Reagans eminence grise.

• Author: Merry, Robert W.
• Position: Ronald Reagan - Biography

In 1983, Ronald Reagan awarded James Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award. Reagan declared, "As a scholar, writer, historian and philosopher, James Burnham has profoundly affected the way America views itself and the world.... Freedom, reason and decency have had few greater champions in this century." With his characteristic smile and tilt of the head, Reagan added, "And I owe him a personal debt, because throughout the years traveling the mash-potato circuit I have quoted you widely." The award's recipient, then seventy-seven, was surely flattered. Fie was in declining health--his eyesight deteriorating, his short-term memory devastated by a stroke. His professional standing, too, was a far cry from the days when he had stirred up intellectual debate with books that assaulted conventional thinking.

It was fitting that Reagan and Burnham should come together to celebrate their mutual fight against global Communism. If the Gipper--who gets credit from many historians and commentators for being, as the Economist put it in a 2004 cover headline, "The Man Who Beat Communism"--was key to winning the Cold War, then Burnham laid the intellectual blueprint for him. He was the father of the Reagan Doctrine. Like Whittaker Chambers, who had made a searing break with Communism, Burnham was, as Reagan put it upon his death in 1987, "one of those principally responsible for the great intellectual odyssey of our century: the journey away from totalitarian statism and toward the uplifting doctrines of freedom." Nor was Reagan alone in his view. "More than any other single person," writes historian George H. Nash, "Burnham supplied the conservative intellectual movement with the theoretical formulation for victory in the Cold War." Still, the Cold War ended nearly a quarter century ago. Even granting Burnham's pivotal role in the ideological battles surrounding that long struggle, it seems fair to wonder: What lessons, if any, can we derive from Burnham's global outlook for the present? There is an understandable but misguided tendency among many intellectuals and policy makers these days to apply Cold War impulses and strategies to post-Cold War realities. Burnham was a fierce Cold War hawk on the intellectual scene, as was Reagan on the political scene, and thus many assume that their hawkish instincts would carry over into the subsequent struggles against Islamic fundamentalism or upstart regional powers. Indeed, Burnham biographer Daniel Kelly and conservative commentator Richard Brookhiser have suggested that Burnham was "the first neoconservative."

Others, though, have suggested that Burnham was a quintessential foreign-policy realist, who stripped away wispy thoughts about human fulfillment and punctured myths fashioned by elites to justify their societal dominance--a realist rooted in an unadorned understanding of human nature and man's irrepressible quest for power. But this interpretation also runs into difficulty, as Burnham's Cold War prescriptions often differed from those of the era's realists--including Hans J. Morgenthau and Walter Lippmann, among academics and journalists; and Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, among foreign-policy practitioners.

Perhaps it is best to try to understand Burnham as he understood himself. For his oeuvre reveals some intriguing contradictions that may help to elucidate contemporary foreign-policy disputes. Indeed, he personified the post-Cold War foreign-policy debate in his earlier writings about global power and America's position in the world. The Burnham record cannot be fully understood, however, without exploring his remarkable odyssey from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan--or, in his case, from Trotskyism to Reaganism.

Born on November 22, 1905, in Chicago, Burnham was the son of a wealthy railroad executive. He studied at Princeton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he received advanced degrees in English literature and medieval philosophy. Then he joined the philosophy department at New York University's Washington Square College, where for the next thirty-two years he taught aesthetics, ethics and comparative literature. Soon--agitated by the ravages of the Great Depression, the apparent looming collapse of capitalism and the intriguing rise of Communism--he plunged into the turbulent world of left-wing radicalism.

He adopted the anti-Stalinist Bolshevik Leon Trotsky as his ideological lodestar. He joined various Trotsky-Ieaning organizations, coedited a Trotskyist theoretical journal called the New International, corresponded widely with the great man himself, and became embroiled in the intrigues and maneuverings of the Left. A gifted writer, Burnham emerged in New York literary circles as a thinker of rare dimension, depth and shrewdness.

Burnham was anything but the typical scruffy Trotskyist. Dedicated to the cause by day, the elegantly attired Burnham retreated to his Greenwich Village apartment by night and played bourgeois host at black-tie dinners where the guests seldom included his ideological brethren. Irving Howe considered him "haughty in manner and speech, ... logical, gifted, terribly dry." Others viewed him more as standoffish, perhaps a bit shy. But he was not easily ignored. James T. Farrell, who saw him as "prissy and ministerial," used Burnham as the prototype for a character in his novel Sam Holman.

With the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, however, Burnham did a somersault. He repudiated Trotsky's preposterous admonition that good socialists owed fealty to the Soviet system even in the face of comrade Stalin's deviations from the true doctrine. Now he concluded the problem wasn't Stalin but Communism itself. He broke with Trotsky, who promptly labeled him an "educated witch-doctor" and a "strutting petty-bourgeois pedant." Burnham evinced no agony over this rupture. His commitment was "rational and pragmatic, not spiritual," he explained. "God had not failed, so far as I was concerned. I had been mistaken, and when I came to realize the extent of my mistakes, it was time to say good-bye."

Besides, he was developing a new theory of the ideological clash enveloping the industrial world, which he pulled together in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution. It sold more than one hundred thousand hardcover copies in the United States and Britain during World War II, and far more in paperback. Postwar sales surged further when the book was translated into fourteen languages. The New York Times devoted three days of reviews and analyses to the book. Time displayed Burnham's photo with a review that called the volume "the most sensational book of political theory since The Revolution of Nihilism" Peter Drucker, reviewing it for the Saturday Review of Literature, labeled it "one of the best recent books on political...