Before the Storm (15 page)

It would be 1968 before Yale saw hell-raisers as audacious. Yale was known as the most conservative of the Ivies. It wasn't conservative enough for Buckley. In his first semester Bill led a fight against the establishment of a student council (he feared it would be captured by liberals). When the rest of campus was welcoming the third-party bid of the left-wing, Communist-backed Henry Wallace as the royal road to Dewey victory, Buckley, a friend, and two of his sisters invaded a Wallace rally at the New Haven arena in mock “radical” attire (no makeup for the girls; hair laid flat with grease for the boys) and circulated signs reading “LET'S PROVE WE WANT PEACE—GIVE RUSSIA THE ATOM BOMB.” Authorities foiled the planned coup de grace: the release of a flock of doves.

Buckley was chosen unanimously to be chairman of the Yale Daily News his senior year, the most powerful student position on campus, where his editorials inspired wonder and fear. One attacked a popular anthropology professor for “undermining religion through bawdy and slap-stick humor.” Since Yale students did not lecture Yale professors, an issue had to be published without advertisements to make way for the letters of protest. For his valedictory in
1950 he convened a dinner to honor the retiring Yale president. The guests of honor included such fellow college presidents as Harold Stassen of Penn and General Dwight D. Eisenhower of Columbia, both 1952 White House contenders. Chairman Buckley stepped to the podium and browbeat them for letting enemies of religion and free enterprise reign in their classrooms under cover of academic freedom. His conclusion brought stunned silence: trustees of elite universities must compel their employees—professors as much as administrators—to show a proper measure of piety and patriotism. “And if they cannot, Godspeed on their way to an institution that is more liberal.”

That was, more or less, the argument of his first book,
God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,”
published after Buckley completed a short stint with the CIA in Mexico. Yale's attempt to suppress publication only whetted the public's curiosity; Yale's attempts to discredit it (alum McGeorge Bundy's
Atlantic Monthly
review called Buckley a “twisted and ignorant young man”; Yale distributed two thousand reprints) made it a best-seller. His next book, coauthored with Bozell, was an unabashed attempt to defend a family friend: Joe McCarthy. By evaluating the senator's early cases in narrowly legalistic terms, they managed to acquit McCarthy to their own satisfaction as someone around which “men of good will and stern morality may close ranks.” But what was most remarkable about
McCarthy and Its Enemies,
what makes it in retrospect a signal document of a new conservatism struggling to be born, was the number of
critical
references to McCarthy it included. Just as for Goldwater, the hunt for subversives appeared inadequate to the greater task at hand. “We are interested in talking, not about ‘who is loyal?,' ” Buckley and Bozell emphasized, “but about
‘who favors those politicians that are not in the national interest as we see it.' ”

Buckley's next project would make criticizing those politicians into a merry art—a mighty engine for massing right-wing fellow travelers into a community,
a force,
a band of brothers and sisters ready to take on the (liberal) world. Buckley founded
National Review
after a spell of barnstorming colleges on behalf of a new conservative organization, the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. ISI was modeled on the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded by Jack London in 1905. The conservative group's founders were convinced that the nation's enthusiasm for the socialistic schemes of the New Deal and after was traceable to the propaganda efforts of ISS alumni who had graduated to positions of power and influence—youthful socialists like Walter Lippmann, whose recollection of his ISS days at Harvard they never tired of quoting: “Our object was to make reactionaries stand-patters; stand-patters, conservative liberals; conservatives, liberals, and liberals, radicals; and radicals, Socialists.” ISI sought to work the operation in reverse. College students
were sent books like Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, Friedrich A. Hayek's
Road to Serfdom,
and Frank Chodorov's
The Income Tax: Root of All Evil,
along with postcards asking if they wished to continue receiving literature. The group sent out one million pamphlets and books in 1953 alone.

Buckley loved sparring with the liberals on his campus recruiting trips for ISI (if the liberals hadn't already convinced administrators to bar the incendiary speaker from the campus outright). But he had greater ambitions. He had already been rebuffed by the owners of
Human Events
in a proposal to buy the newsletter and turn in into a full-fledged magazine. Meanwhile Willi Schlamm, a brilliant ex-Communist expatriate of the Luce empire, was witnessing at close range the crackup of an earlier attempt at a mass-circulation conservative magazine,
The Freeman,
for which he served as literary editor. One faction of editors sought to remain aloof from unseemly day-to-day political battles in Washington, while another—Schlamm's—yearned to engage them. The magazine folded from the strain. Schlamm was all ready to settle into his next job, editing a new journal of high-minded reflection on current events for Henry Luce, when Luce got cold feet during the 1954 recession. Schlamm, left at the altar, and Buckley, all dressed up with no place to go, discovered one another, and
National Review
was born. Or at least a business plan was born. It offered two classes of stock. Class A held no financial value but included voting rights. Class B was $I a share and had no voting rights. All Class A shares—all decision-making authority—were possessed by a single man: William F. Buckley Jr. This new magazine, the two founders were determined, wouldn't be brought down by power struggles like
The Freeman.

Buckley spent over a year on the road peddling
NR
debentures to businessmen who could afford to lose money. His prospectus began: “The New Deal revolution could hardly have happened save for the cumulative impact of
The Nation and The New Republic,
and a few other publications, on several American college generations during the twenties and thirties.” That was ISI talking. The rest was pure Buckley: “New Deal journalism has degenerated into a jaded defense of the status quo.... Middle-of-the-Road,
qua
Middle-of-the-Road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant.” The Millikens proved generous; L.A. oil magnate Henry Salvatori gave $50,000. Most people gave nothing. It did not surprise Buckley's father to see his experience reconfirmed: the task of preserving capitalism was too important to leave to the capitalists. The Buckley family stepped in to finance the rest of the endeavor.

The first issue rolled off the presses in November of 1955. The baffled criticisms came soon after. That of John Fischer, editor of Harper's, was typical. He said he had high hopes for
National Review
as “a remarkably useful addition to the American scene.” Those hopes “did not survive the first half-dozen
issues. By that time it was plain that the new magazine was an organ, not of conservatism, but of radicalism.” His conclusion: “it will have a certain interest for students of political splinter movements.” He wondered why these “conservatives” could not abide a fellow like Dwight Eisenhower, who was so judiciously
conserving
the progress of the FDR years, without recklessly expanding them. In the immediate postwar years, in fact, the meaning of “conservatism” had been up in the air. When Senators Nixon and Kennedy first ran for Congress in 1946, the former ran as a “practical liberal,” the latter as a “fighting conservative.” The poet and political philosopher Peter Viereck, the first to argue that conservatism was a rebellion against a liberal status quo, argued that a true conservative should welcome the welfare state as a stabilizing force. As did Tory journalist Peregrine Worsthorne: “For only if the many are spared economic hardship can the few expect to enjoy economic and social privilege.” But National Review's conservatives seemed scarcely concerned with anything so pedestrian, so
materialist,
as economic and social privilege.

“Are you for majority rule in the U.S.A.?” Mike Wallace asked Buckley on his television interview program.

“Yes,” came the exhalation from the graceful man leaning back in his chair across from him. “Unless the majority decides we should go Communist. I would try to subvert any Communist society.”

Wallace: “You mean you would turn revolutionary?”

Buckley: “Yes. I am already a revolutionary against the present liberal order. An intellectual revolutionary.”

There hadn't been anything like
National Review
since the Marxist weeklies of the 193os—not surprising, since many of its editors were veterans. “The Tranquil World of Dwight Eisenhower” (an article that ran in the January 18, 1958, issue) was boring.
National Review
never was. “We are an opposition,” wrote
NR
chief theoretician Frank Meyer, “and we have to fight conformity.” Arch wit and stylistic daring were revered in the cramped offices on East 37th Street. Garry Wills, a young Midwestern seminarian brought on board as drama critic on the strength of one unsolicited manuscript, and two of the most influential critical stylists of the 196os, John Leonard and Joan Didion, got their start in the the magazine's culture pages. But culture was the undercard. The main event was exposing the Liberals (the word was always capitalized, sticking out like an unlovely anomaly in the march of Western Civilization) as an unaccountable establishment—a mission formalized, in early issues, by eleven separate columns, each devoted to monitoring a single redoubt: the intelligentsia (Willmoore Kendall on “The Liberal Line”), foreign policy (James Burnham on “The Third Cold War”), newspapers (Karl Hess on “The Press of Freedom”), and on and on.

National Review
rode an impressive postwar tide of conservative intellectual work that, wrote an observer, “would tax the dialectical agility of a thirty-third degree Trotskyite.” They believed that the bulwark of any civilization was not industry or riches or men under arms, but
ideas.
The West was imperiled because it was infected by error: by materialism, in the philosophical sense of the word, believing the world to be wholly composed of ordinary physical matter and of valuing physical well-being as an ultimate end. And materialism's handmaids: humanism and egalitarianism, which assumed man had unlimited power to order his own world; pragmatism, which said whatever worked was right; and utopianism, the doomed attempt to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth (Buckley liked to call that “immanentizing the eschaton”). The offenders were both Democrats (Kennedy: “Our problems are man-made; they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants”) and Republicans (Rockefeller: The ideal politician “goes in and says, ‘I want to find out what the facts are.' Then he adapts his program and his approach to the realities”). It was the political water America was swimming in—a swamp, Buckley's acolytes thought.

If this was abstruse stuff, that only added to the thrill of belonging to the club. Young
National Review
readers were discovering one another. The spring that
Conscience of a Conservative
was published, the Midwest Federation of College Republicans meeting in Des Moines, overwhelmed with a record 435 delegates, resolved by voice vote to endorse Barry Goldwater for vice president. A group of them who had met through the loyalty oath fight formed Youth for Goldwater for Vice President, headed by Caddy and a University of Indiana student who was active in ISI, Robert Croll. Within a few weeks Youth for Goldwater had sixty-four campus chapters in thirty-two states, a headquarters in Washington, and a mentor: an edgy right-wing publicist named Marvin Liebman, for whom Caddy was working that summer, and who was going to the Republican National Convention to plump for an old China Lobby stalwart, Republican Walter Judd of Minnesota, for vice president.

Restless, lonely teenagers discovering their first intellectual and political high; craggy old Midwestern foundry men counting their inflation-addled dollars and chasing the unions from their gates; the newly wealthy in a changing South—and the gruff and glamorous cowboy aristocrat whom they all pictured when they closed their eyes and imagined their political beau ideal: quietly, just below the notice of a media and political establishment for whom such a confluence was unimaginable, something was happening—“like the meeting of the Blue and White Nile,” as William Rusher, publisher of
National Review,
would describe it much later, although at the time he chose a different metaphor: “I think we had better pull in our belts and buckle down to a long
period of real impotence. Hell, the catacombs were good enough for the Christians!”

The tributaries would converge in Chicago that summer at Richard Nixon's Republican National Convention. Croll began organizing National Youth for Goldwater for Vice President full-time out of a Chicago attic with funds raised via a
National Review
ad and a dollar-a-head membership fee. Manion's allies in the South Carolina Republican Party at their state convention on March 26, clutching advance copies of
Conscience of a Conservative,
listened to Goldwater criticize Nixon's “complacent attitude” toward the South and, in a move coordinated by Manion that caught Goldwater quite by surprise, pledged their thirteen convention delegates to him. Manion immediately began mobilizing for a repeat performance in Mississippi in April. He opened an Americans for Goldwater headquarters in Chicago on July 7; a full-page ad ran in the
Tribune
on July 13. People were coming to the dean and asking how to organize their own clubs; soon there were hundreds of Americans for Goldwater chapters.