening’s wistful homecoming mood to the recent funeral of the former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee.
“It’s the end of an era,” Mr. Hertzberg said, noting a recent interview with The New York Times in which Mr. Hughes described The New Republic as a “digital media company,” not a magazine. “I’m very glad that Chris Hughes is pouring resources into the magazine. They obviously think of it in a different way. Maybe it will work out.”
Whatever the future, Mr. Clinton’s appearance spoke to the magazine’s, and Mr. Hughes’s, continuing drawing power. The former president took the stage after a musical performance by Wynton Marsalis and delivered a long riff that meandered across topics including his new status as a grandfather, immigration, genomics research, Fox News, ISIS, Mexican higher education, health insurance in Arkansas and the New Republic’s historic connection to liberalism. (“Big error at New Republic centennial dinner: having Bill Clinton talk before we eat. 35 mins so far and he’s only up to about 1920,” the Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank tweeted.)
Andrew Sullivan, the magazine’s editor from 1991 to 1996 who presided some of the magazine’s high-water marks of Clinton-bashing, declared the speech “very Clintonesque,” and noted the awkwardness of being seated facing Mr. Clinton at opposite ends of a very long table full of former New Republic editors.
“It’s very ‘Game of Thrones,'” Mr. Sullivan said. “Whoever made this seating chart has a sense of humor.”
Some in attendance wondered if a game of thrones was also taking place onstage. In his remarks introducing Mr. Clinton, Mr. Hughes paid tribute to the magazine’s storied past but kept things future-looking, declaring that the New Republic’s tradition of experimentation was “our greatest asset, not a liability.” In brief remarks, Mr. Vidra said that the digital age would usher in a “new golden era” in which journalistic excellence would remain the magazine’s “guiding light.”
When his turn came, Mr. Foer thanked Mr. Hughes briefly, but looked mainly backward, recalling the day he started at the magazine more than a decade ago under Mr. Peretz, and was surprised to find a photograph of Michael Straight, a former Soviet spy and the magazine’s publisher in the 1940s and 50s (“probably the most despicable character in the magazine’s history,” Mr. Foer said), hanging over the toilet.
“To work at the New Republic is to have the old photographs on the wall shout at you and to have the right, even the obligation, to shout back,” Mr. Foer said.
Leon Wieseltier, the magazine’s longtime literary editor, took to the stage to read and parse the Walt Whitman poem “Passage to India,” sending lines like “Who shall soothe these feverish children? / Who justify these restless explorations?” into the air with perhaps a bit more than his usual prophetic tone.
“Welcome the future, but do not worship it,” Mr. Wieseltier said. “We are not just incubators and innovators, but also stewards.”
After a toast by the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, guests milled around recalling lighter moments, like the time in the early 1990s when Mr. Peretz, as a prank, arranged for a fake C-SPAN crew to pretend to film one of the magazine’s famously disputatious editorial meetings for live broadcast. “That tape still exists somewhere,” said Jonathan Karl, the chief White House correspondent for ABC News, who worked at the magazine at the time.
As the crowd dwindled, a gaggle of former staffers stood by the door, running down the list of political characters who had showed up, including Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Paul Begala, Joe Scarborough, Gene Sperling, Anthony Weiner and at least one fake president, Michael Gill, from the Netflix drama “House of Cards.”
Mr. Wieseltier paid tribute to one man who wasn’t there, Mr. Peretz, who attacked Mr. Hughes in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last year and was not invited to the party. “Marty collected all these generations of talent, and set the tone of passionate intensity, as Yeats put it,” Mr. Wieseltier said. “Except this time it wasn’t the worst who had it.”
He also reminisced about his legendary 1988 dispute with the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, a former colleague at the magazine, over the meaning of a Hebrew word for grasshopper that the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir had used to describe Palestinian protesters.
He and Mr. Krauthammer, he said, recently buried the hatchet after discovering that they were related. “Now we call each other ‘dear cousin,'” Mr. Wieseltier said. “After 30 years of not talking to each other, we should’ve known that meant we were family.”
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this post misstated the year of a dispute between Leon Wieseltier and the columnist Charles Krauthammer. It was 1988, not 1998.