Strictly Right
by Ron Capshaw
Issue 96 - November 21, 2007

The value of the book “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement” (by Linda Bridges and John Coyne Jr.: Wiley 2007) is two fold. First, Bridges and Coyne, both insiders with the magazine, but not of its first generation, nevertheless capture perfectly a different era than today when conservatives didn’t have a toehold in the media. Secondly, it refutes leftist and mainstream media characterizations of conservatives as likeminded soldiers never deviating from the commands from on high.

Strictly Right chronicles Buckley and his magazine and how they shaped conservatism into what it is today. It is hard to remember in today’s climate where John Kerry sports a rifle and a duck blind and Hillary Clinton prays in public how dominant liberalism was before National Review hit the stands in 1955. “Liberalism is the only dominant political philosophy in American life today,” wrote liberal critic Lionel Trilling five years before. And it was hard, despite the election of Republican Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 not to agree. By 1955, McCarthyism was a spent force, with former ally vice president Richard Nixon now shunning public appearances with the senator. The Democrats were back in control of Congress, and the magazine circuit was dominated by liberal weekly and bi-weeklies such as The Nation and New Republic. Even liberals such as critic Dwight MacDonald admitted, amidst all this pleothora, “we need a good conservative magazine today.”

Enter William F. Buckley and National Review. Bridges and Coyne don’t always offer a pretty picture of the behind the scenes work that went into the publishing. Buckley spent more time as a fundraiser (from, and this shows how long ago this was, friendly Hollywood backers such as Adolph Menjou, Ward Bond and John Wayne) and refereeing the ideological and personal battles that raged between cubicles: Whittaker Chambers denouncing Ayn Rand’s followers as “soulless materialists:” James Burnham arguing for an Eisenhower-Nixon second term, William Schlamm attempting to organize a more purist third party alternative; William Rusher denouncing George Will for his column advocating the dumping of Richard Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew, etc, etc. Unlike the Clinton White House, conservatives then allowed such fights to venture out of the “family” and into the public arena.

Couple these squabbles inside the magazine’s offices with a necessary purging from the conservative movement of the conspiracy crackpots, racists and anti-semites and Buckley must have been a migraine level by the early 1960s. Unlike the Democratic Party today, which refuses to repudiate support from such hate-mongers as move.on org, Cindy Sheehan, and Al Sharpton because it might lessen the money flowing in, Buckley condemned the John Birch Society for its naming Dwight Eisenhower a communist spy, and refused the alliance of such anti-semites as the Knights of the White Flower.

Today, writers such as Sam Tannenhaus, have chartered the death of conservatism with the presidency of George Bush. It may be too early to tell, but a reading of Strictly Right reveals what a big tent the movement has always been, and how, by its weathering the Great Society, the counterculture, Watergate, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, it can regain its life.

Ron Capshaw