* EVERYWHERE WILLMOORE KENDALL went he carried turbulence with him. Unusual behavior. Outrages. The geometrical opposite of the decorous, diplomatic, and elegant James Burnham.
At National Review there remains to this day a leather couch known as “The Willmoore Kendall Memorial Couch.” One evening, after hours, an editor returned to the premises and surprised Kendall on this piece of furniture in flagrante with an employee. Bill Buckley, hearing of this, wondered why he could not have found a hotel room. The business-hours occupant of that office was appalled that he had used her couch for this purpose.
A former Books editor at National Review remembers the following about a drive through New Jersey with Willmoore at the wheel: “We were stopped for speeding, requested to ‘follow me’ to a headquarters building where a State Police sergeant or captain was sitting behind an ordinary desk. This officer requested Professor Kendall to show him his driver’s license. Kendall said he didn’t have one, and then added, rather gratuitously I thought, ‘I don’t believe in them.’ A look of blank disbelief crossed the officer’s face. He started to speak, paused, peered intently at Kendall, and finally in a quiet voice asked, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m an associate professor in the Political Science Department at Yale University,’ Kendall replied. The officer looked at Kendall again, started to nod his head up and down, and said, ‘Oh, I see.’ What he saw I don’t know, but I’m here to attest that he allowed Professor Kendall to continue on his way, unticketed and unlectured, simply demanding, after asking for and being shown my driver’s license, that I drive the car at least until we had passed beyond his jurisdiction.” Weird. Willmoore.
Though Kendall had been granted tenure by Yale on the basis of his publication and professional reputation as a political philosopher, he was eventually given to understand that he would not receive the normal next promotion to full professor. Beyond Yale, his professional reputation remained formidable, and, thinking about teaching elsewhere, he accepted a position as visiting associate professor at Stanford for the academic year 1958–59, with every expectation that it would lead to a permanent post as full tenured professor. But three weeks into his first term he was arrested for driving drunk and against the traffic flow on a California freeway. The state police jailed him for the night. This got into the Stanford student newspaper, and that was the end of his Stanford opportunity. He wrote to Leo Strauss explaining that he had been drinking a bit of bourbon for a cold and some snoop had smelled it on his breath.
His Yale career ended in a unique, that is Kendallian, way. Somehow he prevailed upon Bill Buckley, as a friend, to find out why Yale was refusing to promote him to full professor. Buckley profoundly disliked the whole idea of becoming involved in this.3 Universities usually insist upon holding such decisions closely, for many good reasons, including the professional reputation of the candidate. Buckley did make an appointment to see President Charles Seymour, who was direct and said the reason was lack of publication while at Yale.4 That is a perfectly valid reason. Yale had every right to demand more than Kendall had produced. He had published essays and reviews. But his last book had been John Locke and Majority Rule (1941), which earned him his reputation, his Yale post, and Stanford’s interest. That book was almost twenty years old. Two more important works came along, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition and his edition of Rousseau’s The Government of Poland; but those were published posthumously, years later, in 1972. Yale might have been justified in promoting him on the basis of his teaching, but that would have been rare for a research university and would have required institutional goodwill, which was absent.Since he was inspired by important ideas, what was the explanation for his lack of publication? In addition to his disorderly private life, the evidence suggests a profligate scattering of energy on nonprofessional matters. He wrote letters of gargantuan length, enough prose and enough articulation of ideas for several books, a singular phenomenon. Perhaps a Selected Letters may yet be published. In addition, with a construction project in hand on his New Haven property, he wasted time driving hundreds of miles for cheaper bricks, nonsensically in that the sum saved was trivial.
Then, naturally, his Yale career ended in an extraordinary manner. Kendallian. While he was in Madrid on one of his therapeutic leaves from Yale, so the Kendall oral tradition goes, he phoned President Seymour and, probably drunk, said something like, “You sonofabitch. I know you hate my guts. I’ll tell you what. You can buy back my tenure.” The deal was struck, a check arrived immediately for $42,500. That was a lot of money in 1961, about five times his annual salary.
After his departure from Yale, he remained a senior editor at National Review, contributing valuably, as we will see, until 1963. I spent some time with him later in Europe. This proved in its entirety a bittersweet experience, also an education in political theory. It was a week memorable, strange, and leading to a bad ending. But what else could have been expected?
* His [President Eisenhower] mask was that of the simple farmer boy turned soldier … rather than of a politician whose operations were deliberately shielded from his contemporaries other than his immediate associates.… As a thinker, the public saw a folksy, common-sense replica of the man in the street. The confidential records show a man with extraordinary capacities for detached, orderly examination of problems and personalities. In public he seemed to be removed from the arena. But the inner Eisenhower reasoned about political contingencies with greater rigor and readiness than many political professionals.
* The most successful presidents are coalition builders, and during the twentieth century, these included Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan. Roosevelt was center-left, as his times required, Eisenhower and Reagan center-right, in response to different exigencies. Both Eisenhower and Reagan were prudent, resolute, trustworthy. They both inspired broadly based confidence, and won reelection by landslides. Both used force reluctantly; and when they did so they did so overwhelmingly and unanswerably. In the second half of the twentieth century, Eisenhower and Reagan have gained recognition by historians as the great presidents of the era.
National Review saw Eisenhower as drifting without principle, refusing to define himself in terms of ideas against the ideas of international communism. His refusal to engage in principled argument with Marshal Zhukov, for example, became a scandal from that point of view. But if we can make an abstraction of Eisenhower’s animating “idea,” it would be Americanism. Eisenhower did not think he had to talk about it: because he was it.
* National Review…saw that philosophically, communism and liberalism were both products of the Enlightenment. Both emphasized equality, Communists through force, liberals as a political goal. Though communism could be called “hard” socialism, liberals, or many of them, were simply “soft” socialists.
* If the availability of potential agents among noncommunist progressives had made recruitment easy, it also guaranteed that innocent progressives, who had enough contacts within the deeper shades of red circles, were vulnerable to false charges of “guilt by association.”
* Perhaps James Burnham was in an excessively pessimistic mood when he remarked to me once that the black problem “probably will ruin the country.”
* This view—that the Supreme Court had assumed powers properly and explicitly assigned to the state legislatures—has recently received powerful support within the legal profession, and explicitly on the grounds National Review had advanced. For example, Paul D. Carrington in Stewards of Democracy: Law as a Public Profession (1999) argues that national judicial action during the 1950s should have addressed blacks’ voting rights, since voting is the bedrock of democracy—and that school desegregation in time would have reflected electoral realities. Carrington believes the command that desegregation proceed “‘with all deliberate speed’ has been appraised and found a disaster.”1 Carrington, by no means opposed to desegregation as such, holds that it should have been the result of a political and not a judicial process.
* It is perhaps too harsh to declare extended school desegregation [and similar issues] … were all failed heroics. There were benign consequences. But a significant price was paid in thrusting the Court and the Constitution into the political cockpits where they do not belong, jeopardizing the independence of the Court and the integrity of the Constitution. And in different ways and to different degrees, all of these heroic initiatives at social reform backfired in precisely the ways that Cooley, Brandeis, Freund, and Hand foretold.
* Carrington concludes that the Court too often has derived its decisions arbitrarily, on the basis of shaky interpretations, and without regard to the citizens’ “right to self-government.” He considers that the law schools have fostered a culture that encourages its students to regard themselves as philosopher-kings, and that they are further encouraged by the publicity given to “impact decisions.” In a review of Carrington’s book in the Journal of Law and Politics, Jeffrey O’Connell, Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, notices with a touch of amazement that “Carrington is politically incorrect enough to argue boldly and at length that Roe vs. Wade was a decision that should not have been made in court.” He notes that “[s]ome of the Court’s resisters practiced defiance, while others took to the streets and became violent. Those violent reactions have no counterpart in the politics of other nations, even predominantly Catholic ones in which abortion rights have been established by parliamentary means.”
* Again and again, National Review articulated this perspective on the Court’s “heroic advances,” as in this editorial, worthy of partial but extended quotation:
“In June 1954 relations between Whites and Negroes in the United States, and racial relations generally, were in a more amicable and promising condition than ever before in the nation’s history.
Then a Supreme Court obsessed with an egalitarian ideology rendered its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. What has happened, what is happening, was predicted. Every observer, whatever his views, concurs in the finding that Negro-White relations in the South, and in many northern cities also, have catastrophically worsened. (Even the rate of integration in the schools is actually slower than during the five years prior to 1954.) From this poisonous cauldron the fumes of anti-Semitism, too, begin to spread, both because the racist impulse tends to be non-selective, and because organized Jewish groups have noisily egged on the Court, and called for immediate implementation of its decisions. Now comes the shutting down of Southern schools, the dynamiting of homes, schools, and Jewish temples. And it will be worse. A viciousness has been released that is not easily brought back to kennel. The Court, in Brown and the successor decisions, was “obsessed”: the word is carefully chosen. Obsessed in that it acted from abstract imperatives of a monolithic dogma, without reference to the real situation of real men in the real world. It is easy enough for Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter, at the turn of an ideological spigot, to lecture their 175 million countrymen about instant and total obedience to “the law of the land,” but platitudes from the bench—that so plainly exempts itself from the restraints of judicial precedent and tradition—will not, overnight, transmute the ingrained sentiments and convictions of self-reliant communities. Tragically, the resistance by self-reliant and decent men to what they deem the usurpations of the Court and the despotism of the central government tends to promote a general atmosphere of civil disobedience, and disrespect not only for the Warren Court but for the law; in which the dregs of society break through to the surface.”
* Brown plus “all deliberate speed” destroyed the once excellent public school systems, especially in the metropolises of the North, whites and their tax money fleeing to the suburbs beyond the reach of “busing.” Brown was tacitly shelved as unenforceable, but not before the destruction of the public schools. Brown had made a desert and called it peace.
* [Gary] Wills, who was not and is not simple-minded, lets [James] Baldwin get away with anything, even with calling Jesus a “sunbaked, disreputable Hebrew…” Wills lets Baldwin get away with junk thought, Baldwin even demanding “immediate secession from our civilization,” the “transcendence of color, and of nations and of altars”—that is, for a rejection of the profoundly actual. Jump, white man, jump. Wills knows that we should respond to this kind of disgraceful performance by a black man by getting angry with him—that is, we should treat him as an equal. Yet Wills voluntarily accepts nonsense.
What are we to make of Wills’s performance? Literary criticism throws up its hands. Apparently, he had been utterly disoriented by the black revolution.
* But for now, the Eastern Establishment had demonstrated suicidal incapacity, helpless before the Black Revolution that was erupting in riots, property destruction, arson, and murder in urban centers across the nation. In due course, New Yorkers would exchange Yale’s John Lindsay for such very different leaders as Rudy Giuliani. Nor could the Eastern Establishment, in its Perfumed Stockades, deal with or even understand the fury and agony of the blue-collar neighborhoods, for years tribal Democrats, over the court-ordered integration of their schools in the form of “busing.” On top of that, the older elite could not do what was needed to protect its own institutions, the universities for example, against the youth upheavals. It appeased. It even sympathized. Collectively, the elite had lost the courage to govern, and the odor of its weakness could be sniffed on the air.
