Willmoore Kendall: Tribune and Teacher of the American People by Christopher H. Owen

Author:Christopher H. Owen [Owen, Christopher H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, Civics & Citizenship, Intelligence & Espionage
ISBN: 9781793624451
Google: OZ1BEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
Published: 2021-09-27T20:30:56+00:00

Chapter 6

1954–1959

“Why Are You So Damn Logical?”

On November 19, 1955, the premier issue of National Review hit U.S. newsstands. Unsurprisingly—with senior editor Willmoore Kendall’s name on the front cover—the magazine immediately went on to the attack against liberals. Its editors asserted that “the nation’s opinion-makers for the most part share the Liberal point of view, try indefatigably to inculcate it in their readers’ minds, and to that end employ the techniques of propaganda.” Therefore, “we may properly speak,” they continued, of “a huge propaganda machine, engaged in a major, sustained assault upon the sanity, and upon the prudence and the morality of the American people.” Liberals had set themselves in opposition to “the goals and values appropriate to the American tradition.” Moreover, the sanity of liberals themselves was suspect, proclaimed the editors, “because the political reality of which they speak is a dream world that nowhere exists.”1

Liberal intellectuals responded by heaping scorn on the infant magazine. A negative comeback from social critic Dwight Macdonald was predictable. But the nastiness of his attacks—labeling National Review’s staff “Scrambled Eggheads of the Right”—was startling. James Burnham was a traitor to Trotsky with clichéd ideas, Suzanne La Follette an angry incompetent, and Willi Schlamm a “lowbrow” mediocrity. Kendall, said Macdonald, was “a wild Yale don of extreme, eccentric, and very abstract views who can get a discussion into the shouting stage faster than anyone I have ever known.” An unkinder cut for Kendall came from old classmate John Fischer, then editor of Harper’s. Over lunch Kendall had solicited him to write a piece about the new magazine. In “Why is the Conservative Voice so Hoarse?,” Fischer, in his column “From the Editor’s Easy Chair,” linked National Review with other “extremist little magazines.” The new publication, he wrote, “aimed primarily at an audience of True Believers . . . who throw themselves frantically into a cause—often to make up for some kind of frustration in their private lives.”2

Harder yet for Kendall and his fellow editors to swallow was disapproval from fellow conservatives bothered by the magazine’s take-no-prisoners style. Kendall had a hard time attracting fellow academics to write for the magazine. His only real success in this regard was in getting Revilo Oliver, then an obscure classicist at the University of Illinois, to write the occasional article. Eric Voegelin thought Kendall was wasting his time “mangling” left-wingers. R. B. McCallum, Kendall’s old tutor, saw National Review as intemperate. He gently suggested that instead of calling Franklin Roosevelt the “worst ever” president it might have focused a specific failure such as getting “duped” at Yalta. Though often wooed by Buckley and Kendall, Bertrand de Jouvenel, prominent French conservative and Willmoore’s close friend, refused to write for the magazine because it supported McCarthy. The tone of National Review, he said, was inappropriate for how “Christians should fight their battles.” Even Charles Hyneman criticized the new magazine for so severely “slamming the liberals.”3

Despite such reactions, National Review, during the time Kendall worked actively there, rapidly expanded in circulation and influence.

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