William F. Buckley Jr. was a 21-year-old Yale sophomore when he met Willmoore Kendall. It was the fall of 1947, and Buckley had enrolled in the first political-science seminar that Kendall, age 38, taught at the university. The young man watched as the tall, rakish professor paced back and forth in the classroom, interrogating his students in an unmistakable voice that combined the slang and southern accent of his native Oklahoma with the donnish mannerisms he’d picked up as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.

Buckley fell hard for this brilliant, charismatic, and troubled figure. He and Kendall shared tough anti-communism, opposition to New Deal liberalism, and love of intellectual combat. They were rebels whose gut patriotism and willingness to defy accepted opinion infused both the early conservative movement and National Review. “He was a conservative all right,” Buckley said of his mentor years later, “but invariably he gave the impression that he was being a conservative because he was surrounded by liberals; that he’d have been a revolutionist if that had been required in order to be socially disruptive.”

In Heaven Can Indeed Fall, historian Christopher Owen ably and succinctly narrates the life story of Kendall, a remarkably unconventional individual who nevertheless believed in the wisdom of crowds. A child prodigy born in 1909, Kendall became literate as a toddler by reading baseball box scores aloud to his father, a blind Methodist preacher. He entered first grade at age four, and high school at age nine. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in Romance languages when he was 17. He studied for a language Ph.D. at the University of Illinois before his stint at Pembroke College, Oxford, where his encounter with philosopher R. G. Collingwood influenced his writing style as well as his pedagogical and critical methods.

Kendall was both a lifelong Democrat and an opponent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policy. In his student years, he believed that the New Deal was not radical enough — it couldn’t cope with the blight of the Great Depression. He thought that FDR wielded power with caprice, and that American entry into World War II would be unnecessary and counterproductive. Fluent in Spanish, a socialist and isolationist, Kendall worked for several months in 1935 and 1936 as a journalist in Spain. He watched the Spanish blunder into civil war. The polarization and violence alarmed him. It proved to Kendall that even the most sophisticated societies could collapse into chaos and terror if public consensus disappeared.

When he returned to Illinois, Kendall decided to study political theory rather than Spanish literature. He was interested most in the principle of popular sovereignty, and in challenges to it. One of his first papers on political theory, published in 1939, was an attack on judicial review. Courts, he said, should defer to legislatures in practically every case. Elites do not exist to overrule majorities, Kendall argued. Their job is to satisfy the popular will.

Kendall was still a man of the Left in 1940, when he completed his dissertation, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule. It was published as a book the following year. His audacious reading of the 17th-century English philosopher concluded that the author of the Second Treatise on Government was not, as had been widely assumed, an advocate of individual natural rights. According to Kendall, Locke actually was a majoritarian who believed that as an empirical matter the people would not, in Kendall’s words, “withdraw a right which the individual ought to have.” (As Owen observes, much depends on that “ought.”) Kendall’s thesis, expressed in his characteristically winding, schematic, and logic-chopping prose, won him accolades. Then the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor.

Kendall spent World War II as an intelligence officer. He worked for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, where he tried to persuade Latin American nations to ally with the United States. During his time in what would later become known euphemistically as the “intelligence community,” Kendall moved to the right. This critic of unelected bureaucrats and unaccountable experts himself became an authority on propaganda and on political and psychological warfare. He alternated between stints of government service and teaching jobs around the country. His services were in demand. By August 1946, Kendall was chief of the Latin American Division of the Office of Reports and Estimates for the Central Intelligence Group. It was a precursor to the CIA.

Kendall was shocked by the presence of Communists in high government positions. His political transformation was a consequence of his growing alarm at Soviet efforts to infiltrate the United States and subvert it from within. “By the spring of 1947,” Owen writes, “Kendall had made his conservative turn, and ever after viewed himself as a man of the Right.” He continued to work for the CIA after he joined Yale. Among the virtues of Owen’s book is the attention it devotes to Kendall’s career in intelligence, including his time overseeing a psychological-warfare project during the Korean War. The Kendall that emerges from Heaven Can Indeed Fall is not just a political theorist. He’s also a combatant in the cold war between communism and freedom that dominated the 20th century and shaped the post-war American Right.

Yet Kendall’s relationship with the Right was never comfortable. He was neither a religious traditionalist nor a free-market capitalist. He considered himself a Keynesian and had no a priori objection to government intervention in the marketplace. He voted for Dem­ocrats such as Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson even as he edited the manuscripts for Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and Buckley and L. Brent Bozell Jr.’s McCarthy and His Enemies (1954). His opposition to communism was based on his commitment to democracy. He saw totalitarianism as the definition of rule by the scientific elite.

Kendall believed that every institutional and political structure rests on an orthodoxy defined by the majority. And those majorities, in his view, have every right to suppress or expel minority viewpoints that undermine said orthodoxy. It was on this basis that Kendall and his protégés defended Senator Joseph McCarthy’s demagogic investigations into potential security risks within the executive branch of government. “For Kendall, the sovereign right of the American people to protect itself from all enemies took precedence over individual liberties,” writes Owen, who is reluctant to label Kendall a “populist” because the term is often so vaguely and lazily defined.

Still, Kendall’s theories offer the most plausible and persuasive explanation for the populist aspects of the post-war American Right. The issues Kendall identified and the problems he defined continue to intrigue, galvanize, and vex conservatives. Kendall thought seriously about anti-elitism, suspicion of expert knowledge, “activist” judges, the pernicious biases of the mainstream media, the limits of permissible dissent, the place of free speech within public institutions, the nature of democratic acco­untability, and the sources of legitimacy in a constitutional republic.

He joined National Review as a senior editor when this magazine was launched in November 1955. The following September, he delivered a lecture on the “layman–expert dilemma” to a group of conservatives in Buck Hill Falls, Pa. As Owen relates, “Kendall claimed that he hated and feared liberalism because it was antidemocratic.” He argued that the “Great Bureaucracy” of executive-branch departments and agen­­cies, media outlets, and the academy “monopolized not just how important political questions were decided but even how they were framed and the factual narratives underlying them.” Such arguments are commonplace on the right today.

Kendall also anticipated the conservative turn toward the Constitution and the Am­e­rican founding. Political phil­osophers Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss profoundly influenced him. In 1957, Kendall moved from strict majoritarianism to an understanding of the constitutional order as expressing the “deliberate sense” of the political community. He began to think about the Constitution as the Founders’ means of distilling and refining the will of the people. According to Kendall, constitutional mechanisms such as regular elections, federalism, representation, the separation of powers, and bicameralism — as well as long-standing institutions and traditions not mentioned in the Constitution such as political parties and the Senate filibuster — did not thwart majority rule. They channeled it toward nobler purposes and higher ends.

In other words, Kendall became a Madisonian. Devotion to the Con­stitution would allow America to avoid the fate of Spain. “Nobody understands the sources of the American political tradition anymore: in scholarship, the whole business has got to be reexamined; and I look forward eagerly to the reexamining,” he wrote to Buckley in 1959. The emphasis on the adjective that informs the noun in the phrase “Amer­ican conservatism” was Kendall’s lasting and important contribution to conservative thought. “I make no sense,” he wrote,

of calling “Conservative” the man who takes a dim view of his country’s established institutions, feels something less than at home with its way of life as it actually lives it, finds it difficult to identify himself with the political and moral principles on which it has acted through its history, dislikes or views with contempt the generality of the kind of people his society produces, and — above all perhaps — dissociates himself from its Founders, or at least holds them at arms’ length.

Kendall feared that America’s nonideo­logical parties, regional and local politics, and supreme Congress would give way to the centralizing tendencies of power-hungry chief executives and succumb to the pressures of activist ideologues. Toward the end of his life, he upheld the Constitution and Congress as the bulwarks of American public orthodoxy and the vessels of the “deliberate sense” of the people. That was why he supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and why he privately loathed Barry Goldwater’s “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” speech to the Republican National Convention the same year. “There’s nothing wrong with that statement that couldn’t be put right by a hundred thousand well-chosen words,” he said in response.

Kendall might be more widely recognized as a seer had he not died at the early age of 58. He was an alcoholic and a philanderer whose private life was turbulent, scandalous, and self-destructive. He left Yale, broke off relations with close friends, including Buckley, and was divorced twice. A semblance of tranquility came to him only after he married his third wife, Nellie Cooper Kendall, and joined the faculty of the University of Dallas in 1963.

Years of hard living caught up to him in 1967. The epitaph on his gravestone reads: “Teacher.” And rightly so. The dominant issues of his day — McCarthy and civil liberties, civil rights and segregation, containment or rollback of communism — may be different from contemporary concerns. But the writing and teaching of Willmoore Kendall remain very much alive.