Spokesman for Conservatism

"This magazine," said William F.

Buckley Jr. in his prospectus for the first issue of the National Review, "will forthrightly oppose the prevailing trend of public opinion; its purpose, indeed, is to change the nation's intellectual and political climate." Only five years out of Yale, Buckley had already made a national name for himself with his first book, God and Man at Yale, which accused his Alma Mater of preaching liberalism and secularism to the exclusion of almost everything else. And in that fall of 1955, the articulate young conservative found the political weather parlous. "Clever intriguers are reshaping both parties in the image of Babbitt gone Social-Democrat," he wrote. The press, he said, was a mess of "New Deal journalism"; conformity, fabricated by "Social Engineers," loomed as "the largest cultural menace in America."

From the start, National Review's polemic spirit, bolstered by its editor's intellectual bravura, was a rallying point for those who subscribed to the Buckley brand of "radical conservatism." In its pages, such conservative spokesmen as Russell (Conservative Mind) Kirk, Cornell University's Clinton Rossiter (Conservatism in America) and James Jackson Kilpatrick Jr., editor of the Richmond News Leader, spelled out the philosophy of their politics. Sometimes even outsiders were permitted aboard, among them Liberal Columnist Murray Kempton and Steve Allen, whose occupation as a TV comedian allows time for the espousal of liberal causes.

If there were occasional exercises in doctrinaire pedantry, there was always a balance of nicely aimed journalistic needling. Neither liberals nor middle-of-the-roaders were spared the Review's witty and often savage prose. There was also a leaven of practical politics. And it was hardly surprising that, when the intellectuals of conservatism spotted a proper champion, they announced his candidacy before he got around to doing it himself. In April 1963, National Review began its Barry Goldwater for President campaign.

Goldwater & Eisenhower. "I have never importuned Mr. Goldwater to run," Buckley wrote then, "but I am for him, and I do believe that if he would declare himself, and go to the people, in no time at all he'd dispose them to say, 'Yes, Mr. President.' " By August 1963, National Review had filled out its Republican ticket: Goldwater and Eisenhower. "Before dismissing the idea as inherently preposterous," said Buckley, who thought it up, "one should consider that the strength Mr. Eisenhower could give to the ticket would almost surely be conclusive." Somewhat later, Buckley added: "It is quite irrelevant that I don't like Ike."

Now that the Goldwater bandwagon has picked up a full head of steam, National Review is already looking beyond the election. This week it publishes a 16,000-word A Program for a Goldwater Administration. Sample advice: Goldwater should man the battlements of states' rights ("within the federal harem, the states today are merely eunuchs"), invade Cuba if necessary, insist that Russia dismantle its "world revolutionary apparatus" and retire to its borders of 1939.

"Venture in Triviality." "We burnish the truths of Society as we see them," says Buckley. National Review has held that racial segregation is "not intrinsically immoral," and it opposed the civil rights bill on the grounds that it ceded to the White House "the powers of a despot." When Pope John XXIII, in his Mater et Magistra encyclical, seemed to be saying that a little socialism was not necessarily bad, Buckley, a Roman Catholic, attacked the encyclical as "a venture in triviality." He also objected to last summer's Freedom March on Washington: "Mob-deployment in circumstances that call for thought and discussion is a dangerous resort."

The magazine is still not self-supporting (annual loss between $100,000 and $150,000 a year). But circulation, which reached 30,000 by 1960, has more than doubled since. Today Bill Buckley is convinced that National Review is living up to its promise to "change the political face of America." In the light of Goldwater's growing successes, that conviction seems to carry more weight than it did in 1955.

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