He Knew He Was Right

A stint in the U.S. Army at the end of World War II taught him to get along with other young Americans (who were, at first, put off by his arch mannerisms). Entering Yale in 1946, he became the ultimate Big Man on Campus: champion debater at the Yale Political Union, editor of the Yale Daily News, member of the most exclusive senior society, Skull and Bones. Yet nervous deans tried to tone down his Alumni Day speech because it attacked Yale as a bastion of secularism and collectivism. Buckley refused and was removed as speaker. Instead, he turned his speech into the book that made his young name: "God and Man at Yale."

The WASP establishment came down hard on young Buckley's apostasy. In The Atlantic Monthly, then the red-hot center of Brahmin orthodoxy, the ultimate pure-blood, McGeorge Bundy (later dean at Harvard and JFK's national-security adviser), wrote that "God and Man at Yale" was "dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author." Buckley's answer? In 1955, he started a magazine to make his arguments every other week. In the National Review's first issue, Buckley cheekily proclaimed: "For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D.s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town."

Actually, it made the National Review a cold and lonely holdout against the Zeitgeist of the mid-1950s. With the triumph of the New Deal and liberal internationalism, conservatism had become a fringe calling, certainly among the educated classes. Cloth-coat moderates dominated the Republican Party. Lionel Trilling, a Columbia professor who was at the true center of liberal intellectual hegemony, could smugly but rightly proclaim that there were "no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."

Buckley set about, in his insouciant way, to make conservatism fun and a little glamorous. He began having dinner parties with an odd lot of thinkers, radicals and Beautiful People. "He was kind of the Tina Brown of his day," says his son, Chris. "He had this dinner table and they all came to eat at it." (Patricia, a charming socialite, set a lively and brimming table; the younger Buckley likened his parents to the "Nick and Nora of conservatism.") An early contributor to the National Review was Clare Boothe Luce, playwright and soignée wife of the editor in chief of Time Inc., Henry Luce. "There were some who talked about her in a disparaging way, like, 'Why are you slumming?' " recounts Chris. His father, he recalls, answered for Mrs. Luce—in French: Tous les beaux esprits se rencontrent ("All the beautiful spirits find themselves"). There were some moody and slovenly spirits around the table, like Whittaker Chambers, the former communist who was vilified for causing the perjury conviction of liberal darling (and Soviet spy) Alger Hiss. Chambers was depressed by the mid-1950s. Buckley's editors were notoriously fractious and unruly; Buckley benignly encouraged and tolerated debate, with help from his sister Priscilla, who was managing editor and "a kind of den mother to all these high-maintenance personalities," says Chris. But Buckley senior also did some judicious weeding. In his old age, he told his son, "I spent my entire life separating the right wing from the kooks." Though it cost him contributors and readers, he banned conspiratorial members of the John Birch Society from the pages of National Review along with the anti-Semites who had stained the far right. Buckley was, however, hardly a saint. In the mid-'50s, he defended Sen. Joe McCarthy, the anti-communist demagogue. During the war against Jim Crow, he supported Southerners protesting federal integration laws. His idea of a compromise was to deny both uneducated whites and blacks the vote.

The National Review offered common ground for heretofore politically isolated conservatives: anti-communists, churchmen, anti Big Government tax cutters. Buckley gave them a simple but sacred cause around which to rally: individual freedom. "I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level," Buckley had written in "God and Man at Yale." (The words were actually borrowed from Buckley's Yale mentor, a professor named Willmoore Kendall, who edited the manuscript.) Some of the smarter young liberals also began to take notice of Buckley. Charles Peters, later founder of the neo-liberal Washington Monthly, read "God and Man at Yale" and thought, "He's on to something," Peters tells NEWSWEEK. "It called to everyone's attention that liberals had become automatically anti-religion, snobbish people. And that seemed enormously stupid to me at the time." In the 1950s, says Peters, "intellectual snobbery had crept into liberalism." Conservatives "had been treated as Neanderthals [by liberals]," but along came Buckley, "and suddenly they have a guy who sounded elegant. They couldn't be dismissed anymore as cavemen."

Buckley's brand of conservatism, at once fresh and deeply rooted, pushed aside blandly moderate, Main Street Republicanism and won the GOP nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964. The prevailing liberal ethos embodied by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson still buried Goldwater, but National Review was now setting the agenda for the Republican Party. In California, a charter subscriber was a former actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan, elected governor in 1966. A recent convert to the Republican Party in heavily Democratic Hollywood, Reagan later joked that he began reading National Review wrapped in brown paper.