James Burnham 1905-1987

National Review, Sept 11, 1987 by William F. Buckley, Jr., Sidney Hook, Jeanne Wacker, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jerzy Giedroyc, Brian Criozier, Miles Copeland, Samuel T. Francis, James B. Burnham, Jeffrey Hart, C.H. Simonds, Joseph Sobran, LInda Bridges, Richard Brookhiser, Kevin Lynch, Priscilla Buckley

James Burnham

1905-1987

At the most recent quarterly meeting of the sernior editors it was resolved to have a private evening with James Burnham, arranging to bring him from Kent, Connecticut, to Stamford, where the editors would join him for a convivial dinner. The date set for the festivity was Monday, August 3. On Saturday, August 1, I shared with five other men the burden of carrying the casket in which Jim's corpse lay to the gravesite. I pondered, during those moments of physical strain, the great weight Jim Burnham had lifted from the callow shoulders of a 29-year-old who, for a combination of odd reasons, found himself seated at the head of the editorial table when, in November 1955, NATIONAL REVIEW was launched. The ensuing essays relate what one should know about this remarkable man. Having read them, I became aware that there was, really, nothing to add to what I had taken pride in saying about him not after his death but seven years before it, at the 25th Anniversary banquet of NATIONAL REVIEW, in December 1980, in the presence of six hundred guests who gave James Burnham the standing ovation he deserved in this world, and will surely receive in the next.

JAMES BURNHAM, who is here tonight, withdrew from active participation in the affairs of NATIONAL REVIEW two years ago, suffering a stroke. Beyond any question, he has been the dominant intellectual influence in the development of this journal. He brought to it widely advertised qualities as a scholar, strategist, and veteran of the cold war. He had been a practicing philosopher, and editor; and author of seminal works on the nature of the current crisis.

Other qualities he brought to the magazine are almost certainly the primary reason for its survival. He had, to begin with, a (totally self-effacing) sense of corporate identification with it. He devoted, over a period of 23 years, more time and thought to more problems, major and minor, than would seem possible for an editor resident in Kent, Connecticut, who came to New York only two days each week.

Every aspect of the magazine interested him. Its typography--just for instance. He cared always for what he would only call "tone.' He believed in "sentiment' but not in "sentimentality.' At the regular editorial meetings, which by tradition we began by listening to his recommended list of issues about which we should write that week, his comments were always made calmly, with the kind of analytical poise one associates with the professional philosopher. Notwithstanding the gentleness of his manner, he brought great passion to his work: not ungovernable passion, because Jim doesn't believe that passion should be ungovernable. But his commentary, during such crises as are suggested by mentioning Budapest, Suez, Berlin, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, was sustained by the workings of a great mind and the palpitations of a great heart.

Although he once told me that twenty years of teaching was enough--he was twenty years a professor of philosophy at New York University before going to Washington to serve as a policy consultant--his natural instincts were always pedagogical. Probably fifty writers have in the past 25 years had editorial experience in the offices of NATIONAL REVIEW. I don't think any of my colleagues would question that the figure for whom they had the greatest respect, and the greatest feeling of gratitude, was Jim Burnham, who was never too busy to give the reasons for thinking as he did, or too harassed to interrupt his own work to help others with theirs. His generosity was egregiously exploited by one person, whose only excuse is that at least he has documented his gratitude by penning these words.

I. Radical, Teacher, Technician

Sidney Hook

JIM BURNHAM never denied that he had a radical past. In a sense I was responsible for it, though Jim soon left me far behind, damning me as a centrist and revisionist and, worst of all, at heart a liberal--Jeffersonian or Deweyan, but unmistakably bourgeois.

It all came about as a consequence of our association as colleagues in the Department of Philosophy of the Washington Square College of Arts and Sciences of New York University; of his co-editorship (with Philip Wheelwright) of The Symposium, where he was required to deal with social and political issues; and of the worsening of the Depression, which destroyed much of the world in which Jim had grown up. After The Symposium published my long essay, "Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx' our relationship became quite friendly, while both in the magazine and in his classes Jim expressed vigorous criticisms of the existing economic system and strong sympathies for revolutionary socialism.

Word of Jim's political development soon got about among radical students. To my amazement I discovered that by 1933 he had established some working arrangements with members of the YCL (Young Communist League) at NYU, to whom I had become anathema. These students recognized Jim's remarkable talents and cultivated him with skill, first as "an honest liberal' and then as an educational advisor of their group. So impressed were they with Jim's grasp of issues that they reported their find to Earl Browder, Secretary General of the U.S. Communist Party, who was at the time looking for more reliable and less critical intellectual fellow-travelers.