Daniel Kelly, Living on Fire: The Life of L. Brent Bozell Jr. (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2014), 272 pp., $27.95.

IT SOUNDS LIKE THE PREMISE OF A NOVEL: Two gifted young men meet in college, become inseparable friends and plot the beginnings of a political movement that will irrevocably change American politics. Their contemporaries predict that one will become a prominent writer and editor who will influence both elites and average voters, while the other will become a transformative politician whose unstoppable drive will propel him to the White House. As events unfold, one will achieve all his dreams and more, while the other will go insane and die in obscurity.

Such, in fact, was the real-life story of William F. Buckley Jr. and his best friend and brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr. After graduating from Yale in 1950, they helped to create the modern conservative movement. They channeled the ferment stirred by McCarthyism and established National Review, the magazine that gave the movement intellectual guidance and focus. Buckley rose to national prominence as an author, media personality and arbitrator of internal disputes within the conservative camp. He produced the provocative best seller God and Man at Yale at the age of twenty-five and deployed his wit and charisma to attract recruits to the conservative cause. His quest to move conservatism from the margins to the center of American political life came to fruition with Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980. He ended up as the éminence grise of the movement, only to view what he had wrought with trepidation by the end of his life.

“Hell Bent” Bozell was, for a while, as much of a conservative-movement golden boy as Buckley. In 1960, he both cofounded the activist group Young Americans for Freedom and, as ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater, penned the movement’s canonical text, The Conscience of a Conservative. But Bozell’s own election campaigns failed, and during the 1960s he increasingly distanced himself from Buckley and the New Right that he had helped to create. In 1966, he started the conservative Catholic magazine Triumph, but its hard-edged theocratic politics attracted few readers.

By the mid-1970s, Bozell was in the throes of alcoholism and manic depression. His political and intellectual aspirations cut short, he plunged into a nightmare succession of arrests, forced hospitalizations, escapes and recommitments. When he died in 1997, there were few who remembered him aside from movement veterans and scholars of conservatism.

Living on Fire, the new biography of Bozell written by the historian Daniel Kelly (who died in 2012), is a sympathetic and briskly readable account that is candid about its subject’s personal torments and failure of promise. But in a curious way, it both makes too much and too little of Bozell’s significance. It overestimates his impact on the conservative movement as it developed from the 1960s onward, yet underestimates the ways in which he was a precursor of the snarling, turbulent conservative movement we have today. It is Bozell, not Buckley, who deserves to be remembered as the unacknowledged godfather of the Tea Party.

BOZELL WAS BORN IN 1926 in Omaha, Nebraska. His father and namesake was a founding partner of what became a highly successful advertising and public-relations firm, now operating as Bozell Worldwide. The young Brent enjoyed a prosperous and relatively uneventful boyhood. In 1944, at age eighteen, he won the American Legion’s national oration contest, then served in the merchant marine and navy at the tail end of World War II.

In 1946, he enrolled at Yale University. As Kelly notes, “Brent arrived at Yale a Democrat and an Episcopalian. He left a Republican and a Catholic.” Though Bozell seems to have converted to Catholicism of his own initiative, his political transformation came about thanks largely to his classmate, Bill Buckley. The two became best friends and formed a near-invincible debating partnership, in which Bozell was the grave orator to Buckley’s sardonic verbal assassin. Buckley increasingly influenced Bozell to adopt his blend of conservative Catholic social values, anti–New Deal Republicanism and hard-line anti-Communism. According to Kelly, Bozell even went so far as to acquire some of his friend’s faux-aristocratic mannerisms and verbal tics.

In his senior year of college, Bozell married Buckley’s favorite sister, Patricia. In the fall of 1950, when Bozell was in Yale Law School and living a few doors down from Buckley in a New Haven suburb, his wife gave birth to the first of what would be ten children, all of whom inherited their father’s bright red hair. (Patricia Buckley Bozell later explained that she’d had to abandon horseback riding, an activity at which she excelled, since “I was always pregnant.”)

Buckley and Bozell were captivated by Joseph McCarthy’s headline-grabbing investigations into domestic subversion during the early 1950s. The two were not put off by the Wisconsin senator’s character assassination and anti-Communist hyperbole. Quite the contrary. They indulged in it themselves in the advertisements and radio spots they wrote against Connecticut’s Democratic senator William Benton in the 1952 elections on behalf of the Republican candidate, Prescott Bush. “Senator Benton has pampered and coddled loyalty and security risks in his own office,” they charged. “Senator Benton energetically leads the Administration’s effort to cover up Communist treachery in government.”1

After Bozell graduated from law school, he toiled with his brother-in-law on a book defending McCarthy and his populist crusade. McCarthy and His Enemies, published in early 1954, essentially concluded that the ends justified the means. Communism, in the view of Buckley and Bozell, presented such a grave threat that extreme measures were needed to root out Communist ideas from American government and society. Those who protested that these actions violated traditional civil liberties were, the authors strongly implied, unpatriotic. And since Democrats and moderate Republicans could not be trusted to act on their own to remove security risks, McCarthyism was a success because it spurred them to do so.

Buckley and Bozell conceded that McCarthy himself had at times made exaggerated or unsupported charges, though his overall record was “extremely good.” It was not true, they maintained, that liberalism was the same thing as Communism, as McCarthy and many of his followers often claimed. But while McCarthy the man was fallible, McCarthyism was a movement “around which men of good will and stern morality [could] close ranks.” Of course, they were wrong. As Sidney Hook pointed out at the time, no one did more to discredit genuine anti-Communism than McCarthy and his associates. The Kremlin should have been delighted by his efforts.

McCarthy, who by the time of the book’s publication had become a full-blown alcoholic, complained that he couldn’t understand it: “It’s too intellectual for me.” But he was sufficiently impressed with Bozell that he hired him as his speechwriter and adviser.

BOZELL WAS ONE OF THE FIRST writers and editors at National Review, the conservative intellectual magazine Buckley founded in 1955. When McCarthy died in 1957, Bozell moved into conservative journalism full-time. He became, Kelly writes, one of National Review’s “more prolific contributors.” His articles focused on the Communist menace, the Eisenhower administration’s failings in domestic and foreign policy, and the unconstitutional overreach of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. Bozell’s views in the late 1950s were in line with what was later termed “fusionism,” the synthesis of traditionalism, libertarianism and anti-Communism that defined the emerging conservative movement and that would be championed by National Review’s Frank Meyer. More recently, David Brooks has revived the notion.

Kelly’s biography, like some other accounts, implies that Bozell acted as National Review’s principal in-house defender of civil rights. No doubt Bozell criticized Buckley’s notorious 1957 editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail,” which justified Jim Crow oppression in the South on the grounds that the white community was “the advanced race.” But Bozell argued only that the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited states from abridging the right to vote on account of race. He believed that private businesses were fully entitled to deny service to African Americans, while the principle of federalism meant that state and local governments could maintain segregated schools and other public facilities. Bozell was a harsh and unrelenting critic of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and he denied that the court was “the final arbiter of what the Constitution means.” During the Little Rock High School integration crisis, he castigated Arkansas governor Orval Faubus for caving in to federal pressure instead of upholding John Calhoun’s right of interposition.2

Bozell’s McCarthyist credentials and conservative outlook commended him to Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. The senator, who had been one of the few Republicans to vote against McCarthy’s censure, became the most prominent conservative politician left standing after the Republican Party’s disastrous 1958 elections. (Bozell was one of the victims of the anti-GOP backlash that year in an abortive run for Maryland’s House of Delegates.) Goldwater used Bozell as a speechwriter and, at the urging of backers who wanted the Arizonan to run for president in 1960, hired the thirty-four-year-old to ghostwrite a book that would publicize his views. Bozell wrote The Conscience of a Conservative in about six weeks, with little input from Goldwater. To everyone’s surprise, it became the biggest political blockbuster of all time, selling 3.5 million copies by 1964.

The Conscience of a Conservative appealed to young people in particular because of its romantic assumption that the heroic individual could galvanize sweeping change through sheer force of will. “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient,” ran one well-known passage, “for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” (No one reading those lines would guess that Goldwater was an isolated and largely ineffective senator, with almost no legislative accomplishments to his name.) The book overturned conventional wisdom by presenting conservatism as an idealistic philosophy attuned to the spiritual nature of humanity, while liberalism stood for mere grubby materialism. And Bozell channeled the restless spirit of the coming decade in his paean to freedom, individual autonomy, existential authenticity and radical action. With totalitarianism threatening at home and abroad, readers were summoned to a life-or-death struggle to “enforce the Constitution and restore the Republic.”

The book’s specific policy stances were also radical. Bozell proposed to devolve to the states all federal programs not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, including social-welfare programs, education, agriculture, public power and public housing. Federal spending would be reduced by 10 percent each year in all areas where “federal participation is undesirable.” Progressive income taxation would be repealed, as would the farm subsidy program. The federal government would be forbidden to impose its understanding of civil rights (other than voting rights) on the Southern states—and in any case, Bozell declared that he was “not impressed by the claim that the Supreme Court’s decision on school integration is the law of the land.” In foreign policy, Bozell said that the United States should act unilaterally, break diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, achieve military superiority in equipment and weapons, and bring total victory over Communism closer by allowing battlefield commanders to deploy “small, clean nuclear weapons.”

With the success of The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater became the conservative movement’s darling, while Bozell was poised to become one of its principal spokesmen. Instead, he gradually moved away from the movement he had helped to birth. While his former soul mate Buckley channeled the conservative movement toward Reagan’s victory in 1980, Bozell made all the wrong moves and backed all the wrong horses. But it is Bozell’s trajectory after 1960, not before, that seems to have greater relevance today. His dissents and divergences anticipated the missteps that have afflicted conservatism over the past decade, particularly in the years since the rise of the Tea Party movement.

Bozell’s first miscalculation was his declaration that, after Goldwater abandoned his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, conservatives should abandon the Republican Party, which had too many Eisenhower-style moderates to be worth saving. The way forward would be to create a purely conservative third party. Bozell later backtracked from this position, but stipulated that the conservative movement should act as a sort of fifth column seeking to infiltrate the GOP. The movement would preserve its freedom of action by ensuring that “its ties with the Republican organization will be, as a practical matter, severable—ideally at a moment’s notice.”3

This, in fact, would be the approach that Goldwater’s supporters pursued, culminating in their seizure of enough delegates to the 1964 GOP convention to secure the presidential nomination for their candidate. But it did the conservatives little good in the long term to portray themselves as disloyal subversives burrowing into the party with the goal of ruling or ruining it. Farther-thinking strategists such as Reagan and Buckley instead would present conservatives as loyal Republicans capable of coexisting with moderate party faithful—so long as ultimate control rested with the conservatives.

Bozell had been one of the founders of the Young Americans for Freedom organization, and along with Goldwater was a principal speaker at the group’s packed anti-Communist rally in Madison Square Garden in March 1962. The conclusion of Bozell’s speech brought the crowd to their feet as he envisioned the orders a conservative president would give upon taking office:

To the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Make the necessary preparations for landing in Havana. To our commander in Berlin: Tear Down the Wall. To our chief of mission in the Congo: Change sides. To the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission: Schedule testing of every nuclear weapon that could conceivably serve the military purpose of the West. To the Chief of the CIA: You are to encourage liberation movements in every nation of the world under Communist domination, including the Soviet Union itself. And you may let it be known that when, in the future, men offer their lives for the ideals of the West, the West will not stand idly by.

As much as Bozell’s young audience loved this apocalyptic rhetoric, however, it struck the vast majority of Americans as dangerous and irresponsible. In The Conscience of a Conservative, Bozell lamented that “a craven fear of death is entering the American consciousness.” But demanding that the American people embrace heroic self-immolation was hardly the way to win their votes. Buckley recognized this when he killed an article Bozell submitted to National Review favoring a preemptive strike against the USSR.

IN EARLY 1961, BOZELL relocated his family to Spain, renting a farm near the sixteenth-century monastic palace El Escorial. Kelly suggests that Bozell may have wanted to move there in order to have a distraction-free environment in which to produce a book about the Warren court, or because costs were low, or because he wanted to live in a thoroughly Catholic society. What the book skips around, however, is the extent to which Bozell was attracted to the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

Scholars continue to debate whether Franco is better described as a fascist or an authoritarian. What is indisputable is that Spain under his rule was at odds with American ideals of freedom and democracy and presented a gruesome contradiction to the basically libertarian philosophy Bozell had extolled as Goldwater’s ghostwriter. After Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, thanks in large part to assistance from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, he abolished independent political parties, trade unions and free elections. The regime executed and imprisoned opponents by the thousands, demonized Jews and Freemasons as well as Communists, and suppressed women’s rights. And Bozell can hardly have failed to notice that, for all his praise of decentralization and states’ rights in America, Spain was the most centralized country in Western Europe and enthusiastically persecuted advocates of regional autonomy.

But Bozell was greatly impressed by the ways in which the Spanish regime elevated the power of the Catholic Church and prohibited other religions. The church ran the country’s schools and imposed cultural censorship; divorce, contraceptives and abortion were illegal. Bozell was also enthralled by the throne-and-altar conservatism of the Carlist monarchists (part of Franco’s Falangist coalition) as well as the medieval poverty, piety and passion of Spain. His wife recalled, “In Spain he was swept away . . . by the concept of Christendom. Where before he was a dedicated Catholic, he [now] became a Catholic who believed that all thinking, all action, no matter where and when, should be rooted in Catholicism.”

Bozell began to introduce religio-political absolutism into his writings. In a long article entitled “Freedom or Virtue?” published in National Review in September 1962, Bozell declared that the libertarians in the conservative movement were wrong to believe that freedom was the highest value. In fact, the principal end of humanity was religious salvation, which required virtue. Economic and political freedom were good only to the extent that they supported virtue. And since humans were prone to stray if left to their own devices, government should use its power to inhibit freedom in order to promote virtue—by outlawing divorce, for example. This was consistent with the American tradition, according to Bozell, since the Founding Fathers’ writings contained “not a hint of the ideology of freedom . . . not a word suggesting that freedom is the goal of the commonwealth.”

Bozell wasn’t yet calling for the traditionalists to break off from the libertarians in the conservative coalition. Anti-Communism still provided the glue holding the two wings of the movement together. Bozell instructed liberal Catholics that the church’s mission was not to end poverty but, rather, to lead the Christian West in a “crusade” against Communism. Increasingly, however, Bozell would argue that religious conservatives and libertarians had little in common, and indeed were diametrically opposed on many points.

Religious absolutism prompted Bozell to reevaluate the distinction he and Buckley had carefully drawn between liberalism and Communism in McCarthy and His Enemies. Following the formulation of political philosopher Eric Voegelin, Bozell claimed that liberalism and all other modern revolutionary ideologies that had emerged since the Enlightenment were secular versions of gnosticism. And the goal of all gnostics was to “immanentize the eschaton”: to create the kingdom of heaven on earth.

There was no point in conservatives arguing with liberals, then, since both sides held incompatible views of human nature. Liberal aspirations to improve the lot of the poor, for instance, were expressions of what Bozell called the “hope of perfecting man through the agency of man,” and were foredoomed to failure—for God had taught that the poor would always be with us. And liberals, according to Bozell, were coming to understand that their dream of an earthly paradise could only be fulfilled “not by changing society, but by changing man”—through Communism.4

Not surprisingly, Bozell deemed the Democratic Party basically illegitimate. He suggested to Buckley that the Kennedy administration had timed the Cuban missile crisis to benefit Democrats in the 1962 elections.5

Bozell became increasingly dissatisfied with the compromises of American democracy and the inconsistencies within traditional Christian conservatism. As Buckley’s protégé Garry Wills shrewdly observed, “I think Brent’s starting point is a distrust of reality. He demands of creation a consistency it cannot afford him; and thinking it an insult to the Creator to accept such a messy universe, he tidies it up by cutting a large part of it away.” And as Bozell continued to marinate in Spanish politics and mysticism, Wills warned, “He is taking an authoritarian course that can do [National Review] no good, I am afraid. Franco may be good for Spain, but transferred to America his kind of rule goes down hard, and there is no reason for anyone to waste time trying to make it go down.”6

BOZELL RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES by mid-1963, and by early the next year had decided to challenge the congressman in his Maryland district for a seat in the House of Representatives. The incumbent, Charles McC. “Mac” Mathias, was a moderate Republican and Yale graduate from a long-established Maryland family—“the living image of a type that Brent detested,” according to Kelly. What especially raised conservative hackles was the fact that he was one of only a handful of members of Congress from segregated states who openly advocated integration. The district’s registration was three-to-two Democratic, and a New Right candidate like Bozell had no realistic chance of winning in a general election. Nonetheless, anticipating the logic of Tea Partiers decades in the future, he preferred to launch a primary challenge against a moderate Republican in a losing cause than to defeat a Democrat in a more conservative district.

Bozell’s campaign also proved ahead of its time in claiming that Mathias was not a “real” Republican, though his great-grandfather had run on the same ticket as Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the Republican Policy Committee determined that he had supported party positions 83 percent of the time. Bozell cast Mathias as a soft-on-Communism advocate of big-government handouts, and said that his opponent’s support for civil rights would lead to “compulsory integration” at bayonet point. At a time when religion rarely figured into electoral contests, Bozell implied that Mathias’s opposition to mandatory (rather than voluntary) school prayer meant that he was an atheist. (In fact, Mathias was a devout Episcopalian.)

Kelly’s account quotes various Bozell campaign workers to the effect that he was “the greatest natural campaigner” ever. His principal fund-raiser, General Albert C. Wedemeyer, perhaps more accurately described Bozell’s appeal when he wrote to Buckley that “I cannot tolerate middle-of-the-road people. I would rather have them far over in the gutter either to the right or the left but with convictions and the courage to defend them.”7 The Republicans of Maryland’s Sixth District, however, did not warm to Bozell. They were persuaded by the incumbent’s argument that Bozell was a “radical” seeking to impose an “alien doctrine” on the GOP. Mathias trounced the conservative in the primary before going on to win the general election and, later, several terms as senator. Bozell never ran for office again.

In the fall of 1964, Barry Goldwater ran for president on a Republican platform that was almost identical to the radical program Bozell had laid out for him in The Conscience of a Conservative, including opposition to federally enforced Southern desegregation. He went down to smashing defeat in every part of the country outside the Deep South and took most of the GOP with him, reducing the party’s representation in Congress to levels unseen since the New Deal’s high tide. The magnitude of the public rejection made many conservatives rethink their strategy. Frank Meyer, one of Bozell’s intellectual sparring partners at National Review, admitted that conservatives could no longer seek to repeal the entire New Deal outright, since most Americans would interpret the elimination of Social Security and other programs as “a radical tearing down of established institutions. . . . It has to be made very clear that conservatives by their nature proceed in all changes with caution.”8 Chastened leaders like Buckley and Reagan came to realize that conservatism could not win national elections if it refused all compromise and embraced extremism and unpopular positions.

Bozell, however, was prepared to double down. In 1965, he vehemently objected to Buckley’s condemnation of the John Birch Society. When Buckley refused to publish his protest letter, Bozell asked that his name be removed from National Review’s masthead. Indeed, Bozell later turned to the Birch Society’s founder for advice about Triumph, the conservative Catholic magazine he started in 1966. And although Triumph originally was marketed as a CatholicNational Review, Bozell quickly took the publication in a far more radical direction.

In short order, Triumph attacked American Catholic bishops (for their alleged weakness on abortion and failure to crack down on liberal deviancy); the Catholic Church (for its Vatican II reforms); the Constitution (for vesting final authority in “the people” rather than God); the United States (for its moral degeneracy); and the conservative movement (for its secularism). By 1967, the magazine was explicitly calling for Catholic theocracy.

Kelly’s account suggests several reasons for Triumph’s radicalization. Bozell’s jealousy of and growing separation from his more famous brother-in-law led him to take positions that he knew would distress Buckley. Bozell’s incipient mental illness may also have played a role. Conservative thinker Russell Kirk, who briefly wrote for Triumph, felt that Bozell had been possessed by “the demon of the absolute,” which led him to “look for a dogma in all things.”

Buckley felt that his former friend had absorbed the “antinomian” ambience of the late 1960s, when “formulations à outrance” became the norm. Indeed, Triumph closely resembled the leftist revolutionary publications of the time in its millenarianism, its told-you-so delight in urban riots and other ills of the era, and its contempt for America, which it often spelled “Amerika” to emphasize its similarity to Nazi Germany. Bozell boycotted patriotic and civic celebrations and refused to salute the flag.

Bozell even took a page from the Students for a Democratic Society playbook when he staged an antiabortion demonstration at George Washington University in Washington, DC, in August 1970. With his group, the Sons of Thunder (modeled after a pro-Franco Carlist militia), Bozell occupied a campus building, allegedly assaulted police with a large wooden cross and was dragged off to jail, bleeding and in handcuffs. New Right and New Left had come full circle, with Bozell now exhibiting the same sense of martyrdom, exaltation of “direct action” and with-us-or-against-us mentality that characterized his erstwhile political opposites.

But the conservative movement as a whole didn’t follow Bozell’s path, and he was not really, as Kelly half asserts, a founder of the Christian Right. Paul Weyrich spoke for most Christians and conservatives when he worried that Bozell’s actions would lead the public to “equate abortion opposition with Black power and college lunacy.” Right-wing civil disobedience wouldn’t resurface on a large scale until Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue of the 1980s and 1990s. Bozell’s bid to lead an ecumenical antiabortion movement was thwarted by the Catholic bishops (who feared further violence) and his own magazine’s antipathy toward Protestants; Triumph maintained that only Catholics were authentic Christians.

Indeed, for all Bozell’s personal fecundity, he was something of a mule in terms of his influence on the conservative movement as it developed after 1960. He disavowed his bookThe Warren Revolution shortly after its publication in 1966, and hardly any conservative scholars seem to have directly followed his take on constitutional originalism. Few conservatives nowadays call for Catholic theocracy or advocate some of the more interesting ideas that came out of Triumph’s extremism, including its moral opposition to nuclear weapons, its promotion of a quasi-communal economy, and its condemnation of capitalism and the free market. Triumph, which never had more than a few thousand subscribers, finally sputtered to a halt in the mid-1970s, after which Bozell’s mental and financial troubles all but incapacitated him. He spent the last years of his life performing Catholic charitable work and regained some measure of internal peace before dying from pneumonia at age seventy-one.

BOZELL PARTIALLY RECONCILED WITH BUCKLEY before his death, but in the 1960s and 1970s he would have presented National Review’s leader with a series of object lessons on how not to conduct the conservative movement. Now that the movement no longer has Buckley’s guidance, it has tumbled into many of Bozell’s pitfalls. The Tea Party is much closer to Bozell than Buckley in its permanent rebellion against the Republican Party and its leadership, its determination to eliminate any vestiges of moderation from the GOP, its inability to distinguish between liberalism and Communism, and its use of religion to divide rather than unite.

Buckley wanted the modern conservative movement to be intellectually respectable and politically responsible. He knew that the wild, paranoid conspiracy theories of the Birchers made conservatism look “ridiculous and pathological.”9 Like Reagan, he believed that conservatism needed to win friends rather than destroy enemies, and that conservatives had to devise policies to appeal to Americans rather than mocking them as ignorant and cowardly sheep. He knew that traditionalism and libertarianism could only be held together by refraining from taking either belief to its extremes. And he cautioned against the tendency of Bozell and other conservatives toward fanaticism and obsession, which ultimately represented a surrender of individual freedom. His warnings are as pregnant with meaning today as they were then. The problem with living on fire is that you end up flaming out.

Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author, most recently, of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party(Oxford University Press, 2012).

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Sage Ross. CC BY-SA 2.0.

1 William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell Jr. radio copy, n.d. (1952). William F. Buckley Jr. Papers (Yale University) 97-M-160-4: “Corr.–1950s.”

2 Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism(New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 168.

3 L. Brent Bozell Jr., “The Challenge to Conservatives, II,” National Review, January 14, 1961, 12.

4 “To Magnify the West,” reprinted in L. Brent Bozell Jr., Mustard Seeds: A Conservative Becomes a Catholic (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2001).

5 L. Brent Bozell Jr. to William F. Buckley Jr., October 23, 1962. Buckley Papers I-18: “Buckley Family - Bozell, Patricia and L. Brent (1962).”

6 Garry Wills to William F. Buckley Jr., n.d. (1964?). Buckley Papers I-33: “Wills, Garry (1964).”

7 Albert C. Wedemeyer to William F. Buckley Jr., August 21, 1963. William F. Buckley Jr. Papers I-28, “Wetherby-Weiner (1963).”

8 Frank S. Meyer, “What Next for Conservatism?” National Review, December 1, 1964, 1057.

9 William F. Buckley Jr. to Edward T. Foley, April 17, 1962. William F. Buckley Jr. Papers I-20: “Foley, Edward T. (1962).”