Willmoore Kendall: Philosopher of Consensus

Of all the distinctive and unique personalities the conservative movement has produced, there has been none more exasperating, more unpredictable, and intellectually more penetrating and uncompromising than Willmoore Kendall.

Kendall was an enormously gifted and, as is often the case with such people, complex man. He was born in a small town in Oklahoma, the son of a Southern Methodist minister. His father was blind, in consequence of which Kendall became accustomed at an early age to reading aloud to his father and discussing with him what he had read. He finished high school at 13, entered Northwestern University the same year, and graduated from the University of Oklahoma at 18. He was a graduate student under Francis Wilson at the University of Illinois and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford; an incipient trend to the Left was brought to a decisive end by first-hand experience of the Communists in Spain, just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, as a United Press correspondent. Kendall was terribly contentious, but he could also be a warm and generous friend. He was never one to accept anything at face value; he arrived at his conclusions on the basis of hard and rigorous thought; and he was without doubt one of the few really original and creative figures in the field of political theory in his time. Difficult as he was personally, we would be much poorer without the legacy of Willmoore Kendall.

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Henry Regnery

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Of all the distinctive and unique personalities the conservative movement has produced, there has been none more exasperating, more unpredictable, and intellectually more penetrating and uncompromising than Willmoore Kendall.

Kendall was an enormously gifted and, as is often the case with such people, complex man. He was born in a small town in Oklahoma, the son of a Southern Methodist minister. His father was blind, in consequence of which Kendall became accustomed at an early age to reading aloud to his father and discussing with him what he had read. He finished high school at 13, entered Northwestern University the same year, and graduated from the University of Oklahoma at 18. He was a graduate student under Francis Wilson at the University of Illinois and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford; an incipient trend to the Left was brought to a decisive end by first-hand experience of the Communists in Spain, just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, as a United Press correspondent. Kendall was terribly contentious, but he could also be a warm and generous friend. He was never one to accept anything at face value; he arrived at his conclusions on the basis of hard and rigorous thought; and he was without doubt one of the few really original and creative figures in the field of political theory in his time. Difficult as he was personally, we would be much poorer without the legacy of Willmoore Kendall.