(8 of 10)
United Hostility. Many a bright young undergraduate sets the world ablaze with a precocious book only to see it flicker out in a year or two, and nothing is heard from him again. Buckley has fed the flames and avoided obscurity because he had the sustained drive—and also the money. Thanks to $125,000 from the family plus $300,000 he raised elsewhere, he was able to start National Review in 1955, a publication that provided him with a voice. It also served as a rallying point for other conservatives. To Review came Russell Kirk and Frank S. Meyer, Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham. From the outset, they quarreled snappishly on its pages. Traditionalists like Kirk, who value society over the individual, battled libertarians like Meyer, who emphasize the individual over society. "I pretty much had to insist on the relevance of both points of view," says Buckley, who made it his business to keep the fractious conservatives from splitting completely.
They could all unite, however, in their hostility to Communism. Some, like Burnham and Meyer, had been Communists and understood the viciousness of the creed—nor have they forgotten or forgiven. If there has been a thaw in the Soviet Union, there is no way of telling from the Review. The publication denounces the nuclear test-ban treaty as a sellout to the Russians; Burnham writes a column on foreign affairs called "The Third World War"—the Review has no doubt that it has begun. Not long ago, Buckley urged the U.S. to bomb China's nuclear installations—once due warning had been given so that civilians could be evacuated.
Eviscerating Birchers. National Review preaches mainly to the converted; it has a way of repeating itself without offering many new ideas. It does bring off a certain humor each issue—a quality that recommends it to readers who are otherwise appalled by its politics. The liveliest section of the magazine, "The Week," consists of random notes, arch and wry, on a variety of consequential and not so consequential topics.
Because Review tries to avoid what Buckley calls "extreme apriorism," it has parted company with some dogmatic conservatives. "Objectivist" Ayn Rand, who believes that all human activity should be self-serving, refuses even to appear in the same room with Buckley because the Review panned her novel Atlas Shrugged. Max Eastman resigned, with barbs on both sides, after he accused Buckley of tying conservatism too closely to religion.
Angriest of all are the John Birchers, whose leader, Robert Welch, was eviscerated by Buckley in a series of articles. As a result, even though Buckley works are still carried in Birch bookshops, Buckley now receives much more hate mail from the far right than the far left. A wall of his office in Review's midtown Manhattan building is papered with nasty letters. "Buckley's articles cost the Birchers their respectability with conservatives," says Richard Nixon. "I couldn't have accomplished that. Liberals couldn't have, either."