John O’Sullivan
It is pretty generally accepted that Bill Buckley is one of the principal founders of modern conservatism — up there along with Reagan, Friedman, and Hayek. Some of those who concede this do so, admittedly, because they have no very high opinion of conservatism and are content to give Bill credit for it. But that is not true about his equally valid claim to be one of the main figures who helped bring Communism to an end. Liberals have been asserting since 1989 that it was a united America led by Truman and Kennedy as much as by Nixon and Reagan that contained and eventually transcended the evil empire. In that account Bill becomes a minor figure who led a noisy anti-Communist McCarthyite rabble and — sure — kept it more or less civilized.

For an immediate antidote to this nonsense, visit Eastern Europe (of which more later.)

In fact Bill performed four great services to the cause of anti-Communism and to the succouring of its victims. His first was to make anti-Communism the glue that held an otherwise heterogeneous conservative coalition together. As the conservative movement grew, therefore, so it ensured that anti-Communism was kept in the forefront of public policy and the public mind. Second, he created the magazine, National Review, that became the meeting ground for anti-Communists of different stripes. Again, through NR, he kept inserting anti-Communists perspectives into a public debate that would otherwise have marginalized them before 1968 and overwhelmed them after 1968. Third, he gave a platform and a megaphone to the two most important anti-Communist intellectuals in American life after 1945: James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. Strategically and spiritually they gave Americans far better advice on the Cold War than did the liberal intellectuals of the “vital center” who anyway after 1968 began to equivocate and appease. Fourth, Bill himself dispelled the cultivated myth that anti-Communists were by their nature crude extremists or simplistic yokels by the simple device of being himself. Regularly defeating the faculties of Harvard and Yale in debate, he won over the first thousand names in the telephone directory to the anti-Communist cause.

In Eastern Europe he won something more important — the hearts and gratitude of the citizens of the captive nations. When I visited Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, I was treated as a hero and benefactor simply by virtue of being editor of NR. Dissidents told me how they had read smuggled copies of NR by torchlight under the bedclothes. New ministers in anti-Communist governments asked me if I could arrange a meeting with WFB so that they could thank him in person. Even those Soviets still clinging on wanted to persuade him that they weren’t so bad. And now that they were finished, he could afford to be gracious.

In sum: Bill led a fight that Chambers thought was lost and Burnham feared might be endless. And he won because his troops were a minority in the West but the great majority of the East.

The president of Yale sent alumni thousands of copies of McGeorge Bundy's review of the book from the Atlantic Monthly calling Buckley a "twisted and ignorant young man." Other reviews bordered on the hyperbolic. One critic simply burst into tears, then transcribed his entire crying jag word for word.

Buckley's next book, "McCarthy and His Enemies," written with L. Brent Bozell, proved that normal people didn't have to wait for the Venona Papers to be declassified to see that the Democratic Party was collaborating with fascists. The book – and the left's reaction thereto – demonstrated that liberals could tolerate a communist sympathizer, but never a Joe McCarthy sympathizer.

Relevant to Republicans' predicament today, National Review did not endorse a candidate for president in 1956, correctly concluding that Dwight Eisenhower was not a conservative, however great a military leader he had been. In his defense, Ike never demanded that camps housing enemy detainees be closed down.

i just remember seeing it as a boy - buckley and some bearded philosopher were discussing something - when the philosopher made the statement something like, "see my book, we cannot truly say this book exists..." and the man, buckley (even black and white tv could not hide the sparkle in his grin and eyes), said (in much bigger words than i can recall), "then please hand me your non-existent book and let me smash it against your head ... and then we'll discuss whether you think your book really exists or not...." i may not recall the exact words ... but i'll never forget such brilliance.

September 7, 1965, article by Will Herberg blames Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement for the 1965 Los Angeles riots:

“For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the ‘cake of custom’ that holds us together. With their doctrine of ‘civil disobedience’ they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes … that it is perfectly all right to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance… . And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted ‘school strikes’ sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit violation of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed … .”