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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.: “Eugene Genovese,” May 23, 2025

Among the notable traditions of National Review going back to its very beginning is that among the best advocates against Communism, Marxism, and collectivism are its former adherents. Among NR’s founders were former Communists Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, and James Burnham. Eugene Genovese, a Brooklyn-bred historian of the Old South and slavery, was a former Marxist who became one of the great American conservative historians of the 20th century.

Genovese was born on May 19, 1930, in Brooklyn to a working-class Italian immigrant family and grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood. By the time he was 15, he had joined the Communist Party USA, staying active in its youth movement and organizing the American Youth for Democracy Communist front group until he was expelled in 1950 for his refusal to follow party orthodoxy. As he told NR in 2011 , he “zigged when he should have zagged.” Genovese got his M.A. and PhD from Columbia University and during the period, served in the Army until he was discharged for his Communist Party membership and activity.

Genovese had a remarkable early career as a historian of the American South. His first book in 1965 was the Political Economy of Slavery. Along with his second book, The World the Slaveholders Made in 1969, Genovese built a historical argument which described the sectional divide as the result of two fundamentally and radically different societies in the South and North, as slavery in the South limited the region’s economic development and gave rise to a pre-bourgeois ruling class which held a reactionary worldview.

What followed in 1974 was one of the most important books written on the history of American slavery in the South, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Built . In it, Genovese eschewed racial analysis of the master-slave dynamic in favor of an economic analysis which took the role of Christianity seriously within the paternalism of the slaveholding class. Slave religion, according to Genovese, was both a concession to the cultural authority of the masters and a reflection of the slaves’ ability to claim some basic rights and independence. Genovese argued that the southern slaveholders of the antebellum period did not think of themselves anti-progressive or anti-modern, but as forging a different anti-radical means to material progress which would maintain a free Christian society. The historian Steven Hahn, Genovese’s former student, called it maybe “the finest work on slavery ever produced” and NR’s Richard John Neuhaus stated that it was “The best account of American slavery and the moral and cultural forces that undid it.”

During this period, Genovese, still a Marxist, was asked to write for National Review on the the American left in crisis. He was asked to contribute in 1970 to the 15th-anniversary special issue of the magazine by senior editor James Burnham, a former Communist himself. Burnham said of Genovese’s essay that it was “good. Very good. It’s much too good for my taste.” A few years later, in 1973, Genovese would contribute a book review to NR on a biography of Booker T. Washington by Louis Harlan.

In the 1990s, Genovese rejected the label “conservative,” saying that it was a “label applied to me frequently these days by people who understand nothing.” Yet, he was experiencing a personal shift in his beliefs—religious and political. In 1994, Genovese published The Southern Tradition: The Achievements and Limitations of an American Conservatism based on a lecture series he gave in 1993. Genovese wrote about the southern tradition as being “quintessentially conservative” in its adherence to Christianity and anti-industrialism, with its assault upon modernity as threatening to plunge society into moral decadence and decline.

That same year, Genovese made a significant admission as a former Marxist—that of the stunning death toll of Communism over the 20th century in an essay on “The Question” in Dissent. Bill Buckley took notice, writing of how Professor Genovese “begs the historical and moral fraternity of scholars to ask themselves in public direct questions about their behavior over the years.” December that year, Genovese would contribute a cover article to NR, a review of The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein which argued that the “most valuable contribution of The Bell Curve lies in its exposure of the egalitarian swindle that is being promoted not only by a deranged left but also by an ideologically driven free-market Right that reduces people to individual units in the manner of discrete commodities in the marketplace.”

It was during this time that both Genovese and his wife, Betsey-Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a notable historian herself who had co-published with Eugene on slavery—converted to Roman Catholicism. For Eugene, it was a return to the church of his childhood he had abandoned for Marxism at 15. In 1997, the Genoveses gave an interview to NR on the subject of their new Catholic faith and the pro-life statement they had both signed published in the pages of the magazine. “A God who is progressing, learning from his creatures, is not somebody who interests me,” Genovese quipped of his reinvigorated faith. “If I have something to teach God, I don’t need him any more. A God of love who is not simultaneously a God of wrath doesn’t interest me either.”

The final masterpiece the Genoveses wrote came in 2005, The Mind of the Master Class, an intellectual history of the antebellum southern slaveholders which was attentive to class and political economy and the slaveholders’ struggle with modernity, a theme in The Southern Tradition and other Genovese works. Two years later, in 2007, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese succumbed to cancer. Eugene later honored their love story in a memoir, Miss Betsey.

When Eugene Genovese died in 2012, NR’s editors remembered him as a courageous truth-teller and historian of the American South who recognized the mass atrocities of the Communists in a notable mea culpa when “almost no one else issued one.” Genovese committed himself to truth even when “His apostasy cost him friends, but also earned him others.” As the Editors put it, Genovese may have came late to faith and conservatism, but, “he did it gloriously, and his life was superb.”

Read Genovese’s interview with NR in 2011 here.

Read NR’s publication of an excerpt from Genovese’s memoir of his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Miss Betsey, from 2009 here.

Read NR’s 1999 top-100 non-fiction list, which placed “Roll Jordan Roll” at 66 here.

Subj.: “The Gentleman Heretic,” May 16, 2025

Tom Wolfe, whom National Review called the ‘Gentleman Heretic,’ was one of the great American novelists of the 20th century. Conservatives often lament the predominance of liberals and leftists in culture and the arts, but Wolfe is a reminder of the powerful prose of a group of conservative novelists of the era—alongside Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, and others—who showed how intelligent and witty writing could combat the failed arguments of the left.

Tom Wolfe was born March 2, 1930 in Richmond, Virginia. His father, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Sr., was an agronomist and editor of the Southern Planter. Wolfe grew up in the historic Ginter Park neighborhood and showed his promise early—an athlete in high school who was editor of the student newspaper, student council president, and baseball star at St. Christopher’s School.

In 1947, after graduation, Wolfe turned down an offer to attend Princeton University to stay in Virginia at Washington & Lee University. At Washington & Lee, Wolfe was both sports editor of the student newspaper and founded his own literary magazine, Shenandoah. Wolfe was a good enough pitcher on the baseball team that he was given an offer to try out for the New York Giants, but was ultimately cut after three days, ending his playing days in 1952.

Wolfe ended up a PhD student at Yale University’s American Studies program, where he wrote a thesis on the subject of Communist organizational activity among American writers between 1929 and 1942. He wrote that it was a study of how the Communist Party had “created, manipulated and controlled a peripheral organization known as the League of American Writers” and meant to show how the the goal of American Communists was not necessarily conversion to the party but maneuvering the non-communist masses “into a position of struggle against the economic and social order.”

After his graduate studies, Wolfe became a reporter for several newspapers including the Washington Post and New York Herald before he rose to fame in 1963 as a writer of the “New Journalism” style. The style, also associated with Jimmy Breslin and Hunter S. Thompson, was something that Wolfe later called “the use by people writing nonfiction of techniques which heretofore had been thought of as confined to the novel or the short story, to create in one form both the kind of objective reality of journalism and the subject reality that people have always gone to the novel for.”

As NR’s editors put it in 1965, Wolfe was the “hottest thing in journalism right now. You have read him and loved him in Esquire and perhaps also in New York, which is the hottest thing in Sunday supplements and is published by the Herald Tribune. Tom Wolfe’s fame is founded on the novelty of his style, which is in turn founded on two principles: 1) Never use one adjective when six will do, and 2) Write as you would, like, talk.”

His first major work was a collection of essays in 1965 called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. This pop culture analysis was followed by 1968’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a sardonic take on the promotion of “liberation” and psychedelic drugs in hippie culture. In 1970, Wolfe’s next work—Radical Chic and Man-Mauing the Flak Catchers—introduced another new phrase, Wolfe’s witty riposte to the New York elite he encountered writing checks to support the Black Panthers movement.

Wolfe’s most famous novel was likely The Right Stuff which was made into a popular movie in 1983, focusing on Chuck Yeager and the origins of the American space program. NR praised it for making the test pilots and astronauts not only complicated and human, but courageous, professional, and patriotic. Over the years, Wolfe also developed a friendship with William F. Buckley Jr., appearing many times on Buckley’s long-running television program of public affairs, Firing Line, and speaking at the 35th anniversary dinner of NR, where Buckley retired as editor.

At that dinner, Wolfe returned to the topic of his PhD thesis, reflecting on the fall of the Berlin Wall. He noted that Marxists often talked about the “freight train of history” and that September 8, 1989 would enter the annals of history like 1776, 1066, or 1492, symbolizing when the “train pulled in.” Wolfe suggested that “half of that train belonged to Bill Buckley.” He also recalled his time at Yale, right after the publishing of God and Man at Yale and contemporaneous with the founding of NR, praising Bill by saying he had never seen a “more lonely soldier fighting harder than Bill Buckley.”

In 1977, NR’s literary editor Chilton Williamson Jr. once compared Wolfe to H. L. Mencken, saying that both were fascinated by the “detritus of the American popular mind” and both superimposed “stylistic radicalism” upon what were “fundamentally conservative opinions.” As Gregory Wolfe sums Wolfe up, he was the “agent provocateur” of contemporary American letters who starting in the early 1960s produced:

a steady stream of literary journalism and fiction that has combined sharp social observation, a rambunctious prose style, and a sly, indirect moralism to create a large and controversial body of work. His omnivorous appetite for information and documentary writing has led him to cover everything from hippies and stock car racers to astronauts and intellectuals. He has coined phrases that have become staples of American English.

When Wolfe died on May 14, 2018 at the age of 88, NR celebrated him as a Southern gentleman, conservative by temperament, who had “found his niche in American letters by building it himself.”

Read the Editors’ obituary for Wolfe from 2018 here.

Watch Buckley’s interview with Wolfe in 1970 on Firing Line on the subject of “Radical Chic” here.

Watch the Firing Line episode from 1975 with Wolfe on “The Painted Word” here.

Watch Buckley’s Firing Line conversation with Wolfe about whether “Modern Architecture is Disastrous” in 1981 here.

Watch Wolfe’s participation in the 1986 “Roast of William F. Buckley Jr.” on Firing Line here.

Watch Buckley’s final interview with Wolfe on Firing Line from 1999 on “Wolfe and His Critics” here.

Subj.: “Tail Gunner Joe,” May 2, 2025

Senator Joseph McCarthy, known to his conservative supporters as “Tail Gunner Joe,” was a mid-twentieth political hero to Americans of all stripes for his stalwart anti-Communism. While his personal failings and combative nature were often the subject of contemporaneous and historical liberal criticism, McCarthy’s mission was understood by National Review’s William F. Buckley Jr. to be a “movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”

Joseph R. McCarthy came from humble origins, born on a farm in Grand Chute, Wisconsin on November 15, 1908, where he completed the eighth grade in a one-room school. From there, McCarthy then started a chicken farm, which quickly failed, before he attended Marquette University, getting his law degree and serving as class president, boxing coach, and debater. While a student, he was a janitor, salesman, cook, and construction worker and once barred, he quickly became a law partner before the age of 30. By 1939, he had been elected as circuit judge, running as an independent, making him the youngest elected judge in state history.

During World War II, McCarthy joined the Marines, served as an intelligence officer in the Pacific, and even flew combat missions despite it not being part of his job. Soon after the war, he defeated Robert La Follete Jr., who founded the Wisconsin Progressive Party with his brother Philip, in the Republican primary and went on to become the youngest Senator. La Follete Jr. was son to Robert “Fighting Bob” La Folette, whose second cousin, Suzanne La Follete, was a founding editor of NR.

Before launching his anti-Communist crusade, McCarthy took up the cause of due process rights of German soldiers who were imprisoned at the former concentration camp in Dachau, Germany and who had been stripped of their prisoner-of-war status after confessing to shooting American prisoners. The next year, on February 9, 1950, McCarthy gave his most famous speech—the “Wheeling address,” which followed on the heels of Soviet spy Alger Hiss’s conviction for perjury. McCarthy said that the reason “why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation.”

Claiming to have a list of disloyal members of the State Department (he quickly reduced the number to 57 from 205), McCarthy launched an investigation of Communist infiltration of the department. In March 1954, National Review founder and Bill’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. co-wrote McCarthy and His Enemies , a defense of McCarthy’s investigations rather than the man himself. In it, Buckley and Bozell showed through exhaustive research (McCarthy opened his files for the duo to use) that despite the Senator’s faults and errors, many of the allegations McCarthy made were justified and that he was more right than wrong. Buckley and Bozell concluded that McCarthy had taken the role of public prosecutor and “professional hunter of security risks” on the question of the “loyalty-security problem,” and his method was designed to deal with the “nature and resources of the Soviet conspiracy” of an “unbrave new world” which made certain cherished American habits of mind “not only inappropriate but suicidal.”

Just months after the book’s release, McCarthy was censured by the Senate. Bozell joined McCarthy’s defense team and went on to become a speechwriter for the Senator, as Buckley had done on occasion. McCarthy ultimately was swallowed up by his demons, dying at the tender age of 48 on May 2, 1957 of acute alcoholism. NR published a series of obituaries for McCarthy, including from Bozell, who remembered McCarthy’s “iron will,” his “incapacity for doom,” and a man who fought against “the Nation’s enemies, and against its own special enemies at home” before the Senate turned against him and ruined him.

Looking back at McCarthy and “McCarthyism” in a 1970 column, Bill Buckley wrote of how the “reign of terror” of the time was truly against “anyone who thought that Senator McCarthy had here and there a good point to make” and that while McCarthy “did scare a few dozen or a few hundred government officials, and he did often act recklessly,” he also “never interrupted a public meeting, never closed down nor was the cause of closing down, a college; never threw, nor encouraged others to throw, bombs; never destroyed, for wantonness’ sake, the files of a professor, nor did any follower of his cause scholars to leave a campus in protest against the collapse.” This was the “anti-McCarthy legend,” as Buckley put it in 1994—that during the Fifties “we were fools, cowards, and sadists” and that McCarthy was a bigger threat than Communism.

Decades later, Buckley’s friend and NR contributor M. Stanton Evans wrote a revisionist account of McCarthy, Blacklisted, based on copious research of the released Soviet files. Evans found that that McCarthy was “better and truer by far that the tag teams of cover-up artists and backstage plotters who connived unceasingly to destroy him” and found that “the truth he served, moreover, was of the great import–the exposure of people who meant to do us grievous harm, and of long-standing indifference toward this menace by many at high official levels.”

Read Buckley’s retrospective column on McCarthy, “Tail Gunner Joe,” from our WFB 100 archives weekly column here.

Watch Buckley’s 1966 discussion of “McCarthyism: Past, Present, and Future” with Leo Cherne on Firing Line here.

Watch Buckley’s discussion of his 1999 novel about McCarthy, “Redhunter,” on Firing Line, “Looking Back on Senator Joe McCarthy” with Hilton Kramer and Victor Navansky here.

Read NRI’s Buckley Legacy Project Manager, Nicholas Mosvick, on “McCarthy at 70” here.

Read our WFB 100 bibliography entries on “McCarthy and His Enemies” and “Redhunter” here.

Subj.: “Reflections Following the Passing of Pope Francis,” April 26, 2025

On Monday April 21, less than twenty four hours after performing his duties for Easter Sunday as well as meeting with Vice President JD Vance, Pope Francis died at 88. The passing of Pope Francis is a solemn opportunity to recall National Review’s longstanding interest in Catholicism and papal politics.

The interest in the pontificate starts with our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., a devoted cradle Catholic whose faith was so deeply rooted he once remarked that he never had a moment of doubt. When Buckley started NR in 1955, he not only hoped to create a radical counterpoint to the liberal political elite, but to combat them on cultural and religious matters as well—and on Catholicism, that meant taking on the likes of Commonwealth and America magazine. Likewise, on his long running television program of public affairs, Firing Line, Buckley regularly took up the most pressing questions of religion and particularly Catholicism.

In his regular column, Bill regularly took on the key issues of the day for Catholics. For instance Buckley was highly critical of Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio papal encyclical in April 1967, calling it “unfortunate” because its “naivete in economic and other secular matters drowns out passages of eloquence which, had they gone unencumbered by confused and confusing ideological detritus, might have served to remind the responsible community of the inspiring ardor of the Pope’s passion for human reconciliation and the exercise of charity on a universal scale.” Buckley believed that Paul VI was wrong for wanting the problem of poverty to be dealt with by the expropriating power of the state, writing that “those who have worked hardest and most productively for the diminution of human misery and know that the preconditions are 1) political stability, and 2) economic freedom, will be disappointed not at the goals, exquisitely described by the Pope, but by the suggested means, illusory and self-defeating, which if followed would have the contrary effect to that desired by this intense and holy man.”

Paul VI died in August 1978 after a long and painful illness and the Synod elected Albino Cardinal Luciani as the new Pope John Paul I. Despite his significant criticism of the Pope, Buckley praised Paul VI for his Godly commitment and stewardship, writing that “no man ever tried harder than Pope Paul, or ever earned more convincingly his safe passage from this vale of tears.”

But Luciani, known as the “September Pope,” died after only a month in office. Conservative Catholics saw hope when the Synod elected a Pole, Karol Wojltyla who had been the cardinal-archbishop of Krakow and was the only leading churchman behind the Iron Curtain to have a flushing church. Malachi Martin, the defrocked Jesuit who joined NR as religion editor, quickly informed the magazine’s readers of Wojtyla’s impressive background—Wojltyla had been an active member of the Polish Resistance and Home Army (Armia Krajowa) during World War II. As Martin put it about Wojtyla’s resistance to Stalinism:

Everything in Wojtyla’s background and mentality points up his conviction that the only way Marxism and materialism can be defeated is through the form of Catholicism and of Christianity which has successfully flourished behind the Iron Curtain, and specifically in Communist Poland. Given the total lack of American leadership, as Europeans today see it, and given Wojtyla’s deftness in dealing with the Stalinist mind, we can look forward–with trepidation or enthusiasm–to a time in the near future when a change of policy may well be forced on both the USSR and the U.S.A. by the Polish clergyman now become Bishop of Rome.

Over time, Bill Buckley became very appreciative of Pope John Paul II’s role in ending the Cold War and opposing Communism as the force for evil. In his book, The Fall of the Berlin Wall, Buckley credited John Paul II alongside President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with being the most significant figures in winning the Cold War by encouraging dissidents and undermining Communist regimes.

When John Paul II died in early April twenty years ago, following the effects of Parkinson’s disease and the assassination attempt in 1981, Buckley wrote of the Pope’s “penetrating, transcendent warmth” and dumbfounding sixteen-hour-a-day schedule he “regularly imposed on himself.” Among his travels was a visit to Havana, Cuba during the regime of Fidel Castro. Bill commented on how Pope John Paul II coped with the “even benign, to the unworthiest of hosts” and how only hundreds of yards from where Castro sat in front of the altar at the Plaza de la Revolucion, a sign the size of a tennis court reading “Jesucristo En Ti Confio” (“Jesus Christ in Thee I trust”) hung “as concentrated a repudiation of Castro and his works as four words could manage.”

Bill described the “great light” that flashed within People John Paul II, when one would see the “most radiant face on the public scene, a presence so commanding as to have arrested a generation of humankind, who wondered whether the Lord Himself had a hand in shaping the special charisma of this servant of the servants of God, as the pope styled himself, his death leaving a most awful void, and a disconsolate world.”

Read The Editors on the passing of Pope Francis here.

Read NRI Fellow Kathryn Jean-Lopez on Francis and the next Pope here.

Read Michael Brendan Dougherty on Pope Benedict’s legacy here.

Watch Buckley’s April 1980 Firing Line debate with Malachi Martin, Michael Davis, and Joseph Champlin on “The Fight over Catholic Orthodoxy” here.

Watch Buckley’s interview on Firing Line with Malachi Martin on “The Mission of the Pope” in September 1978 here.

Subj.: “L. Brent Bozell Jr.,” April 16, 2025

L. Brent Bozell Jr., a founding senior editor of National Review and its first D. C. correspondent, was, like his brother-in-law and our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., a man of many talents. He was a speechwriter, journalist, debater, lawyer, and social conservative activist who was a key founding father to the modern American conservative movement.

Bozell Jr., known to his friends as Brent or “Red,” was born on January 15, 1926 in Omaha, Nebraska to Leo and Lois Bozell. His father Leo was the founder of Bozell International, a public relations firm he founded in 1921 when he was city editor of the Omaha Daily News. Brent grew up a midwestern Democrat and high Episcopalian.

Brent stood out in high school as an athlete in football and basketball but especially in public speaking and debate. In 1943, he took the top spot for the state in the American Legion’s nationwide competition for best high school orator before he won nationally the following year. His prepared speech was called, “Our Constitution: The American Philosophy of Government,” and it warned Americans that their government had fallen into the hands of those who were either totalitarians or thought the purpose of government was to serve special interests. Even a young Bozell argued that the way to recovery was to return to the Constitution and the true American philosophy of defending the people’s “inherent rights” and to use government to “secure the common good.”

Bozell’s success led to a $4,000 scholarship, but before going to Yale, Brent planned to serve in the Navy in the Merchant Marine service. After a little more than a year in the Merchant Marine, Bozell spent several months at sea and transferred to the Navy in the Pacific on an assault vessel. By the time he was discharged in July 1946, he had already decided with his father to convert to Catholicism—they would wait to join as a family if Lois would agree. Unfortunately, Leo Bozell died that summer of a heart attack.

Brent, like Buckley, arrived at Yale in the fall of 1946 after his service, but unlike Bill, he was still a Democrat and Episcopalian. Political and religious conversion soon took hold. He first joined the Elizabethan Society; took up football and basketball for his residential college; and joined the Fence Club, a fashionable fraternity. His life changed, however, when his passion for politics brought him into Yale’s Political Union, a student debate forum based on the Oxford rules, and when he won a place on Yale’s debating team. There, he met Buckley, a fellow talented debater.

As a team, Bill and Brent were, in the words of biographer Daniel Kelly, “partners to devastating effect,” with Brent the “Roman orator, a man of gravitas” and Buckley the “stage aristocrat with high-bridged nose and chiseled chin, a blender of wit and hauteur.” The duo beat the team from Oxford which had bested every American team it had faced, a significant victory and one in which the two opposed a resolution that American industry should be nationalized. Bill and Brent also fell under the tutelage of Yale’s penetrating conservative mind, Willmoore Kendall, and by the fall of 1948, Brent joined the Political Union’s Conservative Party and started a conservative student newspaper, the Conservative View . His skill as an orator and thinker was so respected that he arose to become President of the Political Union (while Bill became chairman of the Yale Daily News).

Brent and his wife, Trish, Buckley’s sister, would go on to have ten children between 1950 and 1966—Christopher, Michael, Kathy, Maureen, John, Brent III, Aloise, Michael, William, and James. Brent graduated from Yale Law School in 1953 and moved to San Francisco to practice before political events changed his life again. Bill had achieved great acclaim with his first book, God and Man at Yale in 1951, and as a follow up, Bill and Brent joined forces to research and write a defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations, McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning . The book, which came out in March 1954 after over a year of prestigious research and writing, aimed to follow Kendall’s ideas on social consensus and the enforcement of public orthodoxy against the liberal notions of an “open society” in the defense not of McCarthy the man but the campaign against communist infiltration of the federal government. While the two conceded that McCarthy had many faults and frailties, they concluded that the evidence showed many of the most notable allegations were justified and that the Senator was more right than wrong.

By August 1954, Bozell left his San Francisco firm after only a year to aid Senator McCarthy in his defense against censure. While unsuccessful, Bozell drafted McCarthy’s defiant and combative speech against the censure resolution. Bozell became close to McCarthy, continuing to write speeches for him even as McCarthy’s health fell apart and he died in 1957. By 1955, Bozell had also joined Bill in his next venture—the founding of National Review first as a contributor then as a senior editor. Bozell’s column, “National Trends,” followed national politics and foreign affairs.

As Bozell became more devoted and passionate in his Catholic faith, his conservatism moved away from libertarian classical liberalism towards one more based in authority and tradition. This put him in an ideological battle with his close friend at NR and fellow senior editor, Frank Meyer, the ex-Communist and fervent intellectual leader of fusionism. In 1962, the two presented dueling longform essays in the magazine. Meyer’s “The Twisted Tree of Liberty” presented his case for the fusionism of libertarianism and conservatism that regarded the “untrammeled state as the greatest of political evils” and asserted that freedom was the highest political end meant to foster the highest human end of virtue.

Brent’s “Freedom or Virtue?” argued that man’s primary goal was not freedom, but virtue and to endeavor to create a “Christian civilization.” Bozell firmly disagreed with Meyer about free will and the state’s role in aiding the quest for virtue—Brent believed that given man’s corruption by original sin, the state should pass laws that produced order, stability, and prudently regulated man’s actions. Brent concluded that the drive to make freedom the highest political end for its own sake was “a rebellion against nature” and that “the story of how the free society has come to take priority over the good society is the story of the decline of the West.”

Bozell remained deeply active in the conservative political scene. Brent ran for public office twice. After buying a house in 1955 in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Bozell became active in the local GOP before running for the Maryland lower house in 1958. He ran on a platform of right-to-work laws, a back-to-basics educational plan, and local resolutions of racial conflicts over the intervention of federal courts. While he lost, he maintained high spirits, saying, “For while we may not save our country, neither can we abandon it.” Then in 1964, he ran for Congress in Maryland’s sixth district against Charles Mathias, an Eastern Establishment Republican. His campaign manager, a young Neal Freeman fresh out of Yale, wrote later that Brent, when “he was in good form,” was the greatest natural campaigner he had ever seen—even better than Reagan. Yet, Bozell lost the race to Mathias and never ran for office again, as his life shifted towards defense of the faith.

In the same year, Bozell looked like he would be heavily involved in Senator Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, as Buckley and Brent had been organizing for years to get Goldwater to the White House. Brent’s relationship with Goldwater went back many years, as he had been the ghostwriter for Goldwater’s national best-seller in 1960, Conscience of a Conservative—as Goldwater put it years later, Brent had not only written the book but supplied “all the ideas” as well. However, in 1964, Bozell and Buckley were sidelined by other Goldwater insiders under the idea that they would be seen as influencers of the “extreme Right.”

Brent also finally finished his long book project on the American Constitution and the Supreme Court, The Warren Revolution: Reflections on the Consensus Society. The Warren Revolution came out in the fall of 1966, with Neal Freeman as the primary manuscript editor. Bozell argued that the constitutional crisis brought on by Chief Justice Earl Warren’s tenure was the result of an improper understanding of the constitutional order and the court’s proper authority. Brent argued there were two constitutions—one, the text of the 1787 Constitution, was the “written” or “fixed” constitution and the other was the “unwritten” or “fluid” constitution that was amended by “organic processes”—and that Warren had eroded the distinction between the two. In so doing, Supreme Court decisions had become “equivalent to a provision of the fixed constitution” and it made the Supreme Court a roving constitutional convention and judicial dictatorship.

Later, Brent founded his own magazine for the defense of Christendom—Triumph magazine. Bozell’s managing editor was his wife Trish, who had apprenticed at NR under her older sister Priscilla, NR’s longtime managing editor. The senior editors included the University of Dallas professor and NR contributor, Frederick Wilhelmson, who had advised on Brent’s House campaign and introduced him to Franco Spain in 1960, and its early contributors included both Kendall and Russell Kirk. The function of the magazine, Brent told Kirk, was to act as a “cutting edge into the great heresies of our age,” with the enemy being the “technocratic, materialist, self-seeking, thoroughly un-Christian culture of the West.”

The magazine lasted for a decade, until 1976 when mounting debt forced Bozell to close the magazine. Meanwhile, Brent’s activism shifted to Catholic social causes, mainly the firm and fervent opposition to abortion. In May 1970, Brent and a group of like-minded Catholics planned an event called Action for Life to protest the George Washington University Hospital’s clinic, with a group of young Catholic activists known as the “Sons of Thunder” joining. The protest ended with a clash with police, with Brent arrested and handcuffed and with him warning that June 6th was “a foretatste of things to come.” Meanwhile, Brent and his family became aware of a condition he may have suffered from for years—bipolar disorder—in 1976.

After decades of ill health, Bozell died on April 15, 1997. Bill and Bozell had reconciled in 1994, and, upon hearing the news of Brent’s death, Bill said nothing and simply let out an anguished cry. Bozell’s funeral mass was led by his son Michael, who had become a Catholic priest in 1994. His son Brent Bozell III remarked of his incredible father that “It is said that a saint never aspires to that status except by abandoning himself completely to Christ and his suffering; if so, then Pop was saintly. Ask his friends, his brother and sister, his nephews and nieces, his extended family, so many of them here today, how that man could pierce the soul with such beauty, such warmth, such dignity, such friendship.”

Watch Brent’s son, L. Brent Bozell III, and Michael Brendan Dougherty’s session on “Conservative Roots: Personal Reflections from the Buckley-Bozell Media Legacy” from our 2025 Ideas Summit here

Subj.: “The Great Compromiser,” April 12, 2025

At our recent Ideas Summit in Washington D.C., many of our distinguished guests such as Governors Brian Kemp and Ron DeSantis talked about what it means to be a conservative statesman in the American tradition. One of the enduring models for such conservative statesmanship was the “Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay, a dominant political figure of the first half of the nineteenth century whom the eminent conservative intellectual and early National Review contributor Richard Weaver called the “Western Star.”

Henry Clay was born on April 12, 1777 in Virginia in the midst of the American Revolutionary War. Clay studied law as a young man before starting his political career, which lasted nearly five decades, in the Kentucky legislature in 1803. As a young lawyer in Lexington, Clay was taken in by the “Bluegrass triumvirate” of George Nichols, John Breckinridge, and James Brown and he made a key connection with Colonel Thomas Hart, the city’s most enterprising businessman, going on to marry his daughter Lucretia in April 1799.

According to historian Merrill Peterson, Clay made his reputation as a lawyer in these years in capital cases, where “his forensic talents had free reign.” Riding circuit with other Lexington attorneys, Clay was known as a “wildish fellow” and “gamester” who enjoyed cards more than the law. Clay also joined a debating society soon after arriving in Lexington and he made his first big public speech in a furious assault upon the Federalist Alien and Sedition Laws during a meeting in the summer of 1798—some members of the crowd were so impressed that they compared Clay to Patrick Henry. After being selected as an interim Senator by the Kentucky legislature, he reached the House of Representatives in 1810 and was elevated to Speaker of the House at the tender age of 33.

Clay was Speaker for fourteen years, ending in 1825 and fashioning it into the powerful position in the American constitutional system. While Speaker, Clay also served as a peace negotiator at Ghent during the War of 1812 with John Quincy Adams. Infamously, the Election of 1824 resulted in a very narrow victory for Adams after Andrew Jackson won the popular vote but not the electoral college. With no winner in the electoral college, the decision was thrown to the House and Clay, who had placed fourth in the electoral college and remained Speaker, threw his support behind Adams. When Clay was made Secretary of State by Adams, Jackson and his supporters accused him of making a “corrupt bargain.”

A consistent opponent of Jackson’s, Clay became the leader of the American Whig Party, which was established in the wake of the re-election of Jackson in 1832. In the words of historian of the Whig party Michael Holt, Clay “led the effort to build and define the Whig Party” and was considered by 1844 the man who was “the embodiment and polar star of Whig principles.”

Clay’s political program was known as the “American System” and it focused on the need for internal improvements, the protective tariff, and a national bank. By the 1820s, Clay had become a devotee of Matthew and Henry Carey, whose moral philosophy and economic theory organized the Whig economic program into an ideology with a vision of society based economic progress as a means to human redemption and “true happiness” over the “economic man” merely pursuing material advantage. The kind of progress that Clay, like Adams, believed in was one of stability and order based on the ideals of balance and harmony.

Coming of age in antebellum Kentucky, Clay was a slave owner and also an advocate over his public life of gradual, compensated emancipation and “colonization” of the freed slaves in Africa. Clay expressed over his life a regret that slavery was ever introduced to America and was for a time friends with leading abolitionists like James G. Birney and Cassius M. Clay. Historian Daniel Walker Howe describes Clay as a “ideologue of the Center,” who rejected both abolitionism and the “positive good” theory of slavery.

As Alan Cornett puts it, Clay was less a strict conservative than an American statesman with conservative tendencies who was the link between the Hamiltonian Federalists and the Lincoln-Seward Republicans. He was perceived to lack a strong set of political principles, known as the “Great Compromiser” or “Great Pacificator” given his role in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, and the Great Compromise of 1850. It was his deep and abiding dedication to Union which animated Clay.

No figure better summed up Clay’s accomplishments and significance than Abraham Lincoln, who called Clay his “beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life.” After Clay died in 1852, Lincoln made his return to the political stage with a powerful funeral oration in which he summed up Clay:

“Mr. Clay’s predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him, this was a primary and all controlling passion. Subsidiary to this was the conduct of his whole life. He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature.”

Richard Weaver, following Lincoln’s model, agreed in his assessment: “America has seen few political personalities as attractive as Henry Clay. Born in Virginia in 1777, he moved while a young man to that ‘spreading meadow whence the rivers flow,’ which is central Kentucky. He had the right combination of appearance, magnetism, audacity and eloquence to please the cardhorse- and politics-loving aristocracy which dominated that region, and his star rose fast. In 1806 he became United States Senator, and in 1850, forty-four years later, he was still a dominant political figure in his state and in the nation.”

Read Abraham Lincoln’s eulogy for Henry Clay in 1852 here.

Subj.: “Bach and Buckley,” April 1, 2025

The birth of Johann Sebastian Bach was, in the memorable words of our founder William F. Buckley Jr., when God “had decided to clear His throat to remind the world of His existence.” Bach, who’s pen was animated by “divine impulses,” depending on the contemporary calendar, was born March 21 or 31, 1685 in Germany.

Buckley learned music from an early age, as his father, Will Buckley, insisted upon a particular educational curriculum for homeschooling of his ten children. This home education included tutoring on the five pianos and single specially built organ at Great Elm in Sharon, Connecticut.

As a composer, Bach put theological significance upon all works of music, even secular ones, saying that the “aim and reason” of all music was “the Glory of God” and where this was not observed, “there would be no real music but only a devilish hubbub.” On Bach’s 300th birthday, Buckley wrote in his syndicated column, “On the Right,” a celebration of Bach and his centrality to the Western canon. As he summarized Bach’s significance:

“Bach has the impact of a testimonial to God’s providence not because he wrote the most searingly beautiful church music ever heard (about The Passion According to St. Matthew one can say only that it does credit to the Gospel according to St. Matthew), but because he wrote the most beautiful music ever written.”

Bill felt that even if one was to throw away Bach’s three hundred cantatas (or songs), hundred-odd preludes, three chorales, his Mass and Passions—the equivalent Buckley said of destroying “half of Shakespeare”—the “other half would sustain Bach as a creature whose afflatus is inexplicable in the absence of a belief in God.” Buckley also testified to the beauty of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, writing of the Fifth concerto that it was “probably the first fully written-out (rather than improvised) cadenza in the history of music and, over 275 years later, still the most exciting…this is the beauty for which I confess nothing less than a passion”

Among Buckley’s regular contributors to National Review was the famed journalist Ralph de Toledano. De Toledano agreed in particular about the significance of Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion” and Mass in B-Minor, saying that in both, Bach “lay bare the unbuttoning of the bone that it is man’s fate to know before he lifts his eyes and his heart to God.”

As Buckley put it, “To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak or, as happened to us three weeks ago, to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern… We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead.”

Buckley not only professed his love and admiration for the music of Bach in writing and speeches, but also in his long-running show of public affairs, Firing Line. He did this in two ways. First, the famous theme of the show was Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto. Second, he had many notable specials on Firing Line dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of Bach’s music, particularly with his good friend Rosalyn Tureck. Significantly, after a few years of preparation, Buckley played his first concert in 1989 with the Phoenix Symphony live on Firing Line with Bill performing Bach’s F Minor Concerto.

At our recent 2025 Ideas Summit, Larry Perelman discussed at length Buckley’s crucial evangelism for Bach and for immensely talented interpreters of Bach like Tureck through Firing Line. Perelman’s new book, American Impressio (Bombardier Books, 2025), examines Bill’s lifelong love of classical music and the arts as reflective of God’s beautiful works and how Perelman met Bill as an 18-year pianist through an exchange of letters. Perelman summed up the significance of music to Bill’s conservatism through Bill’s own words—”politics was his vocation, not his avocation.”

Watch here Buckley’s performance of Bach’s F Minor Concerto with the Phoenix Symphony in 1989 on Firing Line here

Watch Buckley’s interview with Tureck on Firing Line on the “Fight for Bach” here

Watch Buckley’s earlier 1979 Firing Line discussion with Tureck on “Real Music” here

Watch Larry Perelman’s session, “American Impresario: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Elements of American Character,” from our recent 2025 Ideas Summit here

Subj.: “Clare Boothe Luce,” March 10, 2025

lare Boothe Luce was one of the most significant American conservative women of the 20th century, having been everything from a magazine editor and playwright to ambassador to Italy and a congressional representative. In the words of Michelle Easton, “throughout most of her life, she forged her way with grit and brilliance, achieving remarkable success.”

Luce was born on March 10, 1903 into a middle-class New York City family. Her mother was a former actress and her father a traveling musician. After her failed marriage to the older George Tuttle Brokaw in 1923, the heir to a garment business fortune, Luce took a position at Vogue in 1929 writing captions before becoming an assistant editor at Vanity Fair, where she wrote humorous essays as well as articles on economic decline during the Great Depression.

After FDR won the presidency, Luce briefly worked for the administration in the National Recovery Administration before she left, believing the NRA to be a testament to excessive government and Roosevelt too arrogant and condescending to women. After leaving Vanity Fair in 1933, she returned to New York to become a playwright. She married Henry Robinson Luce in 1935, the founder, publisher and owner of Time and Fortune magazines. The next year, her second play The Women became a sensational success, earning Luce millions of dollars with more than 650 Broadway performances and two movie versions.

After spending most of 1940 as a correspondent in Europe for Life magazine, she came home to run for Congress as a Republican. She ended up serving two terms, gaining a reputation for her independence of thought and expertise on international affairs. In 1944, her speech at the Republican National Convention saw her give a harsh and notable critique of Roosevelt, with her admonition that the President had “lied the American people into war” because he knew in advance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1946, she left Congress after refusing pressure from the party to run for a third term in the U.S. Senate, instead focusing her writing on her conversion the same year to Roman Catholicism in a series for McCall’s magazine.

In 1953, Luce was appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as American ambassador to Italy, the first woman to serve as a U.S. ambassador. By then, Luce was an international celebrity, but she would resign from her role in 1956 in protest of America’s failure to support the Hungarian rebellion and her poor health following arsenic poisoning. She would return to writing, not only for Life, McCall’s, and Sports Illustrated, but NR, where she contributed articles over the decades on abortion, feminism, foreign policy, and Republican Party politics. She also reviewed William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1966 Unmaking of a Mayor , his recollections of his run for New York City Mayor on the Conservative Party ticket, a subject she knew quite intimately.

In the summer of 1964, Luce was co-chair of the National Goldwater Citizens Movement. It was at this moment she briefly and dramatically announced she was considering a run for Senator of New York against Robert Kennedy and Republican Kenneth Keating on the Conservative Party ticket.

Having teased the run for Senate in August, by the end of the month, she had withdrawn her name from consideration after the threats from the state party that they would withdraw support for Goldwater. In late September, Luce told the American Club of Paris that she had given up the idea of running for Senate, joking that of the five Luces in the New York City phonebook, “I personally knew that four would vote for Keating” and she decided that “was good enough as a pool in depth and gave up.” Among the choices to replace Luce was Buckley himself, who was ruled out because he was a legal resident of Connecticut at the time, and William F. Rickenbacker, the son of World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker who was an editor for National Review and declined to run for personal reasons. History professor Henry Paolucci from Iona College, a “learned and passionate anti-Communist,” was chosen instead.

Upon withdrawal, NR’s editors commented that the loss of Luce was “of course a disappointment to New York’s Conservative Party. But she succeeded in making her point dramatically, and in drawing a great deal of attention to a party, about which the official Republican position in New York is that it does not exist.” It was a preview of things to come, namely Buckley’s run for mayor the next year.

When President Reagan honored Luce with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983, Buckley wrote in NR of how Luce’s accomplishments were “a matter of record,” but “more particularly experienced, but no less unique, is the delight she brings.” Buckley added that his friend was “shrewd, engaging, penetratingly bright, philosophical, fatalistic, conscious of all the vanity and sinfulness that make men human, and sometimes inhuman.”

Luce died on October 9, 1987. Buckley was asked by Luce to be one of her eulogists, alongside her stepson, Henry Luce III. In his eulogy, “On Her Way to the Cross,” he discussed Luce’s writing on Saint Therese of Lisieux, who had “picked up and carried the splinters of the Cross” and having gathered them up, had “the material of a cross of no inconsiderable weight.” Buckley concluded his eulogy by saying that only we the living are disturbed, we should be joyful for Luce who had “embarked finally, after stooping so many times to pick up so many splinters, on her way to the Cross.”

Read here Luce’s classic article for National Review in 1976 on Jimmy Carter and Christian socialism

Read Florence King’s 2014 review of the Sylvia Jukes Morris biography of Luce, Price of Fame, here

Watch Luce’s 1969 appearance on Firing Line discussing “Reflections on the Current Scene,” a wide-ranging conversation on everything from Saints and Sinners to Spiro Agnew, here

Watch Luce’s 1975 appearance on Firing Line on “Feminism” here

Subj.: “M.E. Bradford,” March 3, 2025

Dubbed “America’s Plutarch” by longtime National Review editor and Dartmouth literary scholar Jeffrey Hart, M.E. Bradford was one of the most important intellectual figures among the group of twentieth century American conservatives known as “paleoconservatives” or Southern conservatives. This group sought to balance two sets of legitimate claims—those of individual freedom and those of community discipline and social order.

Born Melvin E. Bradford in Fort Worth Texas, he was educated at the University of Oklahoma and Vanderbilt University. He studied under Donald Davidson and Randall Stewart at Vanderbilt, a notably conservative literature department in the period.

In 1967, Bradford had joined Willmoore Kendall, William F. Buckley Jr. ‘s mentor at Yale and an inaugural editor of NR, at the University of Dallas as a historian in his new politics and literature graduate program, along with Frederick Wilhelmsen, a Catholic philosopher and contributor to NR. Bradford would teach at the University of Dallas until his death on March 3, 1993.

Bradford was known as both an Old Southern Conservative traditionalist and a scholar of the American founding. He was trained in literature and also produced well-regarded studies of conservative novelist William Faulkner and Eudora Welty as well as other notable Southern writers like Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Frank Owsley. His notable studies of the American founding include his 1993 book, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution (University of Georgia Press) and his 1982 work, A Worthy Company: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution (Plymouth Rock Foundation).

Bradford’s essential argument about the American founding was that the core documents—the Constitution and Declaration—were conservative documents and the American Revolution itself was a conservative, not revolutionary, event.

Thus, Bradford rejected the liberal view of the founding which focused upon abstract doctrines of liberty, egalitarianism, and natural rights in favor of what he called the “lamp of experience” and “a laboratory of antiquity.” As Bradford constantly emphasized, the Roman idea of habitus, a “way of life,” was “a better guide than reason.”

Bradford, as a result of this view of the American tradition, spent many years arguing with Harry Jaffa, the founder of the Claremont Graduate program and occasional NR contributor, over the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Like Frank Meyer, the longtime NR “Books, Arts, and Manners” editor, Bradford thought Lincoln a liberal revolutionary who had radically altered the American Constitution, while Jaffa strenuously disagreed.

In 1981, Bradford was on the short list for President Reagan to be appointed the head of the NEH, the National Endowment of Humanities, but despite his credentials as a distinguished historian, some influential neoconservatives helped to block his potential nomination. Bradford lost out to William Bennett despite the support of Buckley and Harry Jaffa, Bradford’s old friend and sometimes adversary on the subject of Abraham Lincoln. As historian George Nash puts it in his classic, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (ISI Books, 2006), the conflict between the two factions of the neoconservatives and traditionalist paleoconservatives came to a head with the “bitter lobbying battle that left many scars.”

As Nash puts it, the “feud would remerge” five years later. At the 1986 Philadelphia Society meeting, where Bradford was now president and his friend Stephen Tonsor, the historian and contributor to NR, suggested that the forces which opposed Bradford were not conservatives because, “The Right that is born of modernity is a radical, a revolutionary Right, which cannot in any important degree be distinguished from the revolutionary Left. Now it is a matter of fact that most of those who describe themselves as neoconservatives are or have been cultural modernists….We Conservatives have been baptized in the Jordan, and there is a vast difference between the Jordan and the fiery brook.”

Over the years, Bradford contributed dozens of book reviews to NR on the American founding and Southern literary tradition. Upon Bradford’s untimely death at 58 from a heart attack, Jeffrey Hart summed up all of Bradford’s brilliance, saying he was: “A superb prose stylist, a fine literary critic, a social philosopher, and a profound if combative student of the Constitution, Bradford leaves a gap that cannot readily be supplied.”

Seven years later in 2000, fellow Southern historian Forrest McDonald took the opportunity to appraise Bradford once more:

“The breadth and depth of the late M. E. Bradford’s scholarship was little short of awesome. As an English professor at the University of Dallas, he taught graduate courses in Anglo-Saxon literature, Chaucer, the Medieval lyric, the 16th century, Shakespeare, the 17th and 18th centuries, the English novel. Romanticism, Victorian poetry and prose, American literature, and modern literature. And though he was trained as a literary critic, he taught himself the entire range of the history of Western Civilization, becoming at home with the Creeks and Romans, the Renaissance, Tudor and Stuart England, and, most impressively, the American founding era.”

Subj.: “Joseph Lieberman,” February 24, 2025

National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. was well-known throughout his lifetime for carrying on friendships with notable figures on the left. From New York Mayor Ed Koch to the Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Buckley enjoyed the company of liberals who were principled and joyful enough to maintain relationships over partisanship.

Among such friends was Senator Joe Lieberman. Lieberman was born on February 24, 1942 in Stamford, Connecticut.

Lieberman first met Buckley in 1964 when, as a student at Yale, he held Bill’s former position as chairman of the Yale Daily News. It was a highly prestigious position among Yale students and afforded Lieberman the opportunity to meet and learn from its most famous contemporary alumnus. Lieberman recalled that Buckley “took a wonderfully warm, kind of brotherly interest in those who were at the Yale Daily News. He invited me and a couple of our friends from the News to come to his house in Stamford for a dinner or two—which were stimulating, thrilling evenings. Our friendship would continue.”

In August 1988, Buckley wrote a column entitled, “The Birth of BuckPac” about the establishment of “Buckleys for Liberman.” In it, he presented a satirical press conference about the PAC, which he said was to support the defeat of Lowell Weicker, the liberal Republican Senator of Connecticut. In his jocular faux exchange, Buckley suggested that his conclusion that Weicker was the worst Senator was from “researching the speeches and public utterances of Lowell Weicker over the past eighteen years.”

As Linda Bridges and John Coyne Jr. put it in their 2010 biography of Buckley, Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement (2007, John Wiley & Sons), “BuckPac was one of Bill and Priscilla’s [Buckley, managing editor of National Review and Bill’s older sister] many great jokes with a serious point: it was a PAC founded by the Buckley family to defeat one of the few human beings this side of Stalin in whom Bill can find no good, Lowell Weicker.” As Bill put it to Lieberman when he called him to discuss an endorsement, “Please understand if I endorse you, it is because I despise Lowell Weicker.”

NR would continue to hold Lieberman in high esteem among his Democratic colleagues. As the editors put it in 2000, when Lieberman was Al Gore’s running mate for president on the Democratic ticket, the Senator had “forged a unique, and very difficult, political identity, managing to break with his party’s orthodoxy on questions such as school choice and entitlements, and at the same time compiling an utterly reliable Democratic voting record. He pulls off this trick mostly through his temperament, manner, and rhetoric. He’s the conscientious Democrat, willing to talk about God and values.”

In 2006, Buckley would again endorse Lieberman for Senate, remarking in his column that he felt Lieberman was a key figure to push the Democratic Party in a better direction and that, quite simply, as he told a reporter, “I like Lieberman.” He compared it to an endorsement he made decades earlier of his good friend Al Lowenstein in his run for Congress, despite Lowenstein being a liberal Democrat. Buckley remarked that in both cases, he was “defying my principled opposition to many of Lowenstein’s [and Lieberman’s] positions in order to vote for a human being I thought superior.”

Read Senator Lieberman’s speech on the floor of the Senate on February 27, 2008, the day of Buckley’s death, eulogizing “A Remarkable Man” here

Read National Review’s editorial on Lieberman’s legacy after he died last March at the age of 82 here

Read NRI fellow Kathryn Jean Lopez on how to “Live Like Joe Lieberman” here

Subj.: “Celebrating the Father of Our Country,” February 17, 2025

Before it was consolidated into the current national holiday known as “Presidents’ Day,” Americans yearly made grand celebrations throughout the country of Washington’s birthday. These included not only traditional parades and picnics, but public readings of Washington’s most notable writing, “The Farewell Address.”

As National Review’s editors put it last year, “the federal holiday we celebrate today is not Presidents’ Day: It is George Washington’s birthday. It has been celebrated as such since 1778 and has been an official federal holiday since 1879. In order to give three-day weekends to federal workers, it is often not celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday of February 22.”

In an early issue of National Review in March 1958, following Washington’s birthday, the magazine editors shared two of their favorite Washington passages. One was the admonition from his 5th annual address to Congress in 1793, that, “If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” The other was from Washington’s first Inaugural Address, in which he struck themes about republican culture that Alexis de Tocqueville would decades later:

“It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration to confine themselves within their respective spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

Over the years, National Review developed its own in-house historian and Washington biographer: NRI fellow Richard Brookhiser. In 1989, on the bicentennial of Washington’s inauguration as the first American president, Brookhiser wrote of how Washington’s “heroic character” stands out in our history, a man who “unfailingly did what was needful.” As Brookhiser puts it, it was not just Washington’s heroism in keeping the Continental Army in the field to win the Revolutionary War. It was his support of the Constitution and his presence at the convention as its President which was the “weightiest argument” in its favor, and as the first president, it was Washington’s voluntary retirement after two terms which guaranteed the endurance of that Constitution.

Washington’s retirement came in 1796 with his most notable and enduring text, what became known as the “Farewell Address.” The Address was originally drafted years earlier with the aid of James Madison, as Washington wished to retire after his first term before being persuaded to remain for the good of the country. The final address, completed with the help of Washington’s most trusted adviser Alexander Hamilton, emphasized the republican virtues required to maintain the new nation and the gravest threats to it–namely corrupting foreign influence and factionalism. Famously, Washington noted the need for religion and morality to maintain the Republic:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

The steady leadership, devotion to public service, and firm commitment to a set of traditional principles including duty, honor, and humility makes Washington a figure of veneration for American conservatives. As National Review’s Aram Bakshian Jr. put it in 1971, Washington was, in public life, usually a “towering eagle in the midst of a squabbling brace of peacocks, popinjays, bantams, and screech owls–a firm, thoughtful commander and administrator whose basic, almost instinctive belief in the principles of personal freedom was perhaps deeper than the fulsome preaching of the ideologues.”

Read NRI fellow Kathryn Jean Lopez on Washington’s Farewell Address here

Read the Editors’ 2024 piece for President’s Day, “George Washington Should Still Guide Us,” here

Read NRI fellow Dan McLaughlin 2022 article, “Today, We Celebrate George Washington’s Birthday” here

Read Michael Bishop’s 2020 magazine article, “George Washington’s Twilight Years,” here

Read Jonathan Horn’s 2020 magazine feature on, “In Search of George Washington’s Mother,” here

Subj.: “Happy 114th to the Gipper,” February 6, 2025

The late Ronald Reagan would have celebrated his 114th 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, born in Tampico, Reagan’s life story and career were described in the special NR memorial issue as being “like Lincoln’s, mythogenic beginning to end.” The second son of an Irish Catholic father and Scots-English Protestant mother, Reagan took from his father Jack his sense of humor and skill as a storyteller and from his mother Nelle Wilson, his lifelong Protestant faith, love of the stage, and sunny optimism that defined his life.

Reagan was, starting with his first vote in 1932, a New Deal Democrat and a committed Union man whose first political hero was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His political leanings first started shifting with his experience as the head of the Actors’ Guild, as he learned first hand about the problems of governmental interference and deleterious taxation. Reagan was also extraordinarily well-read, having read and memorized passages from conservative classics like Whittaker Chambers’ Witness.

Reagan’s position, starting in 1954, with General Electric as a spokesman gave him ample opportunity to read during his travels. Already a long-time subscriber to Reader’s Digest, he started reading the conservative weekly newspaper Human Events and the resurrected libertarian monthly The Freeman. Conservative historian George Nash notes the importance of a figure at GE in exposing Reagan to conservative principles and writers, the vice president of employee and community relations, Lemuel R. Boulware. Boulware was a “devotee of free market economics and a consummate propagandist” and had a “crusading temperament like Reagan’s and a desire to make others believe.”

In fact, Nash suggests Boulware may also have purchased for Reagan a charter subscription to National Review, of which Reagan became a lifelong, dedicated reader. As Reagan put it in his speech at the December 1985 30th anniversary dinner for National Review, “The National Review is to the offices of the West Wing of the White House what People magazine is to your dentist’s waiting room.”

William F. Buckley Jr. first encountered the former actor in 1961 and learned of Reagan’s fondness for his book, Up from Liberalism (McDowell & Obolensky, 1959). Reagan’s 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.

As Mark Molesky summarizes, as governor, Reagan balanced the budget, reformed welfare, and quelled campus unrest as “America’s most visible conservative politician,” allowing him to build over time a national political base to launch a presidential bid.

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 legacy of President Reagan, as so vividly described by Buckley, to preserve the American Republic against the threat of tyrannical government and collectivism is a mission that National Review Institute endeavors to carry on.

Read Buckley Legacy Project Advisory Committee Member George Nash at the Imaginative Conservative on Reagan’s “Road to Conservatism” here.

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.: “Reflecting on ‘The Trial of the Century’ at 75,” January 24, 2025

One of the most important events in the rise of the modern American conservative movement was the trial and sentencing of Alger Hiss for perjury. Called the “Trial of the Century,” it was galvanizing for American conservatives both because it exposed the extent of the internal threat of Communist infiltration into American government and society and because it led to the rise of one of the great anti-Communist heroes: Whittaker Chambers.

Seventy-five years ago, on January 25, 1950, Alger Hiss was sentenced to prison for perjury related to his espionage, and he received two concurrent five-year sentences. It was the conclusion of an investigation of Hiss which started on August 3, 1948 with a subpoena from the House Committee on Unamerican Activities (known as “HUAC”) to Mr. Chambers, then a senior editor for Time magazine. Among the members of the committee was a young, little-known freshman Congressman, Richard Nixon.

Chambers testified to the committee about his time as an underground Communist in the 1930s and his knowledge of a Communist spy in the State Department, Alger Hiss. Since the 1930s, Hiss had become a great American success story, reaching the upper echelons of the State Department as a senior State Department officer and part of the American delegation at Yalta in 1945 before becoming the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Chambers testified to personal knowledge that Hiss was a Soviet spy, as Chambers himself was involved in espionage as a member of the “Ware” group, which had moved from Communist infiltration of the American government to spywork over the course of the late 1930s.

Hiss denied Chambers’ claims and sued him for libel, forcing Chambers to release files—known as the “Pumpkin Papers,” as they were hidden among the pumpkin patches at Chambers’ Maryland farm—which were secret government documents confirming Hiss and Chambers were Communist spies in the 1930s. But the road to Hiss’s conviction was a hard one. In the criminal court, a grand jury convened and Chambers produced his evidence, which led to Hiss’s indictment. However, the jury deadlocked and a mistrial was declared. It was only after the second trial that Hiss was convicted for lying about his relationship with Chambers and his espionage—Hiss could only be charged and found guilty of perjury because the statute of limitations on espionage which occurred in the 1930s had already run out.

As Patrick Swam puts it, the case was the one young Nixon “cut his political teeth” on, thereby “earning as his reward a national reputation.” He did so in a case in which the liberal establishment was heavily in Hiss’s favor—Hiss had fifteen character witnesses who vouched for him, including Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1924 Democratic Presidential Nominee John W. Davis, and Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. The liberal establishment of the period saw Hiss as a victim and martyr for social justice, placed against the disheveled Chambers, who they saw as a vicious liar who was allied with reactionary Republicans.

Historian George Nash writes of the enduring effect that the Hiss trial had on the post-conservative intellectual renascence: “As much as any other event, the Hiss case forged the anti-Communist element in resurgent conservatism.” Conservatives and anti-Communists saw Chambers as a courageous, principled man willing to destroy himself “in order to awaken the nation to the Communist peril symbolized by the unrepentant traitor Alger Hiss.” Nash’s assessment recalls that of Ralph de Toladeno, the journalist who covered the trial for Newsweek and befriended Chambers, who wrote that HUAC had “demonstrated, dramatically and effectively, that Communists in government systematically looted the nation of its secrets.”

Chambers soon released his autobiography of the trial and his time as Soviet spy, Witness (Random House, 1952), in 1952 and it quickly became a best-seller. Conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. found Chambers’ pen brilliant and his analysis of the Communist threat to the West incisive, pessimistic, and thoroughly honest. When Buckley decided to launch National Review in 1955, Chambers was one of his primary targets for an editor and he pursued him for years until Chambers finally joined the magazine in 1957.

When Buckley first began his correspondence with Chambers in 1954, Chambers told Bill that the same feeling he had about Buckley and Henry Regnery—that within ten minutes, he “felt as if I had known him always and that there was nothing that we could not discuss with complete trust and understanding”—was the same feeling he had about Alger and Priscilla Hiss. Chambers lamented that “no day passes without my dying a little at the thought of what befell them through me,” as he saw them as still friends whom “history forced me to make suffer.”

Chambers saw the tragedy in the harrowing fight against the forces of atheistic materialistic Communism that the Hiss trial was central to. His allies understood that it was precisely that sober, Quaker mind—pessimistic though Chambers was—that made him the reluctant hero who lit the fire of anti-Communism which furnished the modern American conservative movement for decades thereafter.

Watch the March 1978 Firing Line episode on “The Guilt of Alger Hiss” here

Read Nat Brown’s featured article from the May 2022 issue on Witness at 70 here

Read Peter Baehr’s article “Whittaker Chambers through the Eyes of Rebecca West” from our April 2020 magazine here

Subj.: “Recalling the ‘Sworn Enemy of Clumsy Prose,'” January 13, 2025

Dear Friend,

When National Review was founded in November 1955, it was to be not just a magazine of politics, but of culture. Few embodied that spirit better than longtime contributor, book reviewer, and literary editor for the magazine, the polymath literary critic Hugh Kenner.

Kenner was born on January 7, 1923 in Peterborough, Ontario to academic parents. His father, H.R.H. Kenner, was a classics scholar and his mother Mary a professor of German and French. Early in childhood, he was determined–wrongly–by medical professionals to be deaf and it was this experience that helped him gain such a unique and powerful command of speech and language.

Kenner found himself under the tutelage of Marshall McLuhan, the Catholic philosopher and progenitor of media studies, who became a lifelong friend and supporter of Kenner’s work. Kenner considered mathematics as a discipline before settling on English, receiving his doctorate from Yale in 1950.

Like McLuhan, Kenner was a Catholic convert who was, as Gregory Wolfe puts it, “fascinated by the paradox of how innovation in art and science might renew the tradition of Western Civilization.” Kenner’s first book was on G. K. Chesterton’s examination of paradox, Paradox in Chesterton (1947), but the rest of his career would be focused upon literary High Modernism. Kenner published two dozen books over his career, covering T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett. His 1971 The Pound Era (University of California Press, 1971) is considered his greatest work and seminal analysis of the works of Pound.

Kenner befriended our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., in the late 1950s. Buckley and Kenner became close enough friends over time that Bill was godfather to Kenner’s daughter, Lisa, and Bill was Kenner’s best man in 1965 when he married Mary Anne Bittner, after the death of his first wife Mary Jo from cancer. Kenner also often joined Buckley on his annual skiing trips to Switzerland, in part so that Buckley could bounce ideas off the trusted polymath, and sailed with him a half a dozen times.

As a National Review contributor, Kenner did not just bring his serious academic knowledge of literature and poetry, which Buckley felt was incomparable. He also brought humor. After the Nixon tapes were released in the middle of the Watergate scandal, Kenner took excerpts from the tapes and turned them into pseudo-poems, inventing a phony book called The Poetry of Richard Milhouse Nixon (Cliff House Books, 1974), which he published and reviewed as if it were a real book. In one example in July 1974, Kenner wrote:

“Here are no sonnets for an idle hour. Stark, terse, hard-bitten, cunningly disequilibrated–tip-toe, in fact, on the needlepoint of a century’s anguish–these poems speak to and for the thwarted Tamburlaine that lurks in the heart of urban America…..face to face with such quiet mastery, one is startled to learn from the dust jacket that this is Mr. Nixon’s first book of poetry. Surely we may expect more from his Sony? We have no right to expect better. So consummate is such an achievement, one is quietly satisfied to remark that it certifies to the viability of the middle American lifestyle.”

Kenner also, as Jeffrey Hart attests to in The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times (ISI Books, 2005), helped to build the magazine’s distinctive Books section and memorial section.  He was brought in as a contributor by Frank Meyer, who headed the “Books, Arts, and Manners” section from 1957 to 1972 and who also invited Kenner’s friend, fellow literary critic Guy Davenport, to join in the late 1960s. When Meyer died in 1972, Kenner wrote in his typical precise verbosity that “Many doughty debaters have awaited his coming in heaven. The next time you see sheet lightning, you can fancy it’s Frank Meyer taking on Carlyle.”

After Kenner died in November 2003, Buckley recalled the story about how Kenner not only introduced Bill to computers, but how he devised “WhatStar,” the celestial navigation program. As Buckley recalled, he had a problem he wanted to solve which he thought would be very useful to any sailor–he wanted to be able to “take a star sight, or a planet sight, without knowing what the object was when I shot it and then, knowing the time of the observation, to identify the star and establish the exact position of my boat.”

Buckley told the editor of Yachting that he choose Kenner to help with creating WhatStar because he was “a personal friend and was willing to take the 200 hours it required to dope out and write the program” and he needed someone who was a “whiz with computers” and also “a sworn enemy of clumsy instructional prose.” Kenner was so gifted a writer, in Buckley’s estimation, that he wrote instructions anyone could understand. The program was so successful that within two decades, the Navy stopped teaching celestial navigation.

Buckley worried that in his final years, Kenner may have faced Alzheimer’s, reducing their communications and that famous lucid intellect. Yet, Kenner continued to watch National Review, remarking on NRO’s “Word of the Day” and letting Buckley know if ever one was not posted. He died the day after going to mass with his wife and daughter–Buckley’s 78th birthday.

Watch Buckley’s interview with Kenner on Firing Line from 1974 on “The Political Responsibility of Artists” here

Read Michael Potemra’s review of the posthumous re-release of Kenner’s 1962 classic Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians here

Read Michael Dirda’s review of Edward Burns’ collection of letters between Guy Davenport and Kenner from 2019 here

Read Buckley’s obituary of Kenner from 2003 here

Subj.: “Honoring a ‘Man for All Seasons,'” Dec. 18, 2024

Dear Friend,

It is in the spirit of Christmas—the time for hope, renewal, and gratitude through gift-giving—that National Review Institute wishes to honor one of the great champions of American conservatism who departed us last week: Dr. Lee Edwards. Let us remember with charity and reverence the legacy of Dr. Edwards, who passed away on December 12 at the age of 92.

Lee Edwards was born on December 1, 1932 on the South Side of Chicago, the only child of Willard Ambrose Edwards and Leila Mae Sullivan. As Dr. Edwards put it in his autobiography Just Right: A Life in Pursuit of Liberty (ISI Books, 2017), his father was “an award-winning, hard-drinking reporter for the Chicago Tribune” and his mother was “the oldest daughter of the only Republican in the Irish American enclave of Bridgeport.” Edwards, like National Review’s founder William F. Buckley Jr., described himself as a “cradle conservative,” as he bore witness to his father’s coverage of every presidential campaign from FDR to Nixon, as well as the seminal trial of the Communist spy Alger Hiss.

Dr. Edwards went to undergrad at Duke University, where he joined the campus paper, the Duke Chronicle, before becoming the founding editor of a new student paper, the Duke Peer, in his senior year. Edwards recalls how his paper first garnered attention by profiling and defending Senator McCarthy—his mother was a volunteer in McCarthy’s office and his father a close confidant— under the headline, “Nice Guy or Demagogue?” However, rather than follow his father’s footsteps into the world of political journalism, Edwards instead enlisted in the Army and went to Paris. It was there that he was first published in a new conservative magazine, National Review, in February 1958, and where his witness of the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution amid Western weakness strengthened his passion to fight against Communism.

Upon returning to the United States, three seminal events happened in Edwards’ life. One, he found spiritual direction by entering the Catholic Church; two, he came under the tutelage of M. Stanton Evans, the managing editor of Human Events and NR contributor, which brought him into the burgeoning conservative movement; and three, he met Anne Stevens, the president of the New York Young Women’s Republican Club, in 1962 at the Young Americans for Freedom Madison Square Rally. They would be married for 57 years until her death in November 2023.

Edwards had a key role in the founding of YAF. Two months after attending the 1960 Republican National Convention as the editor of the Young Republican National Federal’s publication, the YRNF News, he joined one hundred young men and women at the Buckley family estate in Sharon, Connecticut. The Sharon Statement, drafted by Evans, was, in Edwards’ recollection, a reflection of the three major strains of conservatism in the 1960s: anti-communism, traditional conservatism, and libertarianism. Edwards quickly joined YAF’s national board and one year later became the founding editor of the organization’s monthly magazine, The New Guard,  a position he remained in until 1963. It was in the fall of that year that Edwards joined the Draft Goldwater National Committee and became an advisor to Senator Barry Goldwater as the director of public relations for his campaign.

As Edwards later reflected, he came to see Goldwater as the political leader of the new conservative movement. Goldwater was, according to Edwards, one of three critical pillars of this new conservative movement, alongside Buckley, the “man of interpretation, the journalist the popularizer,” and Russell Kirk, “the man of ideas, the intellectual, the philosopher,” both of whom also were part of the Draft Goldwater movement.

After decades of running his own D.C. public relations firm, Edwards would go on to obtain a doctorate degree in world politics from Catholic University in 1986, writing a dissertation on Congress and the Cold War under the direction of Claes Ryn, an associate from Philadelphia Society meetings. In that time, Lee also received a message from President Ronald Reagan, of whom he had written a biography years earlier, during a “roast banquet” put on by Peter Gemma and other friends. In his message, Reagan elegantly summed up who he called “a man for all seasons.”

“Recognition for the exceptional talents and achievements of Lee Edwards is both richly deserved and long overdue. Lee has always been more interested in promoting the causes he believes in than tooting his own horn . . . from the days of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Lee Edwards has always been in the forefront of the struggle to restore America, to bring it back to its ancient moorings . . . . Lee has fought hard with uncommon intelligence and resourcefulness. But he has fought fair and always without rancor. That is why his friends cherish him and even his enemies respect him.”

For decades to come, Dr. Edwards continued advancing the conservative movement and the cause of anti-Communism. In 1986, he joined The Fund for American Studies’ Institute of Political Journalism at Georgetown University, was an adjunct professor of politics at his alma mater Catholic University, and later served as Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation beginning in January 2002. The Heritage Foundation established its inaugural Lee Edwards Lecture in Conservative Leadership in 2024. In his long career, he published 25 books, including his biography of Bill Buckley, Maker of a Movement (ISI Books, 2010).

His final and most personal accomplishment was the successful creation of the Victims of Communism Memorial Museum, a decades-long effort which began with a family discussion in 1990 and led to the opening of the Victims of Communism Memorial, which was erected on Capitol Hill and dedicated by President George W. Bush on June 12, 2007, and the VOC Museum, which opened in June 2022.

At the end of his autobiography, Dr. Edwards thanked God for his family and the joy they bestowed, saying, “How blessed can one man be?” In that spirit, may we honor a life well-lived by considering those same cardinal virtues of humility and gratitude that both Lee Edwards and Bill Buckley so ably embodied.

See the Victims of Communism tribute to Dr. Edwards here

Read American Spectator editor Dr. Paul Kengor’s moving tribute to Dr. Edwards here

Read Donald Devine’s remembrances of Lee Edwards at NR here and Jack Butler’s obituary here

Read Dr. Edwards’ last two articles in NR on the three-front war here and on the 40th anniversary of the “Evil Empire” speech here

Read his very first article from February 1, 1958, “The Way of All France,”  here

Subj.: “Victims of Communism,” Nov. 8, 2024

Dear Friend,

On October 17, 1917, the “October Revolution” or Bolshevik Revolution was launched in Russia, leading to the creation of the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin. The “October Revolution” led to a reign of terror of not only the Soviet Union, but later Communist China under Mao Zedong, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, and disastrous experiments in socialism throughout postcolonial Africa and in postwar South America.

Communism as a political theory was developed decades earlier in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with the release of The Communist Manifesto. When Communism moved from abstract theory to totalitarian governance with the Bolshevik Revolution, it led to the deaths of over one hundred million people over the course of the twentieth century and imprisonment or subjugation of many times more. As the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation puts it:

“From Lenin’s Red Terror to North Korea’s Kim dynasty, totalitarian rulers across history and the globe have implemented their versions of communism with disastrous results. These regimes possess six key characteristics: an official ideology, a one-party authoritarian state, a monopoly on violence, control of all information and mass media (including books, radio and television, movies, and now the Internet), a government-planned and centrally-controlled economy, and the use of a communist party-controlled terroristic security service.”

Victims of Communism Memorial Day was established by President Donald Trump in November 2017 upon the one hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution. In his order, Trump stated that in creating a National Day for the Victims of Communism, Americans were condemning communism as a political philosophy “incompatible with liberty, prosperity, and the dignity of human life.” Two years later, President Trump invited Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation director Marion Smith and a group of dissidents from Poland, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam to recognize the new national memorial day.

Dr. Lee Edwards, an advisor to NRI’s Buckley Legacy Project, was the primary force behind the 35-year project to establish a museum by which to educate Americans about the horrors of 20th century atheistic Communism. As Dr. Edwards told National Review in 2022, the museum was intended to be the “cornerstone of our global educational campaign about the manifold victims and crimes of communism.”

Visit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation here and visit the museum, which opened to the public last year in downtown Washington D.C.

Read Richard Reinsch II and Paul Zepeda on the one year anniversary of the opening of the museum here

Read Michael Brendan Dougherty’s interview with historian of Communism Sean McMeekin on his new book, To Overthrow The World: The Rise and Fall and Rise Communism (Basic Books, 2024) here

Read VOC Chairman Elizabeth Edwards Spalding on “Solzhenitsyn and the Life of Truth,” reflections on the Gulag Archipelago 50 years later, here

Read Lee Edwards on the 40th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech here

Read NRI Fellow Douglas Murray’s cover story from 2017 on the centennial of the October Revolution, “One Hundred Years of Evil,” here

Read NRI Fellow Andrew Stuttaford’s review of historian Anthony Beevor’s 2023 Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921, here

Subj.: “The Speech That Made Reagan,” Oct. 31, 2024

Dear Friend,

Sixty years ago, Ronald Reagan gave one of the most important speeches of his long political career and helped to put his stamp on American conservatism forever. This speech, in the words of conservative historian Lee Edwards, “would alter the course of American politics.” On October 27, 1964, a week before Senator Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat against Lyndon Johnson, Reagan gave a televised address which he called “The Speech,” and which has become widely known by the title “A Time for Choosing.”

By 1964, Reagan had undergone his transition from a New Deal Democrat to a Goldwater Conservative—he had met our founder William F. Buckley Jr. in 1961 and had been an inaugural subscriber to National Review, reading it on long train rides when he was the spokesman for General Electric. Now, as co-chairman of Californians for Goldwater-Miller, he was campaigning for “Mr. Conservative” throughout the state, making the same speech he had first worked on when at GE.

The themes of the speech—no doubt influenced by Reagan’s reading of National Review—resound today: a robust defense of limited government, economic freedom, American exceptionalism, faith, and our founding ideals. Reagan immediately laid out the existential stakes of the fight for the West: “We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”

If freedom was lost here, Reagan said, it would be lost everywhere—there was “no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.” He consistently criticized the central planners, that “little intellectual elite” far away who thought they could “plan our lives better than we can plan them ourselves,” reminding his audience that a government program was “the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll see on this Earth.” Reagan added that the fight was not merely left versus right, but “up or down—[up] to man’s old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”

This was our “rendezvous with destiny”—the simple challenge before us all: “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” Lee Edwards, then an advisor to the Goldwater Campaign, wrote in his diary that:

“The Reagan TV show has elicited the greatest response of any program to date. We have received hundreds of telegrams, hundreds of telephone calls, and dozens of reports of undecideds and Democrats now declaring themselves for [Goldwater]. Everyone has suggested, urged, and demanded that the show be repeated. Last night Ike called Ab Herman from Walter Reed to say it was the best thing he had seen in the campaign and asked for a print . . . Ronald Reagan is the man they wish Barry Goldwater was. Or perhaps I should say the man they wish he had been in this campaign . . . Reagan, with his statistics and his awareness of today, has at last fired up the loyal, won the undecided, and shaken the opposition.”

Goldwater went on to lose the 1964 election a week later, but as William F. Buckley Jr. put it in The Reagan I Knew (Basic Books, 2009), after giving the famous speech, “Reagan soon found himself with a political career shaping up.” David Broder, the political reporter for the Washington Star, assessed Reagan’s speech as the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic convention.

At National Review Institute, we are similarly dedicated to the preservation of Western Civilization and our founding inheritance. As we head towards the end of 2024, it is a Time for Giving to an institution that knows and embraces our “rendezvous with destiny.” Please support NRI here. Thank you for being valuable partners in our work!

Read a transcript of the speech here.

Watch the video here.

Read Karl Rove’s 2019 history of the speech for National Review here.

Subj.: “Happy Birthday, Pitts!,” Oct. 17, 2024

Dear Friend,

Priscilla Buckley was, in the words of longtime National Review books editor Frank Meyer, the “grease in our crankcases.” Known by her nickname, “Pitts,” Priscilla had the second longest tenure in the magazine’s history outside of her younger brother William F. Buckley Jr., our founder. Priscilla spent forty-three years at the magazine and twenty-six as managing editor.

Buckley attended Smith College, where she was friends with Betty Friedman, who would not only come to be a leading liberal feminist but a future debate opponent of Bill’s on Firing Line. Like Bill, Priscilla worked for the CIA in the early 1950s before taking a job as a United Press correspondent in Paris. Priscilla never married or had children of her own, but she had 50 nieces and nephews and, in the words of Christopher Buckley, she “was to the Buckley family what the rock of Gibraltar is to the Mediterranean.”

She began work for NR in February 1956 just months after the first issue was published on November 19, 1955, moving to New York and joining full time in July 1956. Bill communicated to Priscilla, still in Paris, through “family channels” that what his magazine of intellectuals needed was a professional journalist. As Bill put it in 2005, “I had founded National Review and reached out for an experienced editorial hand, dragging Priscilla from an exotic life as a reporter and editor in Paris, into the indigent billet of a struggling-to-be-born venture in opinion journalism.”

She quickly took on an important job—bringing peace to an editorial room that already had a budding rivalry between James Burnham and Frank Meyer. Priscilla quickly, in the words of Linda Bridges and John Coyne Jr., became the magazine’s “on-staff investigative reporter,” with one of her first articles, called “Siberia, U.S.A.,” examining and deconstructing the popular right-wing idea that the federal government was plotting to “get rid of political dissenters and critics on the right” by deporting them to Alaska.

Priscilla was Jim Burnham’s officemate for decades and while Burnham’s opinions and temperament often frustrated Meyer and his allies, like William Rickenbacker, at NR, Priscilla found him to be, as Burnham biographer Daniel Kelly put it, “neat, quiet, and considerate and always conscious that the editors were there not to argue endlessly, but to put out the magazine.”

In April 1959, Suzanna La Follette, a founding editor who helped Bill’s childhood libertarian mentor Albert Jay Nock found The Freeman in 1920 and John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt resurrect it in 1950, resigned. Priscilla was made managing editor. As Bridges and Coyne Jr. put it, Priscilla becoming managing editor was fortuitous for the magazine, as “in retrospect it seems clear that Priscilla had as much as Bill himself to do with keeping National Review going over the years, this was a very fortunate move indeed by the young editor-in-chief.”

Writing on the 15th anniversary of the magazine, Priscilla showed her trademark sense of humor while summing up the impact of the magazine on conservative politics: “Five years later, as we rounded the Fifteenth, another Buckley running in New York as a Conservative had just been elected senator. NR played a major role in the organization of the Conservative Party of New York. Between the two events, Bill’s campaign for mayor and Jim’s for the Senate, the Conservative Party—whose bosses Dan Mahoney and Kieran O’Doherty NR defers to with voluptuarian sycophancy (when we agree)—flourished.”

Priscilla’s role over the decades, beyond keeping the editorial room together and being Jim Burnham’s ally and officemate, was to train and mentor NR’s young journalists. Priscilla announced her retirement as managing editor at the magazine’s 30th anniversary dinner in December 1985. George Will gave her a send off, speaking as a “graduate, summa cum laude, of ‘the Priscilla Buckley School of Journalistic Craftsmanship.’” Priscilla, joking that as “is well known to my friends and colleagues, I rarely speak in public. But both times I have been forced to speak, the President of the United States has been in the audience. Now I’m getting the hang of it. The Pope or Rome better watch out.”

Her legacy was that of being, as Bill Buckley put it, the “abiding central figure in the office, year after year, decade after decade”—central to both the editorial operation and the good humor of office life. Ed Capono, the former publisher of NR, summed up Priscilla as “A truly magnificent example of one of Our Lord’s finer creations—brilliant, kind, gentle, warm, adventurous, and athletic (a scratch golfer), with a marvelous sense of humor that emanated from a constant smile and a pair of crystal blue eyes.”

Read here our symposium from 2012 remembering Priscialla Buckley here

Read the magazine’s cover piece from 2012 on “Remembering Priscilla Buckley” here

Read Richard Brokhiser’s reflections on Priscilla here

Subj.: “Remembering the Man Behind the ‘Power of the Powerless,'” Oct. 5, 2024

Dear Friend,

Václav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic for a decade in the wake of the Cold War, was one of the most important anti-Communist figures of the 20th century. As Michael Zantovsky, a noted Havel biographer and former secretary of Havel’s, put it, Havel was the closest thing to a philosopher-king the late modern world has experienced.

Havel was born on October 5, 1936 in Prague to a wealthy, artistic, and entrepreneurial family. The arts were significant to Havel’s early life, as his uncle, Milos, had founded one of the largest film production companies in Czechoslovakia, Lucernafilm, and his maternal grandfather was a former ambassador and famous journalist.

After his time in the military between 1957 and 1959, Havel went to work in theater as a playwright, but as he had been trying to enter post secondary education years earlier, found himself limited under the Czech socialist regime because he was considered to be from a bourgeois family. His first play in 1963, The Garden Party, won him international acclaim, and his next two plays, The Memorandum and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, furnished his reputation, especially in the United States.

The Memorandum debuted in the United States in 1968, a catastrophic year for Czechoslovakia. In what was known as “Prague Spring,” Communist Party First Secretary Alexander Dubcek had proposed a series of liberalizing economic and cultural reforms under the banner of “socialism with a human face.” That August, the Warsaw Pact countries of the Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the Hungarian People’s Republic, and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia and successfully ended Dubcek’s reforms, replacing him with a Stalinist hardliner by the next spring.

As a result, Havel became a political dissident. In 1978, he wrote his most famous essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” which describes the everyday lies required of ordinary people living under the tyranny of totalitarian rule. As friend of NRI Daniel Mahoney puts it in his collection, The Statesman as Thinker (Encounter Books, 2022), the essay shows that, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn before him, Havel “saw the ideological lie as the glue holding together a totalitarian or post-totalitarian regime” and was able to pinpoint the “unique point of vulnerability, of a seemingly invulnerable totalitarian order.” Havel did this most powerfully in his example of the green grocer thoughtlessly putting the “Workers of the World United” sign in his window and thus reinforcing as a ritual the lie of the regime and its hold over human souls.

Mahoney also reminds us in this period about the significance of Havel’s “remarkable partnership with his wife of many years, Olga Havlova,” Havel’s “rock” who was his editor and first reader, as well as his eyes and ears at home during his four periods of imprisonment.

In a review of a later collection of Havel essays, Living in Truth (Meulenhoff, 1986), National Review’s Martin Weiss summarized Havel’s view as resulting from his “allergy to ideological fictions and Utopias of all sorts is nowadays general among Central European intellectuals” and his conviction that the ”arrogant man of the technological age replaced God with science and is paying the price: the world in which individual responsibility could be safely pinned down is mostly gone, leaving fertile ground for the growth of impersonal powers operating outside the realm of moral judgment.”

Richard John Neuhaus, NR’s religion editor in 1990, added in his own review of Living in Truth, that the “cultural and spiritual debilitation of the West” had largely been brought upon us by our “secular and religious clerisy” and would not be remedied by the East. However, Neuhaus noted, that those “coming out of the long night of totalitarianism do not come empty handed and like Václav Havel, they bring testimony to the transcendent sources of human dignity.”

When Communism finally fell in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Havel, in the words of Mahoney, entered a new phase of his life by “setting the tone for morally serious civic engagement in a newly democratic society.” He was the last President of Czechoslovakia and then the first President of the new Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He had, thus, incredibly been both a leading moral authority in the anti-totalitarian revolution that brought down Communism and a democratic statesman.

In the wake of his retirement from political life, Havel wrote To the Castle and Back (Vintage, 2006), a defense of what Havel called “nonpolitical politics” as a response to the problem of modern politics and post-totalitarian politics. Havel added that “market fundamentalists” like his political rival, Václav Klaus, had something in common with Communists as both ignored the moral foundations of a free society and saw politics as an economic problem. National Review Institute follows the imperative that Havel laid out over his life that a defense of Western Civilization is a defense of permanent truths against the forces of atheistic totalitarianism which corrode and destroy the soul.

Read Paul Rahe’s review of Daniel Mahoney’s The Statesman As Thinker here.

Read Jay Nordlinger on “The Havel Spirit, and Its Enemies” here.

Read A. Weiss Mitchell’s “Reflections on the ‘Revolution’ of 1989” here.

Read the 2017 Cover Story, “One Hundred Years of Evil,” by NRI Fellow Douglas Murray, with Roger Scruton’s contribution on Havel’s anti Communism legacy, here.

Read NR’s symposium of reflections on Havel’s life following his death in December 2011 here.

Subj.: “A Way out of the Wasteland,” Sept. 26, 2024

Dear Friend,

Thomas Stearns Eliot, better known as “T. S. Eliot,” was a poet, literary critic, and commentator who, in the words of the scholar M. D. Aeschliman, helped “to illuminate the history and meaning of a tragic era of human history.” Russell Kirk called him the “principal conservative thinker in the twentieth century,” while William F. Buckley Jr. placed him, alongside Whittaker Chambers, among the “birds of paradise” who were intellectually above all.

Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. After permanently moving to London in 1915, he produced two of his most path-breaking poems: The Wasteland (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925). As Aeschliman puts it, these works “gave voice to the widespread feeling of nauseating absurdity in postwar Europe and America” by painting a “very unflattering picture” of a decadent commercial society. After converting to Anglicanism in 1927, Eliot produced Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943), which won him the Nobel Prize in poetry. Eliot also contributed important works of literary criticism, in which he promoted classical ideals and the metaphysical poets like John Donne, who combined reason with a rejection of artificiality and a concern for the soul. As Eliot put it in his essay, “The Social Function of Poetry,” the “trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did.”

Kirk, in his seminal work, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, identified Eliot as a modern defender of the “permanent things” and the great traditions of the civil social order. As Kirk put it, Eliot’s “whole endeavor was to point a way out of the Waste Land toward order in the soul and in society.” His essential purpose was one of “conserving and restoring: melancholy topographer of the Waste Land, but guide to recovered personal hope and public integrity” for those hollow men who were “diseased by life without principle.”

After his death on January 4, 1965, National Review’s poetry editor and noted literary scholar Hugh Kenner wrote a contemplative obituary of Eliot, “Death of a Poet.” Kenner observed that Eliot’s conservative achievement had been the very maintenance of the English language and its forms, even reviving what “had been since the 1750s the most English, the drearily English, the most deadeningly minor of poetic norms: the poem of outdoor meditation.” Of Ash Wednesday , Eliot’s plea for spiritual salvation in a desolate, hopeless world, Kenner in 1967 called it “that incomparable homage to Dante” and “the most agonized, most personal poem of all, and does not let Eliot’s posterity forget that Dante’s ideal lady too once walked an earthly street.”

In an April 1967 speech before Stamford High School on the “Duty of the Educated Catholic,” Buckley talked about Eliot’s place among the twentieth century thinkers who testified against the “hubris of scientism” and “kept the hounds at bay”- G. K. Chesterton, George Tyrrell, Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, Evlyn Waugh, Eric Voegelin and Eliot. Eliot, Buckley said, was the “subtle Christianizer” next to Lewis, the “advocate of the beleaguered miracle.” It was Eliot, Buckley constantly reminded us, who observed that “there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.”

In Eliot’s 1935 verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, about the virtue and martyrdom of Sir Thomas Becket, Eliot shows the power of his pen to defend the Christian West against modernity:

“Those who put their faith in worldly order;
Not controlled by the order of God,
In confident ignorance, but arrest disorder;
Make it fast, breed fatal disease,
Degrade what they exalt.”

Eliot warned that, in the modern cultural wasteland, we are “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.” Our mission at NRI remains steadfast and clear: defend the “permanent things” just as Eliot did when he observed the “Waste Land” over a century ago.

Read more from NRI Senior Fellow Douglas Murray on Eliot at The Free Press here and here.

Here’s former NRI Rhodes Fellow Ian Tuttle on the 100th anniversary of “The Wasteland” from 2022.

Read M. D. Aeschliman review of the “Poems of T. S. Eliot” from the June 2016 magazine here.

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.”