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This Week in the History of the Conservative Movement

Our archive of NRI weekly emails on the Buckley Legacy and the history of the American Conservative Movement

 

The core mission of National Review Institute is to both maintain the legacy of our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., and educate the broader public about conservative principles and history. NRI sends weekly emails to our community to update them on various events throughout the country from Regional Seminars to debates and salon dinners in select cities. We also use these emails as an opportunity to write about important figures, moments, and events in conservatism—not just the life of Buckley, but the greater modern American conservative movement and the history of National Review as an institution. On this page, you can read all of the weekly updates from this year and learn about figures like Ronald Reagan, Edmund Burke, Winston Churchill, James L. Buckley, and Johann Sebastian Bach. You can also find the archive of last year’s emails here. Sign up to receive our emails here. 

Full Text of the Emails:

Subj.: “Celebrating ‘Mr. Republican,'” Sept. 8, 2024

Dear Friend,

Robert Taft, known simply as “Mr. Republican,” was the most important American conservative politician during WWII and its immediate aftermath. Taft, the son of President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, was an Ohio Senator known for his strong positions on battling arbitrary governmental power, maintaining the principles of the Founding, and realism in foreign policy.

Taft was born September 8, 1889. As Matthew Continetti puts it in his history of the American conservative movement, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism (Basic Books, 2022),Taft was “raised to uphold the constitutionalist and free market traditions of his party,” along with a growing sense that the European continent was a “ruin of nationalism, monarchical squabbles, and class struggle.”

As a rising force in Republican politics during the New Deal and Depression, Taft had a very practical and democratic sensibility of representation: “My picture of a statesman has always been a large, rather pompous gentleman, with his hand stuck into his coat, insisting on great principles which have little to do with everyday life.” As National Review’s editors put it in 1956, Taft “was one of the few officeholders in the age of public relations who never adopted the charm-school approach,” a man who traded “not in hopped-up and erotic political visions, but in truth, and honesty, and realism.”

That realism and anti-Wilsonianism led him to worry about FDR’s preparations for entry into World War II, warning against quick mobilization because any rearmament should be “based on defending the United States and not defending democracy throughout the world.” Taft, less the “isolationist” his critics painted him as than a non-interventionist, felt that American foreign policy should follow Washington and aim to avoid treaties which obligated us to go to war and cautioned that entering the war would lead to expanded government, rationing, and aggregation of executive power to FDR.

Taft was an acerbic critic of FDR’s foreign policy and the New Deal, but, as Russell Kirk later put it in National Review, “For all Robert Taft’s being a faithful party man, the intellectual and moral power in the Republican party, even the New Dealers—when Taft was hottest against them—recognized that he would always put country before party.” He was also pragmatic, not ideologically rigid, ready to serve the Roosevelt administration in support of the war effort, but unafraid to criticize the ex post facto Nuremberg trials as an injustice and to support the Marshall Plan while questioning the wisdom of the NATO alliance.

Taft also sponsored the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which restricted the activities of unions following the series of strikes in 1945 and 1946. As NR’s John Chamberlain put it, Taft desired labor legislation which was “conceived in the interests of the worker, seeking to protect the individual against any and all oppression from organization, whether it was exerted by the union or by the employer. Nobody was more insistent than Taft on the right to strike; nobody, on the other hand, was a more unrelenting enemy of the secondary boycott.”

In 1952, Taft unsuccessfully ran to be the Republican presidential nominee, losing out to Dwight D. Eisenhower in a hotly contested race at the July convention that year. Taft had the support of a young Phyllis Schlafly and former President Herbert Hoover. Looking back, conservative historian Lee Edwards wrote for NR in 1999 that the race was “between eastern liberals and mid-western conservatives, between ‘modern’ Republicans and ‘regular’ ones, between pragmatists eager to win and idealists for whom principle was as important as victory. In the short term, the idealists lost. But by sticking to principle, they managed to advance their cause in the long run.”

Taft remained a highly influential figure–by getting behind Eisenhower’s campaign, he was able to get the campaign to follow the Republican platform that Taft’s supporters had drafted, which included a promise to clean up the State Department, fire the “hordes of loafers and incompetents” in the federal government, to balance the budget, and reduce taxes. As Edwards concludes, “Taft may have lost the nomination, but he won the election by insisting that the party and its presidential candidate wage an uncompromisingly conservative, anti-Communist campaign.”

Unfortunately, Taft was also terribly sick and died of pancreatic cancer on July 31, 1953. In 1959, a memorial to Taft was put up near the Senate building, a 100 foot tower of Tennessee marble with 27 bells. NR ’s editors remarked that “ironies abounded” in that “Scarcely a block away, to the north, stands the gleaming new Teamsters headquarters—the house that Predatory Labor built, in contemptuous scorn of Taft’s courageous efforts to curb Big Union power.” The editors wrote that Taft was a man “of lasting significance” and one of the most important figures of his age who lived a life of “diligence, profundity, steadfastness, integrity….synchronized with moral principle; an incorruptible devotion to morality in politics.”

Taft was ultimately, in the words of M. Stanton Evans, a “antiquarian” character, a man who’s political style and character had “more in common with John Adams than with any extant politician,” but whose “old-fangled anxieties about concentrated power seem nowadays more relevant than ever.”

Read here Michael Brendan Dougherty on the 70th anniversary of Taft’s death

Read here Vincent Cannato’s review of Michael Bowen’s 2011 book, “Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party”

Subj. “Celebrating a Buckley Conservative Justice,” August 30, 2024

Dear Friend,

Since his elevation to the Supreme Court in 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch has established himself as one of the most significant forces in judicial conservatism over the last half century.

Born August 28, 1967, and coming of age during the Reagan Revolution, Justice Gorsuch came to his conservatism through the influence of his parents, especially his mother Anne. Justice Gorsuch’s mother, Anne McGill Gorsuch, gained a measure of enmity in the 1980s as a Reagan cabinet official committed to the Reagan Revolution reform of government. As head of the EPA, she was aggressive in carrying out Reagan’s “New Federalism” agenda, cutting the EPA’s budget by 22% while pushing to relax regulations and enforcement. Anne Gorsuch was no political naif either–as a young, forceful conservative state legislature in Colorado, she was responsible for the repeal of over 70 sections of statutes which were obsolete, duplicative, or unnecessary, and was part of what her opponents called the “House Crazies” intent on permanently changing government.

Anne Gorsuch was forced to resign in March 1983 after she was cited for contempt of Congress when she refused to turn over documents related to the “Superfund” scandal, citing Executive Privilege. Justice Gorsuch recalled in 2017 that when his mother resigned, he was indignant with her, saying that, “You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?”

Justice Gorsuch’s brother recalled the early exposure to a debater’s mindset: “When you expose, at an early age, children to the McLaughlin Group, you see people debating, using their critical reasoning.” He was a National Champion debater who was known as a stalwart defender of Reagan and his conservative values, pictured in his high school yearbook holding a copy of our founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1959 classic, Up from Liberalism.

As a freshman at Columbia University, Gorsuch joined three other students in establishing a conservative newspaper, the Federalist Paper, named in honor of Federalist Paper authors John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, graduates of Columbia. In the first issue, Gorsuch and his co-founders explained their mission: “Our voice will be an aggressive but considered one, one that may make you think or may just make you angry. But it will be heard, and it will not be shouted down.”

When NR’s D. Keith Mano, another Columbia alumni, wrote about the Federalist Paper in 1987, Gorsuch told Mano that, “[The] reason why we can be so diverse is that there is so much room to the right. It’s not a matter of having to be a conservative to be identified with the right, it’s a matter of being a thinking man or woman.” Mano’s piece made clear that the group who ran the paper were ideologically diverse and that they did not intend to make a Reaganite paper. Rather, Gorsuch was leader of a “remarkably poised” group of students who held “their audience in high and affectionate regard,” they hoped to help that “poor Columbia student intellectually lung-shot and left for dead by campus radicalism.”

Gorsuch finished the interview echoing Buckley in God and Man at Yale: “We’re going to be the last of this era and the most important. The place of this university in the nation’s campus debate is as progenitor of liberal causes. It all starts here. And The Federalist can focus and reshape campus debate in America for the next twenty years.”

After being elevated to the Supreme Court in 2017 by President Donald Trump, Justice Gorsuch put his view of the Constitution and originalism to National Review in 2019 as simple means of limiting the powers of the judiciary in favor of the principle of self-government which founded the country: “When we depart from the original meaning of the Constitution and hand it over to judges, we weaken our habit of self-government and we atrophy a muscle that Madison wanted us to exercise.”

Read Justice Gorsuch in National Review this month on “How Covid-19 Restrictions Created Winners and Losers” here

Read Leslie Southwick’s review of Gorsuch’s 2019 book, A Republic If You Can Keep It, (Forum Books, 2019) here

Read Charles C.W. Cooke’s interview with Justice Gorsuch for NR in October 2019 here

Subj.: “Celebrating the ‘Man Who Had No Enemies,'” August 23, 2024

Dear Friend,

Over his principled life, James Buckley accomplished that rare trifecta in American politics: He was a member of all three branches of the federal government, beginning as a U.S. Senator, next as an Undersecretary of State and the head of Radio Free Europe during the Reagan Administration, and finally as a Federal Judge on the DC Circuit. His younger brother, our founder William F. Buckley Jr., referred to him as “The Man I trust” and the only person he had ever known who had no enemies because he had “always persuaded everyone with whom he has contact that his fairness is, in a sense, a tribute even to those who are the immediate victims of that fairness.”

James Buckley helped Bill to create a successful conservative third party in New York City in the 1960s after the formation of the Conservative Party by J. Daniel Mahoney and Kieran O’Doherty in 1962. When Bill ran for Mayor in 1965, Jim was his campaign manager and closest confidant. Three years later, Jim ran on the Conservative Party ticket for U.S. Senator and incredibly, on his second try, Buckley won the 1970 New York Senatorial Contest. As a U.S. Senator, James Buckley demonstrated his deep moral principles alongside his characteristic judicious and prudential nature. Examples range from Buckley being the first Senator to call for President Nixon’s resignation—an act of great political courage which may have cost him re-election—to his fight for campaign finance reform. He was also a firm advocate for the pro-life cause.

After the Roe v. Wade decision, on May 31, 1973, Senator Buckley introduced the Human Life Amendment, which would apply the 5th and 14th amendment’s protection of life and “persons” to all human beings at every stage of life, with language that stipulated, “to all human beings, including their unborn offspring at every stage of their biological development, irrespective of age, health, function, or condition of dependency.” Senator Buckley gave in support of the amendment, what National Review’s editors called “an extraordinary speech” and a “model of conservative exposition on moral, philosophical and constitutional issues.”

As Senator Buckley did on other grave questions, like the civilizational battle against Communism and totalitarianism, the fight to protect life and end abortion represented the “first phase of a head-on conflict between the traditional, Judeo-Christian medical and legal ethic (in which the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life is secured by law, regardless of age, health, or condition of dependency) and a new ethic, according to which human life can be taken for what are held to be the compelling social, economic, or psychological needs of others.” He understood that in the hands of arbitrary government or courts, the power to decide the value of persons as being “full” or not would lead to tyranny and a moral abyss.

Jim Buckley died last August at the age of 100, but not before honoring National Review Institute by letting us attach his name to the James L. Buckley Lecture in Principled Leadership at the biennial Ideas Summit. Our inaugural James L. Buckley Lecture was given last spring by the Honorable Michael Mukasey.

Let us remember him by his remarks at NRI’s annual Buckley Prize Dinner in 2020, in which he warned us that we had become a nation of “constitutional illiterates,” where “Few Americans have any understanding of the degree to which the Constitution’s safeguards are being whittled away . . . We need to remind them of their existence and hammer home the urgent need to bring the administrative state under effective constitutional control. That will be anything but easy, but it has to be done.”

For more about the profound legacy of James L. Buckley:

  • Read our recent collection of commentary and reminiscences about James Buckley one year later here.
  • Read National Review’s editorial on James Buckley, “Gent, Thinker, Patriot,” here.
  • Read the reminiscence of Jim’s daughter, Priscilla Buckley II, here.
  • Read Jack Fowler on “James Buckley, American Statesman” here.
  • Read Matthew Continetti from last March’s magazine on “James Buckley at 100.”
  • Watch James Buckley make “The Case for Federalism” in his final public address at the 2019 Ideas Summit.
  • Watch the NRI Prize Dinner “Gala At Home” Honoring James Buckley from 2020 here.
  • And do not forget to enjoy the many interviews Jim gave to his brother Bill on Firing Line, including his first interview with Jim in 1971, their discussion of Nixon and conservatism in 1974, and Jim’s appearance as  President of Radio Free Europe in 1982.

Subj.: “Happy Birthday to one of the Remarkable Women in American History,” August 16, 2024

Dear Friend,

Phyllis Schlafly was, in the words of the eminent conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans, a woman with “several careers–housewife, mother, media personality, political leader, and constant nemesis of women’s lib.” She was, like National Review’s founder William F. Buckley Jr., a force of nature who tirelessly worked to advance the conservative movement–she wrote 27 books, thousands of articles and op-eds, constantly traveled and lectured, and founded and ran one most successful conservative advocacy organizations, the Eagle Forum.

Schlafly was born August 15, 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri. During World War II, she worked in a munitions factory and shortly after the war, she joined the American Enterprise Institute as a researcher. The same year, the precocious Schlafly entered Republican politics, managing a Congressional campaign in Illinois for Claude Bakewell. At just 28, in 1952 she ran for Congress in Illinois, losing by 63,000 votes to Democrat Charles Melvin Price–she would run once more unsuccessfully in 1970.

Schlafly first appeared in the pages of National Review in 1957 when she wrote a letter to the Editor endorsing the phonics method for teaching school children. She appeared in the magazine again eight years later when she co-wrote with Chester Ward, a retired Rear Admiral, “The Gravediggers,” a short paperback originally intended to support the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Reflective of Schlafly’s deep interest in foreign policy, the subtitle of the book was, “Who is Really Risking Nuclear War?” The same year, she sold millions of copies of her self-published volume, “A Choice Not an Echo,” in which she, along the lines of William F. Buckley Jr. and NR , endorsed Goldwater as a means of combating the dominance of Eastern liberal Republicans to make the Republican Party a vehicle for conservative politics.

The questions of deterrence, nuclear war, and the Communist threat were key to Schlafly’s rise in the conservative movement. However, the issue during that period which she would most make her mark on was that of the ERA–the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA dated back to 1923, when Alice Paul first introduced it following the successful adoption of the 19th amendment and its guarantee that the right to vote could not be conditioned on the basis of sex. The ERA was reintroduced in 1972 and had a great deal of popular and political support, with 28 states ratifying it by the end of 1972.

Schlafly was not content to allow the amendment to win, creating the Eagle Forum to oppose the measure on the basis that there were innate differences between the sexes and that such a strict legal requirement of equality of the sexes would destroy the family and have other perverse effects–including, she warned, the eventual requirement that women register for the draft. As M. Stanton Evans recounted in NR , Schlafly attacked the ERA by defending traditional womanhood, “stressing the creative, civilizing role of women, the centrality of home and family, and the profound differences between male and female psyches which the radical feminists would deny.” For Schlafly, like the fight against Communism, the ERA represented an affront to the West and the traditional values of Western Civilization.

She explained all of this to Buckley in a debate on Firing Line concerning the ERA in 1973, saying that the “ERA won’t give women any more than they’ve already got, or have a way of getting. But on the other hand, it will take away from women some of the most important rights and benefits and exemptions we now have.”

Commenting on the incredible success of Schlafly’s grassroot conservative movement, the magazine’s editors in 1982 declared her to be one of the “most remarkable women in American history,” even if the “ideologically engineered textbooks” of the public schools would never recognize it. Of her victory against the ERA, the Editors wrote that, “She has triumphed over the major media, the bureaucrats (and bureacrettes), and the ‘women’s movement’ almost single-handedly. The ERA is dead.” They understood that while the left portrayed the defeat of the ERA as a loss for equal rights and demonized Schlafly as playing on “people’s worst fears,” Schlafly had understood that the real victory was over a aggrandized judiciary who, under the amendment, would have had power to “define ad libitum outside the political process” the meaning of “equal rights” just as the Warren Court had the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Decades after her greatest conservative success, NR’s Kate O’Brein wrote of Schlafly in 2005 the “Founding Mother:” “With her well-reasoned arguments and tireless advocacy, she recruited thousands of women to her cause. They would stop the ERA, evolve into the powerful pro-family movement, and go on to transform the GOP and American politics.”

Read The Editors’ obituary from 2016 on “Phyllis Schlafly, Happy Warrior” here

Read John Fund on Schlafly, the “Sweetheart of the Silent Majority,” here

Read John McCormick here on how Schlafly and Conservatives Were Right about the ERA

Watch Buckley’s other interview with Schlafly on Firing Line in 1978 concerning the Panama Canal treaty here

Subj.: “Celebrating the 150th of ‘the Chief,'” August 9, 2024

Dear Friend,

Herbert Hoover was a committed public servant dedicated to the cause of American values and conservatism over the course of his long life. Our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., described Hoover as having, “not only character, intelligence, and insight, but an ardent desire to help individual human beings—together with an ardent desire to preserve a society which, in his judgment, is unique.”

Hoover was born August 10, 1874 in West Branch, Iowa. He graduated from Stanford in 1895 and went on to great success as a mining engineer and businessman, becoming a multi-millionaire by 1914. From there, he launched a stunning career in American politics—first, privately, at the outbreak of World War I in London, he created the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a private humanitarian relief agency whose work was delivering food supplies to the conquered Belgians starting in 1914; then, publicly, as the President of the United States Food Administration during World War I and its aftermath; third, as the Secretary of Commerce for the Harding and Coolidge administrations in the 1920s; and then finally, winning the presidency over Al Smith in 1928.

Hoover set up the Hoover Institution in 1919 as a library to house all his documents and correspondence from his time heading relief efforts during World War I. In 1957, it was renamed the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace and by 1959, it had become independent from Stanford, as Hoover had grown dismayed by the growing influence of the academic left upon his library and scholars. The Hoover Institution shifted from a library to a think tank, with a mission according to Hoover to, “recall the voice of experience against the making of war, and by the study of these records and their publication, to recall man’s endeavors to make and preserve peace, and to sustain for America the safeguards of the American way of life.”

Buckley met the former President in 1954 to tell him that, in his judgment, “political discourse in the United States was suffering gravely from the absence of a conservative journal of opinion.”  Buckley recalled the meeting in vivid detail in a speech celebrating Hoover’s 114th birthday in 1988 before the Hoover Institution:

“In those days, I said to him—having only recently graduated from college—it was generally assumed, by what goes by the name of the thinking classes, that the conservative movement was a loose conspiracy of illiterate tycoons whose only interests were to maximize profits and burn books. I rattled on a little bit on the subject. He sat there at his desk, silent; looking just a little bit to one side as, I later came to know, was habitual. I was still going on when he cleared his throat for a minute and I stopped talking. ‘You need capital,’ he said simply. A clean knife, through all that butter.”

In 1960, Hoover joined Lewis Strauss and General Douglas MacArthur in sponsoring the 5th anniversary dinner for National Review, but was physically unable to attend the ceremony. Buckley last corresponded with Hoover in 1962 over their shared outrage concerning the Warren Court’s decision to outlaw common prayer in schools. Buckley, with Lewis Strauss and Robert Murphy, organized the Committee for Religious Liberty and invited Hoover to be a co-chairman. Hoover declined both on part of his age and the worry that, “Every time I lend my name to some righteous movement, the public holds me responsible.”

Hoover was, as his eminent biographer, the conservative historian George Nash, has shown, the most important domestic political figure in the United States from 1921 to 1933 and a man who, following his presidency, spent his remaining life on a “crusade against collectivism.” A pragmatist who believed that the state had a responsibility to step forward and help those in need, Hoover also believed that America was not blessed so much by abundant land and resources, but our social system, “animated by the ideal of human freeman,” in the words of George Nash.

When Hoover turned 90 in 1964, shortly before he died, National Review’s editors remarked that the nation should be “grateful to Herbert Hoover, whose service in behalf of the Boys’ Clubs, which have meant so much to so many hundreds of thousands of Americans, is simply another day’s charitable and creative work for this remarkable human being.” When Hoover died that November, “his friend and biographer Eugene Lyons wrote in NR of Hoover the man of “shining integrity” and “moral greatness,” who “was gentle and kind, honest and modest and shy. He shrank from applause and demonstrations. He was capable of great angers, against injustice and corruption and brutality, but not of malice against people.”

Read John J. Miller here on Hoover’s Vice President, the first Native American in the office, Charles Curtis

Read Victor Davis Hanson on the 100th anniversary of the Hoover Institution here

Read Michael Knox Beran on Hoover in the White House here

Read the Kirk Center’s Interview with George Nash on the legacy of Hoover the Conservative here

Subj.: “Still No Free Lunches,” August 3, 2024

Dear Friend,

Milton Friedman was, like National Review’s founder William F. Buckley Jr., a man of many talents–economist, political advisor, political theorist, public intellectual–which made him one of the most impactful figures in American conservatism and libertarianism over the past century. Friedman was, in the words of Buckley, “the American fons et origo of libertarian enterprise” and a man for whom everything he touched had “the feel of his optimism.”

Friedman was born July 31, 1912 in Brooklyn, New York. The majority of his academic career was spent at University of Chicago where, starting in 1946, alongside George Stigler, Friedman was one of the chief proponents of the Chicago School of Economics, which arose in opposition to the Keysenian model that dominated the previous decades

In 1962, Friedman published what historian George Nash calls, “one of the most significant works of conservative scholarship of the 1960s,” Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1962). Nash notes that what made Friedman’s classic work so impactful was not that his arguments were new–Friedrich Hayek, for example, had similar ideas–but that his writing presented a “daring and iconoclastic assault on conventional twentieth-century liberal wisdom and an incisive indictment of liberal failures.” Friedman’s book questioned the wisdom of everything from the monopoly of the post office to social security, the minimum wage, and the tax system, while also refuting leftist accusations that capitalism was racist and at fault for the Great Depression.

One of Friedman’s trademark phrases–which Buckley quipped was a “reductionist triumph”–was the trenchant observation that “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Applied to the Social Security program, Friedman helped conservatives like Buckley intuit that the program sold itself, as Buckley put it, “to the unwary on the occult superstition that we are all engaged in prim exercises in self-insurance” when it was merely “massive acts of income transfers, from younger people to older people.”

It was not just Friedman’s positions on economics and monetary theory which had a significant impact on Buckley and National Review . Many of his political positions did as well, most notably his opposition to military conscription, his favoring of school vouchers, and his criticism of the “War on Drugs.” Friedman was convincing enough on these fronts that he helped persuade President Nixon to create a Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force in 1970, leading to the temporary end of the draft two years later. Friedman also became the object of controversy for the advice he gave to Pinochet in Chile, delivering lectures there and defending his actions on the notion that all tyrannies are despicable, but that the tyrannies of the right tend to be less tenacious than those on the left.

Friedman and Buckley were also good friends who vacationed together and skied with fellow economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Friedman skied with Buckley for nearly two decades until in 1994, at 81, he had to stop on account of his ailing knees. Friedman remarked in a letter that, “Those (the nineteen years of skiing) many years we spent three days together at Alta are among my happiest memories.” Buckley responded in kind with a column on their skiing life, writing that, “Your generosity of spirit is remarkable and I am most grateful for having been a major beneficiary.”

Buckley, upon Friedman’s death in 2006, wrote that while the world had lost “that great wellspring of liberal and penetrating thought” he stressed Friedman’s “capacity for friendship and fine company,” a characteristic he shared with Buckley, and emphasized that it was a personal loss for him and many others who admired the “dominant economic and libertarian voice of the 20th century.”

Through its “Capital Matters” initiative, National Review Institute does the work of keeping aflame the prescient lessons of Friedman’s brilliant career.

Read here Peter Boettke’s review of historian Jennifer Burns’ recent book on Friedman, “The Last Conservative.”

Read Jon Hartley on Friedman’s “Shareholder Capitalism” principle 50 years later here

Watch Buckley and Friedman debate on Firing Line in 1990 Buckley’s proposal of National Service from his book, “Gratitude”

Watch Buckley’s first interview of Friedman on Firing Line in 1968, on “The Economic Crisis”

Watch Dominic Pino’s interview with  Jennifer Burns on her biography of Friedman, “The Last Conservative,” here.

Read Amity Shlaes’ critical review of Burns and defense of Friedman, the “zero government libertarian,” here.

Read Matthew Continetti on the timeless lessons of Friedman’s monetary theory in times of high inflation here.

Subj.: “A Bright Man and a Sharp Polemicist,” July 27, 2024

Dear Friend,

Robert Joseph Dole, known to all Americans as “Bob” Dole, was an immensely important figure in American conservative politics during the mid-to-late 20th century, as he held office for over four decades between the Kansas state house, the U.S. House and Senate, and as Republican candidate for President in 1996. He was, in the words of our founder William F. Buckley Jr. in 1976, a “bright man and sharp polemicist.”

Dole was born July 22, 1923 in the small town of Russell, Kansas. A soldier in the army’s mountain division during the Italian campaign in World War II, Dole nearly died after being grievously wounded by a German shell. Dole was paralyzed from the neck down and while he regained mobility, his injuries were life-long numbness in his left arm and limited mobility in his right, which left him always holding a pen in his right hand once he learned to sign left-handed.

During Dole’s time in the Senate, William F. Buckley Jr. was critical of his commitment to Reaganomics. Buckley argued that the collapse of Reaganomics in 1982 was a “testimony to a failure of both nerve and understanding” by Dole and a capitulation on both goals of Reaganomics–not overtaxing the people and ensuring the government did not do too much. At the time, Dole was the chairman of the Finance Committee and he mobilized his members to vote for the highest single peacetime tax increase in American history at the time.

Dole first entered presidential politics in 1979, even appearing on Firing Line with Buckley to discuss his candidacy, and in 1988, he won the Iowa Caucuses over the eventual nominee, Vice President George H.W. Bush. In 1996, Dole ran for the Presidency against Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton and chose as his running mate a favorite of Bill Buckley and National Review, Jack Kemp. But, as in 1988, Dole the frontrunner faced a serious challenge, with Pat Buchanan gaining the support of pro-life religious conservatives and Steve Forbes the loyalty of supply-siders and libertarian conservatives.

With his poll numbers down and the party split over the 1996 platform regarding abortion, Buckley wrote of Dole that, “He is a handsome man; his countenance is both that of the American who enjoys impieties at the Mark Twain level, and that of the American one goes to war with, knowing that, at your side, is a noble man and true companion. The other stuff he’s not very good at, and it goes against his natural character as a presidential candidate.”

When Dole lost the race to President Clinton, Buckley wrote of Dole that one had to acknowledge that “he appears to change his own beliefs quite regularly.” Dole’s struggle was to be the establishment candidate in the wake of Reagan when the conservative coalition was fragmenting.

At National Review Institute, we look to remember that although Bill Buckley and National Review had much criticism for the political choices of Senator Dole, they never forgot the character of the man–noble and true.

Read Craig Shirley on Bob Dole the “Best Compassionate Conservative” here

See National Review’s photo montage of Dole upon his death in December 2021 here

Read Steve Hanke on Dole and the end of the Soviet Union here

Watch Firing Line’s 1987 Special, Republican Contenders for President here

In 1979, Bob Dole “Presidential Hopeful” was interviewed by Buckley, watch the video here

Subj.: “Celebrating the ‘Quintessential Republican,'” July 19, 2024

Dear Friend,

William A. “Bill” Rusher played a key role in both the rise of National Review as the foremost magazine in American conservatism and the creation of a formidable American conservative political movement. As William F. Buckley Jr. recalled, Rusher was known for coming to NR editorial conferences “with his notebook and his clippings, to pour vitriol on the ideologically feeble.”

Bill Rusher was born on July 19, 1923 in Chicago and grew up primarily in New York. Like William F. Buckley Jr., he served during World War II, an officer in the Air Corps before attending Harvard Law School. After time at a Wall Street firm, Rusher became an associate counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee. It was during this time that Rusher both got to know Buckley socially and became immersed in conservative thought–reading Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind . Armed with a robust intellectual conservative compass, Rusher found himself breaking with the Eisenhower administration over its insufficient commitment to anti-communism and treatment of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

A charter subscriber to National Review in 1955, by 1957, Rusher was ready to leave DC. He happened to find himself having lunch with Buckley and within a few minutes, Buckley, according to conservative historian Kevin Smant, “stunned” Rusher by offering him the position of publisher.

Rusher would go on to spend 31 years as publisher of National Review, giving it, in Smart’s words, a “badly needed dose of organization and detail” alongside knowledge of “the nuts and bolts of practical Republican Party politics.” Rusher also quickly became politically active, first as one of the members of NR at the formation of Young Americans for Freedom at Buckley’s house in Sharon in 1960, then going on to help found the Draft Goldwater Committee in 1961, the New York Conservative Party in 1962, and the American Conservative Union in 1964.

Rusher ultimately retired from NR in 1988 and joined the Claremont Institute as a Senior Fellow in 1989. Rusher continued to serve on the board of NR and went on publishing the syndicated column he began in 1973, “The Conservative Advocate.” Buckley gave a toast in celebration of Rusher in December 1988, calling him the “quintessential Republican” and a man of “meticulous” and “fastidious” habits, joking that it was a miracle that Rusher “should have endured for so long the disorderly habits of his colleagues.”

With that, let us allow Bill Rusher his own final word, with wisdom about the unchanging essential principles of conservatism: “Conservatism is essentially an analysis of social problems from the standpoint of a particular understanding of human nature. As long as that understanding continues essentially unchanged, the ways of dealing with those problems will remain basically unchanged. What is that understanding? Conservatives believe that people are designed to pursue their own best interests and that the job of society is to make sure that, as far as possible, the pursuit of those interests conduces to the benefit of society as a whole. Happily, it tends to do so.”

Read the 2011 NR special issue on Remembering Bill Rusher here

Read Bill Buckley’s speech in honor of Rusher’s retirement in 1987 here

Read Neal Freeman on Buckley, Rusher, and the Draft Goldwater Committee here

Read former NR editor John O’Sullivan on Bill Rusher here

Visit the Bill Rusher Centennial Project here

Subj.: “Honoring the ‘Accidental President,'” July 14, 2024

Dear Friend,

111 years ago today, on July 14, 1913, President Gerald Ford was born. Ford—the moderate Republican who served as Richard Nixon’s vice president, and later went on to become president following Nixon’s resignation—was a significant, if enigmatic, figure among American conservatives.

It was nearly 50 years ago in August 1974 that Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal and Ford was sworn in as president. Upon the transition, the editors and writers of National Review put out a special magazine to examine what had happened and what to expect of the Ford presidency. William F. Buckley Jr. wrote, following Nixon’s resignation, that conservatives needed to ask, “how can we help to bind the wounds of the conservative community, and remobilize for the ongoing struggle against those who, catapulting us toward the socialist state and a precarious sovereignty, are guilty of covering up history, and ignoring the bases of human freedom?”

Professor Ernest van den Haag found Ford’s ascension to seem “providential,” as, “His entire career has been devoted to routine partisan politics, his latter months as Vice President to awkward and increasingly implausible protestations of his belief in his President’s innocence; but when the office fell to him, his luminous affability enabled him to unite the country instantly, magically . . . This accidental President was exactly—for the moment—the right man.”

NR‘s publisher, Bill Rusher, thought that the resignation would be good news for true conservatives, as he hoped it would spell the end of the imperial presidency. He hoped too that despite having been installed by the liberals, Ford would “turn out to be to the right of Mr. Nixon on a number of crucial issues.”

Soon, the magazine would be critical of Ford’s liberal Republican program and particularly his choice of Nelson Rockefeller as vice president. By 1975, Buckley was making a serious push for Ronald Reagan to be the next Republican nominee, particularly after Ford refused on the advice of Henry Kissinger to receive Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the summer of 1975.

Even when Reagan lost the contest, Buckley wrote that Reagan had successfully moved Ford ideologically towards his position. And conservatives did not forget Reagan’s opposition to the Panama Canal treaty, which was central to his campaign and, in Buckley’s eyes, led him to the White House four years later—even if Buckley famously disagreed with his friend.

National Review Institute honors our history in all its complexities and we look to do the same for Gerald Ford, a decent man in an impossible position who played a vital role in paving the road to Ronald Reagan.

Subj.: “Remembering ‘the American Cicero’ Thirty Years Passed,” May 3, 2024

Dear Friend,

Thirty years ago, on April 29, 1994, the eminent conservative philosopher, thinker, poet, and best-selling novelist Russell Kirk, dubbed by M. E. Bradford the “American Cicero,” died. In the pages of National Review in 1985, the great conservative historian Forrest McDonald summed up Kirk’s immense contributions to American conservatism: “His founding of Modern Age and of The University Bookman, his long-running ‘From the Academy’ column in NR, his syndicated column, his foundation activities, his private philanthropies, his personal University of Mecosta, and, above all, his books have been justly celebrated.”

Kirk changed the landscape with his publication of The Conservative Mind in 1953, an anthology of conservative statesmen and thinkers in America and Europe meant to canvas the conservative sentiments and disposition—a body of conventional wisdom, as Kirk described it—while rejecting ideology. His conservatism was based in a belief in a transcendent moral order, social continuity, the principle of prescription, prudential and natural change over abstract theoretical systems, the rejection of “belligerent individuals which subordinated all continuity and tradition,” and the imperfectability of man against the liberal view of human nature.

One reader taken by Kirk’s mind and pen was a young William F. Buckley Jr., who at 28 traveled to Michigan to persuade Kirk to write for his new magazine, National Review. As Buckley recalled: “I was so elated by his spontaneous and generous willingness to associate his august name with that of a wizened ex-schoolboy known mostly for an iconoclastic screed directed at his alma mater.”

At the magazine, Kirk frequently battled against the rising “fusionist” philosophy of Frank Meyer and continued to argue in favor of the traditional conservatism of his philosophical heroes, namely Edmund Burke. He continued to publish notable conservative tomes, including Roots of American Order and The American Cause in 1974 and The Politics of Prudence . The conservative statesmen and thinkers he admired ran the gamut from ancients like Cicero, to Southern agrarian conservatives like John Randolph and Richard Weaver, to men of letters like Samuel Johnson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and T. S. Eliot.

When Kirk introduced Buckley at the first Acton Institute dinner in 1992, Kirk described plainly how much he valued NR: “Which has done more to defend the permanent things in American politics and society than any other publication in the history of this country.” Upon his death, Buckley concluded that Kirk embodied that fundamental conservative virtue of gratitude: “Few have repaid their debt to their family, their country, and their faith so extravagantly.”

Last year, our weekly email discussed Kirk’s Acton speech in more depth, particularly his illustration of how his and Buckley’s lives were parallel.

Read Matthew Continetti’s NR magazine article, “Russell Kirk, a Conservative Guide for Our Times,” here

Read Matthew Continetti on “Kirk at 100,” here

Read James Matthew Wilson’s 2019 magazine article, “For Russell Kirk,” here

Read Jack Butler’s, “Ghost Stories with Russell Kirk,” here

Read friend of NRI, Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy, here

Watch CSPAN’s video of the 2018 event pairing NRI and the Kirk Center, “Russell Kirk and the Future of Conservatism,” here

Subj.: “A Towering Figure, A Generous Friendship,” April 26, 2024

Dear Friend,

Eighteen years ago, John Kenneth Galbraith, the six-foot-eight socialist Harvard economist, ambassador to India, and expert skier, passed away. A man of the left, he was one of our founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s greatest friends.

Galbraith and Buckley first met in 1966 at Truman Capote’s masked ball, with Buckley asking Galbraith to explain why he had admonished a colleague to not publish in National Review. Galbraith, whom as Buckley recalled in his literary biography Miles Gone By was “The Enemy, professional and personal,” responded, “I regret that.” Two weeks later, Galbraith invited Buckley to ski with him in Gstaad, Switzerland, the beginning of a life-long friendship.

Galbraith made a total of 11 appearances on Firing Line , demonstrating both his budding friendship with Buckley and his own wit. Buckley was more than willing to be a critic of Galbraith’s political ventures and his support of redistributionist policies, writing of Galbraith’s role as economic advisor to the George McGovern campaign he helped launch in 1972: “Galbraith, as I say, is probably the principal intellectual patron of the McGovern Convention. He has given his enormous prestige to popularizing the kind of populism that George McGovern has ridden in on. Where else, except in Galbraith, can you find someone who is at once president of the American Economics Association, past president of the Americans for Democratic Action, author of the best-known economic treatises since John Maynard Keynes’, and principal dispenser of the kind of snake oil they have been drinking here in Miami Beach?”

In celebration of Galbraith’s 90th birthday in 1998 at the Kennedy Center, Buckley remarked that, “Ever since I had the good fortune to meet Professor Galbraith, which is to be distinguished from the jolt some of us get from reading the things he writes, I have found him an omnipresence.” He also put it simply: Galbraith was a beloved personal friend.

Upon his death, Buckley reflected that it pleased him that Galbraith “knew the value I placed on his friendship.” Buckley did not forget their differences on economic freedom and policy, but he ultimately wanted to focus on Galbraith’s private life and his capacity for generous friendship. As Buckley put it, “Forget the whole thing, the getting and spending, and the Nobel Prize nominations, and the economists’ tributes. What cannot be forgotten by those exposed to it is the amiable, generous, witty interventions of this man, with his singular wife and three remarkable sons, and that is why there are among his friends those who weep that he is now gone.”

Watch Buckley at Galbraith’s funeral service in 2006 here.

Watch Buckley and Galbraith’s team debate ‘That Free Market Competitiveness is Best for America” on Firing Line in 1989 here.

Watch Buckley interview Galbraith on his life in economics and policy in 1981 here.

Subj.: “At Once the Weakest of Men, and the Strongest,” April 19, 2024

Dear Friend,

30 years ago, President Richard Milhouse Nixon, the enigmatic, controversial, and impactful 37th president, died. Nixon was a complex and difficult figure for conservatives to wrestle with, but he also left a legacy of strong anti-Communism and the success of the modern American conservative movement leading to his election in 1968.

Upon his death, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote about Clare Booth Luce’s remark that all public figures would come to be associated with a single achievement and Buckley felt Nixon’s would be negative—the only American president in history to be kicked out of office. Yet, he was a “dominant political figure” who had taken “very large strides in history,” winning reelection with a runaway majority before his inglorious departure from the Oval Office.

Buckley summed up the career of Nixon, a man whose prestige “did not derive exclusively from the office of president” given his invaluable feeling for the American political scene. Nixon first gained the respect and admiration of conservatives when he was the young freshman Congressman who believed Whittaker Chambers and disbelieved Alger Hiss.

As president, he was the man who, in the eyes of Buckley and National Review, lost the Vietnam War, pulled out of Bretton Woods, declared wage and price controls, and opened diplomatic relations with China by charming the detestable Communist dictator Mao Zedong. Buckley would, despite the rocky relationship with the Nixon administration, serve as a delegate to the United States in 1973 and accompany Nixon to China in 1972. When the FBI asked whether or not Buckley had done anything since 1969 to embarrass the administration, NR publisher William Rusher quipped, “No, but the Nixon administration has done a great deal to embarrass Mr. Buckley.”

Watergate was a watershed moment for conservatives. Jeffrey Hart writes that NR responded to the scandal “with condemnation for the violation of constitutional norms mixed with a great deal of disgust.” Bill’s older brother, Senator James L. Buckley, was the first to call for Nixon’s resignation in March 1974. Bill reflected in a speech that October about the costs of Nixon’s “grave deceptions” and the pain his brother felt upon being “roundly denounced” for his “reasoned, compassionate, and prescient call on Mr. Nixon to step down for the good of the country.”

For Buckley, Nixon was ultimately a contradictory figure emblematic of fallen humanity—a man who was “at once the weakest of men, and the strongest; a master of self-abuse, and of self-recovery. Stained by worldliness, and driven by the hunger to serve.” At NRI, as part of honoring the Buckley Legacy, we aim to educate on conservative first principles and an accounting of our history which encounters our past conservative figures as they were—full, complex humans.

Subj.: “The Architect of Fusionism,” April 5, 2024

Dear Friend,

Frank Meyer, the architect of “fusionism” and the longtime “Books, Arts & Manners” editor for National Review, died 52 years ago this week.

Like other founders and early luminaries of  National Review, such as James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers, Meyer was an ex-Communist widely read in the classics with keen insights about the totalitarian threat of collectivism. Meyer recruited a great variety of talents, many of whom disagreed sharply with him, to turn the “Books, Arts & Manners” section or the “back of the book” into one of the strengths of the magazine. He recruited not only Kenner, but also Guy Davenport and Francis Russell alongside discovering Joan Didion.

Meyer’s more libertarian conservatism came to clash with other National Review  founders, most prominently Russell Kirk and L. Brent Bozell. Kirk and Meyer disagreed over a 1956 column Kirk wrote condemning one of Meyer’s heroes, John Stuart Mills, for his commitment to “abstract appeal to free discussion, sweet reasonable, and solitary simple principle.” Meyer’s rejoinder was to assert the “right of individual freedom not on the grounds of utility but on the grounds of the very nature of man” and the freedom of individuals against “the collective instrumentalities of state and society.”

Meyer’s philosophy, as Bozell would term it critically “fusionism,” was meant to be a bridging of libertarianism and traditionalism. His 1962 book, In Defense of Freedom , aimed to defend the primacy of the individual against the incursions of the bureaucratic state. Meyer’s conviction, as he wrote in 1964, was that “as against the prevalent Liberalism of the first six decades of the century, contemporary American conservative thought shares a common set of values; and that these values are derived in their essentials from the values held in common by the Founding Fathers.”

Alongside William F. Buckley Jr., Meyer did much to help organize and build up the modern American conservative movement. He spoke all over the country and was an organizer for the Young Americans for Freedom, the New York Conservative Party, and the Goldwater for President campaign.

Meyer died mere hours before Easter, having been baptized into the Catholic Church just two days earlier. Buckley was with Meyer in his final days, weeping with him and hearing him complain in physical agony that “the only remaining intellectual obstacle to his conversion was the collectivist implications lurking in the formulation ‘the communion of saints’ in the Apostles’ Creed.”

As part of a vital component of Buckley’s legacy of making cultural commentary a critical part of the magazine’s mission, National Review Institute today proudly sponsors  the “Books, Arts and Manners” section.

Subj. “Nearer My God: Celebrating Holy Week,” March 29, 2024

Dear Friend,

As part of the celebration of Holy Week as a institution founder by the lifetime faithful Catholic, William F. Buckley Jr., we are sharing a few brief thoughts about the significance of Lent and Easter from Buckley and his sage friend, Whittaker Chambers.

In a March 1948 essay for Time magazine, Whittaker Chambers, the celebrated anti-Communist who would become close friends with William F. Buckley Jr. and a National Review editor, wrote about “Faith For a Lenten Age.” In it, Chambers discussed the “devolutionary theopantheism” of the modern age in which God had become a “rather unfairly furtive presence, a lurking luminosity, a cozy thought.” He put this crisis squarely on the shoulders of progressivism and liberalism:

“Under the bland influence of the idea of progress, man, supposing himself more & more to be the measure of all things, achieved a singularly easy conscience and an almost hermetically smug optimism. The idea that man is sinful and needs redemption was subtly changed into the idea that man is by nature good and hence capable of indefinite perfectibility. This perfectibility is being achieved through technology, science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th Century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is divine, or at least benign.”

In a 1987 column, William F. Buckley Jr. reflected that the abiding lesson of Christianity is that, “Man is a sinner. Man can repent. God will forgive. That is so very different from the fashionable secular complement, which is: What is sin?”

At the heart of the season of Lent is not just man’s duty and relationship to God, but the meaning of suffering and God’s sharing of that immeasurably human experience on Calvary Hill. In remembrance of Malcolm Muggeridge, the great journalist and late Catholic convert, Buckley recalled the words of Muggeridge’s wife, Kitty, who told Buckley that, “As an old man, Bill, looking back on one’s life, it’s one of the things that strikes you most forcibly–that the only thing that’s taught one anything is suffering.”

In Nearer, My God, Buckley’s autobiography of faith, he put the argument for the truth of the miracles at the heart of Christianity and Easter succinctly: “If a movement that would absorb the Western world was launched by a few dozen men and women all of whom thought themselves witnesses to miracles, isn’t the burden of disbelief harder?’

Subj: “God cleared his throat,” March 21, 2024

Dear Friend,

339 years ago, the great German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born. Our founder William F. Buckley Jr. wrote upon his 300th in 1985 that Bach’s birth was “as though God had decided to clear his throat to remind the world of his existence.”

Buckley’s celebration of Bach was a reflection of both his conservative reverence for the Western canon and his endearing Catholic faith. He often connected the two, saying that Bach had “the impact of a testimonial to God’s providence not because he wrote the most searingly beautiful church music ever, but because he wrote the most beautiful music ever written.” Just as a sunset showed the presence of the Divine, so too did the sound of one of Bach’s toccatas and fugues in a darkened chapel.

Bach was the musical equivalent of Shakespeare in Buckley’s estimation and thus, one could throw away his three hundred cantatas, hundred-or-so preludes and even the Mass and still the “other half would sustain Bach as a creature whose afflatus is inexplicable, for some of us, in the absence of a belief in God.”

Buckley likewise connected Bach’s genius to the glory of freedom itself, saying if a human being existed who “is unmoved by the B minor Mass it should not be surprise that human beings exist who are unmoved by democracy, or freedom, or peace. They have eyes but they do not see, ears but they do not hear.” To appreciate Bach was to follow the conservative virtue of gratitude, a recognition, in Buckley’s words, of “how much we have received by the great wellsprings of human talent and concern.”

Viewers of Firing Line would have understood intimately Buckley’s love of Bach through the opening theme. As NRI fellow Richard Brookhiser recalled, “the first thing you heard was the trumpet in the Brandenburg Concerto—a high-pitched reveille, as startling as it was bright, because the baroque trumpet had been obsolete for more than 200 years.”

In 1989, Buckley joined the Phoenix Symphony for his first public performance of Bach, playing the F Minor Concerto on the harpsichord and sharing it on Firing Line. It required two years of preparation, including practice on a Yamato keyboard aboard his yacht. Buckley said that it was “fun finding out that a lapsed amateur can, if he is willing to spend lots and lots of time on the problem, manage to draw on a lifetime of a devotion to a composer and play creditably for eight and one-half minutes one of (Bach’s) beautiful concertos.”

As Buckley put it in the original mission statement, National Review is “on the side of excellence (rather than ‘newness’).” The publication was founded in 1955 as a magazine of both politics and culture. As a man of artistic, cultural, and literary pursuits, Buckley had a deep understanding of the essential role they play in realizing a life well lived. National Review Institute has embraced this aspect of Buckley’s legacy by sponsoring the magazine’s popular Books, Arts & Manners section—an explicitly nonpolitical section of the magazine—to fulfill the National Review mission.

Subj: “How Buckley Took on the ‘Anti-McCarthy Myth’ and Communism,” March 15, 2024

Dear Friend,

70 years ago, in March 1954, William F. Buckley Jr. and his brother-in-law and Yale classmate L. Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning. In it, the two examined the nine public cases Senator Joseph McCarthy had made of Communist infiltration of the State Department to set upon a “responsible judgment.”

The book required eighteen months of research and writing—what Buckley recalled in 1961 as “a long enough time to spend seeking out an eighth allegory in Dante’s Inferno.” It was meant to be a “serious book” studying the “shifting coordinates of power within the federal government and the dilemma posed for the open society by the unassimilable political minority; a study of the question of conformity in a democratic society engaged in a Cold War.”

Buckley and Bozell wrote the book to deal with American “indecision” on Communism at home—we were “undecided [about] how to cope with the new menace, we lacked even the will to find a solution. Our confusion and our purposelessness was crippling.” Importantly, the book was meant to be a careful analysis of the fact, not a defense of McCarthy personally, as in total, the book included 66 criticisms of McCarthy.

Buckley and Bozell concluded that McCarthy’s critics, having misread history and the democratic process, failed to understand that the “determination of the American people to curb Communism cannot be dismissed as a capricious, ignorant, or impetuous decision.” McCarthyism, thus, was a weapon of war available to Americans who had given Communism a fair hearing and rejected it.

Buckley’s final word on McCarthy was his 1999 book, The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy. Buckley biographer Lee Edwards writes that in it, Buckley “rejects the liberal view that McCarthy spawned a ‘reign of terror’ that gripped” both elite and common Americans, but also offered a “candid portrait of a man who will distort the truth to make a point and blacken the reputation of an opponent without apology.” As Buckley conceded to Charlie Rose in 1997 , it was “impossible to defend McCarthy” and it was “super-impossible to defend his critics.”

Ultimately, Buckley retained the view that while McCarthy’s style was problematic, he understood that the function of any vital democratic society was to reject “unassimilable ideas” like Communism. National Review Institute aims to continue the Buckley legacy both of reasoned judgment and the rejection of Communism as antithetical to American ideals.

Subj: “A Time to Remember James Buckley,” March 9, 2024

Dear Friend,

101 years ago, James Buckley, older brother to William F. Buckley Jr. and one of the great American statesmen of the past century, was born. We remember him as his brother saw him, a man with no enemies who was the embodiment of the virtuous conservative statesmanship which National Review stands for. While continuously championing constitutional limits, James Buckley accomplished that rare trifecta in American politics: He was a member of all three branches of the federal government, beginning as a U.S. Senator, next as an Undersecretary of State and the head of Radio Free Europe during the Reagan Administration, and finally as a Federal Judge on the DC Circuit.

Incredibly, on his second try, Buckley won the 1970 New York Senatorial Contest as a third party nominee of the New York Conservative Party, which he and Bill helped create in 1962. As a U.S. Senator, James Buckley demonstrated his deep moral principles alongside his characteristic judicious and prudential nature. Examples range from Buckley being the first Senator to call for President Nixon’s resignation—an act of great political courage which may have cost him re-election—to his fight for campaign finance reform. He was also a firm advocate for the pro-life cause.

After the Roe v. Wade decision, on May 31, 1973, Senator Buckley introduced the Human Life Amendment, which would apply the 14th amendment’s protection of life and “persons” to all human beings at every stage of life, to the Senate Floor in what National Review’s editors called “an extraordinary speech” and a “model of conservative exposition on moral, philosophical and constitutional issues.” No finer succinct summary of James Buckley’s extraordinary life could be given.

Bill Buckley called his brother Jim “The Man I Trust” and once said that he was “the only person I have ever known who has no enemies” because he had “always persuaded everyone with whom he has contact that his fairness is, in a sense, a tribute even to those who are the immediate victims of that fairness.”

Jim Buckley died last August at the age of 100, but not before honoring National Review Institute by letting us attach his name to the James L. Buckley Lecture in Principled Leadership at the biennial Ideas Summit. Our inaugural James L. Buckley Lecture was given last spring by the Honorable Michael Mukasey.

Let us remember him by his own words in his final address in from his 2020 Prize Dinner Award remarks, in which he warned us that we had become a nation of “constitutional illiterates,” with few Americans having “any understanding of the degree to which the Constitution’s safeguards are being whittled away.” Our ongoing regional seminars, including this past Wednesday in New York City, are doing that all-important work James Buckley asked of us to restore those constitutional guardrails and pillars which have been whittled down but can be built back up by a constitutionally literate citizenry.

For more about the profound legacy of James L. Buckley:

Subj: “Keeping His Fire Alive,” February 27, 2024

Dear Friend,

Sixteen years ago, on the morning of February 27, 2008, still busy as ever writing at his desk, the great William F. Buckley Jr. died. He was 82 years old. At his funeral, close friend Henry Kissinger succinctly placed Buckley among the greatest Americans of his time: “Bill Buckley inspired a political movement that changed American politics . . . He wrote as Mozart composed, by inspiration; he never needed a second draft.” And as his son Christopher noted in his eulogy, Bill Buckley’s writings comprised a “prodigal output,” with some estimating showing Bill to have “written more letters than any other American in history.”

Upon his death, National Review’s editors ably summed up the impact of Buckley upon the modern conservative movement:

“If ever an institution has been the lengthened shadow of one man, this publication is his. So we hope not to be thought immodest for saying that Buckley has had a greater impact on the political life of this country—and a better one—than some of our presidents. He created modern conservatism as an intellectual movement and then a political one. He kept it from drifting into the fever swamps. And he gave it a wit, style, and intelligence that earned the respect and friendship even of his adversaries.”

The impact of Buckley on a generation of conservatives was apparent on the Hill. Former Senator Jim Talent said, “Next to Ronald Reagan, Bill Buckley was more responsible for the rise of conservatism in this country than anyone else—and that’s a very considered statement.” Representative Tom Feeney reflected that like many conservatives in Congress, he “started reading National Review when I was twelve years old” and that “There was a myriad of different ways that National Review affected us, and Bill Buckley in particular.”

Buckley’s death also brought out the deep respect he had cultivated on the other side of the aisle. The New York Times’ headline referred to him as the “Sesquipedalian Spark of Right,” with their obituary portraying him as the man of “polysyllabic exuberance” and a “refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse.”

In the March 2018 issue of National Review that marked the tenth anniversary of Buckley’s passing, NRI fellow Richard Brookhiser reminded that Bill was both a “celebrity pugilist and institution builder,” writing that, “Bill was more than a curator of current ideas; he wanted his to prevail, and he would use almost any weapon—logic, jokes, or the occasional fast one—to ensure that they did. If his pistol misfired he could, like Dr. Johnson, strike you with the butt end of it.”

As NRI’s Buckley Legacy Project aims to remind the next generation and conservatives writ large, Buckley believed in fair play—he wanted to go up against the best and win. The crucial mission NRI and the Buckley Legacy Project aims to carry out is to ensure that conservatives do not forget the world Bill Buckley forged and that we not only maintain our gratitude for all Buckley accomplished but endeavor to keep his fire alive.

Subj: “Celebrating the Statesmen Devoted to Our Founding Principles,” February 19, 2024

Dear Friend,

On this Presidents Day, let us consider how the legacies of our greatest presidents help us to honor and uphold the constitutional foundations of our country.

Presidents Day has over time come to combine the celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12 with the historic celebration of George Washington’s on February 22. Lincoln himself, as President-elect on his way to Washington in February 1861, gave one of his most significant and fiery speeches at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in which reflected upon the threat the newly formed Confederacy brought to the principles of Washington and the founders. Lincoln said:

“I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here, in this place, where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live…I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and framed and adopted that Declaration of Independence… Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis [of the Declaration]? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”

Presidents Day should be a day to combine the essential conservative virtue of gratitude, which our founder William F. Buckley Jr. held so dearly, with a firm reverence and honor for the greatest American statesmen who understood how precious the principles of the American founding are.

As President Ronald Reagan put it on the 250th anniversary of Washington’s birth, “Pursuit of liberty and justice under God is still the most inspiring, the most successful, the most revolutionary idea the world has ever known. Words alone cannot express how much we revere this giant for freedom.”

National Review Institute is holding Regional Seminars all over the country this year which are celebrating and teaching the importance of America’s Constitutional pillars as our “Foundations of Freedom.” See below for a list of cities remaining on our tour.

Subj: “Remembering Justice Scalia,” February 13, 2024

Dear Friend,

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly eight years ago, on February 13, 2016. A gregarious intellectual giant of constitutional conservatism, Scalia’s three decades on the Supreme Court changed the institution; in the words of Justice Elena Kagan, Scalia’s influence meant “we are all originalists now.”

Upon his death, National Review’s editors wrote that he was “by far the most eloquent and effective writer of judicial opinions in the past 60 years of Supreme Court history” and that, “With his brilliance, his tenacity, and his devastating wit, Justice Scalia transformed the terms of debate in American constitutional law. Under his commanding intellectual influence, constitutional discourse both on and off the Court took an originalist turn.”

Upon his nomination to the Supreme Court in 1986, leftist critics warned that “Scalia is a William F. Buckley conservative rather than a New Right conservative” who had “a remarkably consistent record of conservatism.” Once confirmed 98-0 to the bench, Scalia proved to be exactly that.

Justice Scalia did more than just give a jovial, thoughtful, and convincing public face to the originalist movement. He was a key institutional figure on a Court long in need of reform. In the pages of NR in 1996, Professor David Forte wrote of the “effrontery” of Scalia to “expose the oligarchic agenda of his brethren . . . a consistently pursued agenda by a privileged elite to impose its moral views . . . [whose] political and social objectives are corrupting the constitutional enterprise itself.”

Justice Scalia himself was published in the pages of the magazine, writing an article in 1997 entitled “Vigilante Justices” which argued that, “Historically, and particularly in the past 35 years, the ‘evolving’ Constitution has imposed a vast array of new constraints—new inflexibilities—upon administrative, judicial, and legislative action.” Scalia’s condemnation of these “constitutional evolutionists’ ‘ was perfectly in line with NR’s criticism of the Warren Court, as Scalia reminded us that such a court impairs good democratic governance without expanding individual freedom nor the social order with which all freedom must be balanced.

In appreciation for the Constitution which Scalia ably upheld, National Review Institute is holding regional seminars all over the country this year to celebrate and teach the importance of America’s Constitutional pillars as our “Foundations of Freedom.” See below for a list of cities remaining on our tour.

Subj.: “When Character Counted,” February 6, 2024

Dear Friend,

President Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, would have celebrated his 113th birthday today. As esteemed conservative historian Paul Johnson put it, Reagan’s presidency was “a turning point both in the fortunes of his own country and in the history of the world—and the two were closely connected.”

From humble beginnings in small-town Illinois, Reagan’s life story and career were described in the special NR memorial issue as being “like Lincoln’s, mythogenic beginning to end.” William F. Buckley Jr. first encountered the former actor in 1961 and learned of Reagan’s fondness for his book, Up from Liberalism. Reagan was a charter NR subscriber whose efforts in supporting the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964 led him to two terms as California’s Governor beginning in 1966—a victory his opponents understood as the triumph of Buckley conservatism over liberal Republicans.

His greatness as a conservative leader is ably summed up by Johnson: “First, he had a few simple, strongly held, and tenaciously pursued convictions, which also happened to be right and popular. Second, he knew how to present them in plain terms that all could grasp. Third, on the issues he cared about most, he exercised a formidable will, which, though courteous, brooked no opposition till what he wanted was done. Fourth, he had style.”

Buckley gave a speech to honor Reagan’s 88th birthday in 1999, entitled “When Character Counted: The Importance of Ronald Reagan.” He called Reagan’s era “brief, but he did indeed put his stamp on it: and he did so in part because he was scornful of the claims of omnipotent government, in part because he felt, and expressed, the buoyancy of the American Republic.”

The imprint of Reagan was the rejection of Communism, collectivism, and the omnipotent state in favor of ordered liberty and the potential of the American people for good—a mission that National Review Institute happily carries on in the Buckley-Reagan tradition.

Read NR contributor Matthew Continetti on Reagan’s inaugural address as California Governor in 1967 here.

Read Joseph Locente on Reagan’s 1982 speech pleading to send the Soviet Union to the “ashbin of history” here.

Read conservative historian biographer and historian Alvin Felzenberg on Reagan’s Cold War strategy and victory here.

Subj: “Celebrating a Monumental Conservative Achievement,” February 1, 2024

Dear Friend,

On February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed the 13th amendment after Congress passed it the previous day. On December 6th, the 27th state, Georgia, ratified the amendment and the end of slavery became permanently enshrined in the Constitution.

Lincoln’s—and the Republican Party’s—fight against slavery is a monumental conservative achievement because it was based first and foremost on the recognition, stated in the Declaration, that all were created equal in the eyes of God. As NRI fellow and 13th amendment lawyer Dan McLaughlin puts it, by banning all slavery—including private restrictions of the right to leave one’s job— the amendment incorporated the “free-labor ideology of the early Republicans who adopted Jefferson’s wording [in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787].”

Lincoln’s push for a constitutional amendment to permanently abolish and end slavery was integrally connected to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. As Lincoln historian and NR friend Allen Guelzo states, once he issued the emancipation, Lincoln was adamant that he “should be damned in time & in eternity” if he should abandon the free slaves, even promising to resign should Congress or the People demand emancipation be revoked. Lincoln worried that the measure could be struck down by the courts, especially Chief Justice Roger Taney, and that should the war end, it would become a dead letter.

In signing the amendment, Lincoln called it a “King’s cure for all the evils” because it finally put emancipation beyond the reach of judicial review and the control of the states, making the end of slavery permanent. It was a victory for what the eminent historian James Oakes calls the anti-slavery reading of the Constitution and the belief that the Declaration of Independence and founding were “flatly incompatible with slavery.” And it was a political victory which required the support of a third of the House Democrats acquired by Lincoln and his administration’s lobbying efforts.

Today, all of this history should be a reminder of our most timeless principles and what we have achieved by the model of our conservative Revolution, our nation’s founding documents, and the Constitution’s promise of a more perfect Union.

For more, read Dan McLaughlin’s 2021 National Review magazine article on the “Party of Lincoln.”

Subj.: “The Lion of the British Empire,” January 24, 2024

Dear Friend,

Winston Churchill, the “lion” of the British Empire, died on January 24, 1965.

Daniel Mahoney, former NRI board member and architect of our Burke to Buckley Fellowship Program curriculum, summarizes the greatness of Churchill in a way that echoes today: “Churchill saw what was at stake in the totalitarian assault on liberal and Christian civilization like few people before or after. Among twentieth-century statesmen, only de Gaulle shared this admirable lucidity and the determination to resist the inhuman totalitarian temptation on the intellectual, military, political, and spiritual fronts.”

Mahoney could have been recalling Churchill’s warning to his countrymen in June 1945: “Here can be no doubt that socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state. It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conception of socialism.”

William F. Buckley Jr. was a great admirer of Churchill and while a student at Yale in 1949 saw Churchill speak at MIT about the Cold War. Buckley recalled “the hypnotizing voice” of this genius who united the “affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy.”

Buckley upon Churchill’s death wrote that it was Churchill alone who “stirred the world’s imagination…at that critical point in world history, to press for the final goal the war was fought to achieve—the elimination of the source of aggressive evil that find us today.”

Today, we must follow the example of Churchill in caring to save Western Civilization because it alone has, in the words of Mahoney, “fully valorized the dignity of human beings who are souls as well as bodies, persons imbued with dignity and not playthings of ideological despotisms that in decisive respects were ‘beyond good and evil.’”

Subj.: “Remembering the Faith and Virtues of MLK,” January 16, 2024

Dear Friend,

This week, we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day, giving us an opportunity to reflect with gratitude upon a man who, while not a political conservative, took up his Cross and bore it with reverent faith. As King put it in his sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church a mere three months before he was killed, “If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, then my living will not be in vain.”

Friend of National Review Institute Dr. William Allen, the former chair of the US Civil Rights Commission, reminds us that King was no conservative, as he jettisoned claims of freedom and self-government as sufficient for black Americans to achieve integration into American society. King was interested in a “radical restructuring of the architecture of American society” and, in Allen’s analysis, felt American racism “could be negated ultimately only by the negation of the moral soil from which it sprouted”—the pursuit of a conservative good of equality under God by radical means.

Yet, conservatives must keep this political and cultural legacy in mind alongside the most conservative aspect of King’s life: his abiding faith. William F. Buckley Jr. in 1999 noted the “bizarre paradox in the new secular order in the celebration of Dr. King’s birthday” as a national holiday—meant to embody a new “articulated idealism in race relations,” to be “conscientiously observed in our schools,” but with “scant thought given to Dr. King’s own faith.” King’s most famous speech, “I Have a Dream” ends with the invocation that, “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” Likewise, in his final sermon, King reminded his audience that he had no fear because he was doing God’s Will and “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Conservatives can reckon with King’s more radical notions while understanding that the virtues he most cherished, particularly dignity as Robert Woodson reminds us, are ones we defend against the vast government programs like affirmative action which deny it and upend the mediating institutions which support it.

Read more from NRI fellow Jay Nordlinger on admiring King’s quest for equality for all.

Subj.: “Prudence and the Virtues that Make Conservatism,” January 12, 2024

Dear Friend,

On January 12, 1729, the pre-eminent philosopher of conservatism Edmund Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland. It was the publication of his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 that has become an indispensable volume of wisdom to conservatives today wishing to preserve our most treasured traditions and liberties against the threat of revolutionary destruction.

Burke’s model of a statesman was one who combines a disposition to preserve with an ability to reform. Russell Kirk noted that Burke knew that “justice resides in the tension between authority and liberty, the claims of both recognized and reconciled,” and the prudential balancing of personal freedom and just authority.

Prudence, according to Burke, was the “queen of political virtues.” It was supported by the virtues of discipline, humility, charity, and gratitude. As Burke put it in his Reflections, the evil of the Revolutions was that “a spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

Among William F. Buckley’s favorite Burke words from Reflections were those concerning tolerance: “We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the idea of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.”

National Review Institute’s Burke to Buckley Program, which is currently putting out its last call to applicants for our Spring Fellowships in Miami, New York City, and Philadelphia, is modeled on what Kirk observed about Burke: that “students learn from Burke not only the first principles of civil social order, but the prudential maxims for the governance of men.”