The Foundation and the Academy

The summer of 1953—an exciting time in the world at large—my wife and I and our two small children spent, as we had spent the previous two summers, atop a ten-thousand-foot peak in the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho, watching for forest fires for the Forest Service. One cannot imagine isolation more complete. And yet, in that isolation, we heard echoes of the great events unrolling in the world below. Stalin had died in March, and from our fire tower we heard of the abortive East German rebellion and of turmoil within the leadership of the Soviet Union. For a moment it seemed that the Soviet empire might come unraveled.

One day that summer I hiked four miles—and four thousand feet down—to meet the ranger and pick up a month’s accumulation of mail. My mentor, Joseph Ward Swain, a distinguished scholar of the history of antiquity, had clipped various articles and reviews which he thought might be of interest. Among those clippings was a review, in the New York Times Book Review of May 17, of a book by a young historian at Michigan State College, Russell Kirk. The book, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, had been a surprising success. As I read it in my lookout on Ruffleneck Peak I had no way of knowing that the book was an event on a par, in terms of influence, with the events in Moscow and Berlin. Russell Kirk’s book was the beginning of the long decline of the left-liberal ascendancy which had gripped American cultural and intellectual life since the turn of the century.

ST

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Stephen J. Tonsor

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William F. Buckley Jr.

The summer of 1953—an exciting time in the world at large—my wife and I and our two small children spent, as we had spent the previous two summers, atop a ten-thousand-foot peak in the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho, watching for forest fires for the Forest Service. One cannot imagine isolation more complete. And yet, in that isolation, we heard echoes of the great events unrolling in the world below. Stalin had died in March, and from our fire tower we heard of the abortive East German rebellion and of turmoil within the leadership of the Soviet Union. For a moment it seemed that the Soviet empire might come unraveled.

One day that summer I hiked four miles—and four thousand feet down—to meet the ranger and pick up a month’s accumulation of mail. My mentor, Joseph Ward Swain, a distinguished scholar of the history of antiquity, had clipped various articles and reviews which he thought might be of interest. Among those clippings was a review, in the New York Times Book Review of May 17, of a book by a young historian at Michigan State College, Russell Kirk. The book, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, had been a surprising success. As I read it in my lookout on Ruffleneck Peak I had no way of knowing that the book was an event on a par, in terms of influence, with the events in Moscow and Berlin. Russell Kirk’s book was the beginning of the long decline of the left-liberal ascendancy which had gripped American cultural and intellectual life since the turn of the century.