The Cold War had whipsawed since 1955 when President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev met in Geneva for the first East-West summit conference. The 1956 GOP platform boasted: “The threat of global war has receded. The advance of Communism has been checked and, at key points, thrown back.” Then came Hungary; then, on the eve of the elections, French and English bombs pounded Egypt for nationalizing the Suez Canal, and Russia threatened to intervene on Egypt’s behalf. There was a glimmer of hope when Russia ceased nuclear testing in October of 1958. Then, in November, Khrushchev first threatened to take over Berlin. Now he had just been mollified by his 1959 American visit. Was peace finally at hand?
Conscience of a Conservative answered that Soviet expansionism was enabled by the fantasy of coexistence. Russia was “determined to win the conflict, and we are not.” So the Kremlin used arms control agreements and testing suspensions and the rest to seduce the American populace with romantic fantasies of peace. ′′The Kremlin can create crisis after crisis, and force the U.S., because of our greater fear of war, to back down every time.” Then the Soviets looked forward happily to the next phase of coexistence—legitimating their crimes by relabeling them “disagreements” amenable to ′′negotiation.”
“If an enemy power is bent on conquering you, he is at war with you: and you—unless you contemplate surrender—are at war with him. Moreover—unless you contemplate treason—your objective, like his, will be victory.” The logical conclusion: ′′A tolerable peace ... must follow victory over Communism.”
Conscience of a Conservative drew to a close by ticking off the tenets of American foreign policy, asking of each: “Does it help us defeat the enemy?” Alliances were important—but since our alliances did not yet girdle the globe and were defensive in outlook, we must be willing to act alone. Foreign aid (unconstitutional unless it could be shown to promote the national interest) should be limited to military and technical support. Diplomatic ties to the Soviet Union should be reexamined: “I am quite certain that our entire approach to the Cold War would change for the better the moment we announced that the United States does not regard Mr. Khrushchev’s murderous claque as the legitimate rulers of the Russian people or any other people.” The United Nations, which reduced the struggle for world freedom to the lowest common denominator agreement of eighty-odd nations, should be looked upon circumspectly. As for arms talks: “No nation in its right mind will give up the means of defending itself without first making sure that hostile powers are no longer in a position to threaten it.” Since the Soviets understood the nature of the conflict, they wouldn’t dismantle their nuclear weapons despite assurances to the contrary; then, once we dismantled ours, “aggressive Communist forces will be free to maneuver under the umbrella of nuclear terror.”
To prevent that, Conscience of a Conservative offered a quietly extraordinary argument, in a few short paragraphs passing blithely over the simple, awful paradox of the Cold War: in a world where weapons possessed the power to destroy civilization, to attack an enemy with the most effective weapon at your disposal would be to ensure your own destruction through retaliation. This was the “balance of terror” experts believed kept the Cold War peace, but Conscience insisted it did no such thing: the Communists tested us in Hungary, in the Suez, in West Berlin because they knew we wouldn’t stop them. We feared any military altercation might escalate to the unthinkable. The audacious solution: make nuclear war more thinkable—“perfect a variety of small, clean nuclear weapons,” designed to be used locally, on the battlefield. “Overt hostilities should always be avoided,” Conscience averred, “especially is this so when a shooting war may cause the death of many millions of people, including our own. But we cannot, for that reason, make the avoidance of a shooting war our chief objective. If we do that”—if war is rendered unthinkable—“we are committed to a course that has only one terminal point: surrender.”
To many young readers the argument had almost a Gandhian appeal—the same appeal, on the left, held by valiant Southern blacks laying their bodies on the line for the freedom to eat where they wished. Freedom was indivisible. It was worth dying for. Thus Conscience of a Conservative reached its stirring dénouement, read, one imagines, by our pimply freshman with steadily mounting glandular thrust:The future, as I see it, will unfold along one of two paths. Either the Communists will retain the offensive; will lay down one challenge after another; will invite us in local crisis after local crisis to choose between all-out war and limited retreat; and will force us, ultimately, to surrender or accept war under the most disadvantageous circumstances. Or we will summon the will and the means for taking the initiative, and wage a war of attrition against them—and hope, thereby, to bring about the international disintegration of the Communist empire. One course runs the risk of war, and leads, in any case, to probable defeat. The other runs the risk of war, and holds forth the promise of victory. For Americans who cherish their lives, but their freedom more, the choice cannot be difficult.
Our student then sets the book down, blinking twice, stretching his limbs, silently intoning: Let us march.
5
THE MEETING OF THE BLUE AND WHITE NILE
In 1957 Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would imminently catch up to the United States in the production of meat, milk, and butter. The Soviets began testing an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then, in October, Russia sent its bleeping medicine ball around the planet. America’s space-race debut was rushed to the launching pad, where it rose five feet before disintegrating into a fireball (headline: “FLOPNIK”). And a panicked nation busied itself with rituals of compensation. One of them was the National Defense Education Act, designed to enrich science, math, and engineering education. The NDEA included among its provisions the by then routine requirement that beneficiaries forswear allegiance to “any organization that believes in or teaches the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.” But loyalty oaths were in bad odor after the ugly implosion of Senator McCarthy. A coalition of Ivy League administrators campaigned to strike the NDEA loyalty oath from the law as a threat to academic freedom. Senator Kennedy, courting left-wing support for 1960, drafted a bill to drop it. Two eager young conservatives decided the loyalty oath was worth fighting for—and that Kennedy and horsey-set liberals like Yale president A. Whitney Griswold were worth fighting against. It was the beginnings of a youth conservative movement.
David Franke and Douglas Caddy had met in 1957 at a summer journalism school in Washington sponsored by Human Events, a political magazine founded during World War II by right-wing veterans of America First, that by the late 1950s had settled into a comfortable niche as a scrappy Washington newsletter consisting of two sections: four pages of news, and a long article or speech by a McCarthy, Knowland, or Goldwater. Its calling card was its gung ho proselytizing. (“MULTIPLY YOURSELF by mailing to someone each section of ‘Human Events’ after you have read it,” read the banner at the top of each page. “As a bonus for ordering $65.00 or more in gift subscriptions, you can get the annual bound volume of ‘Human Events’ free,” ran a typical promotion.) The summer journalism school was an outgrowth of the evangelism. After the course was over, Franke returned to Del Mar Community College in Corpus Christi, Texas, from where he edited the magazines of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists and the College Young Republicans; Caddy went back to the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where he was chair of the D.C. College Republicans. The two kept in touch. After Kennedy introduced his bill, they decided to form a Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath.
They launched an armada of press releases; they exploited Human Events connections to persuade conservatives to enter their documents into the Congressional Record. Few in Washington paid attention. The nation’s capital even then was replete with faux organizations consisting of no more than a letterhead and a mail drop. But when Caddy and Franke announced that they had thirty college chapters p
etitioning to save the oath around the country—even at Harvard, where the first signature they got was “Attila the Hun” and the second was “Adolf Hitler”—the liberals at The New Republic took notice, and none too defensively: Caddy and Franke’s group was evidence, they editorialized, that liberal arts colleges, properly devoted to the cultivation of liberty, were “carrying a 35 percent overload of the ineducable.”
But when Caddy challenged a representative of the student wing of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action to debate on the radio, ADA director Sheldon Pollack warned a colleague that the ineducable were precisely not what they were dealing with: “I can’t think of any of our students who would be able to hold his own against Caddy,” he said. “He is a junior edition of Buckley and a rather vicious debater.”
Buckley. The young conservatives tried to talk like him, dress like him, write like him—and, of course, think like him. There was his sophistication, which came from his father, William Buckley Sr., a Texas oil millionaire of learning and style who sought to defy every stereotype of Wild West new money. There was Buckley Jr.’s bottomless well of self-confidence, the outlaw demeanor, the devil-may-care grace—and underlying it all, somehow, an orthodox Catholicism so heartfelt it was bracing. That came from his father, too; for William Sr., as it would be for his son, rebellion against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism. William Buckley Sr. made his name lawyering to the wildcatters of the Tampico, Mexico, oil boom of the teens. Then the revolutionary forces of Obregón, Villa, and Zapata began demanding taxes from the oil men on pain of expropriation, which was bad enough. When Obregón called the Catholic church a “cancerous tumor,” Buckley père joined the counter-revolutionary underground and helped coordinate a failed coup in Mexico City. When he was kicked out of the country he bought a mansion, Great Elm, built in 1763 in the town of Sharon, Connecticut, that had once sheltered the governor. It boasted the state’s largest elm tree, the Great Elm itself—symbol of all that was good and enduring in Yankee patrimony. After striking a gusher in Venezuela in the late 193os, Will Buckley showed how much he cared about the Yankee patrimony. He built an addition nearly larger than the original house, complete with three-story Mexican-style patio, with tiles smuggled on his way out of the country. His obsession became educating his six children against the depredations of a fallen world. The youngest children were taught Spanish by their Mexican nanas. At five they began tutorials in French. Professional instructors dropped in to teach the children subjects ranging from art to tennis, from typing to woodcarving. Family dinners were salons, with rewards bestowed on the child who could deliver the most brilliant, witty, and stylish ripostes. The kids published a family newspaper to spread the patriarch’s isolationist, laissez-faire, orthodox Catholic gospel.
Buckleys went to Yale the way Kennedy boys went to Harvard: ready to challenge the WASP stronghold as much as master it. Bill Buckley soon made his voice heard. Three freshmen were selected for the debating squad; he was one. Another was a tall New Dealer from Nebraska, the president of the campus World Federalists, L. Brent Bozell. Bozell was the only Yalie Buckley judged to be as morally and intellectually intense as he was. The two became inseparable. Bill won Brent to his conservatism; Brent won Bill away from isolationism. Brent married Bill’s sister Patricia.
It would be 1968 before Yale saw hell-raisers as audacious. Yale was known as the most conservative of the Ivies. It wasn’t conservative enough for Buckley. In his first semester Bill led a fight against the establishment of a student council (he feared it would be captured by liberals). When the rest of campus was welcoming the third-party bid of the left-wing, Communist-backed Henry Wallace as the royal road to Dewey victory, Buckley, a friend, and two of his sisters invaded a Wallace rally at the New Haven arena in mock “radical” attire (no makeup for the girls; hair laid flat with grease for the boys) and circulated signs reading “LET’S PROVE WE WANT PEACE—GIVE RUSSIA THE ATOM BOMB.” Authorities foiled the planned coup de grace: the release of a flock of doves.
Buckley was chosen unanimously to be chairman of the Yale Daily News his senior year, the most powerful student position on campus, where his editorials inspired wonder and fear. One attacked a popular anthropology professor for “undermining religion through bawdy and slap-stick humor.” Since Yale students did not lecture Yale professors, an issue had to be published without advertisements to make way for the letters of protest. For his valedictory in 1950 he convened a dinner to honor the retiring Yale president. The guests of honor included such fellow college presidents as Harold Stassen of Penn and General Dwight D. Eisenhower of Columbia, both 1952 White House contenders. Chairman Buckley stepped to the podium and browbeat them for letting enemies of religion and free enterprise reign in their classrooms under cover of academic freedom. His conclusion brought stunned silence: trustees of elite universities must compel their employees—professors as much as administrators—to show a proper measure of piety and patriotism. “And if they cannot, Godspeed on their way to an institution that is more liberal.”
That was, more or less, the argument of his first book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” published after Buckley completed a short stint with the CIA in Mexico. Yale’s attempt to suppress publication only whetted the public’s curiosity; Yale’s attempts to discredit it (alum McGeorge Bundy’s Atlantic Monthly review called Buckley a “twisted and ignorant young man”; Yale distributed two thousand reprints) made it a best-seller. His next book, coauthored with Bozell, was an unabashed attempt to defend a family friend: Joe McCarthy. By evaluating the senator’s early cases in narrowly legalistic terms, they managed to acquit McCarthy to their own satisfaction as someone around which “men of good will and stern morality may close ranks.” But what was most remarkable about McCarthy and Its Enemies, what makes it in retrospect a signal document of a new conservatism struggling to be born, was the number of critical references to McCarthy it included. Just as for Goldwater, the hunt for subversives appeared inadequate to the greater task at hand. “We are interested in talking, not about ‘who is loyal?,’ ” Buckley and Bozell emphasized, “but about ‘who favors those politicians that are not in the national interest as we see it.’ ”
Buckley’s next project would make criticizing those politicians into a merry art—a mighty engine for massing right-wing fellow travelers into a community, a force, a band of brothers and sisters ready to take on the (liberal) world. Buckley founded National Review after a spell of barnstorming colleges on behalf of a new conservative organization, the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. ISI was modeled on the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded by Jack London in 1905. The conservative group’s founders were convinced that the nation’s enthusiasm for the socialistic schemes of the New Deal and after was traceable to the propaganda efforts of ISS alumni who had graduated to positions of power and influence—youthful socialists like Walter Lippmann, whose recollection of his ISS days at Harvard they never tired of quoting: “Our object was to make reactionaries stand-patters; stand-patters, conservative liberals; conservatives, liberals, and liberals, radicals; and radicals, Socialists.” ISI sought to work the operation in reverse. College students were sent books like Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Friedrich A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and Frank Chodorov’s The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, along with postcards asking if they wished to continue receiving literature. The group sent out one million pamphlets and books in 1953 alone.
Buckley loved sparring with the liberals on his campus recruiting trips for ISI (if the liberals hadn’t already convinced administrators to bar the incendiary speaker from the campus outright). But he had greater ambitions. He had already been rebuffed by the owners of Human Events in a proposal to buy the newsletter and turn in into a full-fledged magazine. Meanwhile Willi Schlamm, a brilliant ex-Communist expatriate of the Luce empire, was witnessing at close range the crackup of an earlier attempt at a mass-circulation conservative magazine, The Free
man, for which he served as literary editor. One faction of editors sought to remain aloof from unseemly day-to-day political battles in Washington, while another—Schlamm’s—yearned to engage them. The magazine folded from the strain. Schlamm was all ready to settle into his next job, editing a new journal of high-minded reflection on current events for Henry Luce, when Luce got cold feet during the 1954 recession. Schlamm, left at the altar, and Buckley, all dressed up with no place to go, discovered one another, and National Review was born. Or at least a business plan was born. It offered two classes of stock. Class A held no financial value but included voting rights. Class B was $I a share and had no voting rights. All Class A shares—all decision-making authority—were possessed by a single man: William F. Buckley Jr. This new magazine, the two founders were determined, wouldn’t be brought down by power struggles like The Freeman.
Buckley spent over a year on the road peddling NR debentures to businessmen who could afford to lose money. His prospectus began: “The New Deal revolution could hardly have happened save for the cumulative impact of The Nation and The New Republic, and a few other publications, on several American college generations during the twenties and thirties.” That was ISI talking. The rest was pure Buckley: “New Deal journalism has degenerated into a jaded defense of the status quo.... Middle-of-the-Road, qua Middle-of-the-Road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant.” The Millikens proved generous; L.A. oil magnate Henry Salvatori gave $50,000. Most people gave nothing. It did not surprise Buckley’s father to see his experience reconfirmed: the task of preserving capitalism was too important to leave to the capitalists. The Buckley family stepped in to finance the rest of the endeavor.
Before the Storm Page 11
