L. Brent Bozell, Jr.

Leo Brent Bozell, Jr. (January 15, 1926 – April 15, 1997) was an American conservative activist and Catholic writer.

Family

His father was Leo B. Bozell the co-founder of Bozell Worldwide. His wife was Patricia Lee Buckley, sister of William F. Buckley, and their 10 children include L. Brent Bozell III, also a conservative activist and the founder and president of Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group and publisher. Another son, Michael Bozell, is a Benedictine monk in Solesmes Abbey. The Bozell family grew to 48 grandchildren and a great grandchild by the time Bozell died. His godson was novelist Tristan Egolf.

Early life

Bozell attended Creighton Preparatory School in Omaha, Nebraska. Bozell was the state American Legion Oratorical Contest Champion of Nebraska in 1943 and 1944, winning the national title in 1944. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine in the Pacific during World War II. Bozell resolved to convert to Catholicism in 1946 but after his father's death that same year he deferred his decision until 1947 so as not to upset his family.

Catholic conservative

Bozell and William F. Buckley Jr. promote their book McCarthy and His Enemies, 1954

"A young, energetic red-haired Yalie from Omaha", as he is described in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Bozell was the best friend and debating society teammate of William F. Buckley, Jr. at Yale University, where he was President of the Yale Political Union and the campus World Federalists. Bozell arrived to Yale as a New Dealer; Buckley converted him to conservatism and was dissuaded from the isolationism of his upbringing by Bozell in return. The two became roommates and were inseparable. They formed a champion debate duo for Yale, with Bozell offering eloquent prepared statements and Buckley engaging in the cut-and-thrust that Firing Line viewers would come to know well. During the summer of 1949 the two spent the summer in Saskatchewan working for one of the Buckley oil companies; by the end of the summer Bozell was engaged to Patricia Lee Buckley, who was visiting her friend Pat Taylor in Vancouver, later to become William Buckley's wife. Meanwhile in the fall of 1949 Oxford had sent a crack debating team, Robin Day and Anthony Wedgwood Benn, to take on the Ivy League, with intimidating success— until they came to Yale. Taking the negative side on the topic "Resolved: the Americans should nationalize all their non-agricultural industries", Buckley and Bozell trounced the Oxford team 3-0.

After graduation he became a practicing attorney for a San Francisco law firm. Bozell and Buckley initially became involved with The American Mercury when it was owned by Clendenin J. Ryan but later left because of the magazine's drift into anti-Semitism. The two co-authored a defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, McCarthy and His Enemies. Bozell and Buckley were invited to debate the topic of McCarthy with two Yale law professors; they won resoundingly. Bozell became a speechwriter and legislative assistant for the embattled Senator, going on to work with McCarthy's defense team during the Senate censure hearings. He joined Buckley, by now his brother-in-law, when he founded National Review in 1955, writing the column on policy and legislation. While working with National Review he became a close friend and intellectual rival of the libertarian-inclined book section editor Frank Meyer. Meyer, infamous for the sheer number and duration of his telephone conversations, corresponded most frequently with Bozell; Willmoore Kendall defined an emergency phone call between Frank Meyer and Brent Bozell as one that interrupted the regular phone call between Frank Meyer and Brent Bozell.

In 1958 Bozell ran for the Maryland House of Delegates but lost.^{[citation needed]} After this defeat he proposed the formation of a new political party at one of the editors' evening meetings in New York; the idea was summarily rejected by the more fusionist editors Buckley and James Burnham. He later worked as a speechwriter for Senator Barry Goldwater, for whom he ghost-wrote the 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative. He was a founding member of Young Americans for Freedom.

In 1960 he took his family to Spain for the first time, making him absent from the Palm Beach decision of Buckley, Goldwater, Russell Kirk, and William Baroody Sr. to freeze out the John Birch Society from the conservative movement. Kirk inferred that Bozell would not have had any reason to be opposed to the decision but in fact he, along with Frank Meyer and William Rusher, protested the exclusion of the Society from the conservative movement. After the failed attempt to draft Barry Goldwater at the 1960 Republican National Convention, Bozell, a strong proponent of a Goldwater candidacy, was disappointed and annoyed by the would-be candidate's firm endorsement of the moderate Nixon-Lodge ticket. In 1962, addressing a 18,500 strong conservative rally in New York City's Madison Square Garden, he issued a rhetorical order to the Berlin commander to "Tear down the Berlin Wall," which would be echoed more famously 25 years later by Ronald Reagan, who exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall!"

In 1963 Bozell left National Review in a dispute over the importance of Catholic principles in relation to the conservative movement. Buckley had written a scathing editorial, "A Venture in Triviality", about Pope John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in Terris and among the National Review staff the dismissive attitude of 'Mater si, magistra no' toward Catholic social teaching on economics seemed to predominate. Patricia Bozell later said that the split between her husband and her brother was a matter of whether her husband was going to be a "Catholic conservative or a conservative Catholic."

Conservative Catholic

See also: Triumph (magazine)

In 1964 Bozell ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from Maryland against Charles Mathias, one of the leaders of the then-influential liberal wing of the Republican Party;^{[citation needed]} references to the gnostic heresy and to the "arcana of Spanish legitimism" made during his campaign speeches may have contributed to his loss.^{[citation needed]} In 1965 he moved his family to Spain purportedly because "you breathed the Catholic thing there" and, along with Frederick Wilhelmsen and William Marshner among others, founded the Catholic magazine Triumph in 1966 which Bozell intended to be a bulwark of Catholic orthodoxy and a sort of National Review for Catholics. The magazine featured contributions from distinguished names such as Russell Kirk (a Catholic convert), Christopher Dawson, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, John Lukacs, Thomas Molnar, Jeffrey Hart, Sir Arnold Lunn, Charles Journet, Rousas John Rushdoony (a Calvinist), and initially received an enthusiastic endorsement by Buckley in the pages of National Review.

But the relationship between Bozell and his brother-in-law had already begun to sour; in March 1966, when Buckley wrote a column warning that Catholics should not try to seek legislation that would impose on others their belief that abortion is murder, Bozell wrote a letter to the editors of National Review protesting that the column "reeks of relativism... Mr. Buckley writes in this instance as though he had never heard of the natural law." Buckley was stung by the letter and had composed a bitter reply, but decided against sending it. In 1966 Bozell published The Warren Revolution, a scholarly critique of the Supreme Court of the United States under Chief Justice Earl Warren. Despite his relocation to Spain Bozell remained conscious of U.S. politics; he opposed the Richard Nixon administration, intoning in the pages of Triumph that by supporting Nixon's candidacy in 1968 the conservative movement had "ceased to be an important political force in America".

He later repudiated his support for the American experiment itself, as well as his own book The Warren Revolution. Buckley summarized Bozell's new position as follows: "[Bozell's] thesis now is that the republic of the Founding Fathers was doomed because of their failure to adequately enthrall the city of man to the City of God." Bozell himself felt estranged from the United States in general and in particular the conservative movement he was once a rising star in, denouncing conservatism as "an inadequate substitute for Christian politics." Especially following the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, Bozell began to see the United States as a force of evil comparable in magnitude to the Soviet Union and denounced both democratic capitalism as well as Communism. Triumph idealized Francoist Spain, criticized the events leading up to the Vietnam War - including the U.S.-backed assassination of the Catholic President of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem - and the conduct of the conflict thereafter as irreconcilable with Just War Theory, declared against chemical warfare and nuclear deterrence (the latter Bozell had once been a strong proponent of), and identified its economic views with distributism.

Friends of Bozell blamed his increasing devotion to Catholicism, his radicalism, and his dissolving relationship with Buckley (who was reportedly traumatized by the loss of his closest friend) on alleged mental deterioration; Neal Freeman had said "Brent simply started to fade and you could see it happening, but you couldn't do anything about it." John Judis writes in William Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives: "The breakup of their relationship probably could not have occurred ten years prior or ten years hence. It was very much a product of the tumultuous sixties, which exhilarated Buckley and which lifted him to new heights of celebrity, but in which more troubled, less stable souls like Bozell capsized."

After founding Triumph Bozell also founded the Society of the Christian Commonwealth whose educational arm, the Christian Commonwealth Institute headed by Dr. Warren Carroll, conducted annual classes, lectures, and seminars at the El Escorial in Spain. The entirety of the original faculty of and many of the donors to Christendom College had attended the program in Spain and were subscribers to Triumph. Carroll later remarked in his obituary for Bozell that "In a very fundamental sense, Christendom College was a Triumph enterprise."

Bozell was a staunch supporter of Pope Paul VI and strongly defended his condemnation of birth control in the encyclical Humanae Vitae, though he disagreed with the Pontiff's decisions regarding the liturgy. He was a founding member of and served as a special ambassador for Catholics United for the Faith. Since its founding, Triumph teetered on the verge of collapse and Bozell was planning on shutting the magazine down until Patricia Bozell attended a forum at the Catholic University of America featuring radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson in March 1971. When Atkinson said the Virgin Mary was more "used" than if she had participated in a sexual conception, Patricia attempted to slap her and her hand hit the microphone and she was escorted out. When Bozell heard what his wife had done, he rose to his full height (he was a tall, Lincolnesque figure) and bellowed "To Hell with Catholic University!" The positive reader feedback convinced him to keep the magazine alive. In 1975, coinciding with the death of Francisco Franco and the beginning of the Spanish transition to democracy, Triumph ceased publication.

In 1985 Bozell founded Misión Guadalupe, a program devoted to the assistance and evangelization of Hispanic immigrants.

Bozell faithfully visited the inmates of Washington's Lorton Correctional Complex in Northern Virginia every week for years until his death.

Pro-Life Activity

In June 1970, three years before the Roe v. Wade decision and when abortion was illegal in most of the United States, Brent and Patricia Bozell led the first "Operation Rescue" mission to try by direct action to stop it at George Washington University Hospital in Washington D.C. where it was permitted for the mental well-being of the mother. Bozell and a group of 230 rallied and met at St. Stephen Martyr Church for a "Funeral Mass for The Holy Innocents" celebrated by four priests, including an African American, a Chinese, and a Hispanic. The protest included the Spanish group "Los Hijos del Trueno" (the Sons of Thunder), who dressed in khaki and red berets (reminiscent of the Carlists, whom Bozell came to admire while in Spain), wore Rosaries around their necks and carried papal flags. They walked a few blocks to the hospital from the church and Bozell put on his red beret and took hold of a wooden cross. Patricia led the women present in a recitation of the Rosary. The group heard speakers, including one who declared "America... you are daggering to death your unborn of tomorrow. The very cleanliness of your sterilized murder gives off the stench of death." Along with others Bozell was met by police and was clubbed on the head. A police officer grabbed Bozell's cross and broke it in half after he assaulted an officer with it. He was thrown down and handcuffed. In the ensuing scuffle between the protestors and the police, a plate glass window was broken. Bozell and seven others were arrested and given suspended sentences.

Four years earlier Bozell had written "Disorder has become characteristic of a society when the streets of its cities, even its country lanes, can no longer be passed safely at night." When this was brought up to him after the GWU episode, he replied somewhat testily: "If disorder is necessary to stop this murdering of babies, I'm in favor of disorder." This demonstration dismayed "law and order" conservatives already upset with anti-war and student demonstrations on the left. Buckley denounced his brother-in-law's actions, declaring in the pages of National Review "the Sons of Thunder have moved precious few of the unconvinced over to their side." Bozell and the Triumph staff were undeterred and remained active in early pro-life work, including the organization of the first March for Life.

The cover of the January 1973 issue of Triumph was solid black in mourning for Roe v. Wade, except for a small logo at the top and a white cross and the words "For the children" in the lower right hand corner.

Illnesses and Death

Bozell suffered from bipolar disorder, writing publicly about his experiences, suffering, and recovery in the introduction to Mustard Seeds, a collection mostly of his post-National Review writings (including many from Triumph) published in 1986. The book included "Poland's Cross—And America's," Bozell's first National Review essay in almost two decades. It also included the National Review essay for which he may be remembered best, "Freedom or Virtue," which touched off a robust debate between himself and Frank Meyer, mostly around whether freedom or virtue should be the paramount consideration for American conservatives.

Bozell died of pneumonia in a nursing home in Bethesda, Maryland on April 15, 1997 at the age of 71 after years of numerous and crippling health problems. His son, L. Brent Bozell III, spoke of those struggles when eulogizing him:

Dozens of times over...25 years the attacks would come, and with each bout, yet another blow, yet another public humiliation. There were arrests and forced hospitalizations, escapes and re-arrests and recommitments. There was the never-ending parade of lawyers, police, doctors, and, yes, from time to time the State Department was on the line to brief us on yet another prospective international upheaval caused by this very unpredictable man.

Manic depression by itself is enough to break the spirit of any man, but Pop was no ordinary man. He suffered from peripheral neuropathy, sleep apnea, osteoporosis, degenerative disc disease, asthma, and Alzheimer's. One by one they came, and when it seemed that no part of his body had been left untouched yet a new illness was diagnosed. We wondered how he could endure so much, accept this torture with such nobility, with never one word of complaint.

Quotations

• "I would favor destroying not only the whole world, but the entire universe out to the furthermost star, rather than suffer Communism to live."^{[citation needed]}

• "A conservative electorate has to be created out of that vast uncommitted middle—the great majority of the American people who, though today they vote for Democratic or Modern Republican candidates, are not ideologically wedded to their programs or, for that matter, to any program. The problem is to reach them and to organize them."^{[citation needed]}

• "There is no greater paradox in the cosmos than the apparent contradiction of our helplessness ('without me, you can do nothing') alongside God's 'helplessness.' Oh, I know, God is all-powerful, and so on; but he cannot undo what he has done, and what he once did was to make men free. This means that he 'needs' us in order to get us to Heaven as his lovers, and in order to do his will in the world. All we have to do in order to frustrate those wishes -- to render God 'helpless' -- is to say No. But God is not helpless, really, because he has mercy -- himself. And what mercy does is convert, change our hearts. Which God never stops trying to do until we are dead. This means continued suffering for him, which is what Christ is all about."^{[citation needed]}

Works

• (contributor) The Best of Triumph. Lawrence, E. Michael, ed. Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press ISBN 0-931888-72-7.
• McCarthy and His Enemies (with Buckley, William F., Jr.) Chicago: Regnery, 1954. Reissued as ISBN 0-89526-472-2.
• The Warren Revolution. (New York: Arlington House, 1966.)
• Mustard Seeds: A Conservative Becomes a Catholic. Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press ISBN 0-931888-73-5.

Sources

• Bridges, Linda; Coyne, John R. Jr., Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement
• Buckley, William F., Jr.
• Buckley, William F., Jr., 1997. "L. Brent Bozell, RIP," National Review, May 19.
• Critchlow, Donald T., The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History
• Critchlow, Donald T., Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern america
• Hudson, Deal, Onward, Christian Soldiers
• Perlstein, Rick, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
• Stout, David, 1997. L. Brent Bozell, 71, a Champion of Conservatism. The New York Times: April 19.