Sixty Years in the Movement
Reflections on mentors, battles, and the ideas that have defined a lifetime of scholarship and public service.
I entered the University of Pittsburgh in 1960 as a young man from a working-class family. By 1964 I had a B.A. and the beginnings of a vocation. Notre Dame gave me the Ph.D. and, more importantly, Gerhart Niemeyer as my teacher.
Niemeyer had fled the Bolsheviks as a boy. He understood totalitarianism in his bones. He taught us that the crisis of the West was spiritual before it was political. Oakeshott, whom I studied with at LSE, taught the same lesson in a different key: politics is conversation, not engineering.
Between those two men I found the intellectual foundation that has sustained me through Reagan's White House, the battle for Yorktown, the writing of eight books, and the quiet work of building alternatives that continues today.
The movement has changed names many times. The principles have not.