Before the Storm (14 page)

The Manionites' conservatism was a conservatism of fear. They harped endlessly on the “communistic income tax,” how the economy would be decimated by inflation every time workers got a raise. (Taft Republicans, joked
The Nation,
feared “only God and inflation.”) Their scapegoats were unnamed subversives who were invisibly destroying the system from within: “I am at a loss to understand the current public attitude deflating the inflation psychology,” Fred Koch wrote in a self-published pamphlet. “perhaps it is propaganda, of which we have been fed much of late—pink propaganda, in as much as, in my opinion, Russia's first objective is to destroy our economy through inflation.” Politically the philosophy lost when it won: if you removed the fear of subversion by catching subversives, you ended the fear that brought you to power in the first place—although, of course, you could never catch all the subversives, for the conspiracy was a bottomless murk, a hall of mirrors, a menace that grew greater the more it was flushed out. “The Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties for many years,” Koch wrote. “If we could only see behind the political scenes, I am sure we would be shocked.”

Conscience of a Conservative
didn't blame invisible Communists for America's problems. It blamed all-too-visible liberals. Its anticommunism was not about raising nameless dreads but about
fighting
—hard and in the open. America, said
Conscience,
was not losing the Cold War because of Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, or the striped-pants diplomats of the State Department. The enemy was in the mirror. “A craven fear of death is entering the American consciousness.”
It ′′repudiates everything that is courageous and honorable and dignified in the human being. We must—as the first step toward saving American freedom—affirm the contrary view and make it the cornerstone of our foreign policy: that we would rather die than lose our freedom.”

The Cold War had whipsawed since 1955 when President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev met in Geneva for the first East-West summit conference. The 1956 GOP platform boasted: “The threat of global war has receded. The advance of Communism has been checked and, at key points, thrown back.” Then came Hungary; then, on the eve of the elections, French and English bombs pounded Egypt for nationalizing the Suez Canal, and Russia threatened to intervene on Egypt's behalf. There was a glimmer of hope when Russia ceased nuclear testing in October of 1958. Then, in November, Khrushchev first threatened to take over Berlin. Now he had just been mollified by his 1959 American visit. Was peace
finally
at hand?

Conscience of a Conservative
answered that Soviet expansionism was enabled by the fantasy of coexistence. Russia was “determined to win the conflict, and we are not.” So the Kremlin used arms control agreements and testing suspensions and the rest to seduce the American populace with romantic fantasies of peace. ′′The Kremlin can create crisis after crisis, and force the U.S., because of our greater fear of war, to back down every time.” Then the Soviets looked forward happily to the next phase of coexistence—legitimating their crimes by relabeling them “disagreements” amenable to ′′negotiation.”

“If an enemy power is bent on conquering you, he is at war with you: and you—unless you contemplate surrender—are at war with him. Moreover—unless you contemplate treason—your objective, like his, will be victory.” The logical conclusion: ′′A tolerable peace ... must
follow
victory over Communism.”

Conscience of a Conservative
drew to a close by ticking off the tenets of American foreign policy, asking of each: “Does it help us defeat the enemy?” Alliances were important—but since our alliances did not yet girdle the globe and were defensive in outlook, we must be willing to act alone. Foreign aid (unconstitutional unless it could be shown to promote the national interest) should be limited to military and technical support. Diplomatic ties to the Soviet Union should be reexamined: “I am quite certain that our entire approach to the Cold War would change for the better the moment we announced that the United States does not regard Mr. Khrushchev's murderous claque as the legitimate rulers of the Russian people or any other people.” The United Nations, which reduced the struggle for world freedom to the lowest common denominator agreement of eighty-odd nations, should be looked upon
circumspectly. As for arms talks: “No nation in its right mind will give up the means of defending itself without first making sure that hostile powers are no longer in a position to threaten it.” Since the Soviets understood the nature of the conflict, they wouldn't dismantle their nuclear weapons despite assurances to the contrary; then, once we dismantled ours, “aggressive Communist forces will be free to maneuver under the umbrella of nuclear terror.”

To prevent that,
Conscience of a Conservative
offered a quietly extraordinary argument, in a few short paragraphs passing blithely over the simple, awful paradox of the Cold War: in a world where weapons possessed the power to destroy civilization, to attack an enemy with the most effective weapon at your disposal would be to ensure your own destruction through retaliation. This was the “balance of terror” experts believed kept the Cold War peace, but
Conscience
insisted it did no such thing: the Communists tested us in Hungary, in the Suez, in West Berlin because they knew we wouldn't stop them. We feared any military altercation might escalate to the unthinkable. The audacious solution: make nuclear war
more thinkable
—“perfect a variety of small, clean nuclear weapons,” designed to be used locally, on the battlefield. “Overt hostilities should always be avoided,”
Conscience
averred, “especially is this so when a shooting war may cause the death of many millions of people, including our own. But we cannot, for that reason, make the avoidance of a shooting war our chief objective. If we do that”—if war is rendered
unthinkable
—“we are committed to a course that has only one terminal point: surrender.”

To many young readers the argument had almost a Gandhian appeal—the same appeal, on the left, held by valiant Southern blacks laying their bodies on the line for the freedom to eat where they wished. Freedom was indivisible. It was worth dying for. Thus
Conscience of a Conservative
reached its stirring dénouement, read, one imagines, by our pimply freshman with steadily mounting glandular thrust:

Our student then sets the book down, blinking twice, stretching his limbs, silently intoning: Let us march.

I
n 1957 Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would imminently catch up to the United States in the production of meat, milk, and butter. The Soviets began testing an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then, in October, Russia sent its bleeping medicine ball around the planet. America's space-race debut was rushed to the launching pad, where it rose five feet before disintegrating into a fireball (headline: “FLOPNIK”). And a panicked nation busied itself with rituals of compensation. One of them was the National Defense Education Act, designed to enrich science, math, and engineering education. The NDEA included among its provisions the by then routine requirement that beneficiaries forswear allegiance to “any organization that believes in or teaches the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.” But loyalty oaths were in bad odor after the ugly implosion of Senator McCarthy. A coalition of Ivy League administrators campaigned to strike the NDEA loyalty oath from the law as a threat to academic freedom. Senator Kennedy, courting left-wing support for 1960, drafted a bill to drop it. Two eager young conservatives decided the loyalty oath was worth fighting for—and that Kennedy and horsey-set liberals like Yale president A. Whitney Griswold were worth fighting against. It was the beginnings of a youth conservative movement.

David Franke and Douglas Caddy had met in 1957 at a summer journalism school in Washington sponsored by
Human Events,
a political magazine founded during World War II by right-wing veterans of America First, that by the late 1950s had settled into a comfortable niche as a scrappy Washington newsletter consisting of two sections: four pages of news, and a long article or speech by a McCarthy, Knowland, or Goldwater. Its calling card was its gung ho proselytizing. (“MULTIPLY YOURSELF by mailing to someone each section of ‘Human Events' after you have read it,” read the banner at the top of each page. “As a bonus for ordering $65.00 or more in gift subscriptions, you
can get the annual bound volume of ‘Human Events' free,” ran a typical promotion.) The summer journalism school was an outgrowth of the evangelism. After the course was over, Franke returned to Del Mar Community College in Corpus Christi, Texas, from where he edited the magazines of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists and the College Young Republicans; Caddy went back to the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where he was chair of the D.C. College Republicans. The two kept in touch. After Kennedy introduced his bill, they decided to form a Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath.

They launched an armada of press releases; they exploited
Human Events
connections to persuade conservatives to enter their documents into the
Congressional Record.
Few in Washington paid attention. The nation's capital even then was replete with faux organizations consisting of no more than a letterhead and a mail drop. But when Caddy and Franke announced that they had thirty college chapters petitioning to save the oath around the country—even at Harvard, where the first signature they got was “Attila the Hun” and the second was “Adolf Hitler”—the liberals at
The New Republic
took notice, and none too defensively: Caddy and Franke's group was evidence, they editorialized, that liberal arts colleges, properly devoted to the cultivation of liberty, were “carrying a 35 percent overload of the ineducable.”

But when Caddy challenged a representative of the student wing of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action to debate on the radio, ADA director Sheldon Pollack warned a colleague that the ineducable were precisely
not
what they were dealing with: “I can't think of any of our students who would be able to hold his own against Caddy,” he said. “He is a junior edition of Buckley and a rather vicious debater.”

 

Buckley. The young conservatives tried to talk like him, dress like him, write like him—and, of course, think like him. There was his sophistication, which came from his father, William Buckley Sr., a Texas oil millionaire of learning and style who sought to defy every stereotype of Wild West new money. There was Buckley Jr.'s bottomless well of self-confidence, the outlaw demeanor, the devil-may-care grace—and underlying it all, somehow, an orthodox Catholicism so heartfelt it was bracing. That came from his father, too; for William Sr., as it would be for his son, rebellion against the status quo was one of the
definitions
of conservatism. William Buckley Sr. made his name lawyering to the wildcatters of the Tampico, Mexico, oil boom of the teens. Then the revolutionary forces of Obregón, Villa, and Zapata began demanding taxes from the oil men on pain of expropriation, which was bad enough. When Obregón called the Catholic church a “cancerous tumor,” Buckley père joined the counter-revolutionary
underground and helped coordinate a failed coup in Mexico City. When he was kicked out of the country he bought a mansion, Great Elm, built in 1763 in the town of Sharon, Connecticut, that had once sheltered the governor. It boasted the state's largest elm tree, the Great Elm itself—symbol of all that was good and enduring in Yankee patrimony. After striking a gusher in Venezuela in the late 193os, Will Buckley showed how much he cared about the Yankee patrimony. He built an addition nearly larger than the original house, complete with three-story Mexican-style patio, with tiles smuggled on his way out of the country. His obsession became educating his six children against the depredations of a fallen world. The youngest children were taught Spanish by their Mexican
nanas.
At five they began tutorials in French. Professional instructors dropped in to teach the children subjects ranging from art to tennis, from typing to woodcarving. Family dinners were salons, with rewards bestowed on the child who could deliver the most brilliant, witty, and stylish ripostes. The kids published a family newspaper to spread the patriarch's isolationist, laissez-faire, orthodox Catholic gospel.

Buckleys went to Yale the way Kennedy boys went to Harvard: ready to challenge the WASP stronghold as much as master it. Bill Buckley soon made his voice heard. Three freshmen were selected for the debating squad; he was one. Another was a tall New Dealer from Nebraska, the president of the campus World Federalists, L. Brent Bozell. Bozell was the only Yalie Buckley judged to be as morally and intellectually intense as he was. The two became inseparable. Bill won Brent to his conservatism; Brent won Bill away from isolationism. Brent married Bill's sister Patricia.