Rediscovering the Beginnings of Conservatism, A review of [i]Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater[/i] by William F. Buckley Jr.

Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater by William F. Buckley Jr. (Basic Books: New York, 2008).

Right until the end, William F. Buckley Jr. remained as prolific as he was eloquent. Flying High is the proof. It is as graceful as anything he put between two covers, and although short—208 pages, including index—it is only the fi rst of Buckley’s posthumous works. While waiting for Basic Books to publish these reminiscences of Barry Goldwater and his era, Buckley had time to compose a similar volume on Ronald Reagan. WFB was blessed with prodigious literary talents, and he exercised them in full to his last days.

This is indeed a timely book. With so many pundits surveying Republican political setbacks and pronouncing the death of conservatism—as if the one entailed the other—the moment is right for revisiting the conservative movement’s origins. The defeat that Arizona senator Barry Goldwater suffered to incumbent Democrat Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election eclipses anything that is likely to befall the GOP in the near future. Yet it was a beginning, not an end, for the American Right.

A beginning, if not the beginning—for part of the significance of Flying High is that it reminds the reader in 2008 that conservatism did not spring fully formed from the head of Senator Goldwater or the pen of William F. Buckley Jr. The tale of what followed the Goldwater campaign of 1964—the rise of the right wing within the Republican Party and the building of new institutions and media to convey the movement’s message—has been told many times before, recently and very ably by Al Regnery in Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism (2008). Buckley, who was present at the creation, points our eyes in the other direction: back, to the people and events that made the campaign of 1964 possible.

There were conservatives in 1960, but they had relatively little political organization or leadership. Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, a staunch opponent of the New Deal at home and a non-interventionist in foreign affairs (with some exceptions regarding China), had been the Right’s great hope eight years earlier. Yet he lost the 1952 Republican presidential nomination to the moderate Dwight Eisenhower and died two years later. Eisenhower, Buckley recalls, was beloved as a war hero and “a great national figure”—but “the majority of the delegates at the 1960 Republican convention in Chicago…were also glad that he was moving on.” His heir was to be his vice president, Richard Nixon, whose anticommunist credentials “were reassuring to many who thought Ike too much the appeaser…but for not a few Republicans, especially younger ones, there was something unsatisfactory even about Nixon.” That was clear well before 1960 to Clarence Manion, former dean of the law school at Notre Dame and a “leading figure in the conservative movement” in those early days.

Manion, whose political philosophy was very much in the mold of Senator Taft, “was incensed at the liberal policies of the Eisenhower Administration,” writes Buckley. “In 1959 he conceived the need for a slim book which would give fresh syntactical life to conservative doctrine, to stand in opposition to the prevailing political winds. And who better to serve as the offi cial author than Barry Goldwater, the suave contrarian conservative from Arizona?” It was Manion who also recruited the book’s ghostwriter—Buckley’s brother-in-law, “a rangy, redheaded lawyer” named Brent Bozell, Washington editor for National Review. Bozell had written speeches for Senator McCarthy. The book he wrote for Manion under Goldwater’s name was The Conscience of a Conservative.

Goldwater, a first-term senator, had already made a name for himself as an anticommunist and a foe of America’s economically left-leaning labor unions. Bozell fused Goldwater’s free-market politics to deeper philosophical roots nourished by the ghostwriter’s Christian faith. Conscience was not only effective politics: it was transformative. Buckley quotes historians Matthew Dallek (“the book stands today as one of the most important political tracts in modern American history”) and Mary Brennan (“Conscience altered the American political landscape, galvanizing the Right and turning Goldwater into the most popular conservative in the country”) regarding the book’s importance, as well as conservative writer Pat Buchanan (“The Conscience of a Conservative was our New Testament. It contained the core beliefs of our political faith…”).

Manion conceived the book as a means to an end: “namely to fortify the sentiment in favor of nominating Goldwater for the presidency in 1960 if possible, or if not that, for the vice presidency.” Goldwater did not seek either position, though he allowed Manion and his allies to proceed with the campaign to draft him, until the Chicago convention, when it became clear that he did not have the delegates needed to win the nomination. After Goldwater and outspoken anticommunist Rep. Walter Judd failed to make it onto the ticket, “there wasn’t much for the tough young activists to wish for in Chicago, nothing left to do, really, that they cared that much about.” But Marvin Liebman—ex-communist, innovative political fundraiser, friend of the Buckleys, a “roving ambassador of the American right wing, and everybody’s best friend”—had an idea of how to turn the disappointed Youth for Goldwater into a long-term conservative force. He proposed a meeting of Goldwater’s young supporters and a few elder statesmen of the Right at Buckley’s family home, Great Elm, in Sharon, Connecticut. Out of that September 1960 meeting came the conservative youth auxiliary, Young Americans for Freedom, and its charter, the Sharon Statement.

At the Sharon meeting, the young delegates considered three contentious issues. Would their charter explicitly mention God? It did, though the fi rst chairman of the group, Robert Schuchman, “was a freethinking Jew.” Where would the organization stand on states’ rights, at a time when the South was still segregated? “The genius of the Constitution—the division of powers— is summed up in the clause which reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people,” the Sharon Statement declared. And how much stress would YAF place on free-market economics? A great deal: “when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation….”

Differences among the young conservatives on these questions reflected, in part, the fault lines of the larger movement, particularly divisions between libertarians, traditionalists, and anticommunists. Buckley, a Catholic anticommunist whose father had been a friend of the libertarian Albert Jay Nock, had ties to each camp and knew firsthand how mutually incorrigible the groups could be. After World War II, libertarians had been the first to organize themselves, launching a fortnightly publication, christened The Freeman after the journal Nock had edited in the 1920s. Economic journalists Henry Hazlitt and John Chamberlain were among the new publication’s editors, as was Suzanne La- Follette, who had been managing editor of Nock’s Freeman and would later join National Review.

The libertarians had some disagreements among themselves. Buckley relates a remarkable anecdote from one Freeman dinner attended by Ayn Rand, the uncompromising author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and Ludwig von Mises, the imposing dean of the Austrian school of economics. “Rand contradicted Mises on some doctrinal point, causing the eminent professor to stop eating and mobilize his scorn and fury on her. Ayn Rand thereupon burst into tears….” The scene is hard to imagine, and the story comes to Buckley at second-hand. Yet it rings true when Buckley writes that “Hitler, whom he fled in 1934, must have been the only human being who ever intimidated Ludwig von Mises.”

The Freeman eventually dissolved over a more mundane matter—whom to endorse in the 1952 presidential race. “There had been twenty trustees of The Freeman, men successful in their own businesses, with adamant points of view on contemporary politics,” and they split irreconcilably over whether to support Taft or Eisenhower. One refugee from the Freeman’s disintegration was the ex-communist Willi Schlamm, “an Austrian Jewish intellectual who…involved himself in the Luce [publishing] empire.” He hoped to found a journal of his own with Luce’s money; when that fell through, he suggested a joint venture with Buckley and thereby became a co-founder of National Review. Learning from the Freeman’s mistakes, Schlamm told Buckley, “There can only be a single stockholder.” That would be Buckley, who would own the magazine and have fi nal say. This allowed Buckley to hold the magazine together no matter what conflicts arose among such strong personalities as James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and Willmoore Kendall, all early editors of National Review. Ironically, Schlamm himself “came and very quickly went, a victim of the internecine organizational politics against which he had warned….”

National Review, launched in 1955, set the stage for Goldwater’s historic 1964 presidential bid in more ways than one. The philosophy Bozell would promulgate in The Conscience of a Conservative had been incubated in the magazine, and in 1961 Bozell ghosted for Goldwater a hardline anticommunist foreign policy essay in National Review; Buckley terms it “the most distinctive essay ever written for public consumption on the nature of the communist threat, and on the corresponding responsibilities of U.S. policy.” There was every reason to think that when Goldwater made a serious run for the nomination, and the presidency, in 1964, Bozell, Buckley, and other National Review contributors would be key advisors.

But it was not to be. “Brent Bozell and I were nowhere to be seen in the front lines of Barry Goldwater’s campaign,” Buckley writes. “We could guess the principal reason for this early on—the megalomania of Bill Baroody,” head of the American Enterprise Institute and, Buckley believed, a man with ambitions “to be important to Goldwater, and perhaps to a Goldwater White House.” According to Buckley, “Baroody, on whom Barry relied, had passed the word down that the candidate should distance himself personally and professionally from ‘the National Review people.’” Yet Baroody was not the sole obstacle: “Goldwater himself must have acquiesced,” Buckley believed, in denying Buckley a speaking slot at a Youth for Goldwater rally during the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco. “The dissociation did not affect the magazine’s enthusiastic endorsement of Goldwater’s candidacy,” Buckley says, but he wonders “whether Goldwater ever laid eye on” the magazine’s special supplement devoted to “A Program for a Goldwater Administration.” In 1965, when Goldwater endorsed Buckley in WFB’s run for mayor of New York City, Buckley “ruled against conveying the endorsement to the press.” He did not want to make the race a test of conservatism’s national strength, which the Goldwater endorsement might have done. Inadvertently or not, rejecting the endorsement would also have “the effect on Goldwater of acutely reminding him of the rebuff of me and National Review during his own campaign.”

Where would these tensions lead? Goldwater phoned Buckley to invite him, his brother Jim, “and anyone else you’d like” to lunch. “‘What was he up to?’ my associates wondered. I replied that he was up to being a nice guy.” Indeed he was: the exigencies of their political campaigns caused no rift, personal or philosophical, between these icons of twentieth-century conservatism.

There is much more within Flying High than all that this conveys; much more, indeed, than seems possible to fi t within two hundred-odd pages. There are vignettes of lunches with National Review’s early editors and a description of the magazine’s editorial process. Buckley recounts Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in 1959 and the warm welcome National Review planned to give him (dyeing the East River red was one idea), and he imaginatively reconstructs what Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, assigned as Khrushchev’s escort during the communist’s American sojourn, might have discussed with his aides. Nelson Rockefeller, New York governor and Goldwater’s liberal rival within the Republican Party, gets a chapter, as does Karl Hess, the Goldwater speechwriter and early contributor to National Review who later became an antiwar activist and radical libertarian. There is even an account in the book’s prologue of an expedition to Antarctica on which Goldwater and Buckley were companions.

As charming as these stories are, the most important facets of Flying High are those that show how the conservative movement coalesced around Goldwater, despite the disparate nature of its constituent parts. Conservatism today is not more fractious or politically disadvantaged than the brilliant, often cantankerous scholars, journalists, and activists who came together to back Goldwater in the early 1960s. Some on the Right look back fondly to those days as conservatism’s Golden Age. As Buckley’s book reveals, however, reclaiming the spirit of the earlier conservative movement requires more than just returning to the 1960s—it requires rediscovering figures like Manion and Bozell, as well as Goldwater himself.