Customer Reviews

Coming Out Conservative

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(I originally reviewed this book in the Autumn 1992 issue of Terra Nova, a no-longer-published quarterly from the International Freedom Foundation in Washington, DC.) The triumph of conservative politics in the United States and classical liberalism worldwide was not due entirely to academic treatises. It required ward-heeling, electioneering, money, and propaganda. This memoir tells the tale of a behind-the-scenes activist helping others gain the limelight. Liebman was a committed Communist whose mind was changed when Stalin's atrocities came to light in the 1950s. He brought to the nascent conservative movement a talent for the agitprop developed by the Left and instituted grassroots organizing and fundraising methods still in use today. A longtime associate of William F. Buckley, Jr., he cofounded Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union. He is probably the only person to work both on Henry Wallace's Communist-front presidential campaign in 1948 and those of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan two decades later. His book helps put the conservative movement in both a personal and a historical context.