The conservative movement in Buckley’s day, and perhaps even more so today, was composed of many different schools of thought
In a 1990 interview with the Washington Post, upon stepping down as editor, Buckley listed his greatest achievement as “the absolute exclusion of anything anti-Semitic or kooky from the conservative movement.” Buckley, in Continetti’s telling, found both conspiracizing and anti-Semitism to be both wrong as a matter of fact and a moral failing.
But he had another purpose in mind as well. The success or failure of the American conservative movement, which he sought to bring into being, would depend on its ability to earn respect in the consolidated academic and media apparatus of mid-century America, and that would require that it not be easily dismissed as a collection of bigots and paranoiacs. As Continetti puts it, “only a hygienic conservatism,” cleansed of logical and ethical impurities, could attract young minds and remain durable. Buckley was adamant that the term “intellectual” not become coterminous with liberal.
One of his first targets was the John Birch Society and its wealthy founder Robert Welch, who estimated in 1964 that 50 percent to 70 percent of America had already fallen under Communist control, and charged that Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander in World War II and former president of the United States, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
The nascent conservative movement that Buckley was creating, however, drew upon the same base the John Birch Society did, and the National Review was deluged with protests against Buckley’s attacks on the John Birch Society and Welch.
Create a free account to keep reading.
