The First Conservative
How Peter Viereck inspired-and lost-a movement.
In the winter of 1940, The Atlantic Monthly invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college’s top essay and poetry prizes, to write about “the meaning of young liberalism for the present age.” Viereck responded with a five-thousand-word manifesto entitled “But I’m a Conservative . . . ,” which appeared in the magazine’s April issue.
“Why should any young man want to be a conservative, on a globe where so much needs changing?” Viereck began. His defensiveness was understandable. Conservatism as a formal political doctrine didn’t exist in America in 1940. The word “conservative” was associated primarily with fringe groups—anti-industrial Southern agrarians and the anti-New Deal tycoons who led the Liberty League. Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft, of Ohio—two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party—insisted on being called liberal. “In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition,” Lionel Trilling observed in 1950, in the preface of his book “The Liberal Imagination.” “There are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Viereck’s essay was deliberately provocative—“I have watched the convention of revolt harden into dogmatic ritual,” he wrote of the Marxists who he said presided over campus life—but it also contained a sincere entreaty. Published as the Nazi armies were invading Denmark and Norway, it called for a “new conservatism” to combat the “storm of totalitarianism” abroad as well as moral relativism and soulless materialism at home. Nazism and Communism were fundamentally utopian, Viereck argued, sanctioning the murder of any person or group perceived to be an obstacle to a perfect society, and because liberalism suffered from a milder version of the same flaw—a naïve belief in progress and humanity’s essential goodness—it was an inadequate defense against foreign tyranny.
“Political anti-Semitism is no isolated program,” he warned. “It is the first step in an ever-widening revolt of mob instinct against all restraints and liberties. It is the thin opening wedge for the subversion of democracy, Christianity, and tolerance in general.” Only a conservatism based on the “rooted” values of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and an understanding of “the inner unremovable nature of man as the ultimate source of evil” could protect Western civilization from attempts to undermine—or perfect—it. The United States, Viereck wrote, should “everywhere answer illegal force with force-in-law, returning words for words and bullets for bullets.”
Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. But, in a series of books published during the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties (which have recently been reissued by Transaction), he continued to develop his political philosophy. He gave the conservative movement its name and, as the historian George Nash, the author of “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America,” says, he “helped make conservatism a respectable word.” Moreover, Viereck’s belief that the United States could be a moderating influence, confronting the forces that threaten freedom and democracy without succumbing to liberal optimism, became a central tenet of conservative thought and, with the arrival of neoconservatives in positions of power in Washington, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, of American foreign policy.
Yet Viereck never became a rallying figure. Conservatism remained largely an intellectual movement during its first several decades, from the late nineteen-forties to the late nineteen-seventies—a loose affiliation of scholars and writers who had little more in common than a hatred of liberalism and Communism, which they increasingly saw as indistinguishable. Even in this context, Viereck was an anomaly, insisting on a moral distinction between the moderate and the totalitarian left and, as conservatives began to attain political influence, denouncing what he perceived as the movement’s demagogic tendencies. Conservatives, he wrote in 1955, are “trying to overthrow an old ruling class and replace it from below by a new ruling class. . . . The new would-be rulers include unmellowed plebeian Western wealth”—here he singled out Texan oil money—“and their enormous gullible mass-base.”
In 1962, he published an attack on conservatives in The New Republic, titled “The New Conservatism: One of Its Founders Asks What Went Wrong,” in which he depicted a movement infiltrated by religious fundamentalists, paranoid patriotic groups, and big-business leaders, united in their loathing for the cosmopolitan élites on the nation’s coasts. “American history is based on the resemblance between moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism,” he wrote, and this tradition, which had saved the United States from Europe’s violent fate, conservatives now threatened to destroy. Viereck’s vision strikingly resembles the description of the contemporary Republican Party in last year’s best-selling book by Thomas Frank, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” He anticipated the radicalism of the George W. Bush Presidency before Bush had graduated from college. But by then Viereck was regarded by many conservatives as an apostate.
Viereck is now eighty-nine years old and living in retirement in South Hadley, Massachusetts. To say that he has been forgotten by conservatives is not quite right; he has practically been erased from the picture, like an early Bolshevik fallen out of favor. But in conservatism’s rise to power he foresaw its corruption by extremists, and his break with the movement may ultimately be more significant than his role in its creation.
I first met Viereck in the fall of 2002. His house, a rambling Victorian, overlooks the playing fields of Mount Holyoke College, where he taught history for nearly fifty years, until 1997. I found him sitting in semi-darkness at an enormous wooden dining table that he used as a desk, a gaunt figure in a silk robe and two matching blue silk scarves, one of which he wore as an ascot, the other as a turban.
His nose seemed perpetually pointed upward. In the dim light, I could see that his eyes were an icy gray-blue, and, along with his sharp profile, they seemed to lend credence to a story I had heard that Viereck was a relative, though an illegitimate one, of Kaiser Wilhelm II. (When I’d asked Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., about Viereck, who had been a classmate at Harvard, Schlesinger’s wife, Alexandra, said, “You mean the Kaiser’s grandson!”) I mentioned the resemblance to Viereck, who waved his hand dismissively.
“I have cataracts in both eyes, inoperable, hence the ghoulish atmosphere,” he said. “But I hate all this royalty nonsense. My father was obsessed with that.”
Viereck’s father, George Sylvester Viereck, known as Sylvester, or G.S.V., was the embodiment of much that Viereck loathed. He was a features writer for the Hearst newspaper syndicate, and had once been considered a promising lyric poet. (In 1907, when Sylvester was twenty-three, the Times reported that his poems had “awakened the profound interest of two continents.”) He was also an admirer of Germany, his birthplace, and, in particular, of Kaiser Wilhelm, in part because he believed himself to be a grandson of the Kaiser’s grandfather, Wilhelm I of Prussia, via an assignation with a Berlin actress named Edwina Viereck. Edwina’s son, Louis, became a socialist and a friend of Karl Marx. He was imprisoned several times for his political activities; once, he was implicated in a plot to assassinate his father. In 1881, he married an American cousin (Friedrich Engels attended the wedding), and Sylvester was born in Munich three years later. In 1896, the family emigrated to New York City.
Sylvester, who published his first poem, in a Baltimore newspaper, at the age of thirteen, attended City College and eventually settled, with his wife, Gretchen, in an apartment on Riverside Drive, where they raised their two sons, Peter and his younger brother, George Sylvester, Jr. But he also continued to spend time in Germany. In August, 1914, just as war was breaking out in Europe, he had co-founded The Fatherland, a weekly magazine, published in New York, with a pro-German theme, and established the Fatherland Foundation, an organization dedicated to making “German-Americans proud of the hyphen.” In July, 1915, a Secret Service agent followed Sylvester and a mysterious German named Heinrich Albert as they rode the Sixth Avenue subway, and managed to seize Albert’s briefcase. Inside were documents outlining pro-German propaganda schemes and bank statements detailing transfers of large sums from Germany to private accounts around the United States. A few weeks later, the Times alleged that Sylvester had known about German plans to sink the Lusitania. He denied the charge and was never prosecuted. But his reputation was damaged: the Authors League expelled him, his poems were removed from anthologies, and his name was dropped from Who’s Who.
After the war, he managed briefly to rehabilitate himself. In 1923, he published “Rejuvenation: How Steinach Makes People Young,” a book about a Viennese physician who used hormones to slow aging. Sigmund Freud read it and invited Sylvester to write a similar book about psychoanalysis. Sylvester agreed and became a leading popularizer of Freudian thought in the United States.
“My father was always going to Vienna to visit Freud, and Adler, the inferiority-complex guy, would come visit our house,” Viereck told me. “Our whole house was full of Freudian psychoanalysis. My father was being analyzed by Freud, who said he was looking for some strong man, some dominant father figure.”
In the late nineteen-twenties, with Paul Eldridge, a Jewish friend, Sylvester wrote a trilogy of best-selling novels chronicling the adventures of an apparently immortal “Wandering Jew.” (Sylvester himself was Lutheran.) The books combined politics, history, and philo-Semitic race theory with a good deal of sex. Sylvester also interviewed Albert Einstein, who confided, “When I met you, I knew I could talk to you freely without the inhibitions which make the contact with others so difficult. I looked upon you not as a German nor as an American, but as a Jew.”
At the same time, however, Sylvester was increasingly drawn to Nazism. In 1923, he became the first American reporter to interview Hitler, whom he described as “a widely read, thoughtful, and self-made man,” who, “if he lived, would make history.” In May, 1934, Sylvester gave a speech to twenty thousand “Friends of the New Germany,” at Madison Square Garden. The hall was hung with American flags, swastikas, and pictures of George Washington and Hitler. Sylvester expressed admiration for Roosevelt and Hitler, arguing that both men were “trying their utmost to build a new world out of the wreck of the old.” He urged the crowd to support National Socialism “without embracing anti-Semitism.”
Jewish friends and colleagues denounced him in the press, calling him “George Swastika Viereck.” “Mrs. Einstein wrote a letter to my father saying they couldn’t continue relations unless he repudiated the Nazis,” Viereck recalled. “And my father replied with total tactlessness, lack of feeling, lack of empathy. He said, ‘Let the Jews stop attacking Hitler and Hitler will stop attacking them.’ Well, this was monstrous.”
By the late thirties, Sylvester’s literary agent, who was Jewish, had dropped him, as had his book publisher, and he was increasingly dependent on the Nazis for work. He distributed money funnelled to him by the Reich to pro-Nazi groups and started a publishing company to spread isolationist propaganda. Investigated by the F.B.I., he was arrested in September, 1941, convicted of conspiring with the Nazis, and served four years in federal prison. (In 1942, he and twenty-seven others were charged with sedition; the case was eventually dismissed.) His wife left him, giving away what remained of the family’s money to Jewish refugee committees and Catholic charities, and Upton Sinclair wrote to him to say, “If there is a Benedict Arnold of this war, you are he.” Peter, then a graduate student in history at Harvard, removed his belongings from the apartment on Riverside Drive and remained estranged from his father for sixteen years.
In October, 1941, while Sylvester was on trial, Viereck published his first book: “Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler,” a study of the origins of Nazism. The book prompted newspaper stories with melodramatic headlines, such as “top nazi agent’s son, harvard man, exposes true roots of nazis.” But it was praised by scholars and writers, including Thomas Mann, then living in exile in the United States, who admired its “profound historical and psychological insight.” Viereck argued that Nazism grew out of the Romantic German nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, rather than the authoritarian Prussian tradition. This idea is now generally accepted, but at the time Viereck’s analysis was controversial. He criticized the composer Richard Wagner not only for his anti-Semitism during his final years but for his youthful revolutionary activity against the Habsburg empire, and he applauded Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, for opposing radicals of both the left and the right and for his efforts—frequently overlooked—at social reform. Metternich, who is usually depicted as a reactionary, was in Viereck’s view a moderate and a visionary.
When America entered the war, in December, 1941, Peter’s brother, George Sylvester, Jr., volunteered, and fifteen months later Peter himself was drafted. Because of their father’s crime, the brothers were prohibited from becoming officers and from serving in the O.S.S. Peter became the highest-ranking enlisted man in the Army’s Psychological Warfare Branch and was sent to an intelligence training school in Algiers, where he was assigned to propaganda analysis.
“My job was to try to read between the lines,” he told me. “It was like what the C.I.A. does now, only it was a lot easier then because you didn’t need to speak Arabic. They put me to reading, mostly things in German, there in the middle of the desert. I was fascinated. I would write these analyses, sitting at a battered old typewriter.” When he wasn’t typing intelligence reports, he wrote poems, publishing several of them in The New Yorker, under the byline “Sgt. Peter Viereck.”
The week in May, 1944, that his poem “Ode to the M.P. Chasing Me Through a North African Town” appeared in this magazine, Time published a dispatch about his brother, under the heading “heroes: father & sons”:
**{: .break one} ** Late in February a U.S. battalion in Italy made a gallant and determined stand against the Germans from a cave on the rocky road that runs north from Anzio. Cut off from supplies and fighting for a week without replacements, the battalion, in the words of New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Homer Bigart, “withstood the cruelest pressure any American unit has been called upon to face in this war.” Correspondent Bigart singled out for special mention the work of 25-year-old Corporal George Sylvester Viereck Jr., who stood in the mouth of the cave blasting away with his Garand rifle at oncoming Nazis while an artillery barrage thundered down on them from the rear. Said Corporal Viereck: “We had a feeling of animal joy as that stuff came down on the surrounding Germans.” Slight and blond, young Viereck was a onetime student at Harvard Law School, a graduate magna cum laude of Harvard College. There he had helped found and edit a new liberal monthly magazine, the Harvard Guardian. Immediately on reading the dispatch from Anzio, Corporal Viereck’s mother sat down in her Manhattan apartment to write her son a letter of congratulations. Last week the letter came back. Across it was stamped the word “deceased.” That was the way she got the news. Next day, in a barren cell under the Washington courtroom where he is on trial for sedition, Naziphile George Sylvester Viereck Sr., already serving a one-to-five-year prison term as an unregistered agent of the Reich, listened stolidly as his wife broke the news to him. **
Peter Viereck was in Tunisia when he got the news of his brother’s death. He promptly composed “Vale from Carthage,” which began, “ ‘And what if one of us’ / I asked last May, in fun, in gentleness, / ‘Wears doom, like dungarees, and doesn’t know?’ ” He included the poem in his first collection, “Terror and Decorum,” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1949. His brother’s death completed the “shattering of the family,” Viereck told me.
He returned from the war with Anya de Markov, a Russian who had been a resistance fighter, smuggling cash and documents across the Nazi border with Italy, and whom he had met and married while on a tour of duty in Florence. In 1946, he took a job teaching literature at Harvard, and the Vierecks had a son, John Alexis, followed two years later by a daughter, Valerie Edwina. Viereck turned down an offer from the University of Chicago in order to accept a tenured position at Mount Holyoke, where he could live in the country and combine writing poetry and political philosophy with raising a family.
The war had convinced Viereck of the urgency of bringing together the moderate left and right to fight totalitarianism, which was now represented by the Soviet Union. In 1949, he published “Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Revolt,” an expanded version of his Atlantic Monthly essay. In it, Viereck invoked the writings of Edmund Burke, then an unfashionable thinker, borrowing Burke’s notion that liberty can never be attained through revolution but only from the slow evolution of social custom. Viereck cited not just Burke’s famous contempt for the French Revolution but also his less well-known admiration for the American one, along with his opposition to slavery. Burke’s views suggested to Viereck that conservatives could simultaneously fight segregation and protect the moderate reforms of the New Deal, while combatting the spread of Communism abroad. “Conservatism Revisited” was the book that “created the new conservatism as a self-conscious intellectual force,” George Nash writes in his history of the movement, noting that “it was this book which boldly used the word ‘conservatism’ in its title—the first such book after 1945.”
In 1950, Viereck, confident that he shared a “rooted” morality with other new conservatives, began to speak out against Senator Joseph McCarthy. (TP-first mistake.)
It is hard to recall now that the junior senator from Wisconsin had nothing to do with most of the cases that we associate with the McCarthy era: Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the Hollywood Ten. Throughout those trials, McCarthy remained an obscure politician, whose most vehement speech was against sugar rationing. He did not adopt anti-Communism as an issue until the spring of 1950—after the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb and Mao took power in China—and there is no evidence that he felt strongly about Communism, except as fodder for a publicity stunt. McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign amounted to slandering prominent public figures on the floor of the Senate—where he was immune from civil prosecution—and his preferred targets were establishment icons such as Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, whom he called “Red Dean,” and General George C. Marshall.
Viereck’s anti-Communist credentials were beyond question: he had always advocated defending democracy from extremists. But he thought that McCarthy’s crusade was discrediting the anti-Communist cause: “That the McCarthy movement normally accuses only non-Communists of ‘Communism’ is one of the main rules of the game,” he complained in 1955. Worse, he believed that the Senator was not a conservative patriot, or even simply an opportunist. McCarthy, Viereck said, was a radical of the left. In a typical speech, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in New York, in 1954, Viereck subjected the Senator to a Burkean critique:
**{: .break one} ** McCarthy basically is not the fascist type but the type of the left-wing anarchist agitator, by an infallible instinct and not “by accident” subverting precisely those institutions that are the most conservative and organic, everything venerable and patrician, from the Constitution, and precisely the most decorated or paternal generals (Marshall, Eisenhower, Taylor, Zwicker), to the leaders of our most deeply established religion and precisely the most ancient of our universities. . . . He satisfies the resentments of his followers, because his sincerest hatred is always against the oldest, most rooted, and most deeply educated patrician families—the Cabot Lodges, Achesons, Conants, Adlai Stevenson. ** (TP-one can disagree with Viereck here by noting that the “Radical Right” is its own type of revolutionary extremists, as Peter Thiel’s favorite “political theorists,” Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, were in Germany as “Conservative Revolutionary’s, and their “National Conservative/New Right” successors are today.)
McCarthyism, Viereck wrote, “is the revenge of the noses that for twenty years of fancy parties were pressed against the outside window pane.” (What Viereck abhorred about McCarthy, Ann Coulter, in her recent book “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism,” openly admires: “McCarthy’s real ‘victims’ were not sympathetic witnesses, frivolous Hollywood screenwriters, or irrelevant blowhard college professors. They were elite WASP establishment policy-makers. . . . They were well-born and looked good in dinner jackets. . . . Angry ethnics like Joe McCarthy made much better Americans.”)
Viereck wrote to several conservative friends, asking them to join him in signing a statement denouncing McCarthy from the right, but the project went nowhere. Max Eastman, the former Communist writer, said that he thought that McCarthy was a liar, but an invaluable one. Russell Kirk accused Viereck of “McCarthyism against McCarthy.” By the mid-fifties, Viereck had more admirers in Europe than in the United States. In 1954, the Times Literary Supplement called him “the most controversial of the younger school of American authors” and praised his “skillful and adventurous skirmish in the fields of political controversy and polemic.” Two years later, the political philosopher Willmoore Kendall assailed Viereck in National Review, complaining that he lectured people on “how to be a conservative and yet agree with the Liberals about Everything,” and Frank Meyer, a former Communist who had become the culture editor of National Review, called Viereck a “counterfeit conservative.” (TP-and thereby gave the correct definition of what they called “Conservatism,” a recycled fascism presented as “American Conservatism.”)
The attacks on Viereck coincided with the movement’s emergence as a powerful cultural force—a development that even conservatives were hard put to explain. As Viereck’s friend the historian Clinton Rossiter put it in his 1955 study “Conservatism in America”: “After generations of exile from respectability, the word [conservative] itself has been welcomed home with cheers by men who, a few short years ago, would sooner have been called arsonists than conservatives.” Rossiter described the spread of conservative ideas in politics and culture as “one of the wonders of the post-war years,” as “momentous” as the invention of television and the H-bomb. Viereck told me that he thought “Conservatism Revisited” had “opened people’s minds to the idea that to be conservative is not to be satanic.” But, he said, “once their minds were opened, Buckley came in.” (TP-one doesn't need to still self-identify as a “conservative,” as I relatively briefly did while accepting their lies that they stood for the Rule of Law, etc., to recognize that what Buckley and his fellow CIA officers founding the so-called “Conservative Movement,” on the National Review media platform, to recognize it is more correct to say Buckley, et al., infiltrated, co-opted, and subverted what Viereck had initially propounded as “conservatism,” of a sort which saw Adlai Stevenson as more the “conservative” of traditional American values, versus the CIA fascist-sympathizers who called for “Perpetual War.” Who were too hardline even for the 1950s CIA whom Buckley brought together into existence as the “Conservative Movement.” And are still with us today but even more extreme, and now through Goldwater’s friend Scoop Jackson as the “radical-rightist” leading the way in the Democratic Party, infecting both parties with their extreme militarism. Notwithstanding differences on social policy. Sort of like the “difference" between the “liberal” Nazi, Albert Speer, and the “conservative” Nazis, like Himmler, et al., a distinction without a difference as to their extreme militarism.)
In 1951, William F. Buckley published his first book, “God and Man at Yale,” and the Times Book Review asked Viereck to review it. Viereck, who was thirty-five, a decade older than Buckley, praised him for acknowledging that “freedom depends on the traditional value-code of the West and that unmoral materialism results in a suicidal tolerance debunking all values as equally ‘relative.’ ” But he recoiled at Buckley’s stance on McCarthy—“Why is this veritable Eagle Scout of moral sternness silent on the moral implications of McCarthyism?” he asked—and at what he took to be Buckley’s radicalism.
Buckley had been put off by Yale, where, he insisted, leftist and anti-religious views prevailed: “The institution derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists, then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.” As a corrective, Buckley proposed eliminating the “superstition” of academic freedom, turning control of the curriculum over to the university’s trustees, firing any professor whose views they disapproved of, and reviving the school’s original “mission” to instill a “belief in God, and a recognition of the merits of our economic system.” Buckley’s ideas were hardly Burkean, and Viereck feared and disliked them.
Ultimately, however, the differences between the two men were as much a matter of temperament as of ideology. Buckley, despite his rhetoric, was a reconciler and an institution builder: his goal was to see conservatism become a politically dominant mass movement. To that end, in an effort to unite libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-Communists, he founded National Review, in 1955, encouraging contributors to attack liberals when they might have preferred to criticize each other. He also succeeded in excluding politically damaging extremists—bigots and members of the John Birch Society—from the conservative movement. Viereck was scornful of this achievement, considering it of a piece with a tactic used by McCarthy which Viereck called “transtolerance” and defined as a feature of the new right wing whereby “manifestations of ethnic intolerance tend to decrease in proportion as ideological intolerance increases. . . . Transtolerance is ready to give all minorities their glorious democratic freedom—provided they accept McCarthyism.” To Viereck, who venerated institutions and compromise in his writing but remained unyielding and aloof, Buckley represented the contamination of conservative ideals by politics.
“Yes, he reviewed my first book somewhere,” Buckley said, when I met with him recently, in the study of his home on the Upper East Side. “He was critical. But there was a glint of ‘This guy may be worth saving,’ that kind of thing.” Buckley stared at the ceiling and then, lowering his gaze to meet mine, broke into a puckish grin. I couldn’t help noticing the similarities between him and Viereck: the pale-blue eyes, the sharp features, the tendency to look heavenward when thinking.
Buckley’s study, with its matching sets of leather volumes, was the antithesis of Viereck’s, where every surface was covered with messy stacks of books and papers. Still, I thought Viereck would have approved of the home’s aristocratic shabbiness, of the fact that the front door was old and unpolished, its number obscured by black paint. Buckley wore a loosened tie underneath his crewneck sweater. I hadn’t seen anyone dress this way since I was in prep school, and it made him seem boyish.
Buckley recalled meeting Viereck in the mid-fifties, after giving a lecture at Smith. “I came out of the lecture and this thin, angular man bounded over and said, ‘My name is Peter Viereck. Can we talk?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d love to talk, but I’ve got a car here with somebody who’s driving me back to New York City.’ ‘Can I walk with you to the car?’ he said. I said, ‘Of course.’ He was on a bicycle”—Buckley was still marvelling at the notion, half a century later. “So we chatted for about five minutes, as we walked in a leisurely direction, and then he fell. So I dragged him out of this sort of ditch. It didn’t interrupt his talking for one second! I had just begun National Review about then—well, he had written something critical about it, but in the context of how America needed a conservative magazine. But National Review should, in Peter’s opinion, begin by acknowledging that the true conservative on the American scene was Adlai Stevenson! Of course, that was just preposterous from our point of view.” (Viereck had endorsed Adlai Stevenson for President in 1956; Stevenson had made Viereckian pronouncements throughout his campaign, arguing that “the strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party [while] Republicans are behaving like the radical party, reckless, and embittered, dismantling institutions built solidly into our social fabric.” And former President Harry Truman had complained, referring to Stevenson, that a “self-proclaimed conservative” should not be running on the Democratic ticket.)
John Judis, in his 1988 biography of Buckley, mentions that Buckley had written to his publisher, after completing “God and Man at Yale,” to propose a book that would “examine the claims of Peter Viereck . . . to representing the ‘legitimate conservatism.’ ” But when I asked Buckley about the idea, he dismissed it with a flick of his wrist, saying that Viereck represented “a sort of pre-neoconservatism none of us had any use for.” Instead, Buckley’s next book was “McCarthy and His Enemies,” an impassioned defense of McCarthyism, published in 1954.
Buckley’s housekeeper, a stout Slovak woman, served us hamburgers, on fine china, with ramekins for ketchup and mustard on each plate, and I asked Buckley how he felt about conservatism’s current course. “I’m not happy about it,” he said. “It’s probably true that there”—in the support for the war in Iraq—“you have a rediscovery of idealism. But if one acknowledged the second inaugural address of the President as marching orders, well, that would keep us busy with something to do for all eternity. It’s not, in my judgment, conservatism. Because conservatism is, to a considerable extent, the acknowledgment of realities. And this is surreal.”
Viereck might have put it the same way.
In the mid-sixties, Viereck stopped writing about politics and devoted himself to poetry and Russian history. (He may be the only American ever awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in both history and poetry.) He travelled to the Soviet Union, and brought Joseph Brodsky to Mount Holyoke, where they co-taught a poetry class, “Poets Under Totalitarianism”—which Viereck referred to as “Rhyme and Punishment.” Viereck also reconciled with his father, who moved into Viereck’s home in 1959, three years before he died. He spent twenty years working on an epic poem, “Archer in the Marrow.” Published in 1987, it imagines a world in which Western Europe lost the Crusades and became Muslim, and Lucrezia Borgia was elected Pope.
The historian Joseph Ellis, who teaches at Mount Holyoke and has known Viereck for thirty years, says that Viereck reminds him of John Adams. “There’s something contrarian about both of their temperaments that will never allow it to remain comfortable if accepted by any political group,” Ellis told me. “They’re combustible, and they are uncomfortable with democracy, if democracy means majority rule. They think majorities are mostly wrong. They’re happiest when they are being denounced. They know they must be right then.”
I happened to visit Viereck on the day of the Iraqi elections, in January. He was wearing a yellow ascot and turban, but joked about his poor health and was using a walker. Still, he was writing introductions to the new editions of his works, and books on conservatism, revolution, Nazism, and poetry lay open on every surface. Viereck had a nurse, and his second wife, from whom he is separated, lived nearby and visited several times a month to cook him meals. Whenever I saw him, however, he was alone. (His son, John Alexis, is an Episcopal priest who lives in California; his daughter, Valerie, is a mother of three who lives in Ohio.)
“Where are the roots?” he said, when I asked him what he thought of the elections. “How can you have a democracy without roots? England had the roots. Switzerland had the roots. Holland had the roots. My hunch is that Iraq has no deep roots, and therefore the best thing you can hope for is inefficient corruption. Some kind of moderate thug ruler, instead of a mass-murdering thug like Saddam. I don’t think in practice more could happen. I think it would take more than a couple of generations.”
He went on, “I think McCarthy was a menace not because of the risk that he would take over—that was never real—but because he corrupted the ethics of American conservatives, and that corruption leads to the situation we have now. It gave the conservatives the habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical right and to looking to these forces—and appeasing them knowingly, expediently. I think that was the original sin of the conservative movement, and we are all suffering from it.”
The visit was my last to Viereck’s home. In March, he was hospitalized with heart and kidney conditions, which kept him on his back for so many weeks that he lost the use of his legs. When I saw him again, in April, he was confined to bed in a cinder-block nursing home in South Hadley. “There’s no privacy here at all,” he explained with a grin, when I arrived. He mused about the difference between Antaean and Procrustean approaches to life, vividly recasting the bed of Procrustes as a parable about the torture chamber of Fascism. “This is all good, to be reminded of one’s mortality,” he said. “It keeps one rooted to the ground. Like Antaeus, we die when we stop touching the ground.”
A nurse looked on bemusedly as Viereck launched into a speech about the lack of aristocratic virtues in contemporary America. “Death would be so inconvenient,” he said, suddenly pausing. “I have only about two more weeks to go on this new essay I’m working on for the beginning of ‘Strict Wildness’ ”—a collection of his writings on conservatism in politics and poetry, which will be published by Transaction in November. But soon he embarked on a new discussion, about whether the Declaration of Independence was a conservative or a radical document. (He decided that it was both.)
In “The Messiness of History,” his final lecture at Mount Holyoke before retiring, in 1997, Viereck warned his students of the dangers of trying to democratize the world:
**{: .break one} ** What causes the greatest crimes in history? The greatest bloodshed? The most murders? I would say two things: sincere love and a sincere devotion to liberty. . . . If you kill out of love or for a perfect utopia, you never stop killing because human nature is always imperfect. Robespierre, rightly called “the incorruptible,” was more sincere than Danton and always found somebody deviating just a little bit from true liberty. **
At the end of the lecture, Viereck qualified his pessimism a little: “I can think of nothing more gallant, even though again and again we fail, than attempting to get at the facts; attempting to tell things as they really are. For at least reality, though never fully attained, can be defined. Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away.” ♦