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View Full Version : Mises, Murray Rothbard: Was the National Review a CIA operation? | William Buckley Jr




FrankRep
02-21-2010, 08:30 AM
National Review and the Triumph of the New Right (http://mises.org/daily/2759)


Murray N. Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises Institute (http://mises.org/)
November 29, 2007


Garet Garrett had called the shots: in referring to the triumph of the New Deal and then of American Empire, he had summed up the strategy: "revolution within the form." The New Right did not bother, would not rouse possible resistance, by directing a frontal assault on the old idols: on the dead Senator Taft, on the Bricker Amendment, or on the old ideals of individualism and liberty. Instead, they ignored some, dropped others, and claimed to come to fulfill the general ideals of individualism in a new and superior "fusion" of liberty and ordered tradition.

How, specifically, was the deed done? For one thing, by hitting us at our most vulnerable point: the blight of anti-Communism. For red-baiting came easily to all of us, even the most libertarian. In the first place, there were the terrible memories of World War II: the way in which the Communist Party had gleefully adopted the mantle of war patriots, of "twentieth-century Americanism," and had unashamedly smeared all opponents of war as agents of Hitler.

Conservative and former liberal isolationists could scarcely forget and forgive; and hence, when the Cold War began, when the "great patriotic coalition" of the United States and Russia fell apart, it was difficult for the Old Right to resist the temptation to avenge themselves, to turn the agents-of-a-foreign-power smear back upon their old tormentors. Furthermore, blinded by hatred of Russia as an interventionist power, we mistakenly believed that repudiation of the fruits of the Russian alliance, including Teheran and Yalta, was in itself a repudiation of World War II. We unfortunately did not realize — as later New Left historians were to point out — that the Cold War and the intervention into World War II were part and parcel of the same development: that one was the inevitable outgrowth of the other, and that both were an integral part of American imperialism rampant.

But the problem was still deeper than that. For our main problem was our simplistic view of the ideological-political spectrum. We all assumed that there were two poles: a "left" pole of Communism, socialism, and total government; and a "right" pole of libertarianism and individualist anarchism. Left of center were the liberals and social democrats; right of center were the conservatives. From that simplistic spectrum we concluded, first, that conservatives, no matter how divergent, were our "natural" allies, and second, that there was little real difference between liberals and Communists. Why not then fuzz the truth just a bit, and use the anti-Communist bludgeon to hit at the liberals, especially since the liberals had become entrenched in power and were running the country? There was a temptation that few of us could resist.

What we didn't fully realize at the time was that the Communists and socialists had not invented statism or leviathan government, that the latter had been around for centuries, and that the current developing liberal-conservative consensus and in particular the triumph of liberalism was a reversion to the old despotic ancien régime. This ancien régime was the Old Order against which the libertarian and laissez-faire movements of the 18th and 19th centuries had emerged as a revolutionary opposition: an opposition on behalf of economic freedom and individual liberty. Jefferson, Cobden, and Thoreau as our forbears were ancestors in more ways than one; for both we and they were battling against a mercantilist statism that established bureaucratic despotism and corporate monopolies at home and waged imperial wars abroad. But if socialism and liberalism are reversions to the Old European Conservatism, then it becomes clear that it is statist conservatism — now joined by liberalism and social democracy — that is still, and not simply in 1800, the major enemy of liberty. And if liberals and Communists sound alike, this does not mean, as we thought then, that liberals had somehow become crypto-Communists; on the contrary, it was a sign that Communists had become liberals!

But for us this analysis — to be developed by Leonard Liggio — was still far in the future. During the 1940s and '50s we merrily engaged in red-baiting. My own position was characteristically libertarian: I distinguished between "compulsory" red-baiting, using the power of the State to repress Communists and leftists, which I deplored, and "voluntary" red-baiting by private organizations and groups, which I supported. The former included the Smith Act prosecutions, the McCarran Act, and the inquisitions of HUAC. Another of my blind spots is that I did not realize the virtual impossibility of keeping domestic and foreign red-baiting strictly separate; it was psychologically and politically impossible to persecute or harass Communists or leftists at home, while at the same time pursuing a policy of peace, neutrality, and friendship with Communist countries overseas. And the global anti-Communist crusaders knew this truth all too well.

From early in the postwar period, the major carriers of the anti-Communist contagion were the ex-Communist and ex-leftist intellectuals. In a climate of growing disillusion with the fatuous propaganda of World War II, the ex-Communists hit the intellectual and political worlds like a bombshell, more and more forming the spearhead of the anti-Communist crusade, domestic and foreign. Sophisticated, worldly, veteran polemicists, they had been there: to naive and breathless Americans, the ex-leftists were like travelers from an unknown and therefore terrifying land, returning with authentic tales of horror and warning. Since they, with their special knowledge, knew, and since they raised the terrible warnings, who were we to deny that truth? The fact that "ex-es" throughout history have tried frantically to expiate their guilt and their fear of having wasted their lives by attempting to denigrate and exterminate their former love — that fact was lost on us as well as on most of America.

From the very end of the war, the "ex-es" were everywhere on the Right, whipping up fear, pointing the finger, eager to persecute or exterminate any Communists they could find, at home and abroad. Several older generation "ex-es" from the prewar era were prominent. One was George E. Sokolsky, columnist for the New York Sun, who had been a Communist in the early 1920s. Particularly prominent on the Right was Dr. J.B. Matthews, foremost Communist fellow traveler of the early 1930s, who by the end of that decade was chief investigator for the Dies Committee; Matthews was to make a fortune out of his famous "card files," a mammoth collection of "Communist front" names which he would use to sell his services as finger man for industries and organizations; pleasant and erudite, Matthews had been converted from socialism partly by reading Mises's Socialism (http://mises.org/store/Socialism-P55C0.aspx). But the first libertarian-red-baiting marriage was effected shortly after the end of the war by the veteran red-baiter Isaac Don Levine, who founded a little-known monthly called Plain Talk, which featured a curious mixture of libertarian political philosophy and ferocious exposés of alleged "Reds" in America. It was particularly curious because Don Levine has never, before or since that short-lived venture, ever exhibited any interest in freedom or libertarianism. When Plain Talk folded, Don Levine moved to West Germany to play in the revanchist politics of East European emigré groups.

Plain Talk disappeared after several years to make way for the weekly Freeman in 1950, a far more ambitious and better-financed venture which, however, never achieved anything like the influence or readership of the later National Review. Again, this was a libertarian-conservative-red-baiting coalition venture. Coeditors were two veteran writers and journalists: Henry Hazlitt, a laissez-faire economist but never an isolationist; and John Chamberlain, a man of libertarian instincts and a former isolationist, but an ex-leftist deeply scarred by a Communist cell which had been nasty to him in Time magazine.[1] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note1) And so the isolationist cause was never well represented in the Freeman; furthermore, Willi Schlamm later came in as book editor, and Chamberlain brought in the profoundly antilibertarian Forrest Davis to be a third coeditor. Davis, along with Ernest K. Lindley, had written the official Roosevelt administration apologia for Pearl Harbor, and then moved on to become a ghostwriter for Joe McCarthy.[2] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note2)

It was, in fact, McCarthy and "McCarthyism" that provided the main catalyst for transforming the mass base of the right wing from isolationism and quasi-libertarianism to simple anti-Communism. Before McCarthy launched his famous crusade in February 1950, he had not been particularly associated with the right wing of the Republican Party; on the contrary, his record was more nearly liberal and centrist, statist rather than libertarian. It should be remembered that red-baiting and anti-Communist witch-hunting was launched by the liberals and, even after McCarthy arose, it was the liberals who were the most effective at this game. It was, after all, the liberal Roosevelt administration that passed the Smith Act, which was then used against Trotskyites and isolationists during World War II and against the Communists after the war; it was the liberal Truman administration that prosecuted Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs — and that launched the Cold War; it was the eminently liberal Hubert Humphrey who put through a clause in the McCarran Act of 1950 threatening concentration camps for "subversives."

In fact, New Left historians Steinke and Weinstein have shown that McCarthy himself learned his red-baiting from none other than the saintly social democratic figure Norman Thomas. During the 1946 campaign, McCarthy first ran for the Senate against the great isolationist leader Robert LaFollette, Jr. While McCarthy did a little red-baiting of the still-consistent isolationist LaFollette in the primary, McCarthy was then a standard internationalist, or Vandenberg, Republican, with indeed a few maverick endorsements of the idea of negotiating peace with the Soviet Union. Then, on August 26, 1946, Norman Thomas, speaking at an annual picnic of the Wisconsin Socialist Party, red-baited the Democratic senatorial candidate, Howard J. McMurray. Thomas in particular accused McMurray of being endorsed by the Daily Worker, an accusation that McCarthy picked up eagerly a few weeks later. McCarthy had gotten the bit in his teeth; he had learned how from a veteran of the internecine struggles on the Left.[3] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note3)

McCarthy's crusade effectively transformed the mass base of the right wing by bringing into the movement a mass of urban Catholics from the Eastern seaboard. Before McCarthy, the rank-and-file of the right wing was the small-town, isolationist Middle West, the typical readers of the old Chicago Tribune. In contrast to the old base, the interest of the new urban Catholic constituency in individual liberty was, if anything, negative; one might say that their main political interest was in stamping out blasphemy and pornography at home and in killing Communists at home and abroad. In a sense, the subsequent emergence of Bill Buckley and his highly Catholic-ish National Review reflected this mass influx and transformation. It is surely no accident that Buckley's first emergence on the political scene was to coauthor (with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, a convert to Catholicism) the leading pro-McCarthy work, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954). To the McCarthy banner also flocked the increasingly powerful gaggle of ex-Communists and ex-leftists: notably, George Sokolsky, a leading McCarthy adviser, and J.B. Matthews, who was chief investigator for McCarthy until he stepped on too many toes by denouncing the supposedly massive "infiltration" of the Protestant clergy by the Communist Party.

Not seeing this transformation process at work at the time, I myself was a McCarthy enthusiast. There were two basic reasons. One was that while McCarthy was employing the weapon of a governmental committee, the great bulk of his victims were not private citizens but government officials: bureaucrats and Army officers. Most of McCarthy's red-baiting was therefore "voluntary" rather than "compulsory," since the persons being attacked were, as government officials, fair game from the libertarian point of view. Besides, day in and day out, such Establishment organs as the New York Times kept telling us that McCarthy was "tearing down the morale of the executive branch"; what more could a libertarian hope for? And "tearing down the morale of the Army" to boot! What balm for an antimilitarist!

Recently, I had occasion to see once again, after all these years, Emile de Antonio's film of the McCarthy censure hearings, Point of Order (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Order_(film)). Seeing it with an old-time member of the Circle who had also abandoned the right wing long since, we were curious about how we would react; for neither of us had really rethought the long-dead McCarthy episode. Within minutes, we found ourselves cheering once again, though in a rather different way, for that determined symbol of the witch-hunt. For the film began with McCarthy pointing as his basic premise to some crazed map of the United States with the "international Communist conspiracy" moving in a series of coordinated arrows against the United States. (It was for all the world like some '50s issue of the Harvard Lampoon, satirizing an absurd military "menace.") But the crucial point is that McCarthy's army and senatorial adversaries never contested this absurd axiom; and once given the axiom, McCarthy's relentless logic was impeccable. As Steinke and Weinstein point out, McCarthy did not invent witch-hunting and red-baiting. "Nor, as many liberals complain, did he abuse or misuse an otherwise useful tool; he simply carried it to its logical conclusion." Indeed, he took the liberals' own creation and turned it against them, and against the swollen-leviathan army officials as well; and to see them get at least a measure of comeuppance, to see the liberals and centrists hoisted by their own petard, was sweet indeed. In the words of Steinke and Weinstein, McCarthy



rode the monster too hard, turning it against its creators, and they, realizing finally that their creation was out of control, attempted in flaccid defense to turn it back upon him.[4] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note4)


As a bit of personal corroboration, I fully remember the reaction of a close acquaintance, an old Russian Menshevik, a member of the Russian Social Democratic Federation and veteran anti-Communist, when McCarthy's movement began. He was positively gleeful, and ardently supported the McCarthy crusade; it was only later, when he "went too far" that the old Menshevik felt that McCarthy had to be dumped.


But there was another reason for my own fascination with the McCarthy phenomenon: his populism. For the '50s was an era when liberalism — now accurately termed "corporate liberalism" — had triumphed, and seemed to be permanently in the saddle. Having now gained the seats of power, the liberals had given up their radical veneer of the '30s and were now settling down to the cozy enjoyment of their power and perquisites. It was a comfortable alliance of Wall Street, Big Business, Big Government, Big Unions, and liberal Ivy League intellectuals; it seemed to me that while in the long run this unholy alliance could only be overthrown by educating a new generation of intellectuals, that in the short run the only hope to dislodge this new ruling elite was a populist short-circuit. In sum, that there was a vital need to appeal directly to the masses, emotionally, even demagogically, over the heads of the Establishment: of the Ivy League, the mass media, the liberal intellectuals, of the Republican-Democrat political party structure. This appeal could be done — especially in that period of no organized opposition whatever — only by a charismatic leader, a leader who could make a direct appeal to the masses and thereby undercut the ruling and opinion-molding elite; in sum, by a populist short-circuit. It seemed to me that this was what McCarthy was trying to do; and that it was largely this appeal, the open-ended sense that there was no audacity of which McCarthy was not capable, that frightened the liberals, who, from their opposite side of the fence, also saw that the only danger to their rule was in just such a whipping up of populist emotions.[5] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note5)

It is surely no accident that, with their power consolidated and a populist appeal their only fear, the liberal intellectuals began to push hard for their proclamation of the "end of ideology." Hence their claim that ideology and hard-nosed doctrines were no longer valuable or viable, and their ardent celebration of the newfound American consensus. With such enemies and for such reasons, it was hard for me not to be a "McCarthyite."

The leading expression of this celebration of consensus combined with the newfound fear of ideology and populism was Daniel Bell's collection, The New American Right (http://books.google.com/books?id=k6c4AAAAIAAJ) (1955). This collection was also significant in drawing together exradicals (Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Richard Hofstadter, Nathan Glazer) along with an antipopulist liberal "conservative" (Peter Viereck), into this pro-elitist and antipopulist consensus. Also noteworthy is the book's dedication to S.M. Levitas, executive editor of the social democratic New Leader, the publication that bound "responsible" red-baiters and liberals into the postwar Cold War consensus.[6] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note6)

The peak of my populist and McCarthyite activities came during the height of the McCarthy turmoil, in the furor over the activities of Roy Cohn and S. David Schine. It was shortly after the founding of the Circle Bastiat, and the kids of the Circle, in their capacity as leaders of the still-functioning Students for America, were invited to address a massive testimonial dinner given for Roy Cohn upon his forced ouster from the McCarthy Committee at the Hotel Astor in New York on July 26, 1954. Major speakers were such McCarthyite leaders as Godfrey P. Schmidt, Colonel Archibald Roosevelt, George Sokolsky, Alfred Kohlberg, Bill Buckley, and Rabbi Benjamin Schultz. But the speech which drew the most applause, and which gained a considerable amount of notoriety, was the brief address given by one of our Circle members (George Reisman), which I had written. The speech asked why the intensity of the hatred against Cohn and McCarthy by the liberal intellectuals; and it answered that a threat against Communists in government was also felt to be a threat against the "Socialists and New Dealers, who have been running our political life for the last 21 years, and are still running it!" The speech concluded in a rousing populist appeal that



As the Chicago Tribune aptly put it, the Case of Roy Cohn is the American Dreyfus Case. As Dreyfus was redeemed, so will Roy Cohn when the American people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers, and Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.


Rabbi Schultz, presiding at the dinner, warily referred to the tumultuous applause for the Reisman speech as a "runaway grand jury," and the applause and the speech were mentioned in the accounts of the New York Journal-American, the New York Herald-Tribune, Jack Lait's column in the New York Mirror, the New York World-Telegram and Sun, Murray Kempton's column in the New York Post, and Time magazine. Particularly upset was the veteran liberal and "extremist-baiting" radio commentator, George Hamilton Combs. Combs warned that "the resemblance between this crowd and their opposite members of the extreme left is startlingly close. This was a rightist version of the Henry Wallace convention crowd, the Progressive Party convention of '48."

Particularly interesting is the fact that the by-now-notorious concluding lines of the speech became enshrined in Peter Viereck's contribution to the Daniel Bell book, "The Revolt Against the Elite." Viereck saw the Reisman phraseology as a dangerous "outburst of direct democracy" which "comes straight from the leftist rhetoric of the old Populists and Progressives, a rhetoric forever urging the People to take back 'their' government from the conspiring Powers That Be." Precisely.

Viereck also explained that he meant by "direct democracy," "our mob tradition of Tom Paine, Jacobinism, and the Midwestern Populist parties," which "is government by referendum and mass petition, such as the McCarthyite Committee of Ten Million." Being "immediate and hotheaded," direct democracy "facilitates revolution, demagogy, and Robespierrian thought control" — in contrast, I suppose, to the quieter but more pervasive elitist "thought control" of corporate liberalism.[7] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note7)

Since I failed to understand the interplay of domestic and foreign red-baiting that was at work in the McCarthy movement, I was bewildered when McCarthy, after his outrageous censure by the Senate in late 1954, turned to whooping it up for war on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek in Asia. Why this turnabout? It was clear that the New Right forces behind McCarthy were now convinced that domestic red-baiting, angering as it did the center-right establishment, had become counterproductive, and that from now on the full stress must be on pushing for war against Communism abroad. In retrospect it is clear that a major force for this turn was the sinister figure of the millionaire Far Eastern importer, Alfred Kohlberg, a major backer of McCarthy who supplied him with much of his material, and boasted of his position as Dean of the powerful "China Lobby" on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek. While a failure in the short run, the McCarthy movement had done its work of shifting the entire focus of the right wing from libertarian, antistatist, and isolationist concerns to a focus and concentration upon the alleged Communist "menace." A diversion from domestic to foreign affairs would not only consolidate the right wing; it would also draw no real opposition from liberals and internationalist Republicans who had, after all, begun the Cold War in the first place.

The short-run collapse of the McCarthy movement was clearly due, furthermore, to the lack of any sort of McCarthyite organization. There were leaders, there was press support, there was a large mass base, but there were no channels of organization, no intermediary links, either in journals of opinion or of more direct popular organizations, between the leaders and the base. In late 1955, William F. Buckley and his newly formed weekly, National Review, set out to remedy that lack.

In 1951, when Bill Buckley first burst upon the scene with his God and Man at Yale (http://books.google.com/books?id=FBE4AAAAMAAJ), he liked to refer to himself as a "libertarian" or even at times as an "anarchist"; for in those early days Buckley's major ideological mentor was Frank Chodorov (http://mises.org/daily/2499) rather than, as it would soon become, the notorious Whittaker Chambers. But even in those early "libertarian" days, there was one clinker that made his libertarianism only phony rhetoric: the global anti-Communist crusade.


... continued ...

FrankRep
02-21-2010, 08:33 AM
Thus, take one of Buckley's early efforts, "A Young Republican's View," published in Commonweal, January 25, 1952. Buckley began the article in unexceptionable libertarian fashion, affirming that the enemy is the State, and endorsing the view of Herbert Spencer (http://mises.org/daily/2624) that the State is "begotten of aggression and by aggression." Buckley also contributed excellent quotations from such leading individualists of the past as H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock (http://mises.org/daily/2713#3), and criticized the Republican Party for offering no real alternative to the burgeoning of statism. But then in the remainder of the article he gave the case away, for there loomed the alleged Soviet menace, and all libertarian principles had to go by the board for the duration. Thus, Buckley declared that the "thus far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union" imminently threatens American security, and that therefore "we have to accept Big Government for the duration — for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged … except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores."

In short, a totalitarian bureaucracy must be accepted so long as the Soviet Union exists (presumably for its alleged threat of imposing upon us a totalitarian bureaucracy?).

In consequence, Buckley concluded that we must all support "the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy," as well as "large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington — even with Truman at the reins of it all."[8] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note8) Thus, even at his most libertarian, even before Buckley came to accept Big Government and morality laws as ends in themselves, the pretended National Review "fusion" between liberty and order, between individualism and anti-Communism, was a phony — the individualist and libertarian part of the fusion was strictly rhetorical, to be saved for abstract theorizing and after-dinner discourse. The guts of the New Conservatism was the mobilization of Big Government for the worldwide crusade against Communism.

And so, when National Review was founded with much expertise and financing in late 1955, the magazine was a coming together to direct the newly transformed right wing on the part of two groups: all the veteran ex-Communist journalists and intellectuals, and the new group of younger Catholics whose major goal was anti-Communism. Thus, the central and guiding theme for both groups in this Unholy Coalition was the extirpation of Communism, at home and particularly abroad. Prominent on the new magazine were leading ex-leftists: James Burnham, former Trotskyite; Frank S. Meyer, formerly on the national committee of the Communist Party and head of its Chicago training school; ex-German Communist leader William S. Schlamm; Dr. J.B. Matthews; ex-leftist Max Eastman; ex-Communist Ralph DeToledano; former leading German Communist theoretician Professor Karl Wittfogel; John Chamberlain, a leading leftist intellectual of the thirties; ex-fellow traveler Eugene Lyons; ex-Communist Will Herberg; former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers; and a whole slew of others.

The Catholic wing consisted of two parts. One was a charming but ineffectual group of older European or European-oriented monarchists and authoritarians: e.g., the erudite Austrian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn; the poet Roy Campbell; the pro-Spanish Carlist Frederick Wilhelmsen; and the Englishman Sir Arnold Lunn. I remember one night a heated discussion at a conservative gathering about the respective merits of the Habsburgs, the Stuarts, the Bourbons, the Carlists, the Crown of St. Stephen, and the Crown of St. Wenceslas; and which monarchy should be restored first. Whatever the merits of the monarchist position, this was not an argument relevant to the American tradition, let alone the American cultural and political scene of the day. In retrospect, did Buckley keep this group around as exotic trimming, as an intellectual counterpart to his own social jet set?

The other wing of younger Catholics was far more important for the purposes of the new magazine. These were the younger American anti-Communists, most prominently the various members of the Buckley family (who in closeness and lifestyle has seemed a right-wing version of the Kennedys), which included at first Buckley's brother-in-law and college roommate, L. Brent Bozell; and Buckley's then-favorite disciple later turned leftist, Garry Wills. Rounding out the Catholic aura at National Review was the fact that two of its leading editors became Catholic converts: Frank Meyer and political scientist Willmoore Kendall. It was the essence of National Review as an anti-Communist organ that accounted for its being a coalition of ex-Stalinists and Trotskyites and younger Catholics, and led observers to remark on the curious absence of American Protestants (who had of course been the staple of the Old Right) from the heart of the Buckleyite New Right.[9]

In this formidable but profoundly statist grouping, interest in individual liberty was minimal or negative, being largely confined to some of the book reviews by John Chamberlain and to whatever time Frank Meyer could manage to take off from advocacy of all-out war against the Soviet bloc. Interest in free-market economics was minimal and largely rhetorical, confined to occasional pieces by Henry Hazlitt, who for his part had never been an isolationist and who endorsed the hard-line foreign policy of the magazine.

In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation. We now know that Bill Buckley, for the two years prior to establishing National Review, was admittedly a CIA agent in Mexico City, and that the sinister E. Howard Hunt was his control. His sister Priscilla, who became managing editor of National Review, was also in the CIA; and other editors James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall had at least been recipients of CIA largesse in the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom. In addition, Burnham has been identified by two reliable sources as a consultant for the CIA in the years after World War II.[10] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note10) Moreover, Garry Wills relates in his memoirs of the conservative movement that Frank Meyer, to whom he was close at the time, was convinced that the magazine was a CIA operation. With his Leninist-trained nose for intrigue, Meyer must be considered an important witness.

Furthermore, it was a standard practice in the CIA, at least in those early years, that no one ever resigned from the CIA. A friend of mine who joined the agency in the early 1950s told me that if, before the age of retirement, he was mentioned as having left the CIA for another job, that I was to disregard it, since it would only be a cover for continuing agency work. On that testimony, the case for NR being a CIA operation becomes even stronger. Also suggestive is the fact that a character even more sinister than E. Howard Hunt, William J. Casey, appears at key moments of the establishment of the New over the Old Right. It was Casey who, as attorney, presided over the incorporation of National Review and had arranged the details of the ouster of Felix Morley from Human Events.

At any rate, in retrospect, it is clear that libertarians and Old Rightists, including myself, had made a great mistake in endorsing domestic red-baiting, a red-baiting that proved to be the major entering wedge for the complete transformation of the original right wing. We should have listened more carefully to Frank Chodorov, and to his splendidly libertarian stand on domestic red-baiting: "How to get rid of the communists in the government? Easy. Just abolish the jobs."[11] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note11) It was the jobs and their functioning that was the important thing, not the quality of the people who happened to fill them. More fully, Chodorov wrote:



And now we come to the spy-hunt — which is, in reality, a heresy trial. What is it that perturbs the inquisitors? They do not ask the suspects: Do you believe in Power? Do you adhere to the idea that the individual exists for the glory of the State? … Are you against taxes, or would you raise them until they absorbed the entire output of the country? … Are you opposed to the principle of conscription? Do you favor more "social gains" under the aegis of an enlarged bureaucracy? Or, would you advocate dismantling of the public trough at which these bureaucrats feed? In short, do you deny Power?

Such questions might prove embarrassing, to the investigators. The answers might bring out a similarity between their ideas and purposes and those of the suspected. They too worship Power. Under the circumstances, they limit themselves to one question: Are you a member of the Communist Party? And this turns out to mean, have you aligned yourselves with the Moscow branch of the church?

Power-worship is presently sectarianized along nationalistic lines…. Each nation guards its orthodoxy…. Where Power is attainable, the contest between rival sects is unavoidable…. War is the apotheosis of Power, the ultimate expression of the faith and solidarization of its achievement.[12] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note12)


And Frank had also written:



The case against the communists involves a principle of transcending importance. It is the right to be wrong. Heterodoxy is a necessary condition of a free society…. The right to make a choice … is important to me, for the freedom of selection is necessary to my sense of personality; it is important to society, because only from the juxtaposition of ideas can we hope to approach the ideal of truth.

Whenever I choose an idea or label it "right," I imply the prerogative of another to reject that idea and label it "wrong." To invalidate his right is to invalidate mine. That is, I must brook error if I would preserve my freedom of thought…. If men are punished for espousing communism, shall we stop there? Once we deny the right to be wrong, we put a vise on the human mind and put the temptation to turn the handle into the hands of ruthlessness.[13] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note13)


While anti-Communism was the central root of the decay of the Old Right and the replacement by its statist opposite in National Review, there was another important force in transforming the American right wing, especially in vitiating its "domestic" libertarianism and even its rhetorical devotion to individual liberty. This was the sudden emergence of Russell Kirk as the leader of the New Conservatism, with the publication of his book The Conservative Mind (http://books.google.com/books?id=mGBn2fOdp7gC) in 1953. Kirk, who became a regular columnist of National Review as soon as it was founded, created a sensation with his book and quickly became adopted as the conservative darling of the "vital center." In fact, before Buckley became prominent as the leading conservative spokesman of the media, Russell Kirk was the most prominent conservative. After the appearance of his book, Kirk began to make speeches around the country, often in a friendly "vital center" tandem with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

For Kirk was far more acceptable to "vital center" corporate liberalism than was the Old Right. Scorning any trait of individualism or rigorous free-market economics, Kirk was instead quite close to the conservatism of Peter Viereck; to Kirk, Big Government and domestic statism were perfectly acceptable, provided that they were steeped in some sort of Burkean tradition and enjoyed a Christian framework. Indeed, it was clear that Kirk's ideal society was an ordered English squirearchy, ruled by the Anglican Church and Tory landlords in happy tandem.[14] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note14) Here there was no fiery individualism, no trace of populism or radicalism to upset the ruling classes or the liberal intellectual Establishment. Here at last was a rightist with whom liberals, while not exactly agreeing, could engage in a cozy dialogue.

It was Kirk, in fact, who brought the words "conservatism" and "New Conservatism" into general acceptance on the right wing. Before that, knowledgeable libertarians had hated the word, and with good reason; for weren't the conservatives the ancient enemy, the 18th- and 19th-century Tory and reactionary suppressors of individual liberty, the ancient champions of the Old Order of Throne-and-Altar against which the 18th- and 19th-century liberals had fought so valiantly?

And so the older classical-liberals and individualists resisted the term bitterly: Ludwig von Mises, a classical liberal, scorned the term; F.A. Hayek insisted on calling himself an "Old Whig"; and when Frank Chodorov was called a "conservative" in the pages of National Review, he wrote an outraged letter declaring, "As for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose. I am a radical."[15] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note15) Before Russell Kirk, the word "conservative," being redolent of reaction and the Old Order, was a left smear-word applied to the right wing; it was only after Kirk that the right wing, including the new National Review, rushed to embrace this previously hated term.


The Kirkian influence was soon evident in right-wing youth meetings. I remember one gathering when, to my dismay, one Gridley Wright, an aristocratic leader of Yale campus conservatism, declared that the true ideological struggle of our day, between left and right, had nothing to do with free-market economics or with individual liberty versus statism. The true struggle, he declared, was Christianity versus atheism, and good manners versus boorishness and materialistic greed: the materialist greed, for example, of the starving peoples of India who were trying to earn an income, a bit of subsistence. It was easy, of course, for a wealthy Yale man whose father owned a large chunk of Montana to decry the "materialistic greed" of the poor; was this what the right wing was coming to?

Russell Kirk also succeeded in altering our historical pantheon of heroes. Mencken, Nock, Thoreau, Jefferson, Paine, and Garrison were condemned as rationalists, atheists, or anarchists, and were replaced by such reactionaries and antilibertarians as Burke, Metternich, De Maistre, or Alexander Hamilton.[16] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note16)

With its formidable array of anti-Communists and Catholic traditionalists, National Review quickly took over the lead and direction of the New Right, which it rapidly remolded in its own image. The "official" line of National Review was what came to be called "fusionist," whose leading practitioners were Meyer and Buckley; "fusionism" stressed the dominance of anti-Communism and Christian order, to be sure, but retained some libertarian rhetoric in a subordinate rank. The importance of the libertarian and Old Right rhetoric was largely political; for it would have been difficult for National Review to lead a conservative political revival in this country in the garb of monarchy and Inquisition. Without fusionism, the transformation of the right wing could not have taken place within the form, and might have alienated much of the right-wing mass base. Many of the other National Review intellectuals were, in contrast, impatient with any concessions to liberty. These included Kirk's Tory traditionalism; the various wings of monarchists; and Willmoore Kendall's open call for suppression of freedom of speech. The great thrust of Kendall, a National Review editor for many years, was his view that it is the right and duty of the "majority" of the community — as embodied, say, in Congress — to suppress any individual who disturbs that community with radical doctrines. Socrates, opined Kendall, not only should have been killed by the Greek community, but it was their bounden moral duty to kill him.

Kendall, incidentally, was symptomatic of the change in attitude toward the Supreme Court from Old Right to New. One of the major doctrines of the Old Right was the defense of the Supreme Court's role in outlawing congressional and executive incursions against individual liberty; but now the New Right, as typified by Kendall, bitterly attacked the Supreme Court day in and day out, and for what? Precisely for presuming to defend the liberty of the individual against the incursions of Congress and the executive.

Thus, the Old Right had always bitterly attacked the judicial doctrines of Felix Frankfurter, who was considered a left-wing monster for undercutting the activist role of the Supreme Court in declaring various extensions of government power to be unconstitutional; but now Kendall and National Review were leading the Right in hailing Frankfurter precisely for this permissive placing of the judicial imprimatur on almost any action of the federal government. By staying in the same place, Felix Frankfurter had shifted from being a villain to a hero of the newly transformed Right, while it was now such libertarian activists as Justices Black and Douglas who received the abuse of the right wing. It was getting to be an ever weirder right-wing world that I was inhabiting. It was indeed the venerable Alexander Bickel, a disciple of Frankfurter's at Yale Law School, who converted young professor Robert Bork from a libertarian to a majoritarian jurist.

At the opposite pole from the Catholic ultras, but at one with them in being opposed to liberty and individualism, was James Burnham, who since the inception of National Review has been its cold, hard-nosed, amoral political strategist and resident Machiavellian. Burnham, whose National Review column was entitled "The Third World War," was the magazine's leading power and global anti-Communist strategist. In a lifetime of political writing, James Burnham has shown only one fleeting bit of positive interest in individual liberty: and that was a call in National Review for the legalization of firecrackers!

On the more directly political front, National Review obviously needed a "fusionist" for its political tactician, for the direct guidance of conservatism as a political movement. It found that tactician in its publisher, the former Deweyite Young Republican Bill Rusher. A brilliant political organizer, Rusher was able, by the late 1950s, to take over control of the College Young Republicans, and then the National Young Republican Federation.

Heading a group called the "Syndicate," Rusher has managed to control the national Young Republications ever since. In 1959, National Review organized the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom at Bill Buckley's estate at Sharon, Connecticut. Young Americans for Freedom soon grew to many thousand strong, and became in effect the collegiate youth-activist arm of the National Review political complex. Unfortunately, the bulk of young libertarians at the time stayed solidly in the conservative movement; heedless of the foreign policy betrayal of the Old Right, these young libertarians and semi-libertarians well served the purposes of National Review by lending the patina of libertarian rhetoric to such ventures as Young Americans for Freedom.

Thus, Young Americans for Freedom's founding Sharon Statement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Statement) was its only even remotely close approach to libertarianism; its actual activities have always been confined to anti-Communism, including the attempted interdiction of trade with the Communist countries — and lately were expanded to attempting legal suppression of left-wing student rebellions. But the libertarian veneer was supplied not only by the title and by parts of the Sharon Statement, but also by the fact that Young Americans for Freedom's first president, Robert M. Schuchman, was a libertarian anti-Communist who had once been close to the old Circle Bastiat. More typical of the mass base of conservative youth was the considerable contingent at Sharon who objected to the title of the new organization, because, they said, "Freedom is a left-wing word." It would have been far more candid, though less politically astute, if the noble word freedom had been left out of Young Americans for Freedom's title.

By the late 1950s, Barry Goldwater had been decided upon as the political leader of the New Right, and it was Rusher and the National Review clique that inspired the Draft Goldwater movement and Youth for Goldwater in 1960. Goldwater's ideological manifesto of 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative (http://books.google.com/books?id=QW2pAAAACAAJ), was ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, who wrote fiery articles in National Review attacking liberty even as an abstract principle, and upholding the function of the State in imposing and enforcing moral and religious creeds. Its foreign policy chapter, "The Soviet Menace," was a thinly disguised plea for all-out offensive war against the Soviet Union and other Communist nations. The Goldwater movement of 1960 was a warm-up for the future; and when Nixon was defeated in the 1960 election, Rusher and National Review launched a well-coordinated campaign to capture the Republican Party for Barry Goldwater in 1964.

It was this drastic shift to all-out and pervasive war-mongering that I found hardest to swallow. For years I had thought of myself politically as an "extreme right-winger," but this emotional identification with the right was becoming increasingly difficult. To be a political ally of Senator Taft was one thing; to be an ally of statists who thirsted for all-out war against Russia was quite another.

For the first five years of its existence I moved in National Review circles. I had known Frank Meyer as a fellow analyst for the William Volker Fund, and through Meyer had met Buckley and the rest of the editorial staff. I attended National Review luncheons, rallies, and cocktail parties, and wrote a fair number of articles and book reviews for the magazine. But the more I circulated among these people, the greater my horror because I realized with growing certainty that what they wanted above all was total war against the Soviet Union; their fanatical warmongering would settle for no less.

Of course the New Rightists of National Review would never quite dare to admit this crazed goal in public, but the objective would always be slyly implied. At right-wing rallies no one cheered a single iota for the free market, if this minor item were ever so much as mentioned; what really stirred up the animals were demagogic appeals by National Review leaders for total victory, total destruction of the Communist world. It was that which brought the right-wing masses out of their seats.

It was National Review editor Brent Bozell who trumpeted, at a right-wing rally: "I would favor destroying not only the whole world, but the entire universe out to the furthermost star, rather than suffer Communism to live."

It was National Review editor Frank Meyer who once told me: "I have a vision, a great vision of the future: a totally devastated Soviet Union." I knew that this was the vision that really animated the New Conservatism. Frank Meyer, for example, had the following argument with his wife, Elsie, over foreign-policy strategy: Should we drop the H-Bomb on Moscow and destroy the Soviet Union immediately and without warning (Frank), or should we give the Soviet regime 24 hours with which to comply with an ultimatum to resign (Elsie)?

In the meanwhile, isolationist or antiwar sentiment disappeared totally from right-wing publications or organizations, as rightists hastened to follow the lead of National Review and its burgeoning political and activist organizations. The death of Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and the ouster of Felix Morley from Human Events meant that these crucial mass periodicals would swing behind the new pro-war line. Harry Elmer Barnes, the leader and promoter of World War II revisionism, was somehow able to publish an excellent article on Hiroshima in National Review, but apart from that, found that conservative interest in revisionism, prominent after World War II, had dried up and become hostile.[17] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note17) For as William Henry Chamberlin had discovered, the Munich analogy was a powerful one to use against opponents of the new war drive; besides, any questioning of American intervention in the previous war crusade inevitably cast doubts on its current role, let alone on New Right agitation for an even hotter war. Right-wing publishers like Henry Regnery and Devin-Adair lost interest in isolationist or revisionist works. Once in a while, a few libertarians who had not fallen silent about the war drive or even joined it expressed their opposition and concern; but they could only do so in private correspondence. There was no other outlet available.[18] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note18)

Particularly disgraceful was National Review's refusal to give the great John T. Flynn an outlet for his opposition to the Cold War. The doughty veteran Flynn, who had, interestingly enough, championed Joe McCarthy, bitterly opposed the New Right emphasis on a global military crusade. In the fall of 1956, Flynn submitted an article to National Review attacking the Cold War crusade, and charging, as he had in the 1940s, that militarism was a "job-making boondoggle," whose purpose was not to defend but to bolster "the economic system with jobs for soldiers and jobs and profits in the munitions plants." Presenting figures for swollen military spending between the start of Roosevelt's war buildup in 1939 and 1954, Flynn argued that the economy no longer consisted of a "socialist sector" and a "capitalist sector." Instead, Flynn warned, there was only the "racket" of military spending, "with the soldier-politician in the middle — unaware of the hell-broth of war, taxes and debt." The Eisenhower administration, Flynn charged, was no better than its Democratic predecessors; the administration is spending $66 billion a year, most going for "so-called 'national security'" and only a "small fraction" spent on "the legitimate functions of government."

A fascinating interchange followed between Buckley and Flynn. Rejecting Flynn's article in a letter on October 22, 1956, Buckley had the unmitigated chutzpah to tell this veteran anti-Communist that he didn't understand the nature of the Soviet military threat, and condescendingly advised him to read William Henry Chamberlin's latest pot-boiler in National Review describing "the difference in the nature of the threat posed by the Commies and the Nazis." Trying to sugar-coat the pill, Buckley sent Flynn $100 along with the rejection note. The next day, Flynn returned the $100, sarcastically adding that he was "greatly obliged" to Buckley for "the little lecture."

In this way, Buckley used the same argument for depriving Flynn of a publishing outlet that Bruce Bliven and the war liberals had employed when ousting Flynn from the New Republic in the 1940s. In both cases Flynn was accused of overlooking the alleged foreign threat to the United States, and in both cases Flynn's attempted answer was to stress that the real menace to American liberties was militarism, socialism, and fascism at home, imposed in the name of combating an alleged foreign threat. Flynn denied the existence of a Soviet military threat, and warned prophetically that the executive branch of the government was about to involve us in a futile war in Indochina.[19] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note19)

Virtually the only published echo of the Old Right was a book by the redoubtable Felix Morley who, in the course of decrying the modern New Deal and post-New Deal destruction of federalism by strong central government, roundly attacked the developing and existing American Empire and militarism.[20] (http://mises.org/daily/2759#note20)

Meanwhile, National Review's image of me was that of a lovable though utopian libertarian purist who, however, must be kept strictly confined to propounding laissez-faire economics, to which National Review had a kind of residual rhetorical attachment. There was even talk at one time of my becoming an economic columnist for National Review. But above all I was supposed to stay out of political matters and leave to the warmongering ideologues of National Review the gutsy real-world task of defending me from the depredations of world Communism, and allowing me the luxury of spinning utopias about private fire-fighting services. I was increasingly unwilling to play that kind of a castrate role.


SOURCE:
http://mises.org/daily/2759

FrankRep
02-21-2010, 09:22 AM
Neoconservatism: a CIA Front? (http://jacq.org/people/Pavlik/lrc-pavlik2.pdf)


Gregory Pavlik | The Rothbard-Rockwell Report
1997


Not long after the Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947, the American public and the world were subjected to an unprecedented level of propaganda in the service of US foreign policy objectives in the Cold War. The propaganda offensive of the government centered around its obsession with securing the emerging US-dominated world order in the wake of the Second World War. It was a time when Europe lay in ruins and when subservience to US planners, in government and business, was the order of the day.

Although it is now widely conceded that there was never any serious threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, let alone of the United States, the menace of the Soviet Union was the pretext underlying discussion of foreign policy. To pay for the Cold War, Harry Truman set out, as Arthur Vandenberg advised, to "Scare the Hell out of the American people." A daunting task, considering the years of pro-Soviet accolades that had been previously flowing from the executive branch.

Nonetheless, the Soviet threat served as a useful chimera to keep the masses in line. What were the targets singled out for demonization in the Cold War propaganda campaign? One of the chief aims of the government was to discredit dangerously parochial attitudes about the desirability of peace. It was also thought necessary to inoculate the public, particularly in Europe, against the virus of "neutralism."

Further, since the American government had successfully entrenched the military industrial complex as a permanent feature of American life, US planners were eager to discredit the idea of "disarmament," which meant not only a rejection of the techniques of mass murder developed and perfected by the Allied powers in the Second World War, but also a return to the pre-war days when the union of government and business was more tenuous, government-connected profits were fleeting, and market discipline provided a check on consolidation.

The degree to which the press participated as a partner in the rhetoric of the Cold War was no accident. Media penetration was a major facet of CIA activities in both the foreign and domestic context. At its peak, the CIA allocated 29 percent of its budget to "media and propaganda." The extent of its efforts are difficult to measure, but some information has slipped through the shroud of secrecy.

One report notes that the media organizations funded by the CIA in Europe included: the West German News agency DENA (later the DPA), the writers association PEN in Paris, a number of French newspapers, the International Forum of Journalists, and Forum World Features. The London-based Forum World Features provided stories to "140 newspapers around the world, including about 30 in the United States, amongst which were the Washington Post and four other major dailies."

The US Senate's Church committee reported that the Post was aware that the service was "CIA-controlled." German media tycoon Axel Springer had received the then-substantial sum of more than $7 million from the Agency to build his press empire. His relationship with the CIA was reported to have extended through the 1970s. The New York Times reported that the CIA owned or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, and periodicals. The paper reported that at least another dozen were infiltrated by the CIA; more than 1,000 books either written directly or subsidized by the Agency were published during this period.

The penetration of CIA propaganda into the American press was far more extensive than an occasional distorted report from Europe. By the early 70s, it had been revealed that the head of the Hearst bureau in London was a CIA agent. Some suspicion was aroused among those editors not on the Company payroll, and inquiring minds among them wanted to know if CIA men were currently in their employ. Soon thereafter the Washington Star-News published a report claiming that some three-dozen journalists were on the payroll of the Agency. One agent was identified in the story as a member of the Star-News' own staff. When the paper went belly up in 1981, the "journalist" in question went directly to work for the Reagan administration. Later, he joined the staff of the Washington Times.

Though pressured, the CIA refused for some time to release information on its tentacles in the "free press." There's little wonder why. When George Bush assumed the role of CIA director, he agreed to a single paragraph summary of each of its journalists for the Church committee. When it submitted the last of its data, the CIA had provided information on more than 400 journalists. The final Church report was a disappointment, having been audited by the CIA. A subsequent House investigation was suppressed, though a leak it was published in the Village Voice. The House report indicated that Reuters news service was frequently used for CIA disinformation, and that media manipulation may have been the "largest single category of covert action projects taken by the CIA." According to the watchdog group Public Information Resource, propaganda expenses in the 70s may have exceeded $285 million a year. This was more than "the combined budgets of Reuters, United Press International, and the Associated Press."

By the late seventies, reports emerged that the publishing house Copley Press had for three decades served as a CIA front. Its subsidiary, Copley News Service, provided the CIA a mouthpiece in Latin America. Propaganda in Latin America was more or less constant, as the CIA influenced elections, organized the torture and murder of dissidents, including priests, and backed brutal, but pro-American patsies throughout the region.

The efforts in manipulation of opinion in Latin America were reflected in similar campaigns at home. For instance: pro-contra public relations specialist Edgar Chamorro served as a conduit of disinformation from 1982 to 1984, manipulating journalists and Congressmen at the behest of the CIA. Though domestic propaganda is a violation of the law, it was a standard Agency tactic.

The Carter administration, in an effort to soften public interest in the CIA's involvement with the press, issued an executive order touted in the media as a ban on the manipulation of the American media. Belatedly, as another PIR report notes, the Society of Professional Journalists had this to say-"An executive order during the Carter administration was thought to have banned the practice [of recruitment of journalists by the CIA]. After a Council on Foreign Relations task force recommended that the ban be reconsidered, it was revealed that a 'loophole' existed allowing the CIA director or his deputy to grant a waiver." As a follow-up, the Reagan administration signed a law banning media disclosure of covert operations as a felony.

If reporters were often led to compromise their integrity at the behest of the warfare state, it was an example set at the highest levels of power in the American media. Press ownership, already concentrated to a ludicrous degree, shared a cozy relationship with the CIA from its start. Those chummy with the Company included Time-Life magnate Henry Luce, former Post owner Philip Graham and assorted New York Times owners in the Sulzberger family. Top editors of the Post and Newsweek have also served as agents, while the Post's intelligence reporter was on the take from the CIA in the 60s. Katherine Graham, for decades owner of the Washington Post, had this to say to top CIA officials as the Berlin Wall was starting to crack. "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

The conservative movement that culminated in the elevation of Ronald Reagan to the presidency was a product of those turbulent Cold War years, and perhaps more so a product of domestic intervention by the security state than many of its participants would care to admit. The armchair warriors in the neoconservative camp and the inveterate interventionists at National Review can both trace their roots straight back to the propaganda efforts of the CIA.

After the Hitler-Stalin pact, the neoconservatives moved from cafeteria Trotskyites to apologists for the US warfare state without missing a beat, as Justin Raimondo shows in his 1993 Reclaiming the American Right (http://outboundlink.net/out.php?cid=1117&tr=0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fexec%2Fobidos%2F tg%2Fdetail%2F-%2F1883959004%2Flewrockwell%2F&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fa-albionic.com%2Ftopic%2F126%2Ft%2FNeoconservatism-a-CIA-Front-.html). The CIA's role in establishing the influence of the neocons came out in the late 60s, though the revelations were obscured by the primary actors' denials of knowledge of the covert funding. The premiere organization of the anti-Stalinist left, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, provided a base of operations to launch a left-intellectual crusade against the Soviet Union. The revelation that the Congress was a CIA front destroyed the organization's credibility, and it went belly up despite the best efforts of the Ford Foundation to keep it afloat. The Congress disappeared, but as Raimondo notes, "the core group later came to be known as the neoconservatives."

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was perhaps the Agency's most ambitious attempt at control and influence of intellectual life throughout Europe and the world. Affiliates were established in America, Europe, Australia, Japan, Latin America, India, and Africa, although its appeal was limited in the Third World for obvious reasons. It combined concerts, conferences, and publishing efforts, promoting the State Department line on the Cold War. Magazines affiliated with the Congress included, among others, the China Quarterly, the New Leader and, of course, Encounter.

The funding of the Congress and similar fronts was organized through dozens of charitable trusts and nonprofit foundations, some of which were invented by the CIA. The money was made available through seemingly legitimate means to the Congress, as well as to political parties (including the German Social Democrats), unions and labor organizations, journalists' unions, student groups, and any number of other organizations that could be counted on to support US hegemony in Europe and the world.

The most complete story of the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom is found in Peter Coleman's apologetic book, The Liberal Conspiracy (http://outboundlink.net/out.php?cid=1117&tr=0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fexec%2Fobidos%2F ASIN%2F0029064813%2Flewrockwell%2F&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fa-albionic.com%2Ftopic%2F126%2Ft%2FNeoconservatism-a-CIA-Front-.html). Coleman, a former Australian barrister and editor of the Congress magazine, the Quadrant, lets slip quite a bit of revelatory information in his analysis of the Congress's activities and its relationship to the CIA. The common targets of Congress literature, as Coleman notes, are familiar: the literature was anti-Communist, social democratic, and anti-neutralist. Other aims promoted by the Congress were cataloged by William Blum: "a strong, well-armed, and united Western Europe, allied to the United States....support for the Common Market and NATO and...skepticism of disarmament [and] pacifism. Criticism of US foreign policy took place within the framework of cold war assumptions; for example that a particular American intervention was not the most effective way of combating communism, not that there was anything wrong with intervention per se...." F.A. Hayek commented that the Congress' strategic agenda was "not to plan the future of freedom, but to write its obituary."

Among those involved with the Congress were James Burnham, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, Lionel Trilling, and the self-described "life-long Menshevik" Sidney Hook. After World War Two, Kristol worked as the editor for the American Jewish Committee's Commentary magazine, then served as editor of Encounter from 1953 to 1958.

The Congress was organized by Kristol's boss and CIA man Michael Josselson, who maintained a tight grip on the activities of the Congress as well as the content of its publications. According to Coleman, Josselson's criteria for his editors was simple: they had to be reliable on the State Department line. Later, Kristol was to deny he knew the organization was a front. This seems unlikely for several reasons. For one, Sidney Hook stated that "like almost everyone else," he had heard that "the CIA was making some contribution to the financing of the Congress." More to the point, as Tom Braden, then head of the CIA's International Organizations division, wrote in a Saturday Evening Post article, a CIA agent always served as editor of Encounter. Today, Kristol is a kind of svengali in the modern conservative world.

Neoconservative prominence and influence owes quite a bit to the covert activities of this government, something they forget only rarely, as with the case of neocon Richard Perle who was caught funneling information to one of our "reliable allies" while in the Reagan administration.

While waging the CIA's battle, the neocons were not yet billing themselves as conservatives. But the National Review was another matter, a journal aimed specifically at the American right wing. The official line holds that National Review was founded in an intellectual vacuum, and, for all intents and purposes, created conservatism in America. But events, as are most often the case, were not that simple. The idea for National Review originated with Willi Schlamm, a hard-line interventionist and feature editor with the Old Right Freeman. At odds with the isolationism of the right, Schlamm was well-known for his belligerence, having demanded that the United States go to war over Formosa.

One person in a position to know more details about the founding of NR was the late classicist and right-winger Revilo Oliver. Although late in life Oliver was associated most closely with extremist racialism, in the 50s, he was an influential member of the Buckley inner circle, a regular contributor to National Review and a member of Bill Buckley's wedding party. Later, he went on to serve as a founding board member of the John Birch Society, until his break with the Society's founder Robert Welch.

In his autobiography, Oliver explains that the National Review was conceived as a way to put the isolationist Freeman out of business. A surreptitious deal was cut with one of the Freeman editors (presumably Schlamm) to turn the magazine over to Buckley; a last-ditch effort saved the magazine, and control was assumed by Leonard E. Read, president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Unfortunately, Read balked at "politics," i.e., analyzing and criticizing government actions, and the magazine quickly slipped into irrelevance.

It's hard to blame the editors of the Freeman for failing to see Buckley's treachery coming. As late as 1954, Buckley was denouncing the US military as incompatible with a free society. Soldiers emerging from the armed forces, Buckley argued, were brainwashed with militaristic platitudes. In his essay, Buckley proposed a debriefing regime for all military men "solely based on the great libertarian documents of our civilization" and study of the lives of the world's "great individualists." But, as they say, the times, they were a changin'.

Buckley's decision to launch the National Review was a watershed event on the right by any measure. As Buckley's admiring social-democratic biographer John Judis notes, "Except for Chodorov, who was a Buckley family friend, none of the right-wing isolationists were included on National Review's masthead. While this point of view had been welcome in the Freeman, it would not be welcome, even as a dissenting view, in National Review."

As Judis notes, Schlamm, who envisioned himself as the guiding light behind NR, was not even a conservative. He "had more in common with Dwight MacDonald or Daniel Bell than with Robert McCormick; Buckley was turning his back on much of the isolationist...Old Right that had applauded his earlier books and that his father had been politically close to."

Buckley, by 1955, had already been in deep cover for the CIA. While there is some confusion as to the actual duration of Buckley's service as an agent, Judis notes that he served under E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame in Mexico City in 1951. Buckley was directed to the CIA by Yale Professor Wilmoore Kendall, who passed Buckley along to James Burnham, then a consultant to the Office Of Policy Coordination, the CIA's covert-action wing.

Buckley apparently had a knack for spying: before his stint with the Agency, he had served as an on-campus informant for the FBI, feeding God only knows what to Hoover's political police. In any case, it is known that Buckley continued to participate at least indirectly in CIA covert activities through the 60s.

The founding circle of National Review was composed largely of former agents or men otherwise in the pay of the CIA, including Buckley, Kendall, and Burnham. Wall Street lawyer William Casey, rooted in OSS activities and later to be named director of the CIA, drew up the legal documents for the new magazine. (He also helped transfer Human Events from isolationist to interventionist hands.)

NR required nearly half a million to get off the ground; the only substantial contribution known was from Will Buckley, Senior: $100,000. It's long been rumored that CIA black funds were used to start the magazine, but no hard evidence exists to establish it. It may also be relevant that the National Review was organized as a nonprofit venture, as covert funding was typically channeled through foundations.

By the 70s, it was known that Buckley had been an agent. More imaginative right-wingers accused Buckley of complicity in everything from the assassination of JFK to the Watergate break-in, undoubtedly owing to his relationship with the mysterious Hunt.

But sober minds also believed that something was suspicious about the National Review. In a syndicated column, Gary Wills wondered, "Was National Review, with four ex-agents of the CIA on its staff, a CIA operation? If so, the CIA was stingy, and I doubt it - but even some on the editorial board raised the question. And the magazine supported Buckley's old CIA boss, Howard Hunt, and publicized a fund drive for him." In reply, Buckley denounced Wills for being a classicist. But others close to the founding circle of National Review nurtured similar suspicions. Libertarian "fusionist" Frank Meyer, for example, confided privately that he believed that the National Review was a CIA front.

If it was, then it was the federal government that finally broke the back of the populist and isolationist right, the mass-based movement with its roots in the America First anti-war movement. What FDR tried and failed to do when he sought to shut down the Chicago Tribune, when his attorney general held mass sedition trials of his critics on the right, and when he orchestrated one of the worst smear campaigns in US history against his conservative opponents, the CIA accomplished. That in itself ought to lead conservatives to oppose the existence of executive agencies engaged in covert operations.

Today, the war-mongering right is self-sustaining. Money flows like milk and honey to neoconservative activists from the major conservative foundations. Irving's son Bill Kristol has his sugar daddy in the form of media tycoon and alien Rupert Murdoch. National Review is boring, but in no danger of going under financially.

But the cozy relationship with the federal government is the same. Neocons Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan now insist on massive extensions of the warfare state. The Weekly Standard demands a ground war to topple the head of a foreign government unfriendly to Israel, while denouncing right-wing isolationism, libertarianism, and Murray Rothbard.

This time, the right-wing War Hawks face a potentially insurmountable challenge. The pro-war propaganda directed at the domestic population is failing badly. It is ineffective for two principle reasons: mounting intellectual opposition to the warfare state and the return of grassroots isolationism. Both trends have come to the fore. And not only with the collapse of communism. Widespread public disillusionment exists over the Gulf War of 1991. Sold to the public as a high-tech "virtual" war, the consequences have been harder to hide than the execution of the attack. With over a million Iraqis dead, Hussein still in power, US soldiers apparently poisoned by their own government and a not so far-fetched feeling that the public was duped into supporting an unjust slaughter, people are starting to regard the Gulf War as an outrage. And they are right.

At the height of the Cold War, opposition to interventionism was largely isolated to the anti-war Left. While marshaling an impressive analytic literature on the evils of US imperialism, particularly in the context of Viet Nam, the Left was suspect for its support of socialism and its sometimes overt sympathies for totalitarian regimes. On the right, things were different. Except for a noble band of libertarians lead by Murray Rothbard, conservatives and many libertarians were front and center in support of the security state and its nefarious activities. Now, virtually the entire right is opposed to interventionism. Traditionalists and even nationalist right-wingers are generally opposed to foreign military actions. The dominant anti-war force on the right is the growing number of explicitly isolationist libertarians, who want no truck with the warfare state on principle. The Weekly Standard acknowledged as much and identified Murray Rothbard as the guiding spirit behind today's antistatist, antiwar movement. And the nonliberal left, lead by long-time noninterventionists like Noam Chomsky, remains opposed to US global hegemony. The neocons and their corporate liberal cronies are the only spokesman for militarism.

The grassroots are hated by the neocons for precisely that reason. The man on the street, the movement conservative, the Perot voter, the Libertarian Party man - they all want the troops brought home and the tyranny of the US empire brought to a halt. When the leaders of the empire try to talk down to normal people, they are jeered off the stage. The RRR position - no more war - is more and more the position of the American people. That's a strike for peace and a strike for liberty.

Copyright © 1997 by the Center for Libertarian, Studies, Inc.


SOURCE:
http://jacq.org/people/Pavlik/lrc-pavlik2.pdf

FrankRep
02-21-2010, 09:40 AM
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51MYK7YGZ5L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

http://www.amazon.com/William-F-Buckley-Jr-Establishment/dp/1881919064

William F. Buckley, Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment
John F. McManus, JBS President



Neoconservatism Explained:
William F. Buckley Jr.: the Establishment’s “House Conservative”
http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/457-william-f-buckley-jr-the-establishments-house-conservative

Pragmatists? Neoconservatives? What's the Difference?
http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/744-pragmatists-neoconservatives-whats-the-difference


...

FrankRep
02-21-2010, 10:05 AM
Now you know why the Neoconservative Republican Establishment hates Ron Paul.


Ron Paul calls out the CIA 1988

YouTube - Ron Paul calls out the CIA 1988-2010 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x04FuFj6wm8)


Ron Paul explains what he meant by CIA Coup on Glenn Beck

YouTube - Glenn Beck Radio: Ron Paul explains what he meant by CIA Coup (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMsJPv1sFM4)

BuddyRey
02-21-2010, 11:11 AM
It would take me hours and hours to read all this (I get eyestrain fairly easily from computer monitors), but it looks like there's some really solid info in there.

teamrican1
02-21-2010, 12:30 PM
I doubt the CIA is that astute. William F. Buckley was what he appeared to be- a highly intelligent political thinker from a wealthy establishment family that was smart enough to recognize the failures of socialism but whose upbringing and social connections made it impossible for him to imagine a full break from statism.

FrankRep
02-21-2010, 02:35 PM
I doubt the CIA is that astute.

CIA - Iran–Contra affair 1986
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair

Coverup: Behind The Iran Contra Affair (1988)
YouTube - Iran Contra Coverup: 1 of 8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35KcYgMPiIM)

FrankRep
02-23-2010, 12:51 PM
Bump. This is wild stuff.

johngr
02-23-2010, 01:52 PM
Do you consider the "cold war" an unmitigated, out-and-out scam as I do?

FrankRep
02-23-2010, 01:56 PM
Do you consider the "cold war" an unmitigated, out-and-out scam as I do?
The "Cold War" was hyped sure, but America is implementing the Communist Manifesto plank by plank (http://www.libertyzone.com/Communist-Manifesto-Planks.html).

Free Government education?
Federal Reserve/Central Bank?
Progressive Federal Income Tax?

These are Communist Planks.

johngr
02-23-2010, 02:02 PM
YouTube - Former C.I.A. Agent Chip Tatum On George H. W. Bush & Bill Clinton's Cocaine Smuggling Connection (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU1ymFmFdew)

Peace&Freedom
02-23-2010, 02:11 PM
The "Cold War" was hyped sure, but America is implementing the Communist Manifesto plank by plank (http://www.libertyzone.com/Communist-Manifesto-Planks.html).

Free Government education?
Federal Reserve/Central Bank?
Progressive Federal Income Tax?

These are Communist Planks.

I would say it's been implemented, past tense. I think 30 of the 31 planks are already in place.

johngr
02-23-2010, 02:16 PM
I would say it's been implemented, past tense. I think 30 of the 31 planks are already in place.

9.5 of the ten.

Here's an interesting map. Hopefully Frank's more toleration of (slightly) OT posts than our dialectic scholar
http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/1942world1600.jpg

FrankRep
02-26-2010, 09:52 AM
Campaign for Liberty -
Published 02/25/10

National Review and the Triumph of the New Right
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=638

FrankRep
02-26-2010, 03:27 PM
What going on over at REASON Magazine? They praise National Review/William Buckley Jr and call Ron Paul Crazy, Delusional.


I just found this...



William F. Buckley, Jr., RIP
Farewell to the man who created intellectual space for the libertarian movement (http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/27/william-f-buckley-jr-rip)


REASON Magazine
February 27, 2008


I received the news of Bill Buckley's death with a great sense of loss. No, he was not a major intellectual influence on my becoming a libertarian. I have to credit Robert Heinlein and Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand for that. But since for most of us libertarianism as an intellectual and political movement has been an offshoot of conservatism, Buckley in truth was a great enabler.

By creating National Review in 1955 as a serious, intellectually respectable conservative voice (challenging the New Deal consensus among thinking people), Buckley created space for the development of our movement. He kicked out the racists and conspiracy-mongers from conservatism and embraced Chicago and Austrian economists, introducing a new generation to Hayek, Mises, and Friedman. And thanks to the efforts of NR's Frank Meyer to promote a "fusion" between economic (free-market) conservatives and social conservatives, Buckley and National Review fostered the growth of a large enough conservative movement to nominate Goldwater for president and ultimately to elect Ronald Reagan.
...

Some commentators dubbed Buckley a "libertarian conservative," and in the broadest sense, I guess that was true. Though he seldom let National Review deviate from his own Catholic social issues positions (especially on banning abortion), Buckley courageously took a stance against drug prohibition, making common cause on that issue with Friedman and other libertarians. And that enlightened view seemed to survive Buckley's retirement as the magazine's editor in chief (as one hopes it will survive his demise).
...


SOURCE:
http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/27/william-f-buckley-jr-rip



In other news....


The Ron Paul Delusion
Why the Texas congressman does not represent the future of conservatism (http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/24/the-ron-paul-delusion)



REASON Magazine
February 24, 2010



If only it stopped there. Paul isn't a traditional conservative. His obsession with long-decided monetary policy and isolationism are not his only half-baked crusades. Paul's newsletters of the '80s and '90s were filled with anti-Semitic and racist rants, proving his slumming in the ugliest corners of conspiracyland today is no mistake.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Paul is that thousands of intellectually curious young people will have read his silly books, including End the Fed, as serious manifestoes. Though you wouldn't know it by listening to Paul or reading his words, libertarians do have genuine ideas that conservatives might embrace.


SOURCE:
http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/24/the-ron-paul-delusion

FrankRep
08-14-2010, 11:50 PM
Murray Rothbard bump!

00_Pete
08-15-2010, 12:32 AM
Do you consider the "cold war" an unmitigated, out-and-out scam as I do?

Communism was/is an evil system that wants World domination and many of the "Cold War Warriors" had their heart in the right place, but the Soviet monster was created and nurtured by the Western Elite and the USSR, left to its own devices, couldnt build a black and white TV set.

Aratus
08-15-2010, 11:54 AM
Mr. WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY was CIA to a total 100 percentile forwards, backwards...
and sideways. he may have been there at the begining of that agency in 1947!
He was clearly a part of the CIA in the EISENHOWER 1950s and on a payroll...

sratiug
02-17-2011, 01:10 AM
Bump for use against Young Americans for Fascism.

Sola_Fide
02-17-2011, 01:38 AM
What going on over at REASON Magazine? They praise National Review/William Buckley Jr and call Ron Paul Crazy, Delusional.


I just found this...



William F. Buckley, Jr., RIP
Farewell to the man who created intellectual space for the libertarian movement (http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/27/william-f-buckley-jr-rip)


REASON Magazine
February 27, 2008


I received the news of Bill Buckley's death with a great sense of loss. No, he was not a major intellectual influence on my becoming a libertarian. I have to credit Robert Heinlein and Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand for that. But since for most of us libertarianism as an intellectual and political movement has been an offshoot of conservatism, Buckley in truth was a great enabler.

By creating National Review in 1955 as a serious, intellectually respectable conservative voice (challenging the New Deal consensus among thinking people), Buckley created space for the development of our movement. He kicked out the racists and conspiracy-mongers from conservatism and embraced Chicago and Austrian economists, introducing a new generation to Hayek, Mises, and Friedman. And thanks to the efforts of NR's Frank Meyer to promote a "fusion" between economic (free-market) conservatives and social conservatives, Buckley and National Review fostered the growth of a large enough conservative movement to nominate Goldwater for president and ultimately to elect Ronald Reagan.
...

Some commentators dubbed Buckley a "libertarian conservative," and in the broadest sense, I guess that was true. Though he seldom let National Review deviate from his own Catholic social issues positions (especially on banning abortion), Buckley courageously took a stance against drug prohibition, making common cause on that issue with Friedman and other libertarians. And that enlightened view seemed to survive Buckley's retirement as the magazine's editor in chief (as one hopes it will survive his demise).
...


SOURCE:
http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/27/william-f-buckley-jr-rip



In other news....


The Ron Paul Delusion
Why the Texas congressman does not represent the future of conservatism (http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/24/the-ron-paul-delusion)



REASON Magazine
February 24, 2010



If only it stopped there. Paul isn't a traditional conservative. His obsession with long-decided monetary policy and isolationism are not his only half-baked crusades. Paul's newsletters of the '80s and '90s were filled with anti-Semitic and racist rants, proving his slumming in the ugliest corners of conspiracyland today is no mistake.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Paul is that thousands of intellectually curious young people will have read his silly books, including End the Fed, as serious manifestoes. Though you wouldn't know it by listening to Paul or reading his words, libertarians do have genuine ideas that conservatives might embrace.


SOURCE:
http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/24/the-ron-paul-delusion


Wow. Reason really stepped in it with this article....

Austrian Econ Disciple
02-17-2011, 01:58 AM
The "Cold War" was hyped sure, but America is implementing the Communist Manifesto plank by plank (http://www.libertyzone.com/Communist-Manifesto-Planks.html).

Free Government education?
Federal Reserve/Central Bank?
Progressive Federal Income Tax?

These are Communist Planks.

We had all those things before Cold War Communism, so to blame Cold War Communism is a sort of backwardation of the chicken and the egg.

Sola_Fide
02-17-2011, 02:18 AM
We had all those things before Cold War Communism, so to blame Cold War Communism is a sort of backwardation of the chicken and the egg.

I think he is probably thinking that Marx's manifesto was the starting point for the planks of communism.

Vessol
02-17-2011, 02:28 AM
Wow. Reason really stepped in it with this article....

Reason, from what I personally gather, is a bunch of big L libertarians who think the only way to success is to write articles and keep on thinking that a third party is the only viable method to victory. They hate Ron Paul because he took the libertarian message, which they failed to deliver it successfully to the mainstream themselves, and made it popular. They especially hate the fact that Ron Paul has gathered a lot of young folks, that's what bothers them the most methinks.

And FrankRep is bumping Murray Rothbard? Never thought I'd see that happening :P, jk. Partially making this post as a bookmark for later perusal.

LinusVanPelt
02-17-2011, 03:07 AM
In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation. We now know that Bill Buckley, for the two years prior to establishing National Review, was admittedly a CIA agent in Mexico City

LOL, "transform" the right-wing? Before Bill Buckley there was hardly any such thing as a coherent American right-wing.

Have you ever actually read any of Buckley's work or any biographies on the man? Everything in the above passage has long--and I do mean looong--been common knowledge; Buckley himself spoke openly of his time in the CIA.

And accusing the NR's editorial perspective of being "global warmongering anticommunist" is about as groundbreaking as accusing Cook's Illustrated of promoting global food-mongering epicureanism. These are "secrets" that have been "hidden" in plain sight for at least thirty years. Did you think that National Review was ideologically neutral or pro-communist?

And for what it's worth, I remain a huge fan of Bill Buckley, despite disagreeing with him on some things. God rest his soul. I even read National Review from time to time still.

FrankRep
06-09-2011, 02:53 PM
bump

iamse7en
06-10-2011, 01:08 AM
Are you bumping this because of the Ron Paul Rising article? :)

FrankRep
06-10-2011, 05:40 AM
Are you bumping this because of the Ron Paul Rising article? :)

No, the Barry Goldwater thread reminded me of Murray Rothbard's view of the National Review.

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?297429-Before-They-Hated-Ron-Paul-They-Hated-Barry-Goldwater&p=3330808&viewfull=1#post3330808

Aratus
06-10-2011, 10:42 AM
mr. william f. buckley had worked for and cashed
an ongoing paycheck from the CIA in the 1950s...

Aratus
06-10-2011, 10:45 AM
the younger generation sometimes has not heard of robert taft...
prior to senator barry goldwater he was indeed mr. conservative!