Because there is something wrong with me, accounts of National Review’s founding always get my blood pumping — like it’s the montage in a heist movie where the leader is “getting a team together.” (Ringleader: Buckley. Lancer: Bozell. Driver: Bill Rusher. Gunman: Frank Meyer. Explosives: Willmoore Kendall.) The story is told here in grainy detail. Tanenhaus is especially keen to emphasize the role played by the impetuous Viennese ex-Leninist Willi Schlamm, with whom Buckley “fell into giddy collusion” in the spring of 1954. It was Schlamm who insisted their magazine “must sing and dance and enthuse; it must have the scope (and the size) to create a climate of its own.” Schlamm, however, was another of Buckley’s cranks, “charming but quarrelsome, generous but thin-skinned, expansive when things went his way, touchily defensive, even volatile, when they did not.” And he tested even Buckley’s legendary patience. When Schlamm quit the magazine in July 1957 — after losing an acrimonious debate to the masthead’s other top dialectician, Burnham — Buckley expressed rare resignation: “The matter is one of pathology, and I am an editor, not a doctor.”
Tanenhaus dwells less on the philosophical debates that animated the magazine’s early years — George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (1976) remains the indispensable volume on that score — but he provides a much needed genealogy of the magazine’s early position on race and civil rights, linking the NR line to Buckley’s familial ties to the south. Readers may know of NR’s notorious 1957 editorial, “The South Must Prevail,” in which Buckley declared that White Southerners were “entitled to take such measures, politically and culturally, as are necessary to prevail in areas in which it does not predominate numerically” (i.e. suppress the vote) because they were “for the time being, the advanced race.” But Tanenhaus reveals the degree to which the magazine served, in the 50s and early 60s, as a genteel mouthpiece for Jim Crow, facilitating the ignominious revival of John C. Calhoun thought. “[Bill] is for segregation and backs it in every issue,” boasted Will Buckley peré to his friend Strom Thurmond. (Another revelation: the Buckleys of Camden funded a local paper that was the mouthpiece of the white Citizen’s Council.) As the Straussian Lincoln scholar — and Buckley’s friend — Harry Jaffa observed in 2010, “The origins of American conservatism is the ideology of the Old South in the 1860s. It never changed.”