Stone on LBJ

To the Editors:

Mr. I. F. Stone writes (August 20, 1964) that “[L. Brent] Bozell, [as] the right wing of Buckley’s right-wing weekly, National Review…has moved down in recent years from an editor to a contributor. His enthusiasm for Franco Spain and his predilection for holy war and statism may have proved a little gamey even for the tastes of Buckley’s ‘conservatism.’ ”

I recognize that by Mr. Stone’s standards I do not have the right to call myself a conservative, as I suppose he would also deny me the right to call him a fellow traveler: but I suppose I can speak with some authority on why Brent Bozell was demoted from senior editor to contributor, there to sit at the end of the table along with hoi polloi like John Chamberlain, Joan Didion, James Jackson Kilpatrick, Sir Arnold Lunn, and Gerhart Niemeyer. The reason for the shift in the masthead is that all senior editors take on administrative duties, and Mr. Bozell, on concluding his plans would make that impossible, followed the precedent of John Chamberlain and became a contributor. We do not, at National Review, change the pecking order every week depending on our writers’ ideological temperatures. It is probably Mr. Stone’s experience with the Left, unhappy one would hope, that makes him suppose that life among conservatives is equally sordid.

Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.

New York City