Remembering the Roots of the National Review

Aloise Buckley Heath once reminisced that, when her brother set out to establish National Review in the mid-1950s, “Our most deeply buried fear was that Gerald L.K. Smith was the only other conservative in America.” Fifty years later, William F. Buckley Jr.’s “weekly journal of opinion” (now bi-weekly) reaches more than a quarter-million readers, including the President of the United States, and is recognized as the intellectual fountainhead of modern conservatism. That magazine, whose rudder he captained for so many decades, has been deprived of his guidance. Last Tuesday, William F. Buckley Jr. relinquished ownership of National Review. We should hasten to add, Buckley (thankfully) is not retiring from public life and will continue to produce his regular column. But his beloved magazine will now be guided by hands other than his own.

The move does not come out of the blue. Buckley retired as NR’s Editor-in-Chief in 1990, assuming the title Editor-at-Large, and strictly curtailed his public speaking schedule at the turn of the millenium. However, his transfer of leadership marks a heartsick moment for conservatives, whose melancholy is heightened by the accompanying press release’s terse acknowledgement that, “Mr. Buckley, 78, cited concerns about his own mortality as the primary reason for his divestiture.” More than anyone else, William F. Buckley Jr. has come to embody conservatism itself. He made the term “conservative” respectable, realigned the Republican Party (permanently, one hopes) to the Right and set in motion a movement that saw two of its members elected President of the United States.

His prospects were not always so sunny.

He began his efforts during the high tide of Liberalism, the triumph of which was then, like the ultimate withering of Marx’s colossal State, considered inevitable. It already held all academia under its sway, as Buckley noted in his first book, God and Man at Yale. The intelligentsia believed the Great Depression – and the isolationist, nativist ravings of the Old Right – discredited every alternative; Liberalism was in full victory march. In this struggle, Buckley wrote in NR’s first editorial, his magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

Then, WFB proceeded to create an intellectually respectable conservatism de novo. After the publishing of his first book, he founded National Review (with Willie Schlamm) to present a regular rebuttal to the nation’s academic and political culture. He recruited a roster that included James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Ralph de Toledano and Frank Meyer. Buckley’s evident wit, patrician mannerisms and expansive vocabulary defied caricature. Clearly, neither the sharp-tongued young sophisticate nor his peers could be dismissed ad hominem. Assembling this group proved easier than holding together thinkers with such widely divergent views, a task Buckley accomplished by focusing all parties on the overriding objective of defeating Communism – and leavening disputes with his abundant personal charm. This tactic would be writ large as Cold War conservatism united libertarians, neo-conservatives, traditionalists and social conservatives under its big tent.

Thus united, NR’s staff opened fire on the prevailing academic and political culture. Buckley flatly stated that university professors had a duty to defend the precepts of freedom, to deny that all philosophies were equally true, or equally plausible. (Liberalism claims to honor the intellect by pursuing every wind of doctrine, Buckley wrote, but conservatism pays the mind its highest tribute: that it has come to a few conclusions.) He believed the size and scope of government must be hemmed in as a necessary prerequisite to reviving the engines of capitalism left cooling under Eisenhower’s big government conservatism. He wrote that totalitarianism could be rolled back, not merely contained. And he dared to reveal that milieu of the Eastern Liberal Establishment regularly made martyrs out of scoundrels like Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore and Harry Dexter White. Later, when the fifth column invaded the legal establishment, Buckley would call for the disbarment of William Kunstler. In National Review, and then in his syndicated newspaper column, he punctured the shibboleths of the Left with his rapier-like insights (which, despite their polemical nature, remain some of the most eloquent prose of their time). He also penned a full-length philosophical account of the Left’s pathologies and the Right’s responses, Up from Liberalism, which remains a classic. And the tide began to turn....