Daniel Kelly, Living on Fire: The Life of L. Brent Bozell Jr. (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2014), 272 pp., $27.95.
IT SOUNDS LIKE THE PREMISE OF A NOVEL: Two gifted young men meet in college, become inseparable friends and plot the beginnings of a political movement that will irrevocably change American politics. Their contemporaries predict that one will become a prominent writer and editor who will influence both elites and average voters, while the other will become a transformative politician whose unstoppable drive will propel him to the White House. As events unfold, one will achieve all his dreams and more, while the other will go insane and die in obscurity.
Such, in fact, was the real-life story of William F. Buckley Jr. and his best friend and brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr. After graduating from Yale in 1950, they helped to create the modern conservative movement. They channeled the ferment stirred by McCarthyism and established National Review, the magazine that gave the movement intellectual guidance and focus. Buckley rose to national prominence as an author, media personality and arbitrator of internal disputes within the conservative camp. He produced the provocative best seller God and Man at Yale at the age of twenty-five and deployed his wit and charisma to attract recruits to the conservative cause. His quest to move conservatism from the margins to the center of American political life came to fruition with Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980. He ended up as the éminence grise of the movement, only to view what he had wrought with trepidation by the end of his life.
Source: nationalinterest.org
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