How Buckley Shaped the Cold War Battle for Freedom

William F. Buckley Jr. was a cradle Catholic, cradle conservative, and cradle anti-communist. By birth and upbringing, the first was primary and shaped the latter two, which makes it impossible to separate his anti-communism and conservatism from each other or from their antecedent. Driven first and foremost by his religious convictions, he viewed atheistic communism as not only evil but also the central threat of modern times. 

Buckley was born in New York in 1925, the year after Vladimir Lenin’s death, into a home keenly aware of the totalitarian dictator who violently established communism in the Soviet Union. The interwar period was filled with lessons for Buckley, who — like the rest of his family — moved from isolationist to internationalist patriot after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Joseph Stalin’s sustained brutality consolidated communist power in the Kremlin when Buckley was a toddler; the worst of the Holodomor — the famine in Ukraine engineered by Stalin — hit when he was six and seven; the United States formally recognized the USSR the week before he turned eight; the Communist purges of the Great Terror raged when he was a young teen; and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which all but ensured the start of World War II, was signed as he entered prep school. 

After Army service — wartime, stateside — and the Allied victory in 1945, Buckley attended Yale University and had a brief stint in the CIA. Those early years of the Cold War confirmed to him communism’s monstrous — wrong, vicious, and ugly — nature. In an alumni address that he was invited to give (and which was subsequently censored) while he was chairman of the Yale Daily News, he urged the university to recall and declare “active Christianity the first basis of enlightened thought and action” and “communism, socialism, collectivism . . . inimical to the dignity of the individual.” In the foreword to his first book, God and Man at Yale, published the year after his graduation, in 1951, Buckley explained, “I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” 

This point was also featured in National Review’s mission statement, set forth in the inaugural issue of November 1955. Credendum C — out of a seven-part platform — read: “The century’s most blatant force of satanic utopianism is communism. We consider ‘coexistence’ with communism neither desirable nor possible, nor honorable; we find ourselves irrevocably at war with communism and shall oppose any substitute for victory.”

For decades on Firing Line and on college campuses, Buckley debated against those of the opinion that Marxism was merely, even benignly, a theory. For him, Marxism was an ideology, which meant it was not satisfied with staying on the page. As early as 1845, in Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx explained that he was no conventional theorist, writing plainly, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” A few years later, in 1850, in Class Struggle in France, he added, “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.” In between came the 1848 publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Buckley took Marx at his word and saw ample proof of the rhetoric and actions of the father of modern communism in his successors, from Lenin and Stalin to Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot. 

Buckley was in accord with Whittaker Chambers and Ronald Reagan that the Cold War must be properly understood as the battle between communism and freedom. But this was no matter of moral relativism. Buckley believed that man was made to be free, and he viewed freedom, in its fullness, as “necessary to the development of the human personality.” Communism’s mortal sin was that, in its effort to remake society in the image of the party and the state, it extinguished the human person. In a passage from his 1960 remarks on the fifth anniversary of National Review (and with the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954–58 in mind), a 35-year-old Buckley offered this timeless exposition of the monstrousness that was and is communism:

That we know enough to know that the Communist experiment, the worst abuse of freedom in history, is a violent mutation on truth, a horrible caricature on justice; that the socialized state is to justice, order, and freedom what the Marquis de Sade is to love; and that it is our solemn responsibility not to become so jaded by the continuing barbarism as to become indifferent to its depravities, as French society during the late eighteenth century became indifferent to sexual depravity: not to come to believe, after the millionth political execution, that the millionth and one becomes meaningless; not to come to believe that because there are eight hundred million slaves in the world, it will make no great difference if we add another forty or fifty thousand, who live, moreover, on a couple of desolated rocks just off the China coast.

In short, communism constituted a violation of nature, human nature, tradition, the market, state, and society, acted out with all the tools of the totalitarian state, which, in the Kremlin’s case, included massive military forces backed by nuclear weapons.

Friendships deepened Buckley’s understanding of the monstrousness of communism. Three were essential in this regard. Chambers was the witness par excellence for Buckley. In his “Foreword in the Form of a Letter to My Children” to Witness, Chambers made the point that a “man is not primarily a witness against something,” for that is “only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something.” He stressed that the way in which he used the word referred to a witness “whose life and faith are so completely one that when the challenge comes to step out and testify for his faith, he does so, disregarding all risks, accepting all consequences.” Buckley took this to be true of Chambers, and he strove to live by the same meaning of “witness,” especially with respect to the evil and central threat of communism. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn embodied witness, martyr, and icon. In speeches over the course of more than 20 years, Buckley consistently drew attention to the meaning and impact of Solzhenitsyn’s corpus, not least The Gulag Archipelago. To read Solzhenitsyn is “to undergo a sacramental experience.” Behind the Iron Curtain, Solzhenitsyn and his writings imparted truth and strength; in the West, they revealed the truth about the “Gulag country” that was the Soviet Union and obliterated the European intellectuals’ belief in Marxism. 

As friend, partner, and peer, Reagan rounds out the trio. (Buckley later adduced “Reagan’s decade,” policies, and legacy as proof that his friend and anti-communist partner became peerless.) In his first speech of the 1990s, Buckley stated: “The 1980s are most certainly the decade in which Communism ceased to be a creed, surviving only as a threat. And Ronald Reagan had more to do with this than any other statesman in the world.” He added, “Reagan is not Solzhenitsyn. It was Solzhenitsyn who emerged as the Homer of anti-Communism.” 

In a September 1991 lecture at Vanderbilt University, Buckley set forth the proposition that “after engaging in the greatest ideological struggle in the history of the world, we won.” Once again, he singled out Solzhenitsyn and Reagan as indispensable players in the epic East–West struggle. Buckley sensed that he, too, was called as a witness engaged in the battle for freedom and against communism, and he understood his place in that struggle:

I was nineteen years old at the time the Yalta conference was held. Soon after that came Potsdam, and the West lost Eastern Europe to the Communists. The Cold War had begun. On the last day of August, just eighteen days ago, the Communist Party was banned in the Soviet Union. Coincidentally, I am sixty-five years old. I passed from teenage to senior citizenship, coinciding with the duration of the Cold War.

Buckley worried that unlike the Jewish people, who rightly “will never let the world forget about the Holocaust,” contemporary Americans would not teach or pass on the dark history of communism. He considered “the moral mandate” to remember the Holocaust and the record of communism to be analogous: that such systemic evil must not be allowed to happen again. He urged humility in the light of history, to be sure, but also understood the living costs and death toll — over 100 million — of communism since 1917. Of Eastern and Central Europeans, he said soberly, “We can sleep better for knowing that our cousins have regained their freedom. But we can’t bring back those who lost their lives, nor bring back lifetimes in freedom to those who spent theirs without it.” He explained that the tacit renunciation of the pledge to communize the world, by the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was “meaningless” to Cubans, Nicaraguans, Vietnamese, Ethiopians, Angolans, and others who still felt the “iron of the Soviet boot.” Even as he watched for and expected real change within the Kremlin, Buckley maintained that such change would not happen until the USSR dropped its “primary ideological commitments.”

Like Solzhenitsyn and Reagan, Buckley fiercely criticized Mao, whose status as history’s greatest mass murderer is undisputed, but prudently focused on the primary threat, which, at the time, came from the Kremlin. By September 1991, 15 years after Mao’s death, Buckley expressed a tempered joy amid what appeared to be the possible collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet even then, there remained well over a billion people who lived under communist rule. The happiness and potential of all that occurred from 1989 through 1991 — the slaying of the Soviet bear and the affirmation of the human drive for freedom — was stained by the tyranny of Tiananmen Square. The monstrousness of communism continues to this day in the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba, and it promotes socialism’s destruction of Venezuela. 

In Nearer, My God, his 1997 autobiography of faith, Buckley gave Marxism and communism their due as “redemptive creeds” distinct from liberalism, which “has no eschatology, no ultimate sense of consummation.” In the end, communism’s promise of redemption is as false as it is utopian. It forces the abandonment of hope. Following Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx regarded God as the outward projection of man’s inward nature. But, as Buckley noted, “to the extent that loyalists to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin were guided by faith in the founder, they were engaged in heliocentrism without an enduring sun.” 

Buckley understood that communism denies all virtues — especially the theological virtues. By making a religion of itself, it inverts true faith, hope, and charity. In “Letter to My Children,” Chambers quoted from Genesis — “Ye shall be as gods” — to identify solipsism as “man’s second oldest faith.” Like Reagan, Buckley knew this line as well as the one with which Chambers ended that paragraph: “The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.” Materialism replaces transcendence to monstrous effect. Buckley knew well there is no moral equivalence between communism and freedom, for God created man to live in freedom and truth.