Of all the substantive glue that held the modern conservative movement together, it was steadfast opposition to the threat of Communism.
O f all the substantive glue that held the modern conservative movement together beyond Buckley’s force of personality, it was steadfast opposition to the threat of Communism and collectivism, which made for a successful coalition of traditional conservatives, libertarians, former Democrats, and ex-Trotskyites—much like the beginnings of National Review itself.
Two related events were of great significance to the founding of the magazine and the utility of opposition to Communism in brokering a coalition movement. One was the trial of the Soviet spy Alger Hiss. Hiss had risen to the top ranks of the State Department and became a hero to the liberal establishment when the House Committee on Unamerican Activities subpoenaed Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine and a former Communist spy himself. Chambers named a dozen government officials, including Hiss and his brother, and when Hiss denied the charges, the committee, led by freshman Representative Richard Nixon, investigated the claims against Hiss, who was found guilty and sentenced to prison for perjury in 1950. The second was the subsequent efforts by Senator Joseph McCarthy to purge Soviet agents from the government.
For his second book after God and Man at Yale, Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. spent a year researching what would become McCarthy and His Enemies, released in March 1954. It was a thorough, factual examination of the record of the cases McCarthy had brought against suspected Soviet spies and agents, not a personal defense of the Senator and they found the evidence in McCarthy’s favor.
When National Review was founded the following November after McCarthy’s censure, which Buckley and much of the founders of the magazine opposed, its mission statement was stark about the challenge of Communism: “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.” Among the founders and early contributors and editors were ex-Communists, Trotskyites, and leftists, including James Burnham, Chambers himself, Frank Meyer, William S. Schlamm, Max Eastman, Ralph DeToledano, Will Herberg, and John Chamberlain.