Christopher H. Owen, Heaven Can Indeed Fall: The Life of Willmoore Kendall. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). 256 pp., $105.00.

IN 1994, the year that Newt Gingrich formulated the “Contract with America” and Republicans went on to capture the House of Representatives in the midterm elections for the first time in four decades, Alan Brinkley, a professor at Columbia University, published an influential essay in the American Historical Review. It was called “The Problem of American Conservatism.” The problem that Brinkley sought to diagnose was not the rise of conservatism, but what he described as the lack of imagination of American historians who had failed to acknowledge, let alone comprehend, the vitality of the Republican Right. Their implicit endorsement of a kind of Whig interpretation about the inexorable rise of liberalism had occluded the study of conservatism, rendering it “something of an orphan in historical scholarship.” Brinkley concluded that “a recognition of many traditions, including those of the Right” was overdue.

That recognition has taken place in recent decades. Historians such as Geoffrey Kabaservice have explored the ideological transformation of the GOP since the 1950s, from a bastion of establishment Republicans to an insurgent movement. Others have examined the influence of conservative media over the decades, including Eric Alterman in What Liberal Media? and Nicole Hemmer in Messengers of the Right. And in 2020, the Library of America published an anthology of conservative thought in the past century that was edited by Andrew J. Bacevich. But perhaps the most notable development over the past several decades has been the appearance of biographies of charter members of the conservative intelligentsia, including Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, L. Brent Bozell, William A. Rusher, and Ayn Rand.

CHRISTOPHER H. Owen’s Heaven Can Indeed Fall is the latest entrant to this burgeoning field. Owen, who is a professor of history at Northeastern State University, meticulously chronicles the turbulent life of Willmoore Kendall. Kendall was a Trotskyist in the 1930s who went on to become a staunch conservative, embracing Senator Joseph McCarthy and advising Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. At Yale, where he taught political theory for a number of years, his mission was to topple liberal elites by creating a conservative vanguard. Kendall, you could say, was the original polarizer. A gifted political theorist and slashing orator, Kendall championed the fusion of conservatism with populism, contending that liberals possessed an “instinctive dislike for the American way of life and for the basic political and social principles presupposed in it.” No one did more to forge the intellectual arsenal of the modern Right than Kendall.

The temerity of this Hephaestus at Yale won him a number of admirers. The political philosopher Leo Strauss, who oversaw the creation of his own Bruderbund at the University of Chicago that was dedicated to returning to the timeless wisdom of the ancients, corresponded for several decades with Kendall, lauding him as “the only man who vindicates the honor of our profession.” But Kendall’s volatility—his philandering, his heavy drinking, his flashy suits, and, above all, his sheer cussedness—also meant that he was as notorious for his temperament as his ideas. As Garry Wills observed, “Willmoore was the one man with the depth, training, and style of presentation to lead a conservative revival; but that his prickliness always got in the way of his abilities as a proselytizer.”

Both William F. Buckley, Jr., who met Kendall as a sophomore at Yale and mimicked his elaborate syntax, and Saul Bellow, who befriended Kendall in Chicago, found him fascinating. In his 1999 novel Redhunter, a defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Buckley, whom Kendall recruited into the CIA in 1950, portrays his old professor as Willmoore Sherrill of Columbia University, a mentor to a young aide to McCarthy. Sherrill enjoys nothing more than baiting his liberal colleagues at faculty meetings:

There’s an old colored gentleman who looks after my Fellows suite. He said to me this morning, “Professor, is it true there’s people who want to overthrow the government by force and violence?” I said, “Yes, that’s true Jamieson.” He said, “Well, professor, why don’t we just run them out of town?” Sherrill turned to his distinguished colleagues. “I think Jamieson has a more sophisticated understanding of democratic theory than any of you gentlemen.”

In his short story “Mosby’s Memoirs,” Bellow follows along similar, if more elegant, lines, evoking the consternation that Kendall created among his academic brethren who wanted, in contemporary parlance, to cancel him:

The real, the original Mosby approach brought Mosby hatred, got Mosby fired. Princeton University had offered Mosby a lump sum to retire seven years early. One hundred and forty thousand dollars. Because his mode of discourse was so upsetting to the academic community. Mosby was invited to no television programs. He was like the Guerrilla Mosby of the Civil War. When he galloped in, all were slaughtered.

Indeed, Kendall was a warrior intellectual par excellence who maintained a steady bead on the liberal class enemy—the unelected, unaccountable, and unholy trinity of academics, journalists, and bureaucrats who sought, as far as possible, to distend American democracy for their own elitist ends.

KENDALL, WHO was born on March 5, 1909, grew up in Oklahoma. His Sooner state origins instilled in him a lifelong suspicion of an eastern establishment that he viewed as inimical to the virtues incarnated by the American heartland. Kendall, who was the eldest son of a blind Methodist minister, experienced intense pressure at home to succeed. A child prodigy, he read Hawthorne’s short stories as a four-year-old and entered high school at age nine. Upon graduation at age fourteen, he was already working as a cub reporter for the Tulsa Tribune, a newspaper that had helped to spark the ghastly 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre with the inflammatory headline, “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.”

Kendall liked to engage in intense debates with his father, a gifted public speaker who traveled widely around Oklahoma and espoused interracial and interreligious harmony, defended Jewish rights, and denounced the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan threatened his father. But in March 1923, on his fourteenth birthday, Willmoore boasted to a friend about his plans to resuscitate a state chapter of the Junior KKK with himself as Grand Wizard. A year later, however, he condemned a Klan offshoot at the University of Oklahoma for bullying students. At age seventeen Kendall, who was fluent in Spanish and French, graduated from Oklahoma with a degree in Romance languages.

In 1931, Kendall won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Pembroke College. There he sat at the feet of the political theorist R. G. Collingwood whom he described as “the most superior dialectician I have ever known.” Kendall’s father was less impressed. He wrote to apprise Willmoore of his apprehensions that he would end up a “pedantic donkey besotted with excess of philosophical learning.” Actually, it was worse than that. At Oxford, Kendall became the proud convert of his own scholarship, embracing Trotskyism after reading Marx’s Capital, a work that fortified his previous conviction that Franklin D. Roosevelt was much too timorous in combating the twin evils of unemployment and big business. Indeed, by 1935 Kendall regarded the existence of private property itself as tantamount to “an enslaving convention” whose biggest stronghold was in supposedly democratic America. The Pembrokian’s new faith did not go unnoticed back home. “When Willmoore visited Oklahoma in 1935,” Owen writes, “his father expressed dismay that his son had accepted communist dogma.”

After graduating from Oxford, Kendall worked as a journalist for United Press International in Spain. His sympathy for the Left began to diminish as Spain lurched into civil war and anarchy, instilling in Kendall a permanent fear of the violent consequences of sudden social collapse. He returned forthwith to America to occupy a position as an instructor at Louisiana State University and to earn a Ph.D. in political theory at the University of Illinois. At Louisiana, he quickly became friends with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, both of whom were former Rhodes scholars, as well as Katherine Anne Porter. Amid what he dubbed a “comfortable pluralism,” Kendall shucked off his Trotskyist views but remained a leftist and an isolationist. His early scholarly essays hailed the wisdom of the common man, attacked judicial review, and castigated efforts to “equate democracy with a particular set of ‘natural rights.’” At bottom, the Bill of Rights, he stated, functioned as a mechanism to perpetuate elite power. As an admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he advocated majoritarianism. He would end up transferring his populist toolkit from Left to Right. For the rest of his career, he would preach that Congress, not the presidency or the judiciary, came closest to embodying the Rousseauian general will.

According to Owen, “when read closely … these early articles reveal flashes of Kendall’s brilliance, heralding his later intricately construction and inquisitorial style of scholarship.” Exhibit A was his audacious 1940 dissertation, “John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule,” which would later help him land a position at Yale. He divined in Locke’s political theory an escape hatch—a “latent premise”—that permitted Locke to “argue both for individual right and for a right of the majority to define individual rights” because he believed the people “rational and just” enough “never to withdraw a right which the individual ought to have.” “Call me Rabbi,” he telegrammed home after it passed muster.

Kendall had passionately opposed American entry into World War II, but in 1942 he landed a post at the new Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, which was headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller. Kendall’s mandate was to oversee the production of propaganda for Latin America. He told friends that he was “spreading myself like the green bay tree,” a reference to a verse from Psalm 37:35. “Intelligence work,” Owen writes, “pushed him away from the Left, for it was as an intelligence officer that Kendall made his rightward turn.” In 1946, he was appointed chief of the Latin American Division of the Office of Reports and Estimates for the Central Intelligence Group, a precursor of the CIA. Owen explains that Kendall now “found himself near the center of the burgeoning postwar American intelligence community.”

His main task was to purge communists from that community. “I’m the guy who ‘busted’ the Maurice Halperin operation at OSS and State,” he bragged to the ex-communist Nathaniel Weyl in 1960, “and because of that was named his successor.” Kendall had more than just communists in his gunsights. He also despised liberals in the CIA and State Department, presaging the Right’s antipathy toward both outfits. Bellow captures his loathing for them in “Mosby’s Memoirs”:

He said that the Foreign Service was staffed by rejects of the power structure. Young gentleman from good Eastern colleges who couldn’t make it as Wall Street lawyers were allowed to interpret the alleged interests of their class in the State Department bureaucracy.

Kendall’s hostility toward this mandarin class created a stir in 1949 when he denounced in the journal World Politics the prominent Yale professor and CIA official Sherman Kent who had published a new book, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy. Kent argued that CIA analysts should seek to provide policymakers with objective information. Kendall would have none of this. In his view, Kent’s book was neither strategic nor intelligent. It was of paramount importance not simply to collect information but to scrutinize and interpret it in light of ruthless Soviet ideological aims. Liberals shrank from acknowledging this truth. They were blind to the true gravity of the threat facing America. As controversy swirled around his critique, Kendall told the conservative scholar Francis Graham Wilson, “We’ve had a common enemy (though of course not a common quarrel for many years)—the Liberals.”

In 1947, Yale, on the basis of his book on Locke and his government service, appointed Kendall a fellow at Pierson College. It got more than it bargained for. After he unsuccessfully battled his senior colleagues to hire Eric Voegelin and Herman Finer, Kendall became a pariah in the Government department. “From now on I teach my classes and don’t get close enough to my senior colleagues,” Kendall remarked, “to see the whites of their eyes.”

Not quite. With Buckley and Bozell as his sidekicks, he continually courted public controversy. New Haven became Kendall’s proving ground for successive assaults on liberal orthodoxies. In April 1948, in a debate with supporters of Henry Wallace’s campaign for the presidency, Kendall stated over the radio station WAVZ that they had “in effect transferred their loyalty to the Soviet Union.” There can be no doubting that Wallace, who visited a Soviet labor camp in 1944, only to praise it for its enlightened practices, was naïve about the Soviet threat, but this was putting it starkly indeed. After the broadcast, Kendall told Nathaniel S. Colley, a Black law student who had defended Wallace, that the accusation had “specific reference to and included him.” After Colley threatened a lawsuit, Kendall recanted. 

“For Kendall,” Owen rather blandly notes, “the sovereign right of the American people to protect itself from all enemies took precedence over individual liberties.” In 1950, he publicly supported the “Mundt Bill,” which called for deporting communists. They were, Kendall decreed, “incapable of participating in democratic government.” With William F. Buckley, Jr. or L. Brent Bozell serving as a partner in debates about censorship, civil liberties, and civil rights legislation, Kendall acquired an insalubrious reputation among the wider Yale faculty. In 1950, the political scientist V.O. Key told Kendall he would never receive a promotion and could either resign or stay on as an associate professor. Matters were not improved by the publication in 1954, on the eve of the Army-McCarthy hearings, of Buckley and Bozell’s book, McCarthy and His Enemies, which Kendall closely edited. Buckley and Bozell stated that McCarthy’s great challenge was “how to get by our disintegrated ruling elite, which had no stomach for battle, and get down to the business of fighting the enemy in our midst.”

It amounted to a popularization of Kendall’s teachings about majoritarian rule and social consensus. McCarthy was a formative figure for Kendall and Buckley, a populist tribune who could mobilize Americans against the threat of internal subversion that had been fostered by naïve New Deal liberals. Like Buckley, Kendall always remained a McCarthy votary. In 1963, he published an essay titled “McCarthyism: The Pons Asinorum of Contemporary Conservatism,” which pleaded for social orthodoxy and maintained that liberals were acting in a revolutionary fashion to undermine it.

At the heart of Kendall’s sallies was a sweeping claim: majority rule meant that Americans need not be squeamish about excising the social “cancer” of communism from the body politic. So wedded was Kendall to his stance about the limits of liberty, including free expression, that in one essay he declared that the Athenian Assembly had been well within its rights to execute Socrates as a public enemy. Kendall also denounced a bipartisan foreign policy as inherently elitist and alien to American traditions. Instead, foreign policy should consist of the “native good sense of the American electorate.”

WHEN NATIONAL Review first appeared in 1955, it offered Kendall a wider ambit for his strictures. The inaugural editorial warned of a vast liberal propaganda machine “engaged in a major, sustained assault upon the sanity, and upon the prudence and the morality of the American people.” But how sane and prudent and moral were the fledgling magazine’s own stands? It was a vociferous opponent of civil rights at home and a reliable apologist for nasty right-wing regimes abroad. In 1960, Kendall reviewed Nathaniel Weyl’s book The Negro in American Civilization for National Review, a racist tract that argued for the innate biological inferiority of Blacks. Kendall asked,

Could it be we shall never do justice to the Negroes in our midst, or the Negroes to themselves, save as we all recognize that as a group they may have a lesser capacity than the rest of us for civilizational achievement?” When we impose upon them equal responsibility for civilizational achievement we may be doing them not justice but injustice.

Kendall, who visited Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, wrote Leo Strauss in a 1957 letter that the military strongman had gotten a bum rap: El Jefe’s bloody and corrupt rule actually exemplified “Hobbes’ ‘public-spirited philosophy,’ in your own phrase, translated into palpitating reality; wherefore to call it, as men commonly do, a dictatorship based on something called force, is to miss all in it that is most interesting.”

As the awestruck tone of his correspondence with Strauss, which was published in 2002 in Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives, reveals, Kendall had a man-crush on him. In one letter, Kendall described himself as “always in statu pupillari with you...” The two bonded over their mutual interest in philosophy and politics as well as their contempt for the intellectual aridity of the behavioral political scientists who dominated the profession. Under Strauss’ influence, Kendall performed a volte-face on his original views about Locke’s “latent premise.” “‘Locke the liberal,’” Strauss told Kendall, “is the chief or perhaps the sole idol in the temple of liberalism and whoever questions that idol is guilty of what the liberals themselves call ‘orthodoxy.’”

Kendall echoed Strauss’ contention that Locke had deliberately concealed his true views about private property and individual rights for fear of riling up his countrymen. Kendall, who had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1952, wrote that Locke’s praise for Christian morals was humbug, a smokescreen for hedonism, or what Strauss, in a memorable phrase, deemed “the joyless pursuit of joy.” Modern liberal society, Kendall averred, had gone badly astray in elevating individual rights above social duties. “The Lockeans in America,” Kendall wrote, “are the Liberals,” while “Conservatives ... must learn to understand themselves as the anti-Lockeans.” Strauss was elated. He expressed his admiration for Kendall’s “forceful and noble” work, declaring that he was “the only man who, without being my student, understood marvelously what I thought and intended.” It’s a pity that Owen never grapples with the unresolved tension between Kendall’s attraction to the elitism propounded by Strauss and his own advocacy of populism, not to mention the discrepancy between his personal life and ostentatious avowal of the need for a public morality. Like not a few conservatives over the years, he was wont to preach water and drink wine. If Kendall remained on the warpath against liberals, he also went on to battle Buckley in 1963 after he made Kendall a contributing rather than a senior editor at National Review. Kendall, who was teaching at the University of Dallas, demanded that Buckley remove his name from the masthead before going on to declare that he felt “about NR, much as I would about an ex-wife of mine who’d become a call-girl.” Kendall’s quondam protege gave as good as he got, responding that when it came to “wives and call-girls,” he could “only welcome the news that you have finally learned to distinguish between the two.” Decades later, when I met Buckley for lunch at the New York Yacht Club, he bemusedly recounted that he had instituted the change at Kendall’s own suggestion, only to be denounced by him for following through on it.

WHEN KENDALL died in June 1967, his old friend Charles Hyneman spoke of his “raging compulsion to expose error and force recognition of sound principles.” His former student at Yale Charles M. Lichenstein declared, “here is one sometime disciple of his who—however he messed up our border treaties—never will forget, never will reject, and never will apologize for his influence.” A posthumous collection of his essays was aptly titled Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum. Kendall had tried to live what Diana Trilling referred to as a life of significant contention but regularly got tangled up in insignificant ones. Equal parts visionary and crank, he didn’t suffer fools gladly but often acted foolishly. He knew he was right. In his generous and absorbing biography, Owen treads lightly around Kendall’s foibles and mishaps but ends up underscoring that his true credo wasn’t conservatism. It was radicalism.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.