LETTERS
LETTERS to the Editor Moral Dilemmas Ihave been reflecting on the differing reactions of two kinds of people confronted with moral dilemmas, as described in your August issue. Ronald D. Coleman...
...delegate to the General Assembly of the United Nations...
...My wife went to Vassar, not to Smith...
...This is false...
...For example, Goodell became the principal conservative target in the late 1960s...
...My proposal reiterated a proposal made by a commission appointed by Nelson Rockefeller two years before I ran for mayor...
...At the time the Conservative Party was founded—and for many years thereafter—Charles Goodell was a resolute conservative...
...The story is apocryphal, but the legend refers to the school I went to as a boarder at age fifteen...
...Ronald D. Coleman ("Captain Coleman's Challenging Job and Why He Decided To Leave It") suddenly realized the murderous and anti-Christian implications of his job in a missile silo, and quit for another job paying half as much...
...In the first years o/Na-tional Review, its editors and contributors made this argument [namely that in certain circumstances democracy was not necessarily the best form of government] not only in defense of McCarthyism, but also in defense of segregation and anti-communist dictatorships...
...Buckley . . . refused an invitation to join Skull and Bones until his Jewish roommate, Thomas Guinzburg, was also invited...
...It is a bore, but we may as well guard against their getting embedded in some floppy disk for perpetual retrieval in the future...
...For Kendall as a "black sheep," for example, see Garry Wills's touching memoir in Confessions of a Conservative...
...as Freeman editors...
...The Buckley family's wealth—estimated at $110 million when William Buckley Sr...
...Ambassador John Scali invited me most vigorously to accept the appointment...
...Consummate Conservative John Judis'sarticle ("William F. Buckley Jr., the Consummate Conservative," September issue) has errors of fact...
...I have run out of steam...
...20036...
...Utter historic and academic balderdash...
...Judis has used his careful portrait of William Buckley to provide your readers with an excellent analysis of the contemporary conservative scene in America, with all its nuances, that will certainly help them to understand the realities of the current political situation—all this without resort to nastiness or cheap shots and with an impressive willingness to give the devil his due...
...labor unions "to campaign for a truly open border" with our neighbors ("Those Alien Hordes," Comment, October issue...
...Any member of the political science fraternity will acknowledge that the late Professor Kendall was among the most brilliant political theorists of the post-war age...
...The piece is a model of political journalism...
...I.e., the quote from Burnham has nothing to do with a rejection of democratic values...
...F. Buckley Jr...
...So, here goes...
...John Tirman ("Doing Time"), in discussing his job with Time magazine, mentions that his section editor obediently followed orders from above to do a "hatchet job" on Ralph Nader...
...Those who enjoyed reading about Valerie Pope Ludlam and the San Bernardino West Side Community Development Corporation will find many more examples of successful grass-roots energy organizing in the pages of Power & Light...
...White never hinted at such a thing...
...He [I] even spied on some teachers for the FBI [at Yale...
...If these are, indeed, errors, I apologize to LETTERS to the Editor the reader and to Buckley...
...They were tutored in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, mathematics, and grammar...
...John Elmer Minneapolis, Minnesota Power, Light We were pleased to have an excerpt from our new book, Power & Light: Political Strategies for the Solar Transition, included in your excellent collection of articles on environmental controversies ("A Place in the Sun," October issue...
...died in 1958 and now substantially greater...
...Although Buckley Jr...
...Those opponents of the law determined to give it a racial cast spoke not of the influx of Puerto Ricans, but of southern Negroes...
...The Progressive omitted a comma after "editors" in the sentence Buckley quotes and inserted the other sentence...
...A) My "study" of Ortego y Gassett consumed a part of six weeks in February-March 1964...
...I accepted at considerable personal sacrifice and was bored to distraction throughout the experience from which, however, I wrested a book...
...The first issue of the magazine, carefully explaining the magazine's cre-denda, does not even mention his name...
...I went to boarding school for the first time when I was twelve...
...Sooner than most, Burnham grasped the potential contradiction between America's global war against communism and America's espousal of democratic values...
...I also disclaim responsibility for the inclusion of Burnham et al...
...It was Fence Club, not S&B...
...None of us ever learned a word of Greek, alas...
...But as for the alleged errors of fact that do bear on my interpretation of Buckley's political and philosophical carreer, I beg to differ: Spying at Yale: The reader can consult Sigmund Diamond's "God and the FBI at Yale," in The Nation, April 12,1980, for details and evidence...
...Such an article had no place in a magazine of The Progressive's quality...
...2.8 per cent had collected welfare payments...
...from the beginning o/National Review, Buckley defined the point of unity between them as the defense of McCarthy ism and opposition to communism.'" National Review was begun approximately a year after the censure of Joe McCarthy and the effective end of his career...
...Burnham, along with Buckley's former Yale mentor Kendall and others on the 'left' end of conservatism—Frank Meyer, Max Eastman—had been editors together at The Freeman...
...The [Conservative] Party, modeled after New York's Liberal Party, intended to wrest the conservative vote from such Republican moderates as Nelson Rockefeller, Charles Goodell, John Lindsay, and Jacob Javits...
...Jeff Stein Washington, D.C...
...These illegals pay millions into the Social Security trust fund which they will never collect...
...There are also some questions of interpretation that verge on being quibbles...
...The link with the defense of segregation is typified by Buckley in Up from Liberalism, where he defends the denial of voting rights to blacks on the grounds that "negroes, if enfranchised, would vote as a bloc against segregated schools and for redistribution of wealth...
...The book will be available in many bookstores across the country within the next few weeks...
...Buckley's sister, Jean, rather than his wife, went to Smith with Nancy Davis Reagan...
...Ford W. Cleere Greeley, Colorado Blatant Confrontation Jeff Stein's "interview" with Ambassador Robert White ("The Day of Reckoning Is Coming," September issue) is inaccurately named...
...Burnham on anti-communism and democracy: The quotation expands upon the already-described position...
...The magazine's [The Freeman] leadership split over McCarthy ism, and board members Suzanne LaFollette and John Chamberlain abandoned The Freeman to the libertarians who opposed the Senator and the Cold War...
...William Buckley and his sister Priscilla, who took over from Suzanne LaFollette as managing editor in 1959 after also serving briefly in the CIA...
...Buckley's subsequent books have consisted of collections of his columns, two journals of his day-to-day activity, two novels on sailing, and some fairly good spy novels...
...Stein may be correct that "it may be everyone's best interest in the long run" to support the leftists in El Salvador, but that is not White's position...
...1.6 per cent had collected food stamps...
...Buckley's Up from Liberalism (1959), the most extensive statement of his views, defends McCarthyism at length, and the major philosophical statements on conservatism that National Review published in its early years (Russell Kirk, January 25,1956...
...Levine West Berlin, Germany Alien Hordes Iwholeheartedly commend your exhortation to U.S...
...And the bogus "illegal alien welfare bum" caricature is quickly dispelled with a look at the actual facts...
...The world is in imminent danger of thermonuclear annihilation because of millions of "cheerful robots" denying their conscience...
...Buckley's original contract was not with public television...
...New York, New York The author replies: William F. Buckley has uncovered a few statements that I know to be errors and several others that might be...
...Such a blatant confrontation as your reporter presented has no place in a genuine interview...
...I hastened to copy the article and sent it to a colleague of mine in Vienna who is working on a scholarly analysis of American conservatism...
...When Mexican revolutionaries nationalized Mexico's oil, Buckley organized The American Association of Mexico to lobby against recognition of the government of Alvaro Ob-regon...
...They lent laissez-faire capitalism a new legitimacy by framing it in the context of a world threatened by fascism and communism...
...was born in 1925 after his parents had left the Southwest...
...His [Kendall's] defense was to form the basis for the book that Buckley and his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, wrote in 1954, McCarthy and His Enemies...
...110 million was the value in 1958 of the companies in which the Buckley family had a small personal interest...
...Kendall, Frank Meyer, and Max Eastman were never editors of The Freeman...
...they also pay state income, sales, and property taxes for which they receive little or no benefits...
...With the article on Buckley, The Progressive demonstrates, once again, that it can deal with political issues and personalities fairly, subtly, and convincingly—and, above all, informatively and usefully...
...Whenever Buckley was called upon to define conservatism in those years, he reached first for the McCarthy issue...
...Impossibly scrambled...
...But I've run out of steam...
...Burnham himself argues in the same essay: "The central point is not whether Chiang [Kai-shek] is a democrat...
...B) Firing Line did not begin until April 1966...
...Buckley's] efforts [for Nixon in 1972] won him an appointment as a U.S...
...He [Buckley senior/ raised his children to be members of the American ruling class...
...but that he is, in his own fashion, a shield of the United States against the thrust of communist power out of the heartland...
...Since 1965,1 have written ten books and edited three, including American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century, The Unmaking of a Mayor, and United Nations Journal...
...C) it was not launched on public television, but on commercial television...
...There are other tendentious propositions in Buckley's letter...
...In fact, the illegals, because of a combination of caution and immigrant pride, view the welfare system with suspicion and contempt...
...Mexico took control of oil concessions in the 1910s, almost prompting an American invasion...
...My parents never lived in the Southwest...
...A few appropriately repellent facts are pasted together to provide an alarmist portrait of a dangerous individual, and that's about it...
...Richard E. Morgan David Talbot Washington, D.C...
...The initiative to leave Yale was his...
...Willmoore Kendall, August 31,1957) focused on civil liberties and anti-communism...
...In San Diego County—the big entry point for most Mexican immigrants—a 1977-1978 screening for welfare, Medi-Cal, and food stamp recipients found 317 illegals in a caseload of 285,000...
...B) Henry Hazlitt, who remained as editor of The Freeman, took the identical position on McCarthy as John Chamberlain, Suzanne LaFollette, and Forrest Davis...
...Add to the note above that neither Frank Chodorov nor Russell Kirk had been editors of The Freeman...
...In fact the argument stated was never made in defense of McCarthyism, nor in defense of segregation...
...his wife, Patricia, was a classmate of Nancy Davis Reagan at Smith College...
...When Buckley was sent to boarding school at age ten, he only waited two days before presenting the headmaster with a list of the school's shortcomings...
...All too often magazines with a clear and consistent political outlook fail when they deal with their opponents...
...McCarthyism as central: McCarthy was finished by 1955, but not McCarthyism...
...Herberts...
...Willmoore Kendall was not easy to get along with, but he was hardly a black sheep...
...We also would enjoy an honest debate between the "liberal" and the "radical" positions on El Salvador...
...The reality is that the only alternative to the Communist world empire is an American empire which will be, if not literally world-wide informal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control,' he asserted...
...Thank you for making it available...
...A 1977 San Diego government task force estimated that illegals in that county pay a minimum of $98.8 million in taxes annually, while on the other hand a 1977 survey by the Human Resources Commission reported that the cost of all services for illegals totals only $2 million a year...
...A non sequitur...
...Democracy and segregation: The link between Buckley's view of democracy and his support for anti-communist dictatorships should be apparent...
...The McCarthy book, in detail and in theory, was entirely our own...
...Buckley's mother was from the South, his father from the Southwest, and they lived in Mexico before moving North...
...Inasmuch as President Obregon was assassinated in 1928, and oil was not nationalized until 1938, you will see that there are difficulties here...
...Labor's argument that illegals take jobs away from Americans is indeed a myth...
...Government to keep immigration requirements stringent...
...I was already a member of Skull and Bones when the issue arose...
...I'd suggest it would be progressive to hire a researcher...
...It may also be ordered for $7.95 postpaid from Environmental Action Foundation, 724 Dupont Circle Building, Washington, D.C...
...Milton Friedman's concern during those years was in writing and researching the monetary history of the United States to which he gave his all but exclusive attention...
...Regrettably, I believe the Time section editor is the more typical case today...
...Friedrich von Hayek . .. found an eager disciple in University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman...
...Buckley's knowledge of Greek, boarding-school bravado, and defense of his roommate against the Skull and Bones anti-Semites are cited in Charles Lam Markman's extensive 1973 biography, The Buckleys, in which the Buckleys' cooperation is acknowledged in the foreword, and also in Stephen Birmingham's chapter on the Buckleys in Real Lace...
...Buckley [while running for mayor] proposed, for instance, that welfare not be granted unless someone had lived in New York City for a year—a proposal clearly aimed at stemming the Puerto Rican influx...
...Stein spends much of the interview trying to convince White that his position is incorrect...
...It will certainly help him in applying his own ideas...
...AFL-CIO national conventions, for example, have consistently reaffirmed labor's traditional support for the Immigration and Naturalization Service's ongoing war against so-called illegal aliens, with resolutions urging amnesty for undocumented workers going down to overwhelming defeat...
...The sad fact is, however, that Big Labor is a strategic power group aligned with other groups (such as southern racists and white middle-class "environmentalists") to pressure the U.S...
...they saw any attempt to introduce state planning as a step towards totalitarianism...
...Only 9 per cent of these had received private medical care...
...Your readers would probably benefit from an honest and straightforward presentation of White's views on El Salvador...
...A) The quarrel had nothing to do with McCarthy...
...It serves no purpose other than to excuse the use of Government force to maintain a permanent, largely white labor "aristocracy" in this country...
...The department later paid him a lump sum to renounce his tenure and leave Yale...
...Buckley abandoned his study of Ortega y Gassett, to have been entitled Revolt Against the Masses, which he had been working on for years, and he signed a contract to do Firing Line on public television and to write a syndicated column...
...Schlamm and Buckley] brought together former Freeman editors Kendall, Burnham, Meyer, Eastman, Russell Kirk, and Frank Cho-dorov...
...Incorrect...
...As to the rest of the article, everything the author says that is favorable is true, everything unfavorable is under-researched...
...Any reader of the early issues of National Review will find this to be nonsense...
...One has only to multiply it by ten to get one's feefon the ground on the subject...
...John Judis Chicago, Illinois Iusually write letters-to-the-editor when annoyed, but I must make an exception and congratulate The Progressive and John Judis for the superb article on William F. Buckley Jr...
...Buckley became the protege and friend of Willmoore Kendall, a professor who was then on his way to becoming the black sheep of Yale's political science department...
...The liberals have coined the phrase "undocumented worker"—but, given the facts, undocumented taxpayer is a much more appropriate name...
...Most states had residence requirement laws...
...Buckley, in 1957, called on Franco to ensure the perpetuation of his regime by adopting some symbols of legitimacy that 'would almost surely not be democratic.'' " The author apparently did not note that the article in question called on Franco to resign...
...But the half-hearted slop Stein presented never made either choice...
...My sister Priscilla came to National Review after ten years with the United Press, briefly interrupted by service in the CIA in 1951...
...for the debate over McCarthyism at The Freeman, see Gary Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement...
...for Milton Friedman's economic views in the 1950s, see his essay, "The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom," in Economics and the Public Interest (1955...
...D) I had been writing a syndicated column since 1962...
...Lawrence O'Glasser Minneapolis, Minnesota The author replies: Lawrence O'Glasser may be pleased to know that former Ambassador White was provided with a complete transcript of the interview and given the opportunity to make clarifying changes and additions before it was published...
...The portfolio of my brother James was published when he ran for Senator from Connecticut...
...Hostility simmered between these schools of thought...
...I know that my own thinking on the subject of conservatism was clarified...
Vol. 45 • November 1981 • No. 11
