The Press: Angry Voice on the Right

As a commercial publishing venture, National Review magazine is a dud. In its brief history, it has spent some $860,000 more than it has taken in. Its founder, Editor in Chief William F. Buckley Jr., 34, works for nothing, says that he had to resign from the Yale Club for “economic reasons.” But by Bill Buckley’s lights, National Review is nonetheless a spanking success: it has become the most notable U.S. periodical speaking for the far political right.

As of this week, celebrating its fifth birthday, National Review has a circulation of 31,913, placing it among the leading secular journals of opinion. National Review achieved that status against such veteran competitors as the New Republic (circ. 35,931) and the Nation (circ. 24,015), whose viewpoints place them at the other end of the political spectrum.

National Review is bossed by a brilliant young man who has all his life carried a torch as if it were a branding iron for what he calls conservatism. Bill Buckley is the son of a man who built a $100 million empire in Latin American oil. From his weaning, Buckley was immersed in conservative doctrine. At age six, Bill wrote an angry letter to King George V, demanding that England pay its war debt. As a Yale undergraduate, he advised the U.S. State Department to deliver an ultimatum to Russia: Either hold free elections in Czechoslovakia—or else.

Bill Buckley entered Yale in 1946 as a confirmed conservative and a Roman Catholic. He was soon appalled—and not the least of his talents is in being appalled —at discovering that his own values were unfashionable there. So, in 1951, Buckley produced a bestselling book called God and Man at Yale. It accused the Yale faculty, in sweeping terms, of teaching along anti-Christian and anticapitalistic lines. God and Man at Yale became a pro and con reference point for political eggheads of both the left and right.

After God and Man, Buckley, in company with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, wrote a book called McCarthy and His Enemies, an apologia for the late Senator from Wisconsin that was soundly denounced by many who had never taken the trouble to read it. This established Bill Buckley as conservatism’s enfant terrible as well as the scourge of liberalism. National Review, a magazine that would provide him with a regular opportunity to play both roles, was the result. He established National Review as the only U.S. magazine that would “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’ ‘

In its five years of life, Buckley has led National Review through a sometimes baffling intellectual maze. In 1956, one of its editors, James (The Managerial Revolution) Burnham, recommended President Eisenhower’s reelection: “The least bad choice.” In the same issue, another editor, William S. Schlamm, urged Eisenhower’s defeat: “To liberate the Republican Party from the man who is destroying it.” In 1960 the magazine has endorsed Richard M. Nixon, but with the back of its hand (“Who likes Nixon’s Republicanism? We don’t”), as the only alternative to the Democrats’ John F. Kennedy.

In a labyrinth of double negatives, the National Review’s Buckley describes segregation as “not intrinsically immoral.” He encourages sit-in demonstrations against segregation, but at the same time he violently opposes compelling school integration by law. The magazine is against the graduated income tax, the inheritance tax, centralized government, and Dr. Albert Schweitzer, whose theology, according to a book review published in the Sept. 10 issue, is more destructive than the H-bomb.

Last week Editor in Chief Buckley expressed confidence that in the future, conservatism could only move upward. Already, he said, National Review has sparked a conservative revival among U.S. college students: “It is easy to pooh-pooh the fact that the party of the right is now the largest party in the Political Union at Yale, but it’s very important. The point is we’re humming.”