the title page carries a beautiful example of his signature. g. washington. >> okay. $8,700,000. is there any advance? then selling for $8,700,000. [ applause ] and that goes -- [ applause ] and that goes to mt. vernon. thank you very much. paddle 222. we had pulled in for the refueling that morning around 9:30. we had moored the ship to a -- >> the former commanding officer of the "uss cole" on the events surrounding the october 2000 attack that left 17 dead and 37 injured. >> i was turned back to my desk and doing routine paperwork when

at 11:18 in the morning there was a thunderous explosion. you could feel all 555 feet and 8,400 pounds of destroyer thrust up and to the right. like we seemed to hang in the air as the ship did a twisting and flexing. we came back down in the water, lights went out, ceiling tiles came and popped out. everything on the desk lifted up a foot and slammed back down. i grabbed the underside of the desk until the ship stopped moving and i could stand up. >> more with former "cole" commander kirk lippold tonight at 8:00. each week american history tv sits in on a lecture with one of the nation's college professors. you can watch every saturday 8:00 p.m. and midnight and 1:00 p.m. this week, david keene, president of the national rival association talks about the

modern conservative political philosophy of william f. buckly. mr. buckly who died if 2008, the founder of the national review magazine. david keene was a guest lecturer in south carolina. in a course called the conservative intellectual tradition in america. taught by professor mallory factor. this is just over an hour and a half. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. let me begin by thanking mallory and, indeed, the citadel for this opportunity to talk to you about my old friend and mentor, bill buckley. you should know that the opportunity to attend a course like this is almost unique in american higher education. i'd like to just begin by reading a reference to this sort of thing from the chronicle review, the chronicle of higher education written not too many

years ago by a columbia professor. he says the unfortunate fact is that american academics have until very recently shown little curiosity about conservative ideas. even though those ideas have utterly transformed american and british politics over the last 30 years. a look at the online catalogs of our major universities confirms this. plenty, of course, is on identity politics, post colonialism, nary a one on conservative political thought. professors are expected to understand the subtle differences among gay, lesbian, and transgender studies, but i would wager that few can distinguish between the american enterprise institute, the heritage foundation, and the cato institute, three think thanks that have had greater impact on washington politics than the entire ivy league. so, in many ways, i'm privileged and i'm honored to have an

opportunity to be a part of a course like this at an institution like this. like most conservatives of my generation, i was inspired by william f. buckley. i began reading "national review" as a high school student and can honestly say that to this day the base of my political thinking derives from two giants, bill buckley and friedrich hayek, both of whom will figure in my remarks. though i am today president of the national rifle association, i served for many years as chairman of the american conservative union, was a follower, a friend, and an ally of bill buckley, and i'm here today for that reason. as i was accepting this invitation i was reminded of what bill's brother jim told me he asked of his colleagues in seeking permission to attend the 40th anniversary banquet of the new york conservative party some years ago. jim as mallory pointed out, served a term in the united

states senate as that party's nominee. and when i left the nixon white house, he asked me to be his executive assistant. jim eventually got a steady job as a highly respected federal appeals court judge. judges, you know, aren't supposed to participate in partisan activities. and he had to seek his colleagues' permission to attend the celebration. he told me i prevailed because i told him i wasn't being asked as an activist but as an artifact of their successes in an earlier day. i resemble that remark. i am here today as an artifact or more properly perhaps as a witness to the development of a movement of which jim and i were both a part and to the role his brother played in calling that movement into being. before i retreat into history though, i'd like to make a preannouncement announcement. as many of you may know, the nra through the nra foundation provides grants to support the shooting sports.

many of these grants are requested by college shooting teams through the friends of the nra state fund. the citadel pistol team has requested such a grant two as the grant application makes clear, to introduce promising and motivated cadet student athletes to competitive pistol shooting and allow them to represent their school on a national level. that grant application has been approved. so congratulations. but let's get back to history. the early conservative movement was made up primarily of former democrats or the sons and daughters of former democrats, liberals and even former socialists and communists. frank myer who mallory factor referred to a few minutes ago and who was my mentor was i believe is the highest ranking domestic communist defector ever and to leave the communist

party. he was not atypical. like many who joined up early, i, too, began as a democrat. at 15, i stood in the snows of wisconsin during the 1960 democratic primary passing out literature for john f. kennedy. that was where you might have expected me. as i came from a working class labor family. my father was not just a working man but a union activist. he spent years as a labor union organizer and ten years as the president of the rockford, illinois, labor council. my mother was elected as the president of the women's international auxiliary of the united autoworkers. when i stood in the snow that year, they had never voted for a republican for anything. all of that changed for me and for many of my generation because of bill buckley and the ideas he popularized. his influence is acknowledged by all involved in or witness to the development of the modern conservative movement.

george nash, author of the most thorough history of the development of the post world war ii conservative intellectual movement in this country has said of buckley, and i'm quoting, he was arguably the most important public intellectual in the united states in the past half century. for an entire generation, he was the preeminent voice of conservatism. indeed he was. my own conversion, if you will, came about while i was still in high school about a year into the kennedy administration. i was interested in politics and more importantly in ideas. our high school librarian, perhaps a closet conservative herself, called me over to her desk one day and told me that she had ordered a copy of a book by an economist by the name of friedrich hayek which she had now been told could not be put on the school library shelf. to the liberals of the '50s and '60s, hayek was a dangerous

radical and for good reason. his road to serfdom was already beginning to undermine the liberal consensus. the book that had been banned from our school though was not "the road to serfdom" but a book titled "the constitution of liberty." our high school librarian wasn't about to throw it out so she told me i could have it if i wanted it. i did. i took it home. i read it. i still have it. as preparation for this lecture, i believe you've all read hayek's "why i am not a conservative," which was a chapter in that book, the constitution of liberty. hayek, of course, was a libertarian free market economist. the modern conservative movement had not really come into being at the time he wrote that book. from hayek to buckley was an easy and a natural step. like thousands of young conservatives, i devoured each

issue of "national review." and can attest to the accuracy of nash's assessment of buckley's importance. china's mao tse-tung once famously observed that political power grows from the barrel of a gun. but history tells us something different entirely. political power and influence comes ultimately from the power of ideas. back in 1936, the economist john kenneth galbraith who in spite of his misunderstanding of economics was a lifelong friend of bill buckley's, wrote that "ideas are more powerful than is commonly understood." indeed, the world is ruled by little else. madmen in authority who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribblers of a few years back. sooner or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or for evil."

galbraith, of course, at the time, was referring to the scribblings of marx and the native german philosopher who's were together to produce the monsters of the 20th century it, lenin, stalin, hitler and mao himself. but galbraith, too, was a scribbler whose ideas came to dominate the economic thinking of politicians the world over for decades but were ultimately discredited and deposed by other ideas that were beginning to take root as his influence peaked. william f. buckley was all about ideas. in today's world, he would be described not inaccurately as a public intellectual for he gave voice to the ideas that were to culminate in the modern conservative movement that he more than anyone called into being. he burst on the scene at the age

of 26 with gaddenman at yale, a critique of the educational homogenization to which he was suspected as an undergraduate, and within a couple of years he founded national review, a journal of opinion that would change the world. he edited "national review" for nearly four decades, churned out an estimated 350,000 published words a year while traveling the country to give speeches and debate liberals of his day on more than 500 american campuses. buckley came to madison, the university of wisconsin where i was an undergraduate for one of those speeches in the early '60s, and it was there that we first met. think about the output of this man. during those same years, he published more than 50 books. he hosted nearly 1,500 episodes of "firing line" on public television. he was instrumental in the

founding of the inter collegiate society of individualists now the inter collegiate studies institute, the young americans for freedom which "the washington post" david broder later said was the most influential youth organization of its era and the philadelphia society. he brought the disparate wings of an emerging, new conservatism together to create a politically viable movement where none had existed. as a result of his efforts, barry goldwater won the republican party presidential nomination in 1964, transformed the gop and set the stage for the reagan challenge to an incumbent president four years later that made possible ronald reagan's election in 1980. to grasp the enormity of this accomplishment, one has to remember just what the political and intellectual landscape looked like in the years following the second world war. in his monumental book "commanding heights," harvard's

daniel yergin describes the late '40s, '50s and early '60s as a period in which a collectivist's faith in government dominated the world. britain had gone socialist and was busy nationalizing its industry. sweden had already done it. country after country was developing five and ten-year plans under which the state would direct the economy. history seemed not just to be on the side of collectivism and socialism but of communism. one has to remember or realize that when whitaker chambers abandoned the communists and penned "witness," he was convinced that he was leaving the winning or the losing side. in this country, establishment intellectuals like lionel trilling dismissed the very idea of an american's conservative tradition as silly at best and pathological at worst, and even

today, some psychologists view conservatism in much the same light. this was the 1955 world that young bill buckley set out to challenge and perhaps to change. the words of buckley's mission statement that appeared in his new magazine's maiden issue in november of 1955 said it all. "national review," he wrote, stands to thwart history yelling stop at a time when no one is inclined to do so or to have much patience with those who so urge it. buckley didn't know if he or we would prevail, but he knew what he had to do, and that, of course, was to try. he added, there never was an age of conformity quite like this one. and he was dead right. but as yergin points out in his history of the time, under the surface things were beginning to change. and bill buckley was to be the catalyst for popularizing and

shaping that change both intellectually and politically. yergin suggests that the most important publishing decision of the era was made by "the readers digest" which some years earlier had decided to publish and thus make both famous and influential a book by that austrian economist frederick hayek who was then in residence at the university of chicago. it was his "road to serfdom," and it influenced the thinking of millions around the world including a young hollywood liberal by the name of ronald reagan and a british undergraduate who carried a copy of the book around in her purse and grew up to become the longest serving prime minister in british history. the movement back in those days was tiny. but it was growing. like most young intellectually based movements, it consisted

mainly of academics, students and writer who's spent inordinate amounts of time and energy arguing about minor as well as major doctrinal differences. there were the objectivist followers of the newly famous ayn rand, the remnants of the old anti-roosevelt coalition, a scattering of isolationists and racists, states rightists and even a monarchist or two. there were religious extremists and conspiracy theorists. when my father's union organizing days were over, he bought a bar. and as he prepared to open that bar, he gave me what turned out to be pretty good political advice that i've never forgotten. he said that when you open a bar, you have to spend the first month or so throwing out all of those who have already been thrown out of every other bar in town because if you don't do that, he said, no one else is ever going to come in to your establishment. conservatives in the late '50s

were facing a similar problem as they tried to put together and open a movement with an appeal that wouldn't be limited to malcontents and ideologues who couldn't find a home anywhere else and who could, if they were allowed in, keep everyone else out. buckley and his band of merry men and women at national review decided that their immediate mission was to get rid of the crazies, the racists and those who couldn't get along with others while molding the rest into a coalition that might actually both present an intellectually, defensible conservative and hope eventually to influence the nation's culture and politics. through "national review," buckley began knitting together supporters of different strains of quasi conservative thought that he and his followers believed legitimate and capable of working in a coalition to form a viable conservative political movement. every few years, a reporter or an analyst discovers that the

conservative movement is far from monolithic but more closely resembles a coalition of interests that differ in almost as many respects as not. when that happens, articles appear wondering if this movement can survive these different views and these strains. as if a successful political movement must be both monolithic and homogenous to be either effective or to survive. communists and most totalitarian idealogic movements have always tried to suppress dissent and differences within their ranks fearing like the religious leaders of today in the west and in the middle east that dissent must ultimately lead to its failure. in the 1960s, three main conservative camps had sometimes conflicting but overlapping views. they were the anti-communists like buckley, chambers, myer, burnham, and the rest saw marxism, leninism as an existential threat to everything

they held dear. libertarianism. a belief in individual liberty and free markets andwhat they then called traditionalism, the belief that free men must act morally to preserve those rights that they loved. buckley and frank myer believed that these three basic camps faced the very same threats. free markets, individual autonomy and religious freedom were all threatened by communism. the united states was a fortress of freedom in a dangerous world. anyone who valued tradition or freedom was in the very same boat and none could afford to push the other overboard lest they all perish. the result was what is frank myer termed fusionism. myer rejected a valueless libertarianism as well as state-directed virtue. the rut was a belief in what he

called libertarian means to a traditionalist end. a good society built by men and women freely choosing to pursue moral goals and ends. this combined with hostility toward totalitarianism gave him what is now referred to as the three-legged stool that makes up the conservative movement. but first, they had to throw the folks out who were keeping the others from entering. each camp had hangers on who could endanger the whole enterprise, and therefore, had to go. the first to go with the birchers. the john birch society was the brainchild of a belmont, massachusetts, businessman by the name of robert welch and was named for a soldier killed in korea shortly after world war ii ended by a communist chinese soldier. welch considered him the first casualty of the cold war as he may well have been.

the society attracted tens of thousands of followers around the country. but it quickly became apparent that welch was a conspiracy theorist of the first order. and because there weren't very many organizations on the right, the more liberal media leaped on the john birch society as a way to tar the emerging conservative movement as a bunch of folks much like the john birch society's founders. today, one finds folks like him among the truthers and the birthers, but in those days his bizarre theories were easily caricatured by a hostile establishment and used to tar conservatives like buckley himself as part of what the president liked to refer to as the lunatic fringe. buckley famously read the birchers out of the movement and those of us in his camp followed suit. at the time, i was a board member of the young americans for freedom which i later chaired. we passed a resolution

denouncing the birchers at our national convention. they walked out. it wasn't easy at the time. but it was politically necessary, and we all had a sense that it was the right thing to do. welch had famously or perhaps i should say infamously suggested that president dwight eisenhower was a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy. russell kirk, another conservative and ally of buckley's responded, ike isn't a communist. he's a golfer. next to go were the objectivists who buckley saw as two doctrinaire and whose militant atheism offended him and offended other conservatives. and finally, the racists and extreme libertarians who at the time seemed more interested in selling the highways and legalizing drugs while agreeing with the so-called new left that the u.s. rather than the

communist world was mainly responsible for the cold war, had to go. remember it wasn't just that buckley found the beliefs of the birchers of the objectivists, the racists, and the monarchists objectionable, though he did, but that he was trying, trying desperately to put together a coalition that could present an appealing and consistent philosophical message to those fed up with the direction in which the united states seemed to be heading in the '50s. buckley, of course, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. by 1964, the new conservatives would dominate barry goldwater. drive the eastern establishment, packing or so it seemed at the time, and effectively seized control of one of the nation's major political parties. following the goldwater defeat, a defeat which buckley both predicted and told young conservatives in a private

meeting before the election, told them that it would be a good thing for a couple of reasons most importantly the reason being that he said if goldwater were to have won, who would run the government? because there were not conservatives at that time who had moved beyond theoretical thinking to actually little applying their philosophy to real world problems. i still remember the first book published in those days that took conservative philosophy and tried to address a concrete problem. it had begun as a ph.d. thesis by a young student at stanford that was named marty anderson who later served in several administrations who was called the federal bulldozer, an attack on the urban renewal program of the era. and i still have that book. it was important not because of

its solutions but because it was an initial attempt by somebody to say it's time to stop just debating ideas in the coffee house and to go out and decide what we would do if we were, in fact, in a position to do anything. but following that defeat, buckley urged conservatives as i say to begin putting together this infrastructure, the infrastructure needed to train men and women to not just run for office but to govern. he was instrumental in the formation of the american conservative union in late 1964. and in 1965, he ran for mayor of new york. not because he expected to win. he famously said if he did win, he would demand a recount. but to demonstrate to his fellow conservatives that it was possible to mount a conservative political offensive against the liberal establishment in what most of us considered the belly of the liberal beast.

conservatives around the country listened, they followed that campaign, they cheered bill buckley on. they took heart, and they began filing for office themselves. they even began to win. the republican party had been declared dead by the establishment after the 1964 election. but it was open for business under new ownership. ronald reagan was elected governor of california in 1966 and considered running against richard in iraq on and nelson rockefeller two years later, but ultimately decided it was too early. the result, of course, was nixon and watergate and then finally, ronald reagan. and the triumph of a movement that began as a gleam in the eye of young bill buckley. by 2007, reagan was gone, but george w. bush presented bill

buckley the medal of freedom at a white house ceremony honoring his life, his work, and acknowledging the debt that the country and all of us owed him. by then, though, buckley sensed that the movement he built was fraying around the edges. he was convinced that the balance it had existed among the various constituencies that made up the movement was somehow off kilter. it seemed to him that some like the young president who placed the medal around his neck, just didn't get it. that other who's had come to washington to do good had stayed to do well. and that the sectarianism and hubris that they demonstrated was leading the movement down

the road to potential disaster. buckley had never been orthodox in his conservatism. he didn't believe that conservatism was ideological so much as a way of looking at life. he opposed any dissent into a doctrinaire ideological way of thinking. that was one of the reasons he had so much trouble with ayn rand and the objectivists. over the years he differed with fellow conservatives on all manner of important issues. he favored the legalization of marijuana for both libertarian and empirical reasons. the war on drugs he felt would never be won and was too costly to continue. but is he also favored national service, mostly for empirical reasons. he looked back on the way a generation had been socialized during the '40s and '50s through military service and thought young people in the nation had benefited greatly from that socialization. buckley supported the initial invasion of iraq on national interest grounds but was quickly