The National Review editor and Goldwater ghostwriter showed the importance of principles — and reexamining them.
The National Review editor and Goldwater ghostwriter showed the importance of principles — and reexamining them.
J anuary marks the centennial of the birth of Leo Brent Bozell Jr., a mainstay in the early years of National Review.
For conservatives who conflate loyalty to principle with loyalty to politicians, Bozell’s life offers a rejoinder. But he also demonstrated the value of periodically reexamining principles.
An Episcopalian who converted to Catholicism as a freshman at Yale, Bozell shifted from the chairman of the campus United World Federalists as a sophomore to the elected president of the Yale Political Union on the Conservative Party line as a junior.
These early zigs prefaced later zags.
One rather remarkable reorientation involved Barry Goldwater, the name with whom Bozell’s remains forever linked.
In 1959, Bozell ghostwrote a book as slim as Barry Goldwater’s bolo tie with an influence wider than the brim of his cowboy hat: 1960’s The Conscience of a Conservative. By 1961, in a recently unearthed letter to fellow National Review senior editor Frank Meyer, he dubbed the ostensible author of that political bestseller “our Frankenstein.”
Bozell biographer Daniel Kelly offered reasons for that alienation. They mainly concern Bozell’s sudden shift from a William F. Buckley–Frank Meyer–Barry Goldwater outlook to the Catholic integralism that his 1960 move to El Escorial, Spain, catalyzed. As Kelly points out, none of Bozell’s bylined articles in National Review prior to the trek abroad exhibit a religious theme; afterwards, most did.
Kelly noted of his subject: “His most widely read book was the one that pleased him the least.” Indeed, Bozell even rebuffed Goldwater’s efforts to recruit him to ghostwrite a sequel of sorts.
This change in Bozell’s philosophy, and the occasional mistreatment of Bozell and others of the magazine’s main players by the gruff Arizonan’s team, helps explain Bozell’s second thoughts on Goldwater. More than a few of the hundreds of warehouse-find letters between Meyer and Bozell illustrate that. Therein, the correspondents worry that a charismatic figure uncommitted to their ideas might distort the fledgling movement at such a formative stage.
Goldwater’s “The Forgotten American: A Statement of Proposed Republican Principles, Programs and Objectives” represented a major brakes-slamming moment for Bozell. The senator’s aides designed the Human Events–published broadside as a way to mainstream the politician as a national candidate rather than the darling of a political niche. Bozell and Meyer regarded the manifesto as a rapprochement with the New Deal and a betrayal of the ethos of The Conscience of a Conservative.
“What do we now do about Goldwater?” Bozell asked Meyer in February 1961. “It seems to me that the next move is his. If he wants to whore around with the Nixon crowd, and do his masturbating with Human Events, there isn’t much we can do about it. Or am I giving up too soon? Or too easily?”
That month, Bozell, under Willmoore Kendall’s byline so as not to advertise to the in-the-know crowd a rift between Goldwater and his ghostwriter, published “Quo Vadis, Barry?” in National Review. Goldwater shortly thereafter attempted to pull his name from a direct-mail fundraiser for the magazine. He omitted National Review from a list of indispensable publications for conservatives at a Human Events dinner. The year 1961 would prove challenging for Goldwater’s boosters within National Review.
A short, strange Cold War pitted the Cold Warriors against one another.
Bozell, Meyer, William Rusher, and others began to doubt their champion’s ideological bona fides.
In a letter to Meyer, Bozell juxtaposed “a growing conservative movement on our hands” as the 1960s began with “the lack of a political leader or symbol around which new forces might speedily gather and carry the movement to power.”
He continued:
That was the setting when Goldwater and Conscience of a Conservative suddenly and prematurely walked onto the stage. I say prematurely without appealing to hindsight because the situation, in terms of the internal condition of the conservative movement, was not yet ripe for a leader who was not either a) under control, or b) did not need control — i.e. the paragon of our dreams. The forces within the movement were as yet too diffuse, its leadership too uncertain, its principles too vulnerable to inroads from the Nixonian left and the crackpot right; and all of those dangers were at the fore of our conversations on the subject during the early weeks and months of the Goldwater ascendency. Nonetheless, with the new impetus the movement surged forward and grew in terms of troop strength and public impact at a far greater rate than we had anticipated.
Bozell and Meyer lamented the possibility of a strategic error in tethering their principles so tightly to any politician.
Bozell wrote that “for the conservative movement (us) to have tried to tie itself to Goldwater beyond the point that he voluntarily chose to tie himself to it would have been to dig itself ever deeper into a hole that was, positionally, its tomb.”
They worried. They knew that to go all-in on a hand only to fold made no sense. Bozell argued that they should no longer see Goldwater as the leader of the conservative movement but instead as the favorite senator of conservatives.
This storm, as did other storms in Bozell’s life, would pass.
“I find it very difficult to talk to that man,” he confessed to Meyer by the end of 1961. The “secret to his life and career,” he surmised, was his “magical powers of adjustment.”
What Bozell wrote of Goldwater one could just as easily apply to Bozell.
The 1940s World Federalist reemerged as a 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy staffer. The ghostwriter of Goldwater’s 1960 freedom manifesto became, by 1962’s National Review piece “Freedom or Virtue?,” a proponent of an increase in state power to inculcate Christian values in the citizenry. He took almost a decade to write 1966’s The Warren Revolution, only to repudiate the book to such a degree that by 1970 he issued thinly veiled legal threats to publisher Bobbs-Merrill to attempt to block his brother-in-law Buckley from quoting from that book within his.
The paradox of Brent Bozell shows us a man so deeply principled that he explored new ones whenever he found his old ones lacking. When we reflect on 100 years of this complex man, Bozell’s finding of this or that truth seems less important to understanding him than the realization that a search for truth perpetually characterized him.