FOREWORD
by Neal B. Freeman
D aniel Kelly, the author of the book you hold in your hands, was a rare blessing to mea good friend made late in life. When I met him seven years ago, he was toying with the idea of writing this book. I urged him to do it and, over the subsequent years, I pestered him to finish it. He seemed for several reasons to be the right man for a very challenging assignment.
Most important, Dan had seen the young Brent Bozell on a public platform. When Dan was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Brent had come through Madison on a speaking tour. I asked what he thought of Brents performance and Dans one-word, decidedly unprofessorial review was: Wow. That settled the threshold question. Nobody would have to persuade Dan Kelly that Brent had been an electric speaker, a special forensic talent combining folksy, midwestern affability with a razor-sharp, legally trained mind. (As just one point of reference, Brents debate partnersome would say, junior partnerwhen Yale beat a previously undefeated Oxford team was a fellow named William F. Buckley Jr.)
Second, Dan had previously published a full-length biography of James Burnham, the longtime senior editor of National Review magazine. Jim Burnham was a man of the file, the comprehensive file, a habit born of his early experience as a CIA analyst. If Dan had spent a few years immersed in Burnhams papers, one could be confident that he knew the story of the conservative movement from the ground up. So that box was checked, too.
Finally, Dan was a Catholic mensch. That a man named Daniel Kelly should have sprung from Catholic roots was not much of a surprise, but beyond any theological affinity with Brent, who was a convert to Catholicism, Dan was acutely aware of the vicissitudes of this earthly life. When I met him, Dan was still recovering from liver-transplant surgery. He soon developed a virulent cancer and, perhaps worst of all for a historian, a creeping diabetes that was stealing his eyesight. To borrow a phrase from this book, Dan was suffering from a Homeric catalogue of infirmities. He succumbed to those infirmities in late 2012, but not before finishing the manuscript that would become this fine biography. (That Dan completed the book at all was an act of gallantry: in the dimming light of his own life, Dan told me that he couldnt bear to default on his promise to Brents widow, the luminous Patricia Buckley Bozell, who had entrusted Dan with the unvarnished tale of her time with Brent.)
The subject of this book, L. Brent Bozell Jr., had been my predecessor as Washington correspondent for National Review. That gig was my dream job. But in 1964, after only a few months in grade, I resigned to join the Bozell-for-Congress campaign in Maryland. That was a rash career move, obviously, but it was not quite as crazy as it may have appeared. Those of us who worked on Brents campaign felt privileged to be boarding the bullet train of contemporary politics. There was much chitchat about John F. Kennedys race for a Boston congressional seat back in the 1940s. We Bozellites liked to think that we were on something of that same JFK trajectory. A couple of terms in the House, a U.S. Senate race, and soon after that, we fantasized, it would be off to the Casa Blanca for us. That was the raw expectation, anyway. I dont mean to suggest that we saw it as a slam dunk, Joe and Jack Kennedystyle, but neither did it appear to be a desperation three-ball. Brent was that good.
In Dan Kellys sober judgment, that campaign became not the first rung on a ladder reaching to the sky but, in the clear rendering of hindsight, the apogee of Brents political career.
In this absorbing and moving account, Dan tells the full story of Brent Bozell, both the early triumphs and the heartbreaking stumbles.
By the time he had reached his late thirties, Brent was a man not just of youthful promise but of precocious achievement as well. Among his signal contributions, to my eye at least, were these: He launched the Goldwater movement, which triggered a seismic shift in American politics; he was one of a handful of men who salvaged the anticommunist cause from the missteps of its boisterous champion, Senator Joseph McCarthy; and he was the lawyer-cum-policy wonk who framed the telling arguments against judicial activismat the time, fresh and potent argumentsthat reverberate to this very day in our national dialogue. (You will hear those arguments yet again when a candidate is nominated for the next vacancy on the Supreme Court.) Based on these early accomplishments, Brent Bozell must be reckoned, along with Buckley, Burnham, Frank Meyer, and Russell Kirk, as one of the founding fathers of the modern conservative movement.
The second half of Brents life was not always pretty. After his early success, he turned from defending the country to defending his faith. From there, in stages, he became consumed by fervor, fanaticism, and, off at the end, delusion. His life became a protracted struggle in which a brilliant intellect fought valiantly against insidious maladies of the mind. Brents downward drift became an agony not only for him but also for those who loved himhis wife and ten children, his devoted friends, and his many distant admirers who had been exhilarated by his brief turn on the public stage. Dan Kelly tells this part of the tale with candor and compassiona story that, in the last chapter of Brents life, was entirely new to me, as I suspect it will be to most of Brents other friends. I wont ruin it for you here, but I can tell you this muchhow Brent spent his last days was both astonishing and, ultimately, redeeming.
The story of Brent Bozell is an American story, a big American story, and one that should be more widely known. Thanks to Dan Kelly, it will be.
Neal B. Freeman is chairman and founder of the Blackwell Corporation. Previously he served as an executive with the Hearst Corporation, as director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (appointed by President Ronald Reagan), and as an award-winning television producer. A graduate of Yale, Freeman has written for the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, the American Spectator, and National Review, among other publications.
LIVING
ON FIRE
The fiery orator
PREFACE
I never met Brent Bozell, but I once saw him give a speech. The time was 1960; the place, the University of Wisconsin, where I was enrolled as a graduate student; the topic, the need to outlaw the Communist Party.
Bozell, then National Reviews Washington columnist, cut an impressive figure on stage. In his midthirties, he was tall, slim but solid looking, with a strong, clear voice and a self-assured manner. But what seized and held my attention was his hair. Assertively red, it stood out brightly in the gray atmosphere of the lecture hall, and sometimes more than brightly thanks to an optical illusion produced by the halls ceiling lights. When he moved forward a few inches, his hair would appear to catch fire, as if to stress the importance of the point he was making. When he moved back, the fire would dim, but a new step forward would rekindle it. Illusory though it was, as a rhetorical device self-igniting on stage was sensational.
