The Never Ending Conversation

Six years after the founding of National Review, a philosophical chasm suddenly formed between close friends and fellow senior editors Frank Meyer and L. Brent Bozell. In 1960, Bozell ghostwrote Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and migrated to Francisco Franco’s Spain. By early 1962, he had veered sharply from the pro-freedom conservatism for which he previously shared an enthusiasm with Meyer and Goldwater. What happened? Spain happened. As Bozell tried to coax Meyer there, Meyer attempted to rescue Bozell from foreign ideas and their friendship from threats from this newfound tension. The ongoing debate furthered not the fusion that Meyer so wanted for conservatives but a fissure that gave identity to emergent strains of conservatism. Unlike almost every other conversation in the history of the postwar right, this one continues unabated and with far more debating partners in 2025 than in 1962.