9


Years of Preparation

In the waning days of the 1956 election campaign, as Dwight Eisenhower was surging toward a landslide victory, William F. Buckley Jr. pondered the record of the first Republican president in twenty years. It was not a joyful task. Even in 1952, while urging the Republican Party to “acknowledge a domestic enemy, the State,” Buckley had not believed that it would ever do so.1 Now, in 1956, his apprehensions were confirmed. Eisenhower's first term had been marked by “easy and wholehearted acceptance” of “the great statist legacy of the New Deal.” The Republican program was at best one of “measured socialism.” Buckley realized that for many conservatives the liberal Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, made Eisenhower appealing by contrast. Nevertheless, he warned, the choice in 1956 was only a choice between evils.²

In 1958 Buckley again denounced the Eisenhower administration. The president's principal “sin against reality” was his “deficient understanding” of Communism. Neither Eisenhower nor the American people really believed that our adversaries were totally intent on world dominion. Under Eisenhower the West would continue to serve as “a muffler of Communist atrocities”; in the “tranquil world” of Eisenhower, Communism would continue to advance. Faced with the menaces of Communism and domestic statism, Eisenhower adopted “an approach designed not to solve problems, but to refuse, essentially, to recognize that problems exist; and so, to ignore them.” The president's “political philosophy,” by his own admission, was “incoherent.” The Republican Party should “repudiate” him.3

Buckley's opposition to the Eisenhower administration was no personal aberration. In the 1950s many conservative intellectuals were appalled by “creeping socialism” at home and by such foreign policy developments as the abortive “spirit of Geneva,” the Suez crisis, the failure to rescue Hungary in 1956, and the invitation of Khrushchev to the United States in 1959. Buckley's National Review frequently and sharply criticized the Republican incumbent⁴ —a cry taken up by several right-wing commentators. The Eisenhower administration, said the traditionalist Anthony Harrigan in 1954, was not conservative. Instead of evincing a religious mode of life and “continuity with the past,” it was “the product of the American business community,” which was materialistic and even anxious for change. The administration was staffed not by aristocratic conservatives but by “moneymen and hucksters.”⁵ More typical was Frank Meyer, who was also disenchanted early. Instead of fulfilling his election mandate to fight collectivism, said Meyer, Eisenhower was drifting toward “a somewhat inhibited New Dealism.” Instead of recognizing that “either we or they [the Communists] must be destroyed” and that “the overthrow of the Kremlin” must be our goal, Eisenhower was acquiescing in the foreign policy of his predecessors.6 At the end of the 1950s, Meyer summed up the legacy of the Eisenhower years: “The net balance of 1959, after six years of an administration brought into power by the basic backing of conservative votes, registers an immense slippage in our will to resist Communism and in our position vis-à-vis Communism.”⁷ A few months later, he declared: “Eisenhower . . . simply floated with the tide.”⁸

To Meyer and other conservatives, then, who stressed principle over pragmatism,⁹ blandness and moderation could never be enough.¹⁰ Unlike the man in the White House, they wanted to “roll back” both the Iron Curtain and the “Roosevelt revolution”: such was the radical imperative for conservatism in a liberal age. “The role of radical is temperamentally alien to the conservative,” Meyer acknowledged, “but in the circumstances of Liberal domination under which we live, that role is demanded of him.”11 Not surprisingly, National Review declined to endorse a presidential candidate in 1960; Meyer could detect no grounds for preferring Richard Nixon to John Kennedy.¹²

There is probably no better proof of the isolation of the conservative intellectual movement from American politics in the 1950s than its estrangement from the immensely popular President Eisenhower.¹³ If postwar conservatism were simply a mood or a set of rarefied ideas, one might be tempted to say that its political posture was irrelevant. Moreover, as Russell Kirk has observed,14 movements of ideas do not triumph overnight; usually a generation is needed. Yet to most conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s, politics was important and time was running out. It was not enough to proclaim their ideals and anathematize the forces of darkness. The defense of Western civilization required that their ideas be implemented, and the war could not be fought solely in academic journals or in National Review. Sooner or later the conservative intellectual movement, if it wanted to succeed, would have to shape political forces and prevail in the political marketplace. It would have to do more than stand athwart history, yelling “Stop.”

The need for a practical, popular conservatism was increasingly evident in the late 1950s. Writing shortly after the Republican electoral disaster of 1958, the young historian Stephen Tonsor sounded the alarm:

If we wait for the American electorate to discover of its own sound reason the virtues of the conservative viewpoint, that discovery will never be made.

I think that the party is in extremes [sic] because it has had no new ideas since the death of Senator Taft. It is suffering from a lack of creative leadership able to hazard the solution of contemporary problems in terms of enduring principle.

We are adrift. . . .

Full employment was the issue which lost the last election. . . . The Republican Party and conservatism cannot win an election until it has solved the problem of full employment within the framework of a realistic budget.¹⁵

Tonsor's concerns were shared by Whittaker Chambers. In 1954 he told a friend that while he enjoyed Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, “if you were a marine in a landing boat, would you wade up the seabeach at Tarawa for that conservative position? And neither would I!”16 Chambers informed Buckley that if the Republican Party did not face reality and develop a program “that means something to masses of people—why, somebody else will. There will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into singularity.”¹⁷ Frequently Chambers argued that the Right must come to grips with technology and the inherent dynamism of capitalism, which he considered “profoundly anti-conservat ive.”¹⁸ “A conservatism that cannot face the facts of the machine and mass production, and its consequences in government and politics,” he declared, “is foredoomed to futility and petulance.”¹⁹ In 1959 Buckley himself conceded that conservatives had yet to persuade the public about the dangers of the welfare state and the validity of conservative principles.²⁰

The agenda for the 1960s was therefore obvious. If conservative intellectuals were ever to break out of their ghetto, they would need to do more than consolidate their forces. Suppose that they did solidify and forge a working coalition. Suppose that they did develop a plausible American line of descent and a historically grounded body of principles. Suppose that these internal problems seemed more or less satisfactorily resolved after years of debate and study. What then? What did the movement want to do?

If the decade after 1945 witnessed the birth of the postwar Right, and if the decade or so after 1955 featured a gradual process of self-definition, the early and mid-1960s were to be concurrently years of preparation. The era of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson would see an increasingly sophisticated conservative critique of the Left, elaboration of specific alternatives to liberal programs, and development of a conservative intellectual establishment. The Right, becoming “pragmatized,” would make its first significant forays out of the wilderness.

 

In making their bid for national leadership, conservative intellectuals focused continuously on one principal target: liberalism. In both foreign and domestic policy, the achievements and philosophy of the “liberal establishment”21 were subjected to relentless criticism.

As conservatives surveyed world crises in the late 1950s and the 1960s, one fundamental fact seemed paramount: the continuous, implacable assault on the West by messianic, revolutionary Communism.²² Amid all the swirling ephemera of daily events, this transcendent challenge remained constant. We were at war—an “irrepressible conflict,” Frank Meyer called it;²³ the “Third World War,” James Burnham labeled it in his National Review column of that title. In this struggle, there were, according to Meyer and other conservative cold warriors, only two choices: “the destruction of Communism or the destruction of the United States and of Western civilization.”²⁴ In article after article in Modern Age and issue after issue of National Review, these convictions were either articulated outright or were implicit in the attention paid to the worldwide menace. What Communists were doing in Cuba, Chile, Zanzibar, Laos, or in the American civil rights and peace movements was considered significant. What congressional investigations uncovered about infiltration and subversion was not to be scornfully dismissed or smugly ignored. The Communist enterprise was real —as real as deaths in Budapest, barbed wire in Berlin, harangues in Havana, and marines in the mud of Vietnam.

Liberals, of course, might blind themselves to these unpleasant realities—so said conservatives. Liberals might prefer to hope—serenely, pathetically, endlessly, futilely—that maybe now, maybe this time, maybe soon, the Communists would change their spots, cease to be committed revolutionaries, and settle down. Perhaps we could then have peaceful coexistence at last. Meanwhile let us negotiate, “build bridges,” engage in cultural exchanges, climb to the summit. Come let us reason together.

Nonsense, said the conservatives. Fatuous delusions. The “spirit of Geneva” in 1955 did not prevent the Hungarian nightmare of 1956. The “spirit of Camp David” in 1959 exploded at the Paris summit conference in 1960. The Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting in Vienna in 1961 was followed by the erection of the Berlin Wall and the emplacement of missiles in Cuba. The “spirit of Glassboro” in 1967 was followed by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Would liberals ever recognize that the world was not, every day in every way, getting better and better? The cold war—which was often a hot war—was not over. Reacting to “surface phenomena,” the Left seemed “oblivious to the hard continuing substance of the Communist battle plan,” said Meyer.25 The revolution is not dead, said James Burnham in 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Communists had not succumbed to the “law of bourgeoisification”; their revolution had a momentum which could not be halted at will. “Normal international relations” were “impossible” with a regime that had such features as a government monopoly of foreign trade, no domestic political opposition, and a “global . . . revolutionary apparatus”26 Moreover, Robert Strausz-Hupé of the University of Pennsylvania argued, the Kremlin exhibited an “undiminished appetite.” “In the cold war, there are no sanctuaries.” The Communists had an “enormous” investment in “the arsenal of the cold war,” and “good will and reasonable concessions” would never deter them from their objective.

The Communist system is a conflict system; its ideology is an ideology of conflict and war. . . .

. . . In spite of the twists and turns of the internecine power struggle, the Communist system will endure so long as external pressures do not compound internal strains and bring the system crashing down.²⁷

Why would “external pressures” be necessary? Why could not Communism gradually mellow and evolve? Pervading conservative writings was the unshakable belief that Communism transcended ordinary laws of diplomatic behavior. In The Moulding of Communists, Frank Meyer voiced the conclusions of many other conservatives. The Communist, he asserted, “is different. He thinks differently.” He is not “a mirror image of ourselves.”²⁸ Communism is a “secular and messianic quasi-religion”²⁹ which ceaselessly conditions its converts until they become new men totally dedicated to one mission: “the conquest of the world for Communism.”

Against this vision, the devotion, the determination of Comunist man, there is no recourse in compromise, reasonableness, peaceful co-existence. Only a greater determination can avail, for Communist man poses two stark alternatives for us: victory or defeat.30

The Soviet leaders were not “rational,” Gerhart Niemeyer of Notre Dame concluded in 1956. Their thought processes and assumptions, sustained by a tenaciously held ideology, were radically different from our own.³¹ It was totally unrealistic to expect that Americans could “communicate” with a Communist mind that “shares neither truth nor logic nor morality with the rest of mankind.”³² The Communist view of reality was fundamentally “distorted by their millennial vision and their dialectic reasoning. . . .”³³

If Westerners believe that Soviet thoughts are linked to Soviet actions in a way that they can know, understand, and eventually influence rationally, and make this belief a basis of their policy, they are tragically mistaken.³⁴

The way to defeat this system was to exploit “Soviet irrationality” and the “deep contradictions of the Soviet system.” This could be done by assaulting “Soviet morale at its core: Marxist-Leninist doctrine.”³⁵ Unfortunately, this approach required that Westerners penetrate the alien Communist doctrine sufficiently to expose its fallacies to its apostles.36 Only a few “specialists” and reformed ex-Communists currently possessed this understanding.³⁷

And if the challenge was that grave, if Communism really was “the fundamental break with the unchangeably conservative spirit of western civilization,”³⁸ some conservatives at least were prepared to contemplate nuclear war as an alternative to their enemy's triumph. While not calling for an immediate “preventive” war in 1959, L. Brent Bozell pointed out that such a course was not inconceivable. He preferred a “new leadership” which, while willing to “drop the Bomb,” would first try “an extended war of attrition” which “holds forth reasonable hope of ultimate victory.” But if this hope evaporated, we would then have an “obligation” to destroy the enemy “in the middle of the night,” knowing that “when the right is pursued, it is God who ordains the cost.”³⁹ Frank Meyer was equally convinced that the rightness of the West's cause was “categorical”: “There can be no question of our moral obligation to resist, to counterattack, to destroy, this powerful and proclaimed enemy of man and God.”⁴⁰ Naturally we should refrain from using nuclear weapons if at all possible in our campaign to destroy the Communist regime. But if the issue of atomic war unavoidably arose, the only question would be: “Given the justice of our cause and the necessity of nuclear force to its victory, what strategy should we adopt?” Should we accept a “deterrence” posture, absorbing a first blow and then destroying the only remaining asset of the enemy: the civilian population? (It would be too late to bomb military targets.) Or should we accept a “counterforce” strategy that would, in these ultimate circumstances, require a first strike on the enemy's military installations only? To Meyer the latter course—aimed not at obliterating civilians but at knocking out nuclear bases—was definitely the morally superior position. But was any use of such horrible weapons ever justifiable? To Meyer, the answer was yes:

. . . even granted the most horrendous estimates of the effects of their use, the preservation of human life as a biological phenomenon is an end far lower than the defense of freedom and right and truth. These the victory of Communism would destroy. These it is our duty to defend at all costs.41

Did these remarks mean that conservatives were warmongers? William F Buckley Jr. did not think so. “All civilized men want peace,” he stated. But peace was not identical with pacifism (a “Christian heresy”), and peace was “unthinkable in a community in which plunderers have hold of the city at night.” If peace were “the first goal of man,” one could simply obtain it by surrendering. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Buckley asserted, “cannot compare with the workaday agony of the enslaved world” behind the Iron Curtain. There were, in other words, fates worse than death. Peace is not “thinkable” now because “the West is besieged and the world tyrannized over.”

We must try to win without war: but we must above all try to win, and for the sake of humanity, whose first concern is for the quality of human existence, rather than for life biologically defined.⁴²

Better dead than Red, then? Not quite, for these were not the sole alternatives:

. . . Better the chance of being dead, than the certainty of being Red. And if we die? We die.43

Such remarks did not mean that conservatives expected or wanted Armageddon to occur. On the contrary, they believed that a strong, aggressive cold war posture was America's best hope to avoid a holocaust. William Schlamm, for instance, argued that the Communists did not want war—in fact, dearly wished to avert a nuclear war. The enemy, he said, “thrives on peace, wants peace, triumphs in peace.”⁴⁴ It exploits the Western fear of war to advance its own ends. Since war—as the enemy saw it—was the only obstacle to its success, the “only rational strategy of the West” was “to keep communism constantly confronted with that risk.”⁴⁵ Increase the pressure, Schlamm advised. Maintain a “believable” willingness to fight, and the foe will retreat.⁴⁶ This was the only way to prevent war. Otherwise Communism would continue to expand until, in a last act of desperation, a beleaguered America would fight a suicidal war.⁴⁷

This conservative understanding of foreign affairs as a titanic conflict of ideologies, religions, and civilizations was decisively shaped by the former Communists and Trotskyists who dominated the National Review circle in its early years. Frank Meyer, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, William Schlamm, William Henry Chamberlin, Willmoore Kendall, Eugene Lyons, Freda Utley, Max Eastman—all had glimpsed the Medusa at varying angles. Moreover, many conservative strategists, including Schlamm, Robert Strausz-Hupé, Stefan Possony, Thomas Molnar, and Gerhart Niemeyer, were refugees from the totalitarian Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. A number were ardent Roman Catholics; Bozell and Kendall, for example, were even converts. Such striking biographical information raised many questions. Were these conservatives trustworthy analysts? If they had been deceived by Communism once in their lives, could they be depended on now? Or were they perhaps permanently scarred by their experience and inclined to exaggerate the resources of the enemy? Was there not too obvious a yearning for repentance and atonement for past sins? Too much convert's zeal? Were not these people fanatics who longed for absolutes—first Communism, now Christianity and Western civilization?

These questions, raised from time to time by liberal observers, had a ring of plausibility. The Right's conception of Communism was, so to speak, “historically conditioned.” Yet to conservatives the peculiar experience of the ex-Communists and European émigrés was not a handicap at all. Indeed, it was an advantage. Perhaps these individuals, however unconventional their past or present lives, had divined the terrible meaning of Communism more profoundly than most others of their time. Perhaps, as Gerhart Niemeyer suggested, they had a peculiarly valuable expertise. After all, they had seen the face of evil. And just as artists and writers sometimes lead unorthodox lives but gain a truth at great cost, might not the ex-Communists have special insights to share precisely because they lacked the “objectivity” of the uncommitted? “I sometimes feel,” wrote William F. Buckley Jr.,

that it takes a tainted mind to understand—to really understand—the threat of Communism. To really understand Communism is to have touched pitch: one's view of man is forever defiled. To understand Communism means to understand the terrible capacity of man for violence and treachery, an apprehension of which leaves one forever tormented.48

André Malraux once wrote to Whittaker Chambers, “You are one of those who did not return from Hell with empty hands.”49 To Chambers and others on the Right, Communism was hell. Communists meant what they said. And the Third World War could not be won without countervailing conviction, zeal, and courage.

It was certainly not being prosecuted effectively now, conservatives agreed. The liberal leadership was compiling a melancholy record of retreat, which could not be camouflaged by outrageous assurances that the cold war had ended (why Cuba? why Vietnam?) or by learned references to “polycentrism” in the Communist bloc. M. Stanton Evans, the conservative editor of the Indianapolis News, stated the conservative case pungently in 1966:

The Communists have not in fact been winning the Cold War so much as we have been losing it. We have, on a variety of pretexts, been steadily surrendering the world to the enemy in the Kremlin. We have been losing the fight because, for the most part, the abstractions of Liberalism keep telling us we aren't in it.⁵⁰

William Rickenbacker—son of the war hero Captain “Eddie” Rickenbacker, and contributor to National Review —agreed.

As I see it, recent history can be summed up in a single terrible phrase: retreat by the West. . . . The global trend leaps to the eye: the Communist and anti-Western areas have been expanding, the West and pro-Western areas have been shrinking.⁵¹

It is neither possible nor necessary to examine conservative responses to every foreign policy crisis of the late 1950s and 1960s.52 A few examples will illustrate why the conservatives did not feel they were being shrill, unreasonable, or doctrinaire. To them the liberal defeats were a matter of record. Conservatives did not consider themselves responsible for Cuba, or the Berlin Wall, or our allegedly deteriorating defenses, or the Laotian settlement of 1962, or Vietnam.

Or Hungary. Of all world events since 1955, what Frank Meyer called the “Hungarian slaughter”⁵³ was undoubtedly the most searing and heartrending for the conservative intellectual movement. For a few precious days in the fall of 1956, the people of Hungary had, conservatives thought, liberated themselves from their masters. Then, as the oppressors returned, the beleaguered freedom fighters pleaded vainly for aid from the West. Silence. Send us arms! Silence. Help us before it is too late!

No answer. No answer.

Conservatives were aghast. Calling for “an immediate suspension of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union,”⁵⁴ National Review's editors took the “Hungary Pledge,” calling for a complete cultural boycott of the Soviet Union until all of its forces were withdrawn from Hungary.⁵⁵ Conservatives believed that quick intervention by the United States could have exploited the obvious weaknesses of the Kremlin.⁵⁶ James Burnham later claimed that Russia's hesitation for a week before sending troops back in was a clear sign that the United States could successfully have issued an ultimatum that would have kept them out.⁵⁷ Instead, said National Review, not only did American fail the valiant Hungarians; it simultaneously voted in the United Nations to condemn—France, Great Britain, and Israel for failing to withdraw from the Suez area!

. . . Over the humiliated forms of our two oldest and closest allies, we clasp the hands of the murderers of the Christian heroes of Hungary, as we run in shameless—and vain—pursuit of the “good will” of Asia and Africa's teeming pagan multitudes.58

To Frederick Wilhelmsen (another convert to Roman Catholicism), the American failure to help Hungary had “dishonored” it before the West; this was “the central fact of the mid-century.”

For years our intellectuals have been telling us that Christendom is dead, that the Old Order had run its course. Today we know it was all a lie. It was not the [liberal] dream of the future and the Full Life that brought those children into the streets of Budapest: it was the call of Honor and the Decency of Death.⁵⁹

A decade later James Burnham reflected that the Hungary-Suez crisis was a “turning point” in the Third World War. Among other bitter lessons, it demonstrated the final collapse of the policy of “liberation,” the conferring on the Communist bloc of the status of sanctuary, and the demise of the European foothold in Africa.⁶⁰

If the autumn of 1956 showed the United States (in conservative eyes) paralyzed by fear and liberalism, unable to exploit opportunities that might never come again, American policy toward Africa in the 1960s (said conservatives) showed liberalism at its doctrinaire nadir.61 Bemused by terms like anticolonialism and self-determination, the United States, in league with an irresponsible United Nations, had foisted freedom on largely primitive and unprepared African tribes and had produced “chaos, communism, and neo-colonialism.”⁶² Kwame Nkrumah, the so-called “father” of Ghana, turned out to be a ruthless dictator and purveyor of a pseudo-religion. Here and there throughout Africa tribal warfare broke out, and by the late 1960s, all across the continent, crass dictatorships (such as Sékou Touré's in Guinea) proved to be the legacy of the much-heralded end of Western “imperialism.” To conservatives it was the West's headlong retreat from Africa, not its former control of the area, which was truly immoral. Do not forget, Frank Meyer bluntly asserted, that the long-despised “white man's burden” did represent “high purpose” as well as “confidence that the truth by which the West lived was the highest truth known to man.” The “abdication” of this burden could lead only to upheaval, decay, and Communist penetration.⁶³ Was that moral? Often National Review noted approvingly the economic and political stability of the white-dominated states of southern Africa, in contrast to the turmoil in nations to the north.⁶⁴ When, the Right wondered, would liberals ever understand that their clichés only made matters worse in Africa, that their projection of an abstract ideology onto the “dark continent” ignored such intractable realities as racial prejudice, tribal strife, cannibalism, and political instability? Could liberals put aside their stereotypes long enough to see that Portuguese control of Angola, for example, was not automatically evil? Contrary to ideology, Portuguese Angola did not practice racial discrimination. The bloody uprising of 1961 was not spontaneous but was carefully prepared by brutal guerrillas aided by Toure and Nkrumah.65 Jeffrey Hart asked

when Liberal opinion will assimilate the historical fact that parliamentary democracy has produced stable government in only a handful of nations . . . and when having assimilated that fact, Liberal opinion will cease expecting it to flourish in the Hamnegris [after Hamnegri, an African state in a novel by Russell Kirk] of this globe. So resistant is the Liberal imagination to so manifest a fact that one is justified in suspecting it of a deep hatred of actuality.⁶⁶

For conservatives the fruits of liberal policy in Africa were most bitter in the tragedy of the Congo in the early 1960s. To Frank Meyer the dissolution of the Congo was “a shameful regression in human history” for which the West, and especially the United States, must be held responsible.⁶⁷ James Burnham charged that instead of protecting Western interests in the Congo, the Kennedy administration, guided instead by liberal tenets, favored “supposed neutralist interests.” Liberalism dictated that America never act against the Left, only against the Right.⁶⁸ In the Congo the “Right” was represented by Moise Tshombe, a pro-Western, anti-Communist Christian whose province of Katanga was the only enclave of order in that chaotic land.69 American conservatives watched in outrage as the United Nations, financed by the United States, launched an invasion of Tshombe's province. Ernest van den Haag, a conservative sociologist who traveled to the Congo late in 1961, discovered what he considered to be UN record of treachery, looting, murder of civilians, and blatant interference in the Congo's internal affairs—a record which the UN desperately tried to conceal and which “set back the Congo twenty years.” Van den Haag was also critical of State Department “experts” imprisoned by their ideology:

. . . the UN, right or wrong, must be supported by the United States; “left” disorder is better than “right” order; left dictators are good (progressive); African politicians who are not leftists are stooges of colonialism; the UN should not intervene in the domestic affairs of any country unless it is anti-Communist or governed by whites; the way to prevent Communism from gaining a hold in Africa is to fight African anti-Communists and support pro-Communist dictators such as Nkrumah, Ben Bella, and Patrice Lumumba (of blessed memory).

To van den Haag, the barbarous and dangerous policy of the United Nations in the Congo necessitated a new American policy toward the world organization: let it “vegetate” and “atrophy.” Meanwhile, what the Congo needed was decentralization and the return of Belgian officers and administrators. But the UN would not admit that.⁷⁰

Ironically, Moise Tshombe eventually became the leader of the Congo. But in 1967 this conservative hero was kidnapped while in a flight over Spain, taken to Algeria, tortured, and held incommunicado for two years while his enemies in the Congo sought to bring him home to be executed. In 1969 Tshombe died in Algeria, supposedly of a heart attack. William F Buckley Jr. sardonically expressed conservative indignation at this injustice: “Can anyone imagine the United Nations interrupting a session on the human rights of mankind in order to plead the human rights of one man, victimized by their beloved Third World?”71 To Buckley and many other conservatives the United Nations itself was “the true enemy of the native populations of Africa.”⁷²

Buckley and van den Haag were not the only conservative critics of the United Nations; skepticism about that body was a prominent feature of right-wing commentary in the 1950s and 1960s. To conservatives, liberal praise of the UN as “man's last best hope for peace” and as the embodiment of “world opinion” was preposterous. For one thing, the unwieldy General Assembly, composed increasingly of so-called nonaligned nations, bore little relation to the realities of power in the world. And power, not egalitarian notions (one nation, one vote), was what counted in global politics. James Burnham was most persistently critical of “the motley crew of the UN Assembly [which] has come to wield a kind of preventive veto over the Western powers,” particularly the United States.⁷³ Time and again, said Burnham, the United States, instead of following a “Western strategy” oriented toward its NATO allies, allowed itself to be mesmerized by an “Afro-Asian strategy” designed to placate so-called neutral nations.74

Why in the name of minimal common sense does our government allow itself to be denounced, vilified and lied about day after day in the halls of the United Nations by a mob of terrorists, savages, revolutionaries, bankrupts, demagogues, voluptuaries and half-educated opportunists masquerading as representatives of newborn sovereign nations?⁷⁵

The time had come to deflate the pretensions of the world organization, Burnham argued. This the United States could do by proclaiming that it would no longer vote on substantive matters in the UN. Simply that. Without the cooperation of the organization's chief sponsor, the UN's votes would become “automatically meaningless,”⁷⁶ and its capacity for harm would be curtailed. “Depoliticize” the UN, he urged.⁷⁷

The United Nations also exemplified what conservatives regarded as one of the most annoying errors of liberalism in foreign policy: its double standard of morality. Sir Arnold Lunn called it 'selective indignation”;⁷⁸ James Burnham labeled it “moral asymmetry.”⁷⁹ It was so easy for the UN, “world opinion,” and American liberals to condemn Portuguese “colonialism” in Angola, said conservatives. But why did no one condemn the utterly bestial uprising of Holden Roberto's Angolan terrorists in 1961? It was so easy to criticize the white government of Rhodesia. Why not also the dismal dictatorship of Nkrumah in Ghana and the racism of the new African nations toward their own minorities? Prime Minister Nehru of India was supposed to be the paragon of Third World virtue. Why was he not chastised more vigorously for his seizure of tiny Goa in 1962, especially when many natives of Goa did not even want to be annexed? Liberals were quick to lavish attention on American misconduct in Vietnam. Why were they so comparatively silent about the systematic torture, assassinations, and other atrocities of the Vietcong? Americans were frequently exhorted to isolate “immoral” regimes in Greece and South Africa, yet were simultaneously urged to “build bridges” to far more monstrous governments in China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. “Right-wing coups by army elements,” observed Jeffrey Hart, “are greeted by universal liberal headshaking. Left-wing coups, on the other hand, evoke a capacity for infinite hope.”80 James Burnham commented:

We can force Britain and France out of the Suez, but we cannot so much as try to force the Russian tanks back from Budapest. We can mass our fleet against the Trujillos, but not against the Castros. We can vote in the U.N. against South African apartheid or Portuguese rule in Angola, but we cannot even introduce a motion on the Berlin Wall—much less, give the simple order to push the Wall down.⁸¹

And what was the result of liberal foreign policy? M. Stan-ton Evans expressed the conservative position succinctly: “the liquidation of Western hegemony in every quarter of the globe, the transfer of one billion people from the Western world to the armed camp of Communism, and the establishment of a Communist beachhead 90 miles from American shores.”⁸² William Rickenbacker emphatically concurred. Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, America's “retreat” had “accelerated.”83 From Cuba to Laos, from Algeria to Indonesia, from the Berlin Wall to the assassination of Diem in South Vietnam, the American record was ghastly:

In short, under the Kennedy-Johnson dispensation the U.S. has abandoned forward position after forward position throughout the world, managed to offend every one of our important historic allies, subsidized the rise of socialist regimes on every continent, given sanctuary if not outright aid to the buildup of a Communist military camp in the Caribbean, and demoralized every movement in the world that favors being tough with the Communists.⁸⁴

And yet, incredibly (to the conservatives), it was they, the outsiders, the critics of these disasters, who were accused of “mental aberration.”⁸⁵ It was they who were charged with paranoia, extremism, and conspiracy theories of history. In reply to the common liberal argument that world events since 1945 were largely inevitable and not controllable by the United States, Evans stressed the contribution of American foreign policy to Western defeats. The Bay of Pigs debacle, the overthrow of the anti-Communist Diem in Vietnam, the U.S. aid which propped up anti-American, Marxist dictators in Ghana and Indonesia for so long—these were not inevitable developments. They were deliberate policies and decisions. Moreover, if Communism was the wave of the future, why were pro-Communist leaders deposed in the 1960s in places like British Guiana and Indonesia? The truth, according to Evans, was that liberals were “hiding behind the History Theory of Conspiracy”: the tendency to ascribe liberal failures to the alleged inevitability of history.86 As the pro-Western Lebanese statesman Charles Malik wrote in The Conservative Papers:

If you believe . . . the outcome of the struggle in China, in Korea, in Indochina; the Communist penetration of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America; the absence of any effective counteracting force to the Communist Party; the relative decline in Western influence and Western economic and military strength . . . could not have been helped, then you are already a Marxist.⁸⁷

Again and again, conservatives emphasized that the world was not merely complicated (as liberals insisted) but dangerous. And dangerous precisely because there really were evil men working tirelessly to bury the West. Conservative intellectuals were not simplemindedly asserting that these men were omnipresent and omnipotent. Just the opposite: Communists could be defeated—if the threat were recognized as genuine. For it was there, even in unexpected places. The Philby case, for example, demonstrated that. Harold “Kim” Philby, well-bred, respectable, by the early 1950s a senior official in British Intelligence, had fled to Moscow—a Communist spy who left incredible wreckage behind him. When Philby published his memoirs in the 1960s, National Review proclaimed one of the lessons:

A whole generation of middle-class youth in the West was shattered by the Depression and the rise of Hitler and deluded by the Soviet myth. . . . In the United States this was the generation of Hiss and Chambers.

Which brings us back to the McCarthy file. . . . For the Philby scandal finally justifies the essence, if not the detail, of McCarthy's approach. The argument centered on the question of whether a sober, respected employee of the state who had joined some dim front organization in the early Thirties might thereby in the late Forties be a possible security risk. For reasons of leftist prejudice or easy-going naïveté, McCarthy's opponents said that such affiliations were trivial juvenilia. McCarthy insisted that they were relevant (though not of course conclusive) character indices. And he has been proved right.88

Communism was thus not an imaginary conspiracy concocted by fevered minds. A man could smile and smile and be a villain.

In evaluating liberalism's conduct of foreign policy, conservative intellectuals were driven to meditate on the deeper reasons for the Left's failures. Liberals, said Meyer, were “innately incapable” of victoriously resisting Communism.⁸⁹ For one thing, the Right suggested, the blandly rationalistic liberal mind was incapable of grasping the religious, transnational, and nonrational character of messianic Communism. Too many liberals emphasized old-fashioned nationalism and geography as the “real historical counters.”⁹⁰ Frank Meyer acknowledged that if the Soviet menace were simply a “Russian” threat, then old-fashioned diplomacy could be employed and peaceful coexistence eventually attained.⁹¹ But this was not the nature of the enemy; the Soviet Union was instead “the state form taken by a materialist faith determined to rule the world.”⁹² A frequent target of the conservatives was George Kennan, whom many on the Right regarded as the most eminent liberal strategist. In 1961 Thomas Molnar, a conservative Catholic historian who had survived Nazi brutality at Dachau, expressed the basic conservative complaint: Kennan did not understand the recrudescence of “subterranean,” “quasi-religious convictions” in our time. His nineteenth-century realpolitik missed the “ideological component” of power in the twentieth century.93 As William Schlamm phrased it, Communism was not ordinary; it was “a historical hurricane of unparalleled sweep.”⁹⁴

The roots of liberal confusion went even deeper, conservatives believed. Why did liberals fail to recognize that Communism was intrinsically evil? Why did they not understand that it was a “metaphysical faith,” that “Communism remains Communism”?⁹⁵ Because, said Frank Meyer, liberalism was infected by “a positivism that neither believes in a good for which to fight, nor credits to the enemy the possibility of unstinting devotion to an evil for which he is prepared to fight, come what may.”⁹⁶ Liberal relativism simply could not distinguish between good and evil.⁹⁷ It was virtually a “delusionary psychosis” which preferred “soothing hypotheses derived from flitting changes in the visage of the bear.”⁹⁸

Liberal impotence before—even fascination with—this “ultimate challenge to Western civilization”⁹⁹ could not be explained, however, simply in terms of liberalism's alleged rationalism and moral relativism. The liberal bond with Communism was more intimate. For what was Communism, said William Schlamm, but

the final synthesis of all heretical tendencies that have pervaded western civilization for many centuries. Communism is the culminating hubris of Promethean man who reaches out for the world and means to remake creation. It is scientism gone political.100

Like other conservatives, Schlamm rejected the so-called “stomach” theory of Communism, which asserted that Communism appealed primarily to the economically discontented and the physically miserable. On the contrary, its appeal was mainly to an elite: the intellectuals. Why? Because Communism was “a mutation of the mind, a spiritual venture, the synthesis of several centuries of all the heretical but intellectual unrest in history.”¹⁰¹ Schlamm granted that liberal dislike of “Communism in power” was “sincere.” But the underlying magnetic attraction of Communism was continuous. For deep down, the entire Left shared the scientistic faith that man was “about to conquer his fate, to control creation, to manage all life, and God, through applied science!”¹⁰²

In short, conservatives argued, as William F Buckley Jr. put it on one occasion, that “the continuing blindness of the liberals” to Communism was not “accidental,” not mere “neglect,” but a “deep psychological problem” producing paralysis.¹⁰³ To L. Brent Bozell this paralysis was a sign of despair. For liberalism was a heresy, a form of gnosticism: the belief in salvation on this earth. “Moderate” gnosticism—that is, liberalism—was dying, and liberals were beginning to perceive

that the gnostic dream of an earthly paradise can be realized (as Khrushchev knows) not by changing society, but by changing man—by transmutative surgery on the soul. It follows that if gnosticism is ever to triumph, it will triumph in the Communist form. Yet Liberals instinctively recoil from that prospect. . . . What a pickle—to be possessed by a world view that demands the victory of your enemy!104

Frank Meyer, also relying on the work of Eric Voegelin, similarly stressed that “collectivist Liberalism” and Communism were “forms of the same revolutionary movement.”¹⁰⁵ Back in 1954, Whittaker Chambers expressed this fundamental theme of conservative analysis. The “enlightened, articulate elite” of the West had “rejected the religious roots” of its own civilization for a “new order of beliefs” of which Communism was “one logical expression.”

It is a Western body of belief that now threatens the West from Russia. As a body of Western beliefs, secular and rationalistic, the intelligentsia of the West share it, and are therefore always committed to a secret emotional complicity with Communism of which they dislike, not the Communism, but only what, by the chances of history, Russia has specifically added to it—slave labor camps, purges, MVD et al. And that, not because the Western intellectuals find them unjustifiable, but because they are afraid of being caught in them. If they could have Communism without the brutalities of ruling that the Russian experience bred, they have only marginal objections. Why should they object? What else is socialism but Communism with the claws retracted?¹⁰⁶

It remained for James Burnham to draw the obvious conclusion in one of the most incisive conservative books of the postwar period.107 Suicide of the West was a systematic analysis and indictment of liberal ideology: its alleged double standard, guilt complex, relativistic theory of truth, and a host of other flaws in its understanding of the world. While Communism, for instance, was a threat from the Left, liberalism—“infected” with Communism¹⁰⁸ —was deluded by the false assumption that the true enemy was always on the Right. Indeed, it could “function effectively only against the Right.”¹⁰⁹ To Burnham the function of liberalism was starkly clear: the reconciliation of the West to “dissolution.” Liberalism was nothing less than “the ideology of Western suicide.”¹¹⁰

Since Communism was insatiable, and since liberalism (as the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge described it) was “a collective death-wish,”¹¹¹ the Right believed that only it could save Western civilization. Yes, conservatives said forthrightly, Western civilization. “We of the Christian West,” Bozell declared, “owe our identity to the central fact of history—the entry of God onto the human stage.” It is our task to build and defend “a Christian civilization.”¹¹² The unique and preeminent value of the truths for which the West stood was a recurrent motif in Meyer's writing as well. According to Charles Malik, no civilization “conceived and developed the human and universal” more than the West.113 To liberals such judgments no doubt smacked of arrogance and chauvinism; to conservatives the failure to make such judgments showed how diseased liberalism was. They quoted with approval Robert Frost's gibe, “A Liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in an argument.”¹¹⁴

And so conservatives urgently demanded a policy of victory in the cold war. Not containment, Malik urged, but “an active policy of liberation.”¹¹⁵ In contrast to liberals like Senator J. William Fulbright, who increasingly stressed the limits of American power and beckoned the nation toward a more “isolationist” posture, Malik and other conservatives contended that the West had not even begun to fight; its resources had never been totally committed to the struggle.¹¹⁶ Pursue a Western strategy, Burnham exhorted, not a Yalta strategy of attempted collaboration with the Russians or a Third World-UN strategy.¹¹⁷ Pursue a “Forward Strategy,” said Robert Strausz-Hupé and his colleagues.¹¹⁸ Why Not Victory?, Barry Goldwater entitled his second book—one heavily influenced by the conservative cold war expert Gerhart Niemeyer.¹¹⁹ Occasionally a desperate call for a return to a Fortress America was heard in conservative circles.¹²⁰ But such notes were rare in the 1950s and 1960s. The postwar conservative intellectual movement was not predominantly isolationist.121

Conservative intellectuals did not confine themselves to militant rhetoric. Although it is not possible to list every foreign policy proposal the Right made, a few examples will suggest the contours of conservative thinking. First, the United States must maintain military supremacy—not parity or “sufficiency.” Conservatives distrusted disarmament ideas, the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963, and the military policies of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. They supported antiballistic missile development. The United States should not expand its trade with the Communist bloc, aid unfriendly Third World nations, encourage spy-laden “cultural exchanges,” or otherwise assist Communism. The United States should support its allies regardless of charges of colonialism, and it should stop courting neutrals. Early in the Vietnam war, some conservatives urged a blockade of Haiphong and other stern measures contrary to the step-by-step escalation strategy of the Johnson administration. Repeatedly conservatives advocated efforts to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba; at one point James Burnham considered it the first priority.¹²² (The trouble with the Bay of Pigs invasion, conservatives believed, was not that it had been tried but that it had failed—a “floundering, half-hearted catastrophe.”¹²³ ) The Right believed that successful offensive actions in Vietnam and Cuba alone would reverberate throughout the world. No longer should Communist territory be regarded as a “peace zone” or privileged sanctuary. No longer should American policy be listless, aimless, and uncoordinated. It “must be based,” said Strausz-Hupé, Stefan Possony, and William Kintner, “upon the premise that we cannot tolerate the survival of a political system which has both the growing capability and the ruthless will to destroy us. We have no choice but to adopt a Catonic strategy.”124 Conservatives had little faith in the ability of cold war “thaws,” destalinization, or the Sino-Soviet split to end the menace or “reduce tensions.”¹²⁵

To liberals, of course, such pronouncements seemed wildly simplistic and irresponsible. But whatever the validity of the conservative approach to foreign affairs, an important development occurred during the 1950s and 1960s: the growth of a network of informed conservative foreign policy experts. The Center for Strategic Studies at Georgetown, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the American Security Council were among the outposts of scholarly, respectable, conservative cold war analysis. Particularly influential was the Foreign Policy Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1955 and directed by the Austrian émigré Robert Strausz-Hupé. In 1959 Strausz-Hupé and several colleagues produced a notable analysis of Communist tactics and strategy, Protracted Conflict, which markedly affected the Right and impressed many liberals as well.¹²⁶ The sequel, A Forward Strategy for America (1961), was also well regarded by many conservatives. Eight years later, President Richard Nixon rewarded Strausz-Hupé with the ambassadorship to Ceylon (after Senator Fulbright vetoed an appointment to Morocco).127

More and more conservative academics were being heard: men like Stefan Possony, Richard V. Allen, and Milorad Drachkovitch at the Hoover Institution, Warren Nutter at the University of Virginia, David Nelson Rowe at Yale, Frank J. Johnson at the American Security Council, Willi am Kintner and Strausz-Hupé at the University of Pennsylvania, Lev Dobrian-sky at Georgetown, Gerhart Niemeyer at Notre Dame, Frank Trager at New York University, Richard Walker at South Carolina, Walter Darnell Jacobs at Maryland, Karl Wittfogel at the University of Washington, and Edward Teller at the University of California. These men and many more were not simply publicists or sloganeers but specialists engaged in scholarly analysis. However controversial their position, they gave to the Right some needed intellectual status and sophistication. If not always taken seriously, conservatives were able by the late 1960s to claim that they ought to be taken seriously. Their scholarly output was increasing, and, through Modern Age, National Review, and journals such as Orbis (the quarterly published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania), was reaching larger audiences. In a world of Cubas, Vietnams, Czechoslovakias, and massive Russian penetration of the Middle East, the conservative critique of liberal foreign policy gained plausibility. Other Americans, too, doubted that Communists had suddenly become benign.¹²⁸

As the conservatives' assault on America's foreign policy record acquired momentum, so, also, did their critique of the domestic accomplishments of post-New Deal liberalism.

Reasoned suspicion of the State and defense of the free market were not, of course, novel to conservatism in the 1960s. These themes had been developed years before, by men like Nock and Chodorov, Hayek and Mises, Hazlitt and Buckley. Yet by the late 1950s something clearly was missing. For all the learned works of the Austrian economists and their disciples, for all the polemics of publicists, Buckley felt compelled to acknowledge in 1959 that the “conservative demonstration” had failed. Conservatives had been unable to persuade the country that economic freedom (the one most relevant to our everyday lives and choices) was “the most precious temporal freedom.” Conservatives had been unable to show the “nexus between individual freedom and property rights.”129

Conservatives have not “proved” to the satisfaction either of the public or of the academy that the moderate welfare state has paralyzing economic or political consequences for the affluent society. . . .

The failure of the conservative demonstration in political affairs rests primarily on our failure to convince that the establishment of the welfare state entails the surrender, bit by bit, of minor freedoms which, added together, can alter the very shape of our existence.¹³⁰

A new dimension of analysis was therefore needed, one that pushed beyond the repetition of libertarian principles and Hayekian prophecy. In the 1960s conservatism increasingly acquired that dimension. The revolt against the State began to seem less abstract and doctrinaire; it became, in fact, audaciously specific.

One reason for the shift from a paradigmatic to a more pragmatic approach, conservatives argued, was very simple: reality was at last validating their critique. It was no longer quite so necessary to warn about future effects of the welfare state; examples of its present consequences were increasingly at hand. One of the earliest iconoclastic case studies was The Federal Bulldozer, an analysis of the urban renewal program by a young Columbia University professor, Martin Anderson.131 To Anderson urban renewal was objectionable in principle; it was wrong to compel huge numbers of people to abandon their homes and to destroy these homes by eminent domain in order that the land might be put to private uses that somebody else deemed preferable. But the core of his analysis was a devastating statistical demonstration that the federal program had not worked. Between 1949 and 1962 it had built about 28,000 homes but destroyed 126,000. Over four times more homes had been eradicated than constructed.¹³² Urban renewal had not alleviated the housing problem; it had aggravated it. It had not eliminated slums; it had simply “shifted” them and facilitated their growth. It had killed many small businesses and hurt low-income people for the sake of aesthetic desires of well-to-do elite groups. It had not improved cities' tax bases or stimulated the economy. It had by the early 1960s displaced 1,665,000 people—for no good reason whatsoever.¹³³

In contrast to this dreary record, Anderson boldly extolled the private enterprise system. While urban renewal was floundering in the 1950s, “the greatest improvement in housing quality ever shown in the United States” occurred—via free enterprise.134 It was simply not true that the private sector had been found wanting. “As far as the nonwhite population of the United States is concerned, their housing conditions have been made worse by the federal urban renewal program and have been improved substantially by the free working of the market place.”¹³⁵ Government intervention itself was the culprit. Free enterprise could do the job. Therefore, Anderson urged, repeal the urban renewal program totally—now.¹³⁶

Anderson's scholarly tour de force won acclaim among conservatives, who frequently cited urban renewal as a prime illustration of liberal folly. It is easy enough to see why. His book could not be explained away as merely a conservative tirade, published, perhaps, by Regnery or Devin-Adair. While Anderson did openly proclaim his libertarian principles and was capable of righteous indignation, his book was full of hard data that could not be readily dismissed. Furthermore, it was sponsored by the prestigious Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard University; the book had to be taken seriously.

Anderson's study was only the beginning; as the 1960s wore on, an increasingly powerful genre of scholarly conservative muckraking flourished. Unlike the mudraking of an earlier era, its target was not business but government—federal programs created by liberal humanitarian ideology, programs like rent control, public housing,¹³⁷ “Medicaid,” welfare, farm price supports, and the “war on poverty.” Consider, for example, the minimum wage. Who but a person insensitive to suffering could possibly object to a program that set a floor under a person's job earnings? Who could deny the obvious humanitarian benefits of such a scheme? The respected conservative economist Yale Brozen of the University of Chicago did. Armed with tables of statistics, Brozen insisted that the minimum wage “hurt the poor and increased unemployment for unskilled workers.”138 Every single rise in the legal minimum wage since World War II was followed by an increase in teenage unemployment. Why? Because artificial increases in the wage rate destroyed low-paying jobs for unskilled people.

In other words, for many teenagers and particularly for Negro teenagers, the minimum wage has destroyed the beginning jobs where they would normally acquire the skills and discipline to make themselves more productive. . . .

. . . in the interval between the time the minimum is raised and the time productivity catches up, tens of thousands of people are jobless, thousands of businesses fail that are never revived, and teenagers (particularly Negro teenagers) are barred from obtaining the low-wage jobs that have traditionally been their stepping stones to opportunity and advancement.

In addition, these laws stimulated automation, perpetuated segregation, and increased the flight of blacks from the rural South to the already overburdened northern cities.¹³⁹ Once again the lesson—to conservatives—was clear: not capitalism, not “racist” white America, but liberalism in government caused economic and social dislocation.

Consider the federal regulatory agencies: the ICC, FTC, FPC, CAB, and dozens of others. Were they truly useful or even necessary institutions any longer? After surveying the evidence, Yale Brozen concluded, “The fact is that most of these regulatory agencies have ended up setting price floors to protect industry, not price ceilings to protect consumers—and regulated industry has tended to become more inefficient as a result.”140 If anything, these powerful bureaucracies had, conservatives insisted, clogged and distorted the economy. But what about the monopoly power of big business? Milton Friedman, a colleague of Brozen's at the University of Chicago, declared that the impact of monopoly on the U.S. economy had been greatly exaggerated. Aside from a few “technical” or natural monopolies and some temporary, unstable private arrangements, “the most important source of monopoly power” was government itself, dispensing such favors as tariffs, tax breaks, and exemption of union monopolies from antitrust laws.¹⁴¹ Relentlessly, conservative intellectuals, citing the record, drove their point home:

. . . it is the government itself that causes much of the hardship and poverty that concerns us, partly by its many interventions in the free market and partly by the taxes required to support these programs.¹⁴²

The conservative critique of the welfare state extended even to what the Right learned to its sorrow in 1964 was virtually a sacred cow in American politics: Social Security. Conservatives had long been troubled by this program but had often tended to stress philosophical rather than empirical objections to it. William F. Buckley Jr., for instance, stated in 1959 that its “compulsory character” was “the most serious argument” against it.143 Milton Friedman also based part of his case on these moral grounds.¹⁴⁴ But as time went on, this objection was supplemented by others directed at the mechanics of the program itself. In 1962 Friedman summarized some of its practical defects:

It has deprived all of us of control over a sizable fraction of our income, requiring us to devote it to a particular purpose, purchase of a retirement annuity, in a particular way, by buying it from a government concern. It has inhibited competition in the sale of annuities and the development of retirement arrangements. It has given birth to a large bureaucracy that shows tendencies of growing by what it feeds on. . . . And all this, to avoid the danger that a few people might become charges on the public.¹⁴⁵

Nor was this all. Another conservative student of Social Security, economist Colin Campbell of Dartmouth College, cited statistics revealing numerous defects in the system. The tax rate, for example, was dreadfully regressive, especially for the poor. There was only a “very loose relationship” between the costs of a person's Social Security plan and the benefits he could expect to receive. In particular, young workers just entering the system could not hope to get back later what they would put in for most of their lives.¹⁴⁶ By the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Congress voted election-year benefit increases with seemingly mechanical regularity, and as Social Security taxes soared in consequence, conservative intellectuals became ever more convinced that the program was, in Meyer's word, “fraudulent” in practice as well as objectionable in principle.147 The whole program seemed to be totally out of control. Social Security taxes had increased seven times since 1950, M. Stanton Evans noted in 1972. By 1974 Social Security taxes would reach $1,320 on an income of $12,000, with obligations still far in excess of assets. Evans cited studies showing that workers could obtain much better annuities from private sources, and at much less cost.¹⁴⁸ In 1972, Milton Friedman publicly trod where Barry Goldwater had never ventured. Abolish Social Security, he urged—in the liberal-oriented Washington Monthly. ¹⁴⁹ The idea no longer seemed so shocking.

As liberal programs came under intellectual siege from the Right, as conservative scholars challenged not simply the morality of government action but what Buckley called the very “competence of the state” to remedy social ills,¹⁵⁰ conservatives turned often to the most disruptive domestic issue of the 1960s: the relation between black and white America. Many prominent right-wing intellectuals had been critics of the civil rights movement from the beginning. National Review persistently and forcefully challenged the integrationists' tactics and ultimate goals, despite the initially adverse climate of opinion. The conservative leadership strenuously abjured any notions of innate black inferiority. No ranting, vulgar racism besmirched National Review or Modern Age. Barry Goldwater even declared in The Conscience of a Conservative that integrated schools were, in his judgment, “wise and just.”¹⁵¹ Conservatives pointed out that Goldwater had helped to integrate the Arizona Air National Guard and the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport.152 Frank Meyer insisted that every person has “innate value” and every citizen the right to “equal treatment before the law.” Moreover, Meyer knew (as did other conservatives) that “the Negro people have suffered profound wrongs.” But, he added (and here he no doubt voiced a conservative consensus), black grievances could not be remedied “by destroying the foundations of a free constitutional society.” Legalized coercion in favor of desegregation was as much a “monstrosity” as legalized coercion in favor of segregation. Governmental regulation of individual relationships always brought “disaster to a free society.”¹⁵³

Conservative hostility to governmental coercion and belief in the unconstitutionality of civil rights legislation was deeply and sincerely felt. In the 1960s, however, these objections in principle were supplemented by a more pragmatic argument: integration, even if constitutional, did not work. Probably the most scholarly conservative critic of integration in the schools was the New York University sociologist Ernest van den Haag. According to van den Haag, the “factual” basis of Brown vs. Board of Education was utterly worthless. The Supreme Court had relied on “modern authority” (studies cited by Kenneth Clark, a black psychologist) to prove that racially separate schools were “inherently unequal” since black children suffered psychic damage because of segregation. To van den Haag, however, Clark's studies proved no such thing at all.¹⁵⁴ His scholarship was flatly and suspiciously distorted and wrong;¹⁵⁵ there was “no evidence . . . that separation per se is injurious to Negroes, or that any damage is suffered therefrom.”156 The obvious present educational deficiencies of black children could not, said van den Haag, be solved by placing black children in white schools; such “mixed education” would “impair” the learning of both groups. For the moment, black children did not “on the average” respond as well as white children to “the stimulation given by average white schools.” Therefore black children should be educated “separately,” while black schools must strive to overcome the “culturally deprived home environment” of many black youngsters. Improved education for all was dependent on separation according to ability. “And this,” van den Haag said candidly, “means very largely according to race.”¹⁵⁷

While this sociologist was undermining the claim that integrated schools were a solution to racial problems, other conservatives relied heavily on Beyond the Melting Pot, in which two political liberals, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, demonstrated that ethnic groups had never been totally “integrated” into a homogeneous pattern in New York City. Conservatives used this study to attack the integrationist ethos in toto. Integration, claimed Jeffrey Hart, was based on what we now know was the “myth” of homogeneity. The attempt to effect “total Negro integration” was an effort to set up “a novel and abstract pattern” to which no other ethnic group had con-formed.¹⁵⁸ For that matter, National Review editorialized in 1967, “there is no country with genuine racial integration,” and even blacks did not want it so much any more. Look at the “black power” movement. Divested of its revolutionary dimension, it suggested an impulse toward “black responsibility.” Why not experiment with black administration of black schools, for example, if that was what a majority of black parents really wanted? Why be shackled by clichés about integration.?159

Clichés, empty and dangerous clichés: this was the verdict which conservatives emphatically pronounced on the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) in March 1968. In their response to the commission's examination of the racial crisis, conservatives presented their case with more fervor than ever before. The report, they agreed, was a disaster—and a compelling indication of the intellectual bankruptcy and irresponsibility of liberalism. In 1966, as the wave of urban riots in America gained momentum, Frank Meyer claimed that the black protest movement was shifting from “civil rights” to a revolutionary agitation for “confiscatory socialism.”¹⁶⁰ Now, in the bleak early days of 1968, Martin Luther King was actually publicly planning, in his own words, a “massive dislocation” of the nation's capital “until America responds.”¹⁶¹ In the face of “incipient revolution,” which confronted “the survival of a free society” with the threat of “endemic disorder,” what did the Kerner Commission recommend for the short term? Nothing. Instead, it “put the blame everywhere but where it belongs”: on the rioters, abetted by the liberals “who, with their abstract ideology, prepared the way for the riots by their contempt for social order and their utopian, egalitarian enticements and incitements.” Ignoring the elementary fact that a free society cannot exist if it cannot quell violent threats from within, the commission repeated on a “grandiose” scale the central error of the liberal approach: the creation among blacks of the “false hope” that “by an act of government, without strenuous effort, without the time always needed for beneficent social change, instant Utopia could be created.” That was the fundamental cause of the riots.162

Moreover, M. Stanton Evans stressed, the commission's specific proposals were also defective. The report was “impervious” to the failures of “welfarism”; it could suggest only—more welfarism. It worried about teenage unemployment in the ghettos but advocated a rise in the minimum wage that would magnify the problem. It wanted more public housing, more urban renewal—despite evidence that these programs were failing. If standard liberal nostrums were valid, why, Evans wondered, had the worst riot of 1967 occurred in liberal Detroit, which had received huge amounts of federal money and energetically carried out the war on poverty? “There is little to suggest,” Evans concluded, “that poverty caused the Detroit riots or that welfarism could have prevented them.”¹⁶³

A more extensive dissection of the Kerner Commission Report was performed by Ernest van den Haag. The conservative sociologist emphasized what the report did not: that “in all material respects, the fate of Negroes has improved faster than ever before. . . .” In fact, “there has been more improvement in the last twenty years than in the previous two hundred.” Yet while measurable progress was occurring, severe problems remained which the commission, by blaming riots on “those rioted against,” only tended to exacerbate. Even worse, confronted by a mounting desire among some blacks to fight whites, the commission recommended appeasement, buying off the rioters, on the theory that “we must be at fault if they are dissatisfied.” As if riots were a “rational phenomenon.” As if the yearning for violence, now “independent of material effects,” could be eliminated by rewarding it. No wonder many blacks were outraged by the “pitiful” groveling of white liberals. To alter the conditions that produced the desire to riot, he continued, would take a long time. Moreover, government might not always be the agency to alter them. In the meantime, in the short run, government must govern: it must increase the costs of rioting by swift and rigorous enforcement of the law.164

Equally critical of the Kerner Report was Jeffrey Hart. Like other conservatives, he was angered by the commission's blaming the riots on “white racism” and not at all on the rioters themselves. Like Meyer, he was disturbed by “an erosion of concern for law and for public order.” This decline was encouraged by the spread of “civil disobedience” and the “frivolous attitudes” of liberals like Adlai Stevenson, who suggested early in the 1960s that a jail sentence in the cause of civil rights was an honorable and perhaps even politically profitable thing. Such “remarkably casual” talk, Hart warned, would have to cease. Furthermore, it was not true that white racism was the basic cause of black distress. At the professional level, for instance, blacks were advancing rapidly. All across the board, legal walls of discrimination were crumbling. While it took other ethnic groups three generations or more to move from manual labor to significant white-collar status, there were signs that the new urban Northern black minority would make this transition even more quickly. Adopting what he called a “toughly realistic” approach, Hart emphasized the deeper and more intractable dimensions of the blacks' plight. In part the problem was not one of “white racism” at all but the natural “lag” that occurs when a formerly rural group strives to adjust to an urban environment. Moreover, blacks suffered many additional handicaps: they seemed unable to develop coherent institutions (including businesses) and “group solidarity,” like the Puerto Ricans, Chinese, and other minorities. They were impeded by “the chronic instability of the Negro family.” (Once again, the influence of Moynihan was apparent.) These problems, Hart argued, would not be quickly solved—certainly not by mere disbursement of money, nor by more street protests.165

What, then, should be done about the racial problems? At the most immediate level, conservative intellectuals resolutely demanded the restoration of order and the quelling of violence. This was an eminently proper tactic for a decent and free society. “Repression,” said William F. Buckley Jr., after analyzing Martin Luther King's plan to paralyze Washington, D.C., “is an unpleasant instrument, but it is absolutely necessary for civilizations that believe in order and human rights. I wish to God Hitler and Lenin had been repressed.”¹⁶⁶ But conservatives did not stop here; they went on to specify solutions of their own. Eliminate minimum wage laws and arrange welfare payments so as not to reduce the incentive to work, counseled van den Haag.¹⁶⁷ Eliminate rent control and attack racially restrictive labor union practices, urged Hart. In addition, Hart vigorously called for more black-owned businesses, more blacks on urban police forces, and the development, via education (perhaps at the pre-school level), of a stable Negro middle class. Perhaps black self-consciousness was not such a bad thing.¹⁶⁸ Hart was not the only conservative to urge blacks to organize and rely more upon themselves. Buckley suggested that whites “acquiesce even in impulses to separatism”; perhaps, he added, black unions should be organized.169 In 1965, while a candidate for mayor of New York City, Buckley stated succinctly one of the fundamental conservative tenets: “The principal problems that are faced by Negroes today . . . are not solved by government. They are solved by the leadership of their own people.”¹⁷⁰

Finally, conservatives pleaded: eschew the rhetoric of endless promises. Stop the stimulation of hopes that cannot be instantly fulfilled. Do not overlook the unpublicized but extraordinary achievements of the free enterprise system. Again and again, they stressed that, in Hart's words, “we cannot expect spectacular results in the short run.”¹⁷¹ The path to improvement, National Review declared in 1967, was primarily economic—a route that necessitated “hard work and self-discipline.”¹⁷² Frank Meyer referred to the “great insight” of Booker T. Washington that “respect and access to jobs must be earned by the Negroes themselves.”¹⁷³ Large numbers of “solid Negro families,” he said, were doing just that.¹⁷⁴ Jeffrey Hart uttered what seemed to conservatives an obvious if unpleasant truth: “Some problems are complicated and recalcitrant enough to admit of no immediate solution; such problems cannot be solved but only endured. . . .”¹⁷⁵ But improvement, conservatives also insisted, was quietly and steadily occurring, even if the Kerner Report seemed to minimize it. It might not be easy to dramatize, but it could not be denied.

Whatever the merit of these conservative proposals and approaches, they had one definite rhetorical vulnerability. It was easy to dismiss an appeal for patience, prudence, and self-help as moralistic indifference to suffering. How often conservatives had been told that they were selfish and lacked compassion. Fully aware of this criticism, conservatives sought to account for liberalism's claims to superior sensitivity. In Suicide of the West, James Burnham developed the most systematic analysis. The liberal, he observed, is “relentlessly driven” by an irrational feeling of guilt which he seeks to discharge by attempting to “cure every social evil”:

. . . he must do something about the social problem even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem—when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it. . . .

. . . The real and motivating problem, for the liberals, is not to cure the poverty or injustice or what not in the objective world but to appease the guilt in their own breasts; and what that requires is some program, some solution, some activity, whether or not it is the correct program, solution and activity. . . .the liberal . . . [is] morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself.176

Conservatives believed that this analysis was vindicated by the racial upheaval of the late 1960s. The Kerner Commission, “morally disarmed” by evident social injustices, could only engage in what van den Haag called “pathetic handwringing.”¹⁷⁷ It could only condemn “white racism.”

The cleavage between Left and Right was profound indeed. For conservatives were rejecting not just a program here and there but—in domestic affairs, at least—an entire style of politics: the politics of righteous indignation, moralistic crusades, New Frontiers, Great Societies, Wars on Poverty, the recurrent urge to advertise one's feelings of sympathy for the poor. Was the only way to improve society the way which required that one endlessly verbalize one's good intentions? Were good intentions enough? Did the absence of political zeal mean the absence of compassion? Did reliance on the market imply indifference to the poor?

Yet there was power in the liberal critique, and one unorthodox conservative, Richard Cornuelle, knew it. As a young man in the 1940s, Cornuelle had been converted from a vague belief in socialized medicine by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. As an active proponent of limited government and free enterprise, he became an editorial assistant to the redoubtable libertarian journalist Garet Garrett and later an executive of the Volker Fund. Annoyed by Cornuelle's “tidy ideology,” Garrett told the young enthusiast to visit the coalfields of Kentucky. The suffering he saw there shook him greatly and led him to discover “a lack of humanity in my conservative position.”178 The dilemma was painful: humanity and freedom seemed irreconcilable.

After years of intense searching, Cornuelle found a way to resolve the problem. On one side, he argued in 1965, were the conservatives, properly devoted to limited government, yet unable to present a specific and convincing program. On the other side were the liberals, ever ready with massive federal programs which now, in the 1960s, were failing. The alternative was a long-neglected but still viable American tradition: the “independent sector” of voluntary action motivated by neither profit nor power but by “the desire to serve others.”¹⁷⁹ This sphere, brilliantly analyzed by Alexis de Tocqueville (who called it “associations”), was capable of competing with government and of tapping Americans' enormous desire to do good. Churches and foundations, for example, were doing much and could do more. Government was simply not the sole alternative to apathy and neglect. Cornuelle cited example after example of what the “independent sector” could do. It was a private organization, not government, which virtually eliminated polio. Alcoholics Anonymous, a private concern, was accomplishing substantial good in that area. Cornuelle's own United Student Aid Funds, Inc. was demonstrating that loans for college students need not be a federal responsibility. In Southern cities “independent leadership” was a force for racial harmony. Given recognition and zestful reorganization, this sphere could do again what it had done before the Great Depression: “build a humane society and a free society together.”180

Cornuelle's brisk little book won quick acclaim in conservative circles and from such unexpected sources as Saul Alinsky and (at that moment) Irving Kristol. William F Buckley Jr. also praised Cornuelle's “refreshing thesis.”¹⁸¹ Frank Meyer stressed that Cornuelle's ideas could not thrive in a statist environment and were compatible with conservative principles. He was pleased that Cornuelle, through his Foundation for Voluntary Welfare and his book, was compensating concretely for a conservative defense of the free society which was, Meyer conceded, “largely general and dry.”¹⁸²

Perhaps Meyer sensed what Buckley had felt in 1959 in Up from Liberalism: that it was neither politically nor intellectually satisfying for conservatives simply to reiterate truisms about the free market, even if they were true. The conservative case for the free society needed a fresh practical restatement in the 1960s. Fortunately for the movement, it was forthcoming—from the irrepressibly brilliant economist Milton Friedman and the rising Chicago School of economics.

Born in 1912 of immigrant parents from Ruthenia, Friedman graduated in the early 1930s from Rutgers, where he was influenced by an exciting teacher, Arthur Burns, later an advisor to President Eisenhower and chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In 1932 Friedman began graduate work in economics at the University of Chicago and at once became immersed in its electric atmosphere, dominated by some of the greatest twentieth-century free-market economists: Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and Henry Simons. Another future conservative economist, George Stigler, was a fellow graduate student. After work at the U.S. Treasury during much of World War II, Friedman returned to Chicago and became part of a circle including Simons, Knight, and Friedman's brother-in-law Aaron Director—a group which turned this empirically and theoretically directed economist toward questions of government policy. Shortly after the war, Friedman had a new colleague, Friedrich Hayek, whose Road to Serfdom the young economist regarded as “an extraordinarily insightful and prescient book.” In 1947 Friedman attended the founding session of the Mont Pélerin Society, through which his circle of friends abroad widened significantly.

During the 1950s, as the conservative intellectual renascence slowly made its way, Friedman participated in a number of conferences which, in retrospect, he considered “extremely significant” both for him and for the struggling movement. Sponsored primarily by the small but highly useful Volker Fund, these sessions, held at Wabash College, Claremont, and a few other institutions, brought together such libertarian scholars as Hayek, David McCord Wright, John Jewkes of England, and Bruno Leoni of Italy for lectures and discussion. These meetings, Friedman later recalled, enabled their participants to explore and refine their views, a much-needed task in those years.183

In 1962 Friedman published one result of these conferences: a compact, hard-hitting book called Capitalism and Freedom. It was one of the most significant works of conservative184 scholarship of the 1960s. In the first two chapters of the book, he articulated lucidly the philosophy of nineteenth-century liberalism. Freedom was the ultimate social ideal; governmental power, while necessary, must be limited and decentralized. Interventionism was baneful and dangerous. Economic freedom—that is, capitalism—was an indispensable condition for political liberty. In a centralized socialist state, by contrast, individual endeavor and political dissent would become very difficult: where could dissenters find funds to oppose, for example, state socialism itself? Since all jobs in a fully socialized state would be controlled by the government, who would risk—would the state allow?—significant intellectual and political challenges to the “system”? Capitalism and freedom, Friedman asserted, were inseparable. The government should serve as an umpire, an enforcer of rules, not as a participant in the game itself.

These and other ideas of Friedman's were not, of course, new to conservatives in 1962; Hayek and Simons, for example, had enunciated similar themes years before.¹⁸⁵ What was truly striking was the task Friedman went on to perform in Capitalism and Freedom: a daring and iconoclastic assault on conventional twentieth-century liberal wisdom and an incisive indictment of liberal failures. Why, he asked, should the federal government retain a monopoly of the post office? Why did it forbid by law any competition?

If the delivery of mail is a technical monopoly, no one will be able to succeed in competition with the government. If it is not, there is no reason why the government should be engaged in it. The only way to find out is to leave other people free to enter.186

Why should the government control the price of gold? Why not adopt flexible, floating exchange rates?¹⁸⁷ In the field of education, state insistence on minimum amounts of schooling and even state financial support of this schooling were justified. But did the state have to administer (“nationalize”) the schools themselves?

Governments could require a minimum level of schooling financed by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on “approved” educational services. . . . The educational services could be rendered by private enterprises operated for profit, or by nonprofit institutions. . . .

In terms of effects, denationalizing schooling would widen the range of choices available to parents. . . . Parents could express their views about schools directly by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another. . . .

. . . The injection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools. It would do much, also, to introduce flexibility into school systems.¹⁸⁸

There was the tax system, another example of pernicious governmental activism: “An income tax intended to reduce inequality and promote the diffusion of wealth has in practice fostered reinvestment of corporate earnings, thereby favoring the growth of large corporations, inhibiting the operation of the capital market, and discouraging the establishment of new enterprises.”189

From farm price supports to social security, from the minimum wage to urban renewal, liberal solutions, said Friedman, had not achieved their aims. If in the 1920s and 1930s most intellectuals had understandably believed capitalism to be “defective” and governmental controls the panacea, the times were finally changing. For now at last there was a record of intervention; experience belied the statist dream.¹⁹⁰

Friedman was also anxious to refute various criticisms of the free market. Capitalism was not “racist,” for instance; the emergence of capitalism was marked by a reduction of discrimination and the dramatic opening of new opportunities for minorities.¹⁹¹ The “great achievement” of capitalism, in fact, was the increase of opportunities and the creation of less inequality than in any other economic system.¹⁹² By far his most important contention, however, was his reply to the standard liberal argument that the free market had proved itself a failure in the Great Depression. If capitalism was so laudable, why the disaster of the 1930s? Relying on research later published as part of his monumental Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, Friedman refuted this persistent taunt. The free enterprise system did not produce the Great Depression; “government mismanagement” did:

A governmentally established agency—the Federal Reserve System—had been assigned responsibility for monetary policy. In 1930 and 1931, it exercised this responsibility so ineptly as to convert what otherwise would have been a moderate contraction into a major catastrophe. . . .

. . . [The] evidence persuades me that . . . the severity of each of the major contractions—1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38—is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements. . . .

The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of a country.193

Friedman's liberating revisionism rapidly became part of the conservative scholarly arsenal.

The publication of Capitalism and Freedom and Friedman's emergence as a preeminent economist among conservatives constituted a major landmark in the evolution of the postwar Right.¹⁹⁴ Here was a man of increasing prestige within his profession, a man whom even opponents respected as one of the very best American economists, who was articulating conservative viewpoints with a felicitous combination of learning and wit. In 1967 he was elected president of the American Economic Association; by the end of the 1960s he was probably the most highly regarded and influential conservative scholar in the country, and one of the few with an international reputation.195

In several ways Friedman and the Chicago School represented an advance, for conservatives, over Hayek, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, and the Austrian School.¹⁹⁶ Aside from certain differences of viewpoint concerning the gold standard and monetary questions,¹⁹⁷ the Chicago economists tended to be more pragmatic than the “Austrians,” more oriented toward the use of mathematics than, for example, Mises, who was notably suspicious of “quantitative economics.”198 In an increasingly mathematics-oriented profession, this was an advantage, which explains in part the Chicago School's greater academic status. While Mises labored at a gigantic philosophy of human action which opposed interventionism on principle, men like Friedman, George Stigler, and Yale Brozen were particularly interested in the way government programs actually malfunctioned in practice. In his study of the Federal Reserve Board and his contributions to monetary theory, Friedman broke new ground in a way that “Austrians” did not. While the two schools were united in their devotion to the free market, it was the Chicago circle that was “in the vanguard of contemporary economic thought.”¹⁹⁹ The Chicago School's empirical and skeptical tendencies fitted in well with the general “pragmatization” of conservative thought in the 1960s.

There was another reason for Friedman's impact on the Right: his ability to generate a dazzling array of programs based on his libertarian principles. As much as any intellectual of the 1960s, Friedman was responsible for the growing acceptability of the volunteer army concept. In 1968 the editor of the influential Why the Draft? wrote: “If the ideas in this book can be traced to a single individual, that person is Professor Milton Friedman. . . .” Friedman was also credited by some conservatives with persuading President Nixon's Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force to endorse the concept in 1970.200 On another front, as many of the nation's schools became racked by racial violence, and as secularism in the schools seemed triumphant, many conservatives turned with increasing interest to Friedman's voucher plan for education.²⁰¹ His tax reform program won the support of Buckley.²⁰² His “negative income tax” concept was as provocative a plan to alleviate poverty as any other offered in the 1960s.²⁰³

Friedman's ideas did not, of course, invariably sweep conservatives off their feet. Not all right-wingers, for example, favored a volunteer army.²⁰⁴ The negative income tax was vehemently denounced by Henry Hazlitt, who voiced the skepticism of many in labeling Friedman's idea a politically naive guaranteed annual income scheme that was “not only economically but morally indefensible.”205 But the point remains that the writings of Friedman and his disciples bristled with specific, arguable alternatives to liberal programs. For an antiestablishment force that had to fight off charges of negativism and fetishistic devotion to outmoded ideas, this development was a most welcome boon. In 1968 Buckley sensed the changing climate:

There is in the air a sense of great excitement among American conservatives who have reason to believe that their time is coming. In the past few years any number of ideas developed in the garrets of conservative scriveners and roundly dismissed as radical and irrelevant have suddenly begun to appear in the classiest political shopwindows.²⁰⁶

If there was any single individual he might have thanked, it was Milton Friedman.²⁰⁷

Yet not Friedman alone. Rather, an increasing number of conservative academics like George Stigler, Yale Brozen, Colin Campbell, Ernest van den Haag, Gordon Tullock, Warren Nutter, James Buchanan, James Wiggins, and many more.208 Nor could one ignore the continuing contributions of individuals like Hayek, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, and John Chamberlain.²⁰⁹ Conservative scholarship was proliferating; networks of influence in economics departments and elsewhere were being established; a presence was being felt. These individuals were contributing to one of the significant intellectual currents of the 1960s: disillusionment with government and the remarkable revival of “neoclassical” economics.²¹⁰

 

By the early 1960s, paralleling the deepening intellectual challenge to the Left, signs of conservative resurgence were multiplying. Conservatives felt it; in 1961 M. Stanton Evans discerned a conservative “revolt on the campus” against liberal conformity and collectivism.211 Liberals felt it, too; one result was a flood of popular articles on conservatism, Senator Gold-water, the “radical Right,” and the John Birch Society. Why did this seemingly sudden upsurge occur? Explanations varied. Some argued that the “Ike Age” was over and that both Left and Right were stirring:²¹² Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) was formed at Buckley's home in 1960, while the Students for a Democratic Society was organized in 1962. Many hostile observers saw the revival as merely the quest of frustrated, insecure, resentful extremists for easy answers, simple solutions, a purer, older, and largely mythical America.

Conservatives naturally had different ideas. After all, Evans pointed out, the movement was stirring well before Eisenhower's departure. In part, he noted, campus conservatism represented not “a revolt of generation against generation” but the emergence of “an 'inner-directed underground'—a generation of parents who, in an age of other-direction, have held fast to traditional values, and bootlegged them to their children.”²¹³ Loyal to their parents' beliefs, defiant of the prevailing liberal climate, these young people were sustained by the growth of conservative thought in the 1950s. “The key to the conservative uprising has thus been the development of an intellectual community to provide alternatives to the Liberal orthodoxy, and of an agency to unite that community with the prospective rebels.”²¹⁴ This agency was Frank Chodorov's quiet but very significant Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI). Since its founding in 1953, ISI had in eight years increased its mailing list from 600 to more than 13,000 and had distributed conservative literature to about 40,000 students. ISI, Evans properly observed, was an indispensable link between right-wing scholars and college students.215 It had established a “loose confederation” of youthful conservatives²¹⁶ who would become, through YAF and other channels, important intellectual and political exponents of the cause. The seeds sown by isolated scholars in the 1940s and 1950s and nurtured by such journals as National Review and Modern Age were at last beginning to bear fruit.

The climax of conservatism's burst into prominence in the early 1960s was Senator Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. We are concerned here not with the strictly political aspects of the Goldwater candidacy but with its relation to the burgeoning conservative intellectual movement. The first important point is that the two were related to a degree that politics and intellectuals had not been for a long time. Every campaign organization, to be sure, has its “idea men,” speech-writers, and cast of supporting academics. Still, the Goldwater experience was not an ordinary phenomenon. From an early date, prominent conservative intellectuals significantly assisted the Arizona senator.²¹⁷ National Review enthusiastically promoted his candidacy. Russell Kirk helped to prepare a few of his speeches and was an early supporter.²¹⁸ Harry Jaffa wrote at least part of his acceptance speech; Milton Friedman served as his economic adviser.219 William Rusher was heavily involved from the start.²²⁰ Kirk, Meyer, Buckley, Bozell, even Ayn Rand:²²¹ right-wingers of nearly every variety endorsed Goldwater.²²² The Arizona senator's campaign represented the first thrust of the postwar New Right into presidential politics. Indeed, it is likely that without the patient spadework of the intellectual Right, the conservative political movement of the 1960s would have remained disorganized and defeated. Without The Conscience of a Conservative (actually written by L. Brent Bozell), which sold 3,500,000 copies by 1964,²²³ Goldwater would probably not have attained national stature. Ideas did have consequences, as Richard Weaver had long before observed.

The conservative intellectual movement had certainly come a long way from the ghetto-like isolation of the early postwar years. What a contrast with the era of Senator Taft! Back in 1953 a reporter had asked the Ohio senator whether he had read Russell Kirk's book The Conservative Mind. No, he indicated, and added with a chuckle, “You remind me of Thurber's Let Your Mind Alone.” On the same occasion Taft remarked, “There are some questions that I haven't thought very much about. But I'm a politician, not a philosopher.”²²⁴ Eleven years later, conservatives at last had a colorful political champion who doubled as a philosopher and gathered intellectuals to his side.

The crusade of 1964 ended, of course, in overwhelming electoral defeat. Nevertheless, for conservative intellectuals it was an intensely educational experience. One lesson drawn by many of them was that the campaign revealed the immense power and blatant bias of the news media and the utter unscrupulousness of their presumably responsible liberal foes. It was, said Buckley, a “vile campaign,”225 and conservatives were deeply stung and embittered by it. “Goldwater Republicanism is the closest thing in American politics to an equivalent of Russian Stalinism,” said Senator Fulbright. “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” said Martin Luther King. “All we needed to hear [at the Republican convention] was 'Heil Hitler,'” commented Governor Brown of California. “[The Republicans] had Mein Kampf as their political bible,” charged the mayor of San Francisco. “Goldwater is mentally unbalanced—he needs a psychiatrist,” said Walter Reuther. These and other statements by responsible liberals²²⁶ had a searing and lasting impact on the intellectual Right.²²⁷ In 1965, for instance, M. Stanton Evans devoted a chapter of The Liberal Establishment to what he regarded as willful distortion of Goldwater's views and performance by the principal national news media in 1963 and 1964.²²⁸ “The mass-communication network, solidly in Liberal hands, is even more formidable an opponent than conservatives had thought,” Frank Meyer mused shortly after the election.229 It became a settled conviction. The events of 1964 reinforced conservative awareness of the strength of the opposition and of their own status as an antiestablishment movement.

They did not, however, concede defeat. To be sure, Frank Meyer admitted, there was much to be done. Conservatives needed to “transl ate” their principles into issues more effectively. They needed to find a way to refute liberal charges that the Right wanted instant and “radical tearing down of established institutions.” But on one point, he and other conservatives were uncompromising: America had not repudiated the conservative philosophy. This position had not proved intellectually bankrupt.²³⁰ As Ronald Reagan, writing in National Review, put it, conservatism was not routed; only a “false image” of it was.²³¹ Despite all sorts of handicaps, conservatism had made “remarkable progress” in 1964, James Burnham asserted. An “idea in a few hundred heads” a decade ago now had millions of conscious adherents.²³² “Rivulets,” Gerhart Niemeyer asserted, had been united into a “great stream”: “conservatism in America is now an articulate, inclusive movement of the people.”²³³

Niemeyer was surely correct. As an intellectual and political movement, conservatism did not peak with Goldwater and did not die thereafter. What seems most noteworthy in retrospect was not the magnitude of the movement's defeat at the polls in 1964 but the rapidity of its recovery. The extraordinary resiliency of the Right was apparent in the increasing ties between intellectuals and politicians. In New York, the Conservative Party (an explicitly conservative party, no less), founded in 1961, was steadily growing, and writers like Frank Meyer were intimately involved in its activities.234 In 1965 William F. Buckley Jr. ran for mayor of New York City, gaining unprecedented exposure for his philosophy (and 13 percent of the vote) in the very citadel of liberalism.²³⁵ Such a venture would have been impossible a decade earlier. Increasingly, too, politicians were emerging as foci of conservative enthusiasm—in particular, after 1966, Ronald Reagan. Many of these political figures were also willing to cooperate with their academic brethren. The barriers between conservative thought and political activity were breaking down. It was becoming more and more difficult to separate the two.

Another sign of the growing political sophistication of the intellectual Right after 1964 was its increasingly firm dissociation from the prime symbol of right-wing extremism, the John Birch Society. Ever since the national press had discovered the society in 1961, many conservatives had been embarrassed by the sweeping and irresponsible statements of its leader, Robert Welch. William F. Buckley Jr. believed that Welch's well-publicized activities were being exploited by a liberal press in order to “anathematize the entire American right wing.”²³⁶ For several years the National Review circle concentrated its fire on Welch but refused to condemn the society as a whole. In 1961 Buckley stressed his “grave differences” with Welch and condemned his allegation that President Eisenhower was a Communist. On the other hand, he hoped that the society itself, most of whose members had never even heard of Welch's wild charges, would prosper—if it could distinguish “subjective motives” from “objective consequences” of a person's behavior.237 In early 1962, shortly after a meeting in Miami of several conservative leaders,²³⁸ various conservatives again tried to bury the Birch issue. In Commonweal, Russell Kirk lambasted a number of extremists, particularly Welch, who was harming “responsible conservatism” far more than Communism. While many decent people belonged to the society, it was controlled by “the lunatic fringe”—namely, Welch.²³⁹ Almost simultaneously, National Review denounced Welch (but not the entire society) for “damaging the cause of anti-Communism,” endangering conservative action, and continuing to detect no difference between “an active pro-Communist” and “an ineffectually anti-Communist Liberal.”²⁴⁰

By 1965, however, the distinction between Welch and his followers no longer seemed tenable, and the editors of National Review, in a special feature section, condemned the entire society.²⁴¹ Welch's allegedly paranoid views (which the editors cited in detail) could not be dismissed as merely his own; they dominated the society, whose members gave every evidence of supporting him. These views, the editors believed, were false and increasingly harmful to informed anti-Communism. The society could not, therefore (said Meyer), be considered merely “misguided.” Its “psychosis of conspiracy” (such as the new assertion that America was “60-80 percent” Communist-dominated) was dangerous to the defense of America's national interests.242

While the respectable Right was repudiating Birchism, there was increasing evidence of intellectual maturity and recognition as well. The divisive philosophical quarrels of the early 1960s were yielding (at least temporarily) to a kind of cease-fire sanctified by fusionism. Slowly, here and there, conservatives appeared to be “making it.” National Review's circulation, which had been about 30,000 in 1960, jumped to 60,000 by 1963, over 90,000 in 1964, and, after a postelection slump, around 95,000 in 1965 and more than 100,000 in the late 1960s.²⁴³ Buckley's syndicated column, founded in 1962 with thirty-eight charter newspapers,²⁴⁴ continued to increase its outlets until it became by the early 1970s one of the two or three most widely syndicated columns in the country (with more than 300 subscribers). In 1966 Buckley successfully inaugurated Firing Line, a popular television debate series. Later that same year, Milton Friedman became a regular columnist in Newsweek.²⁴⁵ Meanwhile ISI coordinated scores of lectures on campuses by conservative intellectuals and assisted dozens of conservative clubs. Its Intercollegiate Review, founded in 1965, quickly became a principal conservative journal, with a press run of 45,000 by 1967.246 In April 1964 the Conservative Book Club was formed; obtaining 25,000 members within eight months, it reached 30,000 in 1965.²⁴⁷ Books by nearly every major conservative figure were featured by the club and published by its associate, Arlington House, which was also founded in 1964 and which soon became the leading conservative publisher.²⁴⁸

Surveying these and other developments, a conservative youth-oriented magazine, Rally, observed in 1967:

. . . the last three years have witnessed the evolution of an ideological infrastructure that now unites what was, before 1964, a loose congeries of publications and interest groups. The communications, activist, and academic sectors have coalesced into a conservative commonwealth, with sophisticated internal communication and division of labor.²⁴⁹

The feeling was in the air: the phase of consolidation, the years of preparation, were ending. Conservatives were less and less intellectual pariahs. In 1964, Nelson Rockefeller and the “liberal establishment” told conservatives that they did not belong to the “mainstream” of American life. Four hectic years later, these same conservatives helped capture the presidency of the United States.

 

Yet even as power seemed within reach, the ground appeared to be quaking. The agonies of Vietnam and the ghettos, mounting disorder on the campuses, and numbing fear of crime in the cities were a few of the immediate factors which led many conservative intellectuals to feel—more intensely, perhaps, than ever before—that a truly profound crisis was at hand in the late 1960s.250 Beyond what they regarded as liberalism's practical failures at home and abroad, they perceived a deeper threat: disorder and the decay of the spiritual and moral foundations of civilization. Alarmed at what they saw as moral breakdown fostered by nihilistic relativism²⁵¹ and by the literally subversive doctrine of civil disobedience,²⁵² conservatives asked: what did the malaise signify?

James Burnham, analyzing the riots, supplied their answer in one phrase: “a collapse of the morale of the governing elite.”²⁵³ It was the disintegrating elite, the liberal establishment—above all, the radicalized intellectuals—who were creating the crisis of authority and values in the West. According to Will Herberg, the respected conservative sociologist of religion, America was witnessing the “defection” of an uprooted intelligentsia whose “self-extrusion” from ordered society was leading it to war against its own tradition. Once upon a time, he said, dissent had signified disagreement within a basic consensus. No more. Now it was total, “without fixed content,” “the mask and the instrument” of rage and revolution against a society which refused the floating intellectuals the power they sought.²⁵⁴

Perhaps, though, these clouds had a silver lining, Stephen Tonsor suggested in 1968. For the American people as a whole were not “degenerate”; our society as a whole was not “diseased.” What was occurring was something else: “the last hours of the great liberal ascendancy.” The dominant liberal elite—decadent, “yearning for apocalypse,” sentimentally infatuated with the revolutionary life-styles of a Che Guevara or a Malcolm X, lacking the will to survive—was dying. It was, said Tonsor, “the end of an era.”255 In the traumatic days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, conservatives sought to fill the vacuum.

---

1. William F. Buckley Jr., “The Party and the Deep Blue Sea,” Commonweal 55 (January 25, 1952): 391-393.

2. William F. Buckley Jr., “Reflections on Election Eve,” National Review 2 (November 3, 1956): 6-7.

3. William F. Buckley Jr., “The Tranquil World of Dwight D. Eisenhower,” National Review 5 (January 18, 1958): 57-59.

4. For a sample of the journal's early criticisms of Eisenhower and the “age of progressive moderation,” see John Chamberlain, ed., The National Review Reader (New York, 1957), pp. 185-213.

5. Anthony Harrigan, “Is Our Administration Conservative?” Catholic World 179 (April 1954): 24-28. In a similar vein, see Harrigan's essay “The Realities of the American Situation,” Catholic World 184 (March 1957): 458-464.

6. Frank S. Meyer, 'Where Is Eisenhower Going?” American Mercury 78 (March 1954):123-126.

7. Frank S. Meyer, “Slippage and the Theory of the Lesser Evil,” National Review 6 (February 28, 1959): 556.

8. Frank S. Meyer, “The Politics of 'The Impossible,' II: 1960 Dilemma,” National Review 7 (December 19, 1959): 555.

9. Not all conservatives agreed with Meyer. In a letter to the editor, National Review 4 (December 21, 1957): 573, Ralph de Toledano, later a biographer of Richard Nixon, stressed that politics was, after all, a matter of acquiring power. “Moral: Democrats win elections because they keep their eye on the ball. Republicans, like Trotskyite splinter groups, get their kicks from ideological purity.” For Meyer's rebuttal, see his “On What Ball?” National Review 5 (January 4, 1958): 17.

10. Richard Weaver was another conservative who rejected Eisenhower-style “moderation.” “Properly speaking,” Weaver observed, “middle-of-the-road-ism is not a political philosophy at all. It is rather the absence of a philosophy or an attempt to evade having a philosophy” (“The Middle of the Road: Where It Leads,” Human Events 12 [March 24, 1956]). See also Weaver, “The Middle Way: A Political Meditation,” National Review 3 (January 19, 1957): 63-64. In this essay he declared: “It seems clear that 'the middle of the road' is one of the guises worn by relativism. And relativism is the means by which Liberalism is descending into mindlessness.”

11. Frank S. Meyer, “The Politics of 'The Impossible,” National Review 7 (November 7, 1959): 459. Said Meyer on another occasion: “Conservatives are by definition defenders of [Western] civilization; and in a revolutionary age this means that they are, and must be, counterrevolutionaries” (“On What Ball?” p. 17).

12. “National Review and the 1960 Elections,” National Review 9 (October 22, 1960): 233-234; Frank S. Meyer, “Only Four More Years to 1964,” National Review 9 (December 3, 1960): 344.

Behind National Review's editorial silence on the 1960 election was a dispute among editors about whether or not to endorse Richard Nixon. Meyer, of course, was adamantly against it; see his memorandum to William F. Buckley Jr., May 10, 1960, William F Buckley Jr. Papers, Yale University Library New Haven, CT. National Review's publisher, William Rusher, also opposed a public endorsement of Nixon; see his memoranda to Buckley of September 14 and October 10, 1960, Buckley Papers. On the other side (despite his lack of personal enthusiasm for Nixon) was James Burnham; see Burnham to Buckley, October 9, 1960, Buckley Papers.

13. William S. Schlamm, for instance, an important figure at National Review in its early years, detested Eisenhower. For an amusing anecdote about Schlamm, see “Confidential: Among Ourselves,” National Review 2 (December 1, 1956): 15. When Schlamm went on vacation, the magazine's staff prankishly decorated his entire office with photographs of President Eisenhower. It also prepared a mock issue of National Review in which Schlamm urged that both parties nominate Dwight and Milton Eisenhower for president and vice-president. See also William S. Schlamm, Germany and the East-West Crisis (New York, 1959), pp. 199-202, for a severe critique of Eisenhower. Schlamm was particularly angered by Eisenhower's remark “War is unthinkable,” which Schlamm called “logically without meaning, morally untenable, and politically suicidal.”

14. Lecture by Russell Kirk at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, April 21, 1971.

15. Stephen Tonsor to the editor, National Review 6 (December 20, 1958): 412.

16. Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday (New York, 1964), p. 221.

17. Chambers to Buckley, November [23?], 1958, quoted in Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers' Letters to William F. Buckley Jr, 1954-1961, ed. William F. Buckley Jr. (New York, 1970), p. 216.

18. Chambers to Buckley, May 7, 1959, quoted in ibid., p. 247.

19. Chambers to Buckley, September 1954, quoted in ibid., p. 79.

20. See William F Buckley Jr., Up from Liberalism (New York, 1959), part 2.

21. A frequently used term in conservative circles. See especially M. Stanton Evans, The Liberal Establishment (New York, 1965).

22. To Whittaker Chambers, the Russian Revolution was “the central fact of the first half of the twentieth century” and Communism the “central issue” of the entire century (Cold Friday, p. 109).

23. Frank S. Meyer, “'New Ideas' or Old Truth,” National Review 3 (February 2, 1957): 108.

24. Ibid.

25. Frank S. Meyer, “Saved by the U-2,” National Review 8 (June 4, 1960): 365.

26. James Burnham, “Is the Revolution Dead?” National Review 19 (October 31, 1967): 1162, 1164, 1220.

27. See Robert Strausz-Hupe, “The Kremlin's Undiminished Appetite,” National Review 20 (February 27, 1968): 180-182, 205.

28. Frank S. Meyer, The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre (New York, 1961), p. 4.

29. Ibid., p. 5.

30. Ibid., p. 171.

31. Gerhart Niemeyer, with the assistance of John S. Reshetar Jr., An Inquiry into Soviet Mentality (New York, 1956). This book was published under the auspices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, founded by Robert Strausz-Hupe. At the beginning of the book, Niemeyer explicitly thanked Strausz-Hupé and Stefan Possony for their assistance.

32. Ibid., p. 70.

33. Ibid., p. 69.

34. Ibid., pp. 72-73.

35. Ibid., p. 74.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., p. 72.

38. Schlamm, Germany and the East-West Crisis, p. 172.

39. L. Brent Bozell, “They Gave the Orders, II,” National Review 7 (October 24, 1959): 419.

40. Frank S. Meyer, “Just War in the Nuclear Age,” National Review 14 (February 12, 1963): 105-106.

41. Ibid., p. 112.

42. William F. Buckley Jr., “Peace and Pacifism,” National Review 7 (October 24, 1959): 427.

43. William F Buckley Jr., “On Dead-Red,” National Review 13 (December 4, 1962): 424.

44. Schlamm, Germany and the East-West Crisis, pp. 184, 169.

45. Ibid., p. 183.

46. Ibid., pp. 170, 184.

47. Ibid., p. 170.

48. Buckley, “Tranquil World,” pp. 57-58.

49. Quoted in Odyssey of a Friend, ed. Buckley, p. 78.

50. M. Stanton Evans, The Politics of Surrender (New York, 1966), p. 21.

51. William F Rickenbacker, The Fourth House: Collected Essays (New York, 1971), p. 37. Rickenbacker was describing the period from 1945 to 1965.

52. See ibid., pp. 36-59, for a representative synopsis of conservative attitudes toward many foreign policy developments in the postwar era.

53. Meyer, “'New Ideas' or Old Truth,” p. 107.

54. “The Week” [unsigned editorial], National Review 2 (November 3, 1956): 3.

55. “The Hungary Pledge,” National Review 2 (December 8, 1956): 5.

56. See, for example, Frank S. Meyer, “An American Tragedy,” National Review 2 (December 8, 1956): 12.

57. James Burnham, “Prisonhouse of Nations,” National Review 20 (September 10, 1968):

58. “Abstractions Kill the West,” National Review 2 (December 6, 1956): 6.

59. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “The Bankruptcy of American Optimism,” National Review 3 (May 11, 1957): 449, 451. A few years later Wilhelmsen wrote an essay on “the heresy of co-existence” with Communism; see “Towards a Theology of Survival,” National Review 17 (January 12, 1965): 17-19.

60. James Burnham, The War We Are In: The Last Decade and the Next (New Rochelle, NY, 1967), pp. 15-19.

61. Conservative critiques of developments in Africa were extensive. National Review editorialized frequently on the subject. See also Frank S. Meyer, ed., The African Nettle: Dilemmas of an Emerging Continent (New York, 1965), and Thomas Molnar, Africa: A Political Travelogue (New York, 1965).

62. Burnham, War We Are In, p. 19.

63. Frank S. Meyer, “Abdication of Responsibility,” National Review 10 (April 8, 1961): 218.

64. See, for example, James J. Kilpatrick, René Albert Wormser, and Walter Darnell Jacobs, “Rhodesia: A Case History,” National Review 19 (May 16, 1967): 512-526.

65. See Burnham, War We Are In, pp. 225-226.

66. Jeffrey Hart, “African Gothic,” National Review 18 (July 26, 1966): 733.

67. Meyer, “Abdication of Responsibility,” p. 218.

68. James Burnham, “Tangle in Katanga,” National Review 11 (December 30, 1961): 446.

69. See Buckley's eulogy of Tshombe in William F Buckley Jr., The Governor Listeth: A Book of Inspired Political Revelations (New York, 1970), pp. 403-405, for an example of conservative esteem for him.

70. See Ernest van den Haag, “The Lesson of the Congo,” National Review 16 (September 8, 1964): 771-773, 785. See also Ernest van den Haag, “The UN War in Katanga,” National Review 12 (March 27, 1962): 197-202, and “The UN's Idiot Policy in the Congo,” National Review 17 (January 26, 1965): 61-62. The UN's record in the Congo, including documented charges of atrocities, is analyzed by M. Stanton Evans in The Politics of Surrender, chap. 27. Another prominent, conservatively inclined critic of the UN's Congo policy was Arthur Krock of the New York Times.

71. Buckley, Governor Listeth, p. 404.

72. William F. Buckley Jr., “Must We Hate Portugal?” National Review 13 (December 18, 1962): 468.

73. James Burnham, “Arithmetic of the United Nations,” National Review 8 (February 13, 1960): 99. See also Burnham's essay in The African Nettle, ed. Meyer, pp. 243-253.

74. James Burnham, “Root Fallacy,” National Review 12 (January 16, 1962): 24; “No Friends Allowed,” National Review 12 (January 30, 1962): 60, 73.

75. James Burnham, “Why Do We Take It?” National Review 17 (January 12, 1965): 20.

76. James Burnham, “What to Do About the UN,” National Review 12 (April 24, 1962): 284. See also Burnham, “Emancipation Proclamation,” National Review 13 (November 6, 1962): 348.

77. Burnham, “Arithmetic of the United Nations,” p. 99.

78. Sir Arnold Lunn, “Selective Indignation,” National Review 19 (October 3, 1967): 1081-1082.

79. James Burnham, Suicide of the West (New Rochelle, NY, 1964), p. 205.

80. Jeffrey Hart, The American Dissent: A Decade of Modern Conservatism (Garden City, NY, 1966), p. 102.

81. Burnham, “Tangle in Katanga,” p. 446.

82. Evans, Politics of Surrender, p. 531.

83. Rickenbacker, Fourth House, p. 49.

84. Ibid., p. 58.

85. Evans, Politics of Surrender, p. 531.

86. See ibid., pp. 521-525.

87. Charles Malik, “The Challenge to Western Civilization,” in The Conservative Papers, ed. Melvin Laird (Garden City, NY, 1964), p. 4.

88. “The Lesson of Philby,” National Review 19 (October 31, 1967): 1155. Not surprisingly, conservatives continued to support congressional investigations of Communist subversion at home and abroad. See, for example, William F. Buckley Jr. et al., The Committee and Its Critics: A Calm Review of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Chicago, 1962).

89. Frank S. Meyer, “What Is Under the Bed?” National Review 12 (April 10, 1962): 244.

90. James Burnham, “Is Communism Folding Up?” National Review 17 (July 27, 1965): 631. Burnham labeled this “the Kennan-de Gaulle-Morgenthau-Lippmann approach.”

91. Frank S. Meyer, “Nature of the Enemy,” National Review 3 (March 23, 1957): 283.

92. Frank S. Meyer, “Dilemmas of Foreign Policy,” National Review 5 (March 29, 1958): 303.

93. Thomas Molnar, “All-Too-Hasty Wisdom,” National Review 11 (July 15, 1961): 20-21.

94. Schlamm, Germany and the East-West Crisis, p. 172.

95. Frank S. Meyer, “Communism Remains Communism,” National Review 2 (October 13, 1956): 11, 12.

96. Ibid., p. 12.

97. Frank S. Meyer, “The Relativist 'Re-evaluates' Evil,” National Review 3 (May 4, 1957): 429.

98. Frank S. Meyer, “An American Tragedy,” National Review 2 (December 8, 1956): 12.

99. Schlamm, Germany and the East-West Crisis, p. 174.

100. Ibid., p. 172.

101. Ibid., p. 173.

102. Ibid., pp. 174-175.

103. William E Buckley Jr., The Jeweler's Eye: A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections (New York, 1968), pp. 48-49.

104. L. Brent Bozell, “To Magnify the West,” National Review 12 (April 24, 1962): 286.

105. Frank S. Meyer, “What Time Is It?” National Review 6 (September 13, 1958): 180.

106. Chambers, Cold Friday, pp. 225-226.

107. James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (New York, 1964). R. H. S. Crossman, a prominent Labour M.P. in Great Britain, considered this book a “powerful” work of “corrosive clarity.” Grossman warned the Left not to underestimate Burnham's book and acknowledged that Burnham often scored against liberalism, particularly its “moral asymmetry.” See R. H. S. Cross-man, “Radicals on the Right,” Partisan Review 31 (Fall 1964): 555-565.

108. “What communism does is to carry the liberal principles to their logical and practical extreme: the secularism; the rejection of tradition and custom; the stress on science; the confidence in the possibility of molding human beings; the determination to reform all established institutions; the goal of wiping out all social distinctions; the internationalism; the belief in the welfare state carried to its ultimate form in the totalitarian state” (Burnham, Suicide of the West, p. 289).

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., pp. 305, 297.

111. See Malcolm Muggeridge, “The Great Liberal Death-Wish,” National Review 18 (June 14, 1966): 573-574.

112. Bozell, “To Magnify the West,” p. 287.

113. Malik, “Challenge to Western Civilization,” p. 14.

114. Quoted in Guy Davenport, “First National Poetry Festival: A Report,” National Review 14 (January 15, 1963): 26.

115. Malik, “Challenge to Western Civilization,” pp. 5-6.

116. Ibid., p. 16.

117. See Burnham, War We Are In, especially chap. 3, for an analysis of these alternatives.

118. Robert Strausz-Hupe, William R. Kintner, and Stefan T. Possony, A Forward Strategy for America (New York, 1961).

119. Barry Goldwater, Why Not Victory? (New York, 1962), p. 19. Goldwater said that Niemeyer's “views on the Communist War have proved an invaluable help in my research.” Goldwater's bibliography lists some of the books then influencing conservative opinion on foreign policy.

120. Frank Meyer's columns sometimes contemplated this possibility as a grim alternative to the more aggressive policy he preferred.

121. See James Burnham, “The New Isolationism,” National Review 17 (January 26, 1965): 60.

122. James Burnham, “The Choking Point,” National Review 12 (March 27, 1962): 203.

123. Burnham, War We Are In, p. 17.

124. Strausz-Hupé, Kintner, and Possony, Forward Strategy, pp. 405-406.

125. In 1960 National Review published a special supplement of eight scholarly articles on China and Russia; it concluded that no Sino-Soviet split would occur. In 1966 Jeffrey Hart, in The American Dissent, pp. 157-158, acknowledged that these conservatives had made a mistake. Nevertheless, Hart, reflecting the predominant conservative view, questioned how “significant” this split would be to the West. After all, he said, Russia and China did remain our sworn ideological foes, divided at most over how best to bury us.

126. Robert Strausz-Hupé et al., Protracted Conflict (New York, 1959). The dust jacket included highly laudatory comments by such politically diverse people as Dean Acheson, C. L. Sulzberger, Senator Stuart Symington, Henry Hazlitt, Henry Kissinger, and Adm. Arleigh Burke. M. Stanton Evans declared that the book was “the most important discussion of foreign policy that I have seen since James Burnham's Struggle for the World” (“Moscow Formula for Victory,” National Review 7 [August 1, 1959]: 248-249). James Burnham eventually changed the title of his column to “The Protracted Conflict” and called that work an “excellent book” (“Hungary, Tibet and the Caribbean,” National Review 7 [July 18, 1959]: 203). For another sign of conservative esteem for this scholar, see Russell Kirk, “The Sagacity of Dr. Strausz-Hupe,” National Review 19 (November 14, 1967): 1276.

127. New York Times, December 23, 1969, p. 11.

128. For a discussion of growing liberal disillusionment with the United Nations, see Hart, American Dissent, pp. 158-161.

129. Buckley, Up from Liberalism, pp. 179-183.

130. Ibid., pp. 181, 184.

131. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962 (Cambridge, MA, 1964).

132. Ibid., p. 67.

133. See ibid., pp. 219-233 for a summary of these and other conclusions.

134. Ibid., pp. 219-220.

135. Ibid., p. 213.

136. Ibid., p. 230.

137. In 1962 a young lawyer wrote an article in The Freeman describing the successful campaign of the citizens of Winsted, CT to defeat a proposed federal housing project in their town. Three times the people decisively rejected the idea in referenda. The lawyer delineated the ways in which the public housing program undermined freedom, private property, and the solution of housing problems. “Giant government,” he warned, “has outgrown the capacity of the institutions designed to restrain its encroachments and abuses.” He pointed to Winsted as an inspiring example of resistance to the “service state.” The lawyer was Ralph Nader. See Nader, “How Winstedites Kept Their Integrity,” The Freeman 12 (October 1962): 49-53.

138. Yale Brozen, “The Untruth of the Obvious,” in Republican Papers, ed. Melvin Laird (New York, 1968), p. 145. See in general pp. 144-153.

139. Ibid., pp. 149-150, 152-153.

140. Ibid., p. 157.

141. See Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962), p. 129. See in general chap. 8: “Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business and Labor.”

142. Brozen, “Untruth of the Obvious,” p. 159.

143. Buckley, Up from Liberalism, p. 177.

144. See Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, pp. 185-189.

145. Ibid., p. 189.

146. See Colin D. Campbell, “Social Security: The Past Thirty Years,” in Republican Papers, ed. Laird, pp. 325-337.

147. Frank S. Meyer, “Is Social Security a Sacred Cow?” National Review 17 (June 1, 1965): 463.

148. M. Stanton Evans, “At Home,” National Review Bulletin 24 (July 28, 1972): B118.

149. Milton Friedman, “The Poor Man's Welfare Payment to the Middle Class,” Washington Monthly 4 (May 1972): 11-12, 15-16. Friedman's proposal was supported in the same issue (p. 14) by Nicholas von Hoffman, a well-known liberal columnist increasingly influenced by libertarian economics—particularly as expressed by Murray Rothbard.

150. Buckley, Jeweler's Eye, p. 34.

151. Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, KY, 1960), p. 37.

152. Rob Wood and Dean Smith, Barry Goldwater (New York, 1961), p. 79.

153. Frank S. Meyer, “The Negro Revolution,” National Review 14 (June 18, 1963): 496.

154. See William F. Buckley Jr., “Footnote to Brown v. Board of Education,” National Review 10 (March 11, 1961): 137.

155. See Ernest van den Haag, “Social Science Testimony in the Desegregation Cases-A Reply to Professor Kenneth Clark,” Villanova Law Review 6 (Fall 1960): 69-79.

156. Ernest van den Haag, “Negroes and Whites: Claims, Rights, and Prospects,” Modern Age 9 (Fall 1965): 358.

157. Ernest van den Haag, “Intelligence or Prejudice?” National Review 16 (December 1, 1964): 1061.

158. Jeffrey Hart, “The Negro in the City,” National Review 20 (June 18, 1968): 604.

159. “What Price Integration?” National Review 19 (August 22, 1967): 887-888.

160. Frank S. Meyer, “The Negro Revolution—A New Phase,” National Review 18 (October 4, 1966): 998.

161. Frank S. Meyer, “Showdown with Insurrection,” National Review 20 (January 16, 1968): 36.

162. Frank S. Meyer, “Liberalism Run Riot,” National Review 20 (March 26, 1968): 283.

163. M. Stanton Evans, “At Home,” National Review Bulletin 20 (April 16, 1968): B62. Evans's analysis was corroborated on one point by Moynihan: “Detroit had everything the Great Society could wish for a municipality: a splendid mayor and a fine governor. A high-paying and, thanks to the fiscal policies of the national government, a booming industry, civilized by and associated with the hands-down leading liberal trade union of the world.

“Moreover, it was a city whose Negro residents had every reason to be proud of the position they held in the economy and government of the area” (“Where Liberals Went Wrong,” in Republican Papers, ed. Laird, p. 132).

164. Ernest van den Haag, “How Not to Prevent Civil Disorders,” National Review 20 (March 26, 1968): 284-287.

165. Hart, “Negro in the City,” pp. 603-606, 623.

166. Buckley, Jeweler's Eye, p. 137.

167. Van den Haag, “Civil Disorders,” pp. 286-287.

168. Hart, “Negro in the City,” pp. 606, 623. Van den Haag also strongly criticized union discrimination.

169. Buckley, Governor Listeth, p. 101.

170. William F Buckley Jr., The Unmaking of a Mayor (New York, 1966), p. 147.

171. Hart, “Negro in the City,” p. 623.

172. “What Price Integration?” p. 188.

173. Meyer, “Liberalism Run Riot,” p. 283; Meyer, “Showdown with Insurrection,” p. 36.

174. Meyer, “Liberalism Run Riot,” p. 283.

175. Hart, “Negro in the City,” p. 606.

176. Burnham, Suicide of the West, pp. 195, 196-197.

177. Van den Haag, “Civil Disorders,” p. 287.

178. Richard C. Cornuelle, Reclaiming the American Dream (New York, 1965), p. xiii. The biographical information in this paragraph is drawn from “A Personal Summary,” pp. xi-xv. See also the biographical sketch of Cornuelle at the end of the book.

179. Ibid., p. 55.

180. Ibid., p. 26.

181. The back cover of the paperback edition contains plaudits from Alinsky, Kristol, and Buckley.

182. Frank S. Meyer, “Richard Cornuelle and the Third Sector,” National Review 17 (February 9, 1965): 103.

183. The quotations and biographical information presented in these two paragraphs are drawn from taped responses by Friedman to questions submitted by the author, February 26, 1972. See also John Davenport, “The Radical Economics of Milton Friedman,” Fortune 75 (June 1, 1967): 131-132, 147-148, 150, 154. In the preface to Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962), Friedman stated that the Volker Fund conferences were “among the most stimulating intellectual experiences of my life.”

184. In his taped reply to the author, Friedman stressed that he never called himself a conservative, for the reasons given by Hayek in his essay “Why I am Not a Conservative.” Friedman even protested at times that he was not a conservative. His dislike of the label did not, of course, lessen his impact on the Right or his association with it. Friedman clearly belonged within the “conservative” tent.

185. See especially Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, 1960), and Henry C. Simons, Economic Policy for a Free Society (Chicago, 1948).

186. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, p. 29.

187. See ibid., chap. 4.

188. Ibid., pp. 89, 91, 93.

189. Ibid., p. 198.

190. Ibid., pp. 196-198.

191. Ibid., pp. 108-109.

192. Ibid., p. 169.

193. Ibid., pp. 38, 45, 50. In 1963 Friedman and Anna Schwartz published A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (Princeton, 1963). Chap. 7 contained their scathing critique of the Federal Reserve Board's conduct from 1929 to 1933. In 1965, chap. 7 was published in paperback as The Great Contraction, 1929-1933 (Princeton, 1965). On p. ix of the preface, Friedman and Schwartz summarized their conclusions: “The drastic decline in the quantity of money during those years and the occurrence of a banking panic of unprecedented severity were not the inevitable consequence of other economic changes. . . .Throughout the contraction the System had ample powers to cut short the tragic process of monetary deflation and banking collapse.” As late as mid-1931 the System could have acted successfully to alleviate the contraction and even to terminate it “at a much earlier date.”

194. Friedman's professional reputation rested, of course, on other books as well, including Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago, 1953), A Theory of the Consumption Function (Princeton, 1957), and the Monetary History cited above.

195. See Serge-Christophe Kolm, “De l'utilité du liberalisme,” Le Monde, December 7, 1971, p. 18, a discussion of Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (recently translated into French).

196. For a revealing clash between a leading “Austrian” and a leading “Chicago” economist, see: Frank H. Knight, “Absolute Economics as Absolute Ethics,” Ethics 76 (April 1966): 163-177; Henry Hazlitt, “A Reply to Frank Knight,” Ethics 77 (October 1966): 57-61; Frank H. Knight, “A Word of Explanation,” Ethics 78 (October 1967): 83-85. This exchange was generated by Knight's critical review of Hazlitt's The Foundations of Morality (New York, 1964). In general, Knight favored more extensive governmental involvement in the economy than Hazlitt did, in order “to prevent intolerable divergences from free market conditions and . . . to prevent intolerable consequences that would prevail if society were organized solely through exchange by individuals in the nearest possible approach to the perfectly competitive markets of 'pure' economic theory.” Hazlitt, for his part, was alarmed that the “drift” of Knight's thinking “seems to be a defense of the enormous growth in government power in this country in the last thirty years.”

It seems clear that the Austrian School was more antigovernment than the Chicago School. For a severe critique of Friedman by an economist profoundly influenced by Mises, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Milton Friedman Unraveled,” The Individualist 3 (February 1971): 3-7. Rothbard denounced Friedman as “the Establishment's Court Libertarian” who “has functioned not as an opponent of statism and advocate of the free market, but as a technician advising the State how to be more efficient in going about its evil work.” Among Friedman's many misdeeds, said Rothbard, one of the “most disastrous” was his role at the Treasury Department in World War II in establishing the withholding system for the income tax, a keystone of “the present Leviathan State in America.” Another error was Friedman's advocacy of complete governmental control of the money supply, an “inherently inflationary” proposal.

197. Friedman's willingness to abandon the gold standard and adopt floating exchange rates was controversial among right-wing economists. In his taped reply to the author's questionnaire, Friedman stated that this issue was the most continually debated one at the annual meetings of the Mont Pélerin Society since 1947. Friedman's proposal that the U.S. money supply be increased at a fixed, regular rate (thereby removing the discretionary powers of the Federal Reserve Board) also attracted criticism both from “Austrians” and Keynesians. Both sets of critics agreed that Friedman overemphasized the importance of monetary policy. See Milton Friedman and Walter Heller, Monetary vs. Fiscal Policy: A Dialogue (New York, 1969), and Rothbard, “Milton Friedman Unraveled,” pp. 5-6. For a useful survey of conservative economists, see Peter P. Witonski, “Rough and Tumble among Conservative Economists,” National Review 24 (February 4, 1972): 91-95, 114.

198. See Ludwig von Mises, “The Plight of Business Forecasting,” National Review 1 (April 4, 1956): 17-18. In this article he declared, “There is not, and there cannot be such a thing as quantitative economics.”

199. Witonski, “Rough and Tumble,” p. 93. For a survey of differences between the Austrian and Chicago schools, see Israel M. Kirzner, “Divergent Approaches in Libertarian Economic Thought,” Intercollegiate Review 3 (January-February 1967): 101-108. For an interesting exchange between Henry Hazlitt and Ernest van den Haag on the question “Must Conservatives Repudiate Keynes?” see National Review 8 (June 4, 1960): 361-364. Hazlitt said yes; van den Haag, no. Hazlitt was editor of The Critics of Keynesian Economics (Princeton, 1959) and author of The Failure of the New Economics (Princeton, 1959).

200. James C. Miller, ed., Why the Draft?: The Case for a Volunteer Army (Baltimore, 1968), p. 5; “The Week,” National Review 22 (March 10, 1970): 236.

201. See, for example, William F Buckley Jr., “Notes for the Platform Committees: III. Civil Disobedience, Education, Housing, Labor,” National Review 20 (June 4, 1968): 571. Friedman was not, of course, the only conservative proponent of this idea. It was advanced at least as early as 1958 by the Australian economist Colin Clark; see Clark, “The Horrible Proposals of Mr. Galbraith,” National Review 6 (October 11, 1958): 239. But it seems safe to say that Friedman's vigorous advocacy of the voucher plan in Capitalism and Freedom was at least as important as any other influence in bringing the matter to national attention.

202. William F Buckley Jr., “Notes for the Platform Committees: II. Fiscal Policies & Poverty,” National Review 20 (June 4, 1968): 570. The plan called for elimination of all personal deductions, increase of exemptions to $1,200, and a flat (nonprogressive) tax of about 20 percent.

203. See Milton Friedman, “The Case for the Negative Income Tax,” in Republican Papers, ed. Laird, pp. 202-220, and Friedman, “The Case for the Negative Income Tax,” National Review 19 (March 7, 1967): 239-241. Friedman first propounded the idea in Capitalism and Freedom, pp. 190-195.

204. William Rusher, publisher of National Review, opposed it (interview, Cambridge, MA, October 30, 1971). In 1967, James Burnham criticized the youthful Left-Right anti-draft coalition as a danger, under the circumstances, to America's national interests (“The Anti-draft Movement,” National Review 19 [June 13, 1967]: 629).

205. Henry Hazlitt, “The Coming Crisis in Welfare,” National Review 19 (April 18, 1967): 416. National Review itself criticized Friedman's proposal; see “The Week,” National Review 18 (August 23, 1966): 814. Murray Rothbard called Friedman's plan “catastrophic.” “The libertarian approach to the welfare problem,” Rothbard said, “...is to abolish all coercive, public welfare, and to substitute for it private charity based on the principle of encouraging self-help; bolstered also by inculcating the virtues of self-reliance and independence throughout society. But the Friedman plan, on the contrary, moves in precisely the opposite direction; for it establishes welfare payments as an automatic right, an automatic, coercive claim upon the producers” (“Milton Friedman Unraveled,” p. 5).

206. Buckley, Governor Listeth, p. 127. This was part of a column written by Buckley on January 13, 1968.

207. Two economists summarized Friedman's attack on the “new economics” as follows: “First, he painstakingly reconstructed and tested the quantity theory of money. Second, he re-emphasized the power of monetary policy. Third, he questioned the Lerner view of the flexibility and potency of fiscal policy and the Lerner-Samuelson belief in the trade-offs between inflation and employment. Fourth, he argued that the orthodox interpretation of the Great Depression was incorrect and constructed his own formula for preventing such catastrophes in the future. Fifth, he challenged the logic of the Veblen and Chamberlin methodologies and, lastly, restated the classical liberal philosophy in terms pertinent to his own time” (William Breit and Roger L. Ransom, The Academic Scribblers: American Economists in Collision [New York, 1971], p. 227).

For a lucid and lively exposition of Friedman's views, see “Playboy Interview: Milton Friedman,” Playboy 20 (February 1973): 51-54, 56, 58-60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 74.

208. The Volker Fund Series, mentioned in Chapter Six, was another sign of the academic revival of laissez-faire; it included contributions by such men as Mises, Hazlitt, and Rothbard. For a history of government-promoted monopolies and their consequences, see William Wooldridge, Uncle Sam, the Monopoly Man (New Rochelle, NY, 1970).

209. See, for example, Murray Rothbard's massive Man, Economy, and State, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1962). Henry Hazlitt acclaimed it as “the most important general treatise on economic principles since Ludwig von Mises' Human Action in 1949” (“The Economics of Freedom,” National Review 13 [September 25, 1962]: 232). See also Hazlitt's review essay, “The Development of Economic Thought,” National Review 17 (November 30, 1965): 1102, 1104, which lists the principal libertarian contributions in economics between 1955 and 1965.

210. For a survey of Knight, Simons, and Friedman, see Breit and Ransom, Academic Scribblers, part 4: “The New Neoclassicism.”

211. M. Stanton Evans, Revolt on the Campus (Chicago, 1961). See also Patrick Riley, “Conservatism on the Campus,” American Mercury 84 (April 1957): 39-42.

212. See Eugene V Schneider, “The Radical Right,” Nation 193 (September 30, 1961): 199-203; “Conservatism on the Campus,” Newsweek 57 (April 10, 1961): 35.

213. Evans, Revolt on the Campus, pp. 54-55.

214. Ibid., p. 58.

215. Ibid., pp. 65-66.

216. Ibid., p. 71.

217. William Baroody, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was a key adviser. Other important intellectuals who assisted in the campaign included Gerhart Niemeyer; W. Glenn Campbell, director of the Hoover Institution; Richard Ware of the Rehm Foundation; David Nelson Rowe; Stanley Parry; Karl Brandt; Stefan Possony; Warren Nutter; and Yale Brozen. See Karl Hess, In a Cause That Will Triumph (Garden City, NY, 1967), pp. 28, 34-37.

218. The Russell Kirk Papers in the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, contain interesting correspondence between Kirk and Goldwater. In a letter to Kirk on July 12, 1963, Goldwater thanked him for his substantial role in a speech Goldwater delivered at Notre Dame University. Not long after his nomination, Goldwater, in a letter to Kirk dated August 22, 1964, noted Kirk's involvement in the Goldwater movement at the very start. In a letter to the author on April 29, 1972, Kirk stated that Senator Goldwater was the only conservative politician for whom he worked in this capacity. He mentioned that he “had a hand in” not only the Notre Dame speech but also a lecture delivered by Goldwater at Yale University in 1962. In response to a letter from William F. Buckley Jr. on July 19, 1963 (in Kirk Papers), Kirk wrote “The Mind of Barry Goldwater,” National Review 15 (August 27, 1963): 149-151.

219. Davenport, “Radical Economics of Milton Friedman,” pp. 148-150.

220. Rusher's activities are examined at various points in F Clifton White, Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement (New Rochelle, NY, 1967).

221. Rand's statement of support can be found in Look 28 (November 3, 1964): 53.

222. A list of some academic supporters of Goldwater was printed in the Chicago Tribune, September 29, 1964, sec. 1, p. 6.

223. White, Suite 3505, p. 21n.

224. Duncan Norton-Taylor, “Robert Taft's Congress," Fortune 48 (August 1953): 145.

225. William F. Buckley Jr., “The Vile Campaign,” National Review 16 (October 6, 1964): 853-856, 858. This is a discussion of what Buckley regarded as smears of conservatives and Goldwater by such sources as George Meany, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Anti-Defamation League.

226. These and similar quotations were compiled in Kenneth Paul Shorey, “Letter to an American,” Modern Age 10 (Spring 1966): 131-145.

227. Probably the most famous controversy involved Ralph Ginzburg, publisher of Fact. In this magazine, in hundreds of thousands of leaflets, and in advertisements printed in the New York Times and elsewhere, Ginzburg publicized a personal “survey” of psychiatrists under such headlines as “Is Barry Goldwater Psychologically Fit to Be President of the United States?” The psychiatrists (none of whom had ever examined Goldwater) said no. See Shorey, “Letter,” p. 145. In 1970 Goldwater won a $75,000 libel judgment against Ginzburg (New York Times, January 27, 1970, p. 32).

228. See Evans, Liberal Establishment, pp. 33-50. See also Lionel Lokos, Hysteria, 1964: The Fear Campaign Against Barry Goldwater (New Rochelle, NY, 1967).

229. Frank S. Meyer, “What Next For Conservatism?” National Review 16 (December 1, 1964): 1057.

230. Ibid.

231. Ronald Reagan, comment in National Review 16 (December 1, 1964): 1055. His remarks were part of a symposium, “The Republican Party and the Conservative Movement,” pp. 1053-1056, 1078. Contributors included George Bush, John Davis Lodge, Russell Kirk, Gerhart Niemeyer, and Reagan.

232. James Burnham, “Must Conservatives Be Republicans?” National Review 16 (December 1, 1964): 1052.

233. Gerhart Niemeyer, comment in “Republican Party,” p. 1056.

234. See Daniel Mahoney, Actions Speak Louder (New Rochelle, NY, 1968), a history of the Conservative Party by one of its founders.

235. See Buckley, Unmaking of a Mayor, for an account of his campaign.

236. William F Buckley Jr., “The Uproar,” National Review 10 (April 23, 1961): 243. Russell Kirk believed that the furor was a tempest in a teapot. See Russell Kirk, “Conservatives and Fantastics,” America 106 (February 17, 1962): 644.

237. See Buckley, “Uproar,” pp. 241-243.

238. In December 1961, Goldwater, Kirk, Buckley, William Baroody, and Dr. Jay Gordon Hall met in Miami. One of the main subjects of the discussion was the John Birch Society and the need for a clear dissociation of Goldwater from Welch; among the results of the meeting were the articles in America (cited in 236) and National Review (cited in 240). This information was supplied in Kirk to the author, April 20, 1972.

239. Kirk, “Conservatives and Fantastics,” p. 644. See also Kirk to Francis X. Gannon of the John Birch Society, January 20 and 29, 1962, in William F. Buckley Jr. Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT.

240. See “The Question of Robert Welch,” National Review 12 (February 13, 1962): 83-88. See also Buckley to William S. Schlamm, January 2, 24, and February 1, 1962, Buckley Papers.

241. “The John Birch Society and the Conservative Movement,” National Review 17 (October 19, 1965): 914-920, 925-929.

242. Meyer, ibid., p. 920.

243. See Hart, American Dissent, p. 31n, for approximate circulation figures through 1964. See also Priscilla L. Buckley, “Notes on a Tenth Anniversary,” National Review 17 (November 30, 1965): 1115.

244. “A Chance to Holler,” Time 79 (April 6, 1962): 49.

245. See Newsweek 68 (September 12, 1966): 15 for the announcement. Six years later, Friedman published a collection of his Newsweek essays; see his An Economist's Protest: Columns in Political Economy (Glen Ridge, NJ, 1972).

246. M. Stanton Evans, The Future of Conservatism (New York, 1968), p. 107.

247. Neil McCaffrey to the author, August 3, 1971. Mr. McCaffrey was founder-president of the Conservative Book Club. The Club continued to sustain a membership hovering around 30,000 through 1975.

248. See Anne Edwards, “The Story of the Conservative Book Club,” Human Events 27 (May 20, 1967): 8-9, and “An Interview with Neil McCaffrey,” ibid.

249. “The Call to Battle,” Rally 2 (June 1967): 80.

250. The sense of uncertainty and transition was reflected in a memorandum by Frank Meyer, May 23, 1966, Buckley Papers. Meyer observed that powerful changes were occurring in American politics and society which urgently required conservative analysis. The establishment, he noted, was dividing—a fissure not confined to foreign policy issues.

251. See, for example, M. Stanton Evans, “At Home,” National Review Bulletin 18 (June 21, 1966): B6.

252. This philosophy was often attacked by conservatives. See, for example, Will Herberg, “A Religious 'Right' to Violate the Law?” National Review 16 (July 14, 1964): 579-580, which argued that Martin Luther King's doctrine of civil disobedience was un-Christian and heretical. See also Harry Jaffa, “The Limits of Dissent,” National Review 20 (September 10, 1968): 911-912.

253. James Burnham, “The Right to Riot,” National Review 20 (October 8, 1968): 1000.

254. Will Herberg, “Alienation, ‘Dissent,’ and the Intellectual,” National Review 20 (July 30, 1968): 738-739. By “intellectual” Herberg meant not the professional scholar but “the free-floating journalist, the littérateur, or junior academician, who feels it is his high prerogative, self-conferred, to destroy the existing order . . . “ (p. 739).

255. Stephen J. Tonsor, “On Living at the End of an Era,” National Review 20 (July 30, 1968): 756-758.