The small Spanish town had a profound effect on the National Review senior editor.
The small Spanish town had a profound effect on the National Review senior editor.
El Escorial, Spain — Why did a National Review senior editor present at the magazine’s creation migrate from the United States to Francisco Franco’s Spain? I traveled 3,500 miles in search of answers.
“Spain is bliss,” National Review senior editor Brent Bozell wrote fellow senior editor Frank Meyer in February of 1961. “It is the only country fit to save the West. Therefore, your duties, no less than mine, are to come here and get to work.”
The 1961 letter, one of hundreds between the pair that turned up in a warehouse in 2022 during research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, saran-wraps for posterity 65-year-old enthusiasms for a country on the economic upswing and so far removed from the repressive state of the post-Civil War years that for the first year in the regime’s history, it carried out no executions. But in the small town where Bozell lived sits a massive clue as to why not the 1960s but the 1560s primarily fueled that enthusiasm.
The beauty inside the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, touted as the largest Renaissance structure in the world, strikes as of the type to compel Richard Dawkins to reconsider atheism. The brushstrokes of the El Greco paintings suggest the hand of God; the symmetrical Frailes Garden indicate the skilled hands of men. The golden pages of the tens of thousands of books in the monastery’s library strangely face outward, for preservation, their keepers insisted, with further protection provided by a Pellegrino Tibaldi ceiling that depicts the seven arts. The grounds echo with the Gregorian chants of Augustinian monks and radiate the gravitas of a structure that houses a Pantheon of Kings that holds the remains of many Spanish monarchs.
Tellingly, the royal mausoleum contains the sepulchers of Charles V and his son Philip II. Under their rule, Golden Age Spain fought wars against Protestants, Muslims, and indigenous tribes in large part to replenish the souls lost to the church through the Reformation and to continue the work of the Reconquest completed on the Iberian Peninsula 30 weeks and three days before Columbus set sail on his most famous voyage. The hulking structure that Philip II built became the epicenter of the Counterreformation.
By 1961, Bozell, operating in the shadow of that 16th-century palace/basilica/monastery/school saw a world under siege just as Philip II had. Communism had gobbled up China, Hungary, Cuba, and more than a dozen other nations after the Second World War. Anticommunism, almost alone, united the diverse crowd that contributed to National Review in its early years. But what were they defending from the communists? Western Civilization, which meant for much of its existence Christendom. The anticommunism that animated former Joseph McCarthy staffer and chronicler Bozell shifted toward an embrace of the Christian basis of the civilization that the Reds had tried to overthrow in Spain in 1936. In the shadow of Philip II’s massive monument to St. Lawrence that advertised the moment when Spain served as the preeminent world power and united church and state under one roof, Bozell became radicalized.
The man who a year earlier ghostwrote Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, which emphasized freedom and limited government as an inherent aspect of American conservatism, now regarded the inculcation of virtue as the purpose of an activist state. In the late Daniel Kelly’s biography, Living on Fire: The Life of L. Brent Bozell Jr., he points out that pre-El Escorial, none of Bozell’s “National Trends” columns in National Review dealt with religion; after, most of them did.
Bozell conceded that not the brightest men ruled Spain. But with some money and nuclear weapons, Spain rather than the United States could become the primary force for good. He wrote Meyer, likely in jest, that he hoped now to become not the president of the United States but the caudillo of Spain. He likened the regime’s censorship to the propaganda of the New York Times, save for that the Times suppressed the wrong stories and Franco the right ones. Just weeks removed from the United States, he called Spanish the lingua de casa.
“The incredible thing about Spain is that it is not a nation,” Patricia Bozell wrote Elsie Meyer in April 1961. “It’s made up of violently patriotic towns who look upon people in the neighboring towns with that sort of contemptuous superiority with which one’s apt to look upon foreigners.”
Beyond his wife pressing the Meyers to make the journey from Woodstock to El Escorial, fellow senior editor Willmoore Kendall lobbied Meyer to join them. But Meyer never even went on a vacation to what NR publisher William Rusher began calling “our growing colony in Madrid.”
“I find it hard to accept your theories on the primacy of Spain — or any other nation but the United States,” Meyer responded. “I will, however, listen to the argument.”
For diverse reasons, William F. Buckley’s brother Reid, his former teacher Kendall, and magazine contributor Frederick Wilhelmsen preceded the Bozells — his Yale classmate Brent, Bill’s sister and Brent’s wife Patricia, and numerous Buckley nieces and nephews. Meyer grasped the pressure on the magazine from so many important players in it contributing by remote: “[D]o you propose that we bring Bill [Buckley] too, send Jim [Burnham] back to Kent, and edit NR from Madrid?” Bozell, after all, had essentially proposed that three-fifths of the senior editors of an American magazine operate from Spain.
The Bozells ventured to Francisco Franco’s Spain right as his home country inaugurated its first Catholic president. He essentially forfeited an ability to further shape the conservative movement as he shifted his interest from electing Barry Goldwater and contributing to National Review toward issues related to his Spanish enthusiasm. It would seem he missed out on opportunities in the United States to advance conservatism and Catholicism there.
Bozell eventually founded Triumph, a publication that advertised its dim view of the American freedom Bozell once championed by placing on its cover the Statue of Liberty lifting a coat hanger rather than a torch in the air. This Bozell for many years remained eclipsed by the Bozell who operated within the mainstream of American conservatism.
For years after his 1997 passing, the remark most made in association with Bozell involved his service as Barry Goldwater’s ghostwriter. Now, 65 years after his transformative experience in El Escorial, JD Vance cites this post-Spain Bozell as one of the thinkers that he most admires, and postliberalism adherents and American Catholic integralists regard him as a pioneer for their ideas.
Walking in Bozell’s footsteps in a small Spanish town makes it evident that El Escorial can have a profound effect on a man. And different iterations of this complex man continue to have an effect on diverse figures, many in conflict, on the political right.