Keith Preston
The capture of the conservative movement by the neoconservatives is one of the great ironies of modern American political life. The fact that the neoconservatives, a group that was initially composed of former radical leftists, managed to effectively subjugate a conservative movement that was originally formed for the purpose of opposing the Left would seem a bit improbable. Part of the story of how this trajectory unfolded involves the significance of an event related to a relatively insignificant agency of the federal government, the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH was founded in 1965, and its creation constituted one of many efforts by the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson to expand the role of the federal government in American life. The purpose of the NEH was, and continues to be, the promotion of research and education pertaining to the humanities. Yet a controversy involving the appointment of a conservative scholar by a Republican president to the leadership of a federal agency created by the Johnson administration proved to be a pivotal event in the ascendancy of the neoconservatives, and representative of the wider neoconservative conquest of the conservative movement.
When the conservative movement was originally formed in the 1950s under the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review magazine, the stated purpose of the movement was support for anti-Communism within the context of Cold War geopolitics, and rolling back “big government” represented by domestic programs that were the legacy of the New Deal. Most participants in the conservative movement supported America’s postwar military buildup and position of leadership of the “Free World” as a necessary effort to counter Soviet expansionism. Communism was regarded not only as a form of murderous totalitarianism but also as a threat to the survival of Western Christian civilization. The Soviet Union was a massive territory and nuclear armed power that fomented revolutions in the underdeveloped world. The Soviets also maintained a vast network of sympathizers throughout the Western democracies. Soviet-aligned Communist parties retained high levels of influence in major European nations such as France, Italy, and Greece. The postwar Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and Communist conquests of China, North Korea, and Yugoslavia produced a world order where nearly half of the world’s population lived under Communist regimes. Soviet-supported and/or Communist-led insurgencies were developing in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
During the Cold War, most conservatives supported military intervention on anti-Communist grounds, including many who had taken an isolationist stance before America’s entry into World War II. Those who dissented from National Review’s hard-line anti-Communism were purged from the movement at various points. Among these were the followers of the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, the philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, and the John Birch Society, which opposed the Vietnam War. Parallel to the purge of the noninterventionists was an embrace of former Communists and anti-Soviet leftists who expressed enthusiasm for the Cold War cause.1 Some of these figures, such as Frank Meyer and James Burnham, became very influential in the conservative movement, and others became significant because of their efforts to build bridges between the conservative movement and anti-Communist tendencies on the left. Examples of the latter included the followers of Max Shachtman, a former associate of Leon Trotsky’s who later embraced Cold War politics on anti-Stalinist grounds.2 The Shachtmanites were associated with Social Democrats USA, a splinter tendency from the Socialist Party of America. Social Democrats USA was a fringe leftist party that took hawkish positions on foreign policy, including support for the Vietnam War, and were derided as “State Department socialists” by antiwar leftists.3 It was within this context that the neoconservatives entered the conservative movement.
The development of the neoconservative movement began in the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to the rise of the New Left, the anti–Vietnam War and Black Power movements, and the counterculture. The early neoconservatives were left-wing anti-Communists and Cold War liberals who maintained their support for the New Deal and the civil rights movement. However, some neoconservative intellectuals expressed skepticism of the expansion of the welfare state through the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, having been influenced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s arguments that the welfare state would have the effect of expanding the African American underclass. Yet it was the politics of the New Left to which the neoconservatives expressed their greatest opposition. The neoconservatives objected to the New Left’s largely pacifist stance on the Cold War and frequent support for Third World Marxist regimes such as Cuba and North Vietnam.4
The neoconservatives were staunch Zionists and regarded American power as a critical protector of Israel. The New Left’s growing anti-Zionism and support for the Palestinians were particularly alarming to the neoconservatives. The perceived anti-Semitism of some figures in the Black Power movement offended the neoconservatives as well. The neoconservatives also felt that the positions embraced by liberals in the 1960s and 1970s concerning social issues such as school prayer, abortion, crime, and homosexual rights were alienating liberals from the majority of American voters. The entry of the New Left into the Democratic Party and the subsequent nomination of George McGovern as the party’s presidential candidate in 1972 had the effect of alienating the neoconservatives from the party. During the 1970s, the neoconservatives began drifting toward the Republican Party, embedding themselves in conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, and eventually offering support to the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980.5
The Bradford affair occurred very early in the Reagan administration, and the incident’s primary significance is its foreshadowing of what was to come. During the course of the next two decades, the neoconservatives would gradually become the undisputed intellectual leadership of the “conservative movement” and, by extension, the Republican Party. The neoconservatives managed to achieve this hegemony through a combination of utter ruthlessness, opportunism, and continuing to embed themselves into leadership positions in key conservative foundations, think tanks, activist organizations, and media outlets. Similarly, the neoconservatives came to dominate the Republican Party by embedding themselves in the staffs of key Republican politicians, the party apparatus itself, and various federal bureaucracies during Republican presidential administrations. Because of their hawkish foreign policy views, the neoconservatives were able to gain the financial support of corporate interests connected to the armaments industry. And because of their support for economic policies favorable to the interests of the corporate class, the neoconservatives were able to gain influence among corporate-sponsored political action committees. The steadfast Zionism of the neoconservatives ensured them the support of the Israel lobby, and their mutual support for Israel also allowed the mostly secular Jewish neoconservatives to form an alliance with the Christian Zionists of the religious Right. The faux social conservatism of the neoconservatives also helped cement their relationship with the Christian Right generally. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the neoconservatives has been their influence over the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration. As Senator Chuck Hagel noted, “So why did we invade Iraq? I believe it was the triumph of the so-called neo-conservative ideology, as well as Bush administration arrogance and incompetence that took America into this war of choice.”6
One of the enduring consistencies of the neoconservatives throughout the course of their historical trajectory has been their unremitting hostility to what might broadly be called the “traditional Right.” In particular, the neoconservatives have been zealous to exclude from the mainstream Right those whom they consider to be insufficiently cosmopolitan and egalitarian, or whom they suspect of being overly traditional, ethnocentric, parochial, or provincial. Like their supposed counterparts on the left, the neoconservatives have persistently raised cries of racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia when attacking their opponents on the right.
Foreign policy has always been the principal obsession of the neoconservatives, and the neoconservatives have consistently positioned themselves as the most aggressively interventionist element in American politics. Nothing raises the ire of the neoconservatives as much as those whom they suspect of having tendencies toward “isolationism.” However, what the neoconservatives label as “isolationism” essentially amounts to the authentically conservative view that foreign policy should serve the best interests of the nation while being conducted in a way that is restrained, prudent, and realistic. Clearly, a recognition of the pitfalls of foreign policy adventurism conflicts with the zeal for “global democratic revolution” exhibited by the neoconservatives. A former assistant secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, Paul Craig Roberts, has described the foreign policy views of the neoconservatives as emanating from the fanaticism that emerged during the French Revolution, observing “there is nothing conservative about neoconservatives. Neocons hide behind ‘conservative’ but they are in fact Jacobins. Jacobins were the 18th century French revolutionaries whose intention to remake Europe in revolutionary France’s image launched the Napoleonic Wars.”7
A similar critique of the neoconservatives has been offered by the conservative scholar Claes Ryn.8 The ongoing project of the neoconservatives has been to purge from the American Right any tendency that is suspected of opposing aggressive military interventionism, the revolutionary spread of “democratic capitalism” on an international level, the geopolitical agenda of Israel’s Likud Party, or the cultural values of urban cosmopolitanism. Meanwhile, the neoconservatives will make common cause with anyone on the left they deem aggressively militarist enough. This is demonstrated by the ease with which the neoconservatives will concede virtually any other issue that is normally associated with “the conservative movement” to the left-wing opposition such as immigration, gay marriage, abortion, fiscal policy, the welfare state, education, racial quotas, affirmative action, international aid, and countless other compromises. Indeed, a favorite tactic of the neoconservatives has been to adopt liberal and left-wing icons, ranging from Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy to civil rights leaders such as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as supposed exemplars of conservative values. A favorite tactic that has been adopted by the neoconservatives has been to attempt to appeal to racial minorities and liberal advocates of civil rights by claiming that “Democrats are the real racists.” This claim is supposedly evidenced by the granting of emancipation by Lincoln, the first Republican president, and the support for segregation offered by New Deal Democrats in the South such as George Wallace.
When Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency in 1980, his first choice for the leadership of the NEH was Melvin E. “Mel” Bradford, a literary critic and legal scholar who had held an academic post as a professor of literature at the University of Dallas since 1967. He was a personal acquaintance of Reagan’s and had worked in Reagan’s presidential campaign. In many ways, Bradford seemed to be an ideal choice for such a position. His work was admired by leading conservative intellectuals such as Russell Kirk, and political figures such as Senators John East and Jesse Helms. Professor Bradford was a native Texan, born in Fort Worth in 1934. After receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in English from the University of Oklahoma, Bradford received his doctorate from Vanderbilt University under the tutelage of Professor Donald Davidson, a scholar well known for his contribution to the works of the Southern Agrarians and Fugitive Poets.
Bradford built his reputation as a student of William Faulkner. Bradford emphasized the importance of Southern culture and community to understanding Faulkner’s work. As a legal scholar, Bradford was an advocate of a “strict constructionist” approach to interpreting the Constitution, his view of the American founding as a conservative revolution, and his defense of the South against what he considered to be the usurpations of state sovereignty by President Lincoln during the Civil War. Aside from his lengthy tenure at the University of Dallas, Professor Bradford also taught at the United States Naval Academy and Northwestern State University of Louisiana. He was also a highly prolific writer and contributed to such publications as Modern Age, Chronicles, and Southern Partisan. Before supporting Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1976 and 1980, Bradford had been a supporter of former Alabama governor George C. Wallace in 1968 and 1972.
It was his previous support for Wallace and his critical view of Lincoln that earned Bradford the ire of the neoconservatives. When Bradford was first selected by Reagan to head the NEH, his nomination was supported by a wide range of influential conservatives including Senators East and Helms, the newly elected senator John Tower from Texas, veteran senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Utah senator Orrin Hatch, former prisoner of war and senator from Alabama Jeremiah Denton, newly elected senator from Indiana and future vice president Daniel Quayle, Idaho senator James A. McClure, and numerous other Republican political figures. Additionally, Bradford’s nomination was supported by leading conservative intellectuals and writers such as Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Gerhart Niemeyer, M. Stanton Evans, Jeffrey Hart, Andrew Lytle, and Harry Jaffa. Indeed, Jaffa was a long-standing and strident critic of Bradford’s views on Lincoln but admired his character and scholarship, and considered his nomination to be appropriate. Many other conservative voices supported Bradford as well.
However, Bradford’s nomination was vociferously opposed by the neoconservatives who were then a rising force in the conservative movement and in Republican political circles generally. The neoconservatives had entered into the conservative movement in the 1970s after having previously been associated with the Far Left wing of the Democratic Party in the 1960s. The neoconservatives abandoned the Democrats after the entry of the New Left into the party during the era of George McGovern’s campaign for the presidency in 1972. Among the prominent neoconservatives who expressed opposition to Bradford were Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyite and the coeditor of the Public Interest, who is credited with having coined the term “neoconservative.” The neoconservative movement’s other leading intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, another former leftist and the publisher of Commentary magazine, also expressed opposition to Bradford’s nomination. Other critical voices included Irving Kristol’s son William, a future Fox News commentator; former Treasury secretary William E. Simon, a leading business conservative; and the philanthropist Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation.
The neoconservative choice to head the NEH was William J. Bennett, a Democrat, who would later become prominent in Republican politics as secretary of education under Reagan and director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H. W. Bush. At the time he gained support from the neoconservatives to head the NEH, Bennett was the director of the National Humanities Center, a private research organization located in North Carolina. Bennett had not been a supporter of the Reagan campaign and had voted in the Democratic primaries in 1980. Indeed, Bennett would not change his party affiliation from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party until 1986, after he had become Reagan’s secretary of education. Bennett was touted by the neoconservatives as an accomplished intellectual. However, a copy of his doctoral thesis obtained some years later by the conservative scholars Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis revealed a work that was only barely over a hundred pages (drastically short for a PhD dissertation), with limited source citations and numerous grammatical errors.
A crucial event in the battle over M. E. Bradford’s nomination to head the NEH, and the subsequent replacement of Bradford by Bennett, was a column by George Will that appeared in the Washington Post on November 29, 1981. It described Bradford as “the nostalgic Confederate remnant of the conservative movement,” thereby implying that Bradford was a racist and a likely apologist for slavery. Bradford’s friend Fr. James Lehrberger, a colleague on the faculty of the University of Dallas, recalls his discussion of the Will column with Bradford. Lehrberger noted, “We only spoke once about the NEH episode. On that occasion I asked him about George Will’s November 29, 1981 column which virtually accused him of being an apologist for slavery.” Lehrberger stated Bradford claimed “Will had quoted his words out of context in order to make him look as though he favored slavery. Mel, of course, hated slavery. However, he stated that too many had failed to recognize the southern states’ dilemma.” Lehrberger related that in Bradford’s view the South was simply in an impossible situation, and that Bradford planned to offer a response to Will.9
Although George Will’s column, titled “A Shrill Assault on Mr. Lincoln,” appeared more than two weeks after Reagan had already replaced Bradford with Bennett for the NEH nomination, Will’s characterization of Bradford was consistent with the neoconservative line. Will’s column claimed, “The rare occasions when Republicans wrestle with intellectual matters make one wish the occasions were even rarer. Consider what occurred in the process of selecting a new head for the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Expressing outrage over the Bradford nomination, Will stated, “Some Republicans promoted the candidacy of a professor who believes that the first Republican president was unbalanced, evil and a national disaster. This provoked those, like me, who revere Lincoln and still smolder with indignation about the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.” He lambasted Bradford as a figure who “supported George Wallace’s 1972 presidential campaign and represents the Nostalgic Confederate remnant in the conservative movement.” Claiming Bradford would be a political liability to the Republicans, Will stated, “The nomination of Bradford would be a Christmas present to the Democratic Party, and evidence of Republican philistinism—indifference toward the Republican past and today’s culture.” Will implied that Bradford was a slavery apologist by stating, “To the South then (and, I gather, Bradford today) the issue was whether the federal government could constitutionally legislate morality regarding conduct (such as slavery) that was, in Bradford’s words, ‘not covered by the original federal covenant,’ the Constitution.”10
Bradford penned a response to Will that was published in the Washington Post on December 12, 1981, which was titled “It’s George Will Who’s Being Shrill.” In his response, Bradford offered a brief defense of his scholarly work pertaining to the North-South conflict and the legacy of Lincoln.
Bradford noted that his work had been influenced by the previous insights of reputable scholars such as “Edgar Lee Masters, Donald W. Riddle, Willmoore Kendall, Edmund Wilson, Gottfried Dietze and Will’s one-time editor, the late Frank Meyer.” He pointed out that the focus of his scholarship had been on Lincoln’s rhetoric, militarism, corruption within his administration, and the repression of his political opponents in the North. He also criticized Lincoln for having a grandiose vision of himself as a manifestation of divine will, noting similar characteristics among figures such as Napoleon, Lenin, and Hitler, and for a seeming indifference to the unnecessary waste of lives during the course of the war effort.11
Bradford’s response to Will likewise serves as evidence of Bradford’s magnanimous character. Bradford began the piece by congratulating Bennett on his appointment to the NEH, and with a defense of his own colleagues and supporters, claiming that Will had “grounded his perfervid assault on my supporters in the charge that no proper Republican could possibly tolerate an appointment in the Reagan administration of a scholar with my view of the American past.” He stated that it was not his intention “to complain of the unseemliness of the advantage he has taken of a private person no longer involved in any public question,” but insisted that he was “obliged to make some answer to his post hoc fusillade.”12
Indeed, the magnanimity that Bradford displayed during and after the course of this episode was consistent. His friend and colleague Thomas H. Landess related that “in 1981, a Washington supporter suggested that we do the same kind of hatchet job on Bennett—who, to our knowledge, had behaved well throughout the struggle and had never engaged in Bradford bashing. Mel vetoed the idea. In the end, he agreed with Will Rogers, who said, ‘I’d rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.’ ”13 In 1993, toward the end of his life and shortly before his death following emergency heart surgery, Bradford remarked to Landess during their final telephone conversation, “If I go out tomorrow, I’ll go without any bitterness in my heart. I’m at peace with everybody.”14
Indeed, perhaps one of the most telling aspects of this episode is the ruthlessness with which the neoconservatives attacked Bradford in their attempts to portray him as a cranky buffoon who was nostalgic for the retrograde past of the American South, and a moral reprobate who did not appreciate the evil of slavery. David Gordon, a veteran libertarian scholar and personal acquaintance of Bradford’s, points to what the neoconservatives really found troubling about Bradford, and the lengths they would go to oppose his nomination in the process. In the view of Kristol, Podhoretz, and their cohorts, Bradford was a “Southerner who stressed localism,” and such a perspective was unforgivable to the neoconservatives. Gordon points out how the neoconservatives “did not confine themselves to magnifying the paltry virtues of their favorite” choice for the nomination in the person of William Bennett, “but launched smears against the president’s choice, dredging up Bradford’s 1972 support for George Wallace and—the issue that they stressed interminably—his criticism of Abraham Lincoln. Their efforts to portray Bradford as some latter-day Theodore Bilbo, however unwarranted, proved effective.”15
Thomas Landess has described the range of underhanded tactics utilized by the neoconservatives in their attacks on Bradford. Among these tactics were incidents such as calling the English Department at the University of Dallas on multiple occasions and asking the secretary for negative information or gossip about Bradford.16 Of course, in the ensuing decades the neoconservatives have consistently denied that they ever pursued an orchestrated campaign against M. E. Bradford. An illustration of this denial is provided by David Frum, a Yale undergraduate at the time of the Bradford affair who would later become famous as a neoconservative polemicist, political speech writer, and author of books with such titles as An End to Evil. It was also Frum who wrote the anti-paleoconservative screed “Unpatriotic Conservatives” in the pages of National Review in 2003 upon the commencement of the Iraq War.17 The piece was a polemic against those on the right who had voiced criticism of the war as unnecessary, or expressed skepticism as to whether the war would have a beneficent outcome. In his own discussion of the Bradford affair, Frum offered the neoconservative rendition of how these events transpired: “But as the paleos themselves tell the story, the quarrel that erupted … began as a squabble over jobs and perks in the Reagan Administration—from the perception that, as [Sam] Francis later put it, neoconservatives had arranged matters so that ‘their team should get the rewards of office and of patronage and that the older team of the older Right receive virtually nothing.’ ”18 Frum repeated the accusations that had been made against Bradford concerning his support for George Wallace in the 1972 election and his criticism of Lincoln in his scholarly work. Yet it is not unreasonable to assume that the neoconservatives’ problem with Bradford was rooted in motivations other than his criticisms of Lincoln and his previous support for Wallace. After all, it was Norman Podhoretz who in 1963 penned an essay titled “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” where he describes his general dislike for African Americans.19 Indeed, one is left wondering why Podhoretz would even be upset by Bradford’s taking Lincoln to task over constitutional questions given his comments elsewhere.20 Podhoretz once remarked to Gore Vidal concerning Vidal’s intention to write a play about the U.S. Civil War: “Why are you writing a play about, of all things, the Civil War?” Vidal went on to subsequently explain that the Civil War was “the great, single tragic event that gives resonance to our Republic.” To Vidal’s explanation Podhoretz replied, “To me, the Civil War is as remote and irrelevant as the War of the Roses.”21 Certainly, this is not the kind of comment one would expect from a Lincoln admirer.
Certain insights concerning the neoconservatives’ real motivation for their antipathy to Bradford were offered, albeit indirectly, by the Marxist historian Eric Foner in a February 13, 1982, article for the New York Times titled “Lincoln, Bradford, and the Conservatives.” Foner described how competition for grants from the NEH was just as likely a motivation for the opposition to Bradford as his former support for Wallace, noting “ their real complaint was his pledge to distribute more N.E.H. grants to Texas and Oklahoma and fewer to prestigious Northeastern universities, where many neo-conservatives hold sway.”22
Further, Foner pointed out that Bradford’s sympathy for local autonomy, states’ rights, and constitutional federalism conflicted with the “big government” (and strongly interventionist on foreign policy) agenda of the neoconservatives and their allies among the corporate class, the military-industrial complex, and the then-nascent “religious right.” As Foner recognized, “If Mr. Bradford exalts the Old South as an organic community untouched by the individualism and unfettered capitalism of the North, what of the celebration of free-market values among the aggressive Sun Belt entrepreneurs and supply-side ideologues who surround President Reagan?”23
In other words, Bradford’s real sins in the eyes of the neoconservatives were his views on the relationship between the Constitution and states’ rights, and his respect for America’s unique and organic regional identities such as traditional Southern heritage. The neoconservatives’ efforts to derail Bradford’s nomination to the NEH were no doubt motivated in part by a combination of northeastern parochialism and mere greed for grants distributed by the agency, as Foner observed. However, the zeal and ruthlessness displayed by the neoconservatives in their attacks on Bradford are illustrative of a fundamental conflict of visions.
The M. E. Bradford affair was the first incident where the neoconservatives were able to establish a position for themselves in the conservative movement and Republican politics by aggressively attacking and slandering an accomplished scholar, and by promoting someone who was much less accomplished in his scholarship in his place. The Bradford incident foreshadowed the decades-long neoconservative practice of promoting ideological loyalists over actual scholars. Bennett would subsequently hold several high-level posts in Republican administrations, becoming a conservative movement celebrity in the process. Bennett cultivated a reputation for himself as a champion of the classical virtues and was once even considered potential presidential material.24 However, a comparison of the published work of Bennett and Bradford reveals that Bradford was by far the more accomplished of the two potential choices to head the NEH. While Bradford was a recognized scholar and the author of numerous scholarly books and had been published in multiple academic journals, Bennett’s published writing has largely been limited to popular works intended for lay-level “conservative movement” audiences and columns in the movement’s in-house publications. Such is the legacy of the neoconservatives’ successful effort to derail the nomination of M. E. Bradford to head the NEH, an incident that provided a glimmer of things to come.