L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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Leo Brent Bozell, Jr. (15 January 1926 – 15 April 1997) was a U.S. conservative activist and Catholic writer. His father was Leo Bozell the co-founder of Bozell Worldwide. His wife was Patricia Lee Buckley, sister of William F. Buckley, and their children include L. Brent Bozell III, also a conservative activist and the founder/president of Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group and publisher. Another son, Michael Bozell is a Benedictine monk in Solesmes Abbey.

"A young, energetic red-haired Yalie from Omaha", as he is described in Before the Storm, Bozell was the best friend and debating society teammate of William F. Buckley, Jr. at Yale University, before becoming a practicing attorney and co-authoring (with Buckley) a defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, McCarthy and His Enemies. Bozell became a speechwriter for the embattled senator and joined Buckley, by now his brother-in-law, when the latter founded National Review in 1955.

In 1958 Bozell ran for the Maryland House of Delegates and lost. He later worked as a speechwriter for Republican senator Barry Goldwater, for whom he ghost-wrote the 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative.

In 1960 he took his family to Spain, where he founded the Catholic magazine Triumph in 1965, while writing The Warren Revolution (1966), a scholarly critique of the Supreme Court under chief justice Earl Warren.

Bozell suffered from bipolar disorder, writing publicly about his experiences, suffering, and recovery in the introduction to Mustard Seeds, a collection mostly of his post-National Review writings (including many from Triumph) published in 1986. The book included "Poland's Cross---And America's," Bozell's first National Review essay in almost two decades. It also included the National Review essay for which he may be remembered best, "Freedom or Virtue," which touched off a robust debate between himself and the magazine's more libertarian-inclined book section editor, Frank Meyer, mostly around whether freedom or virtue should be the paramount consideration for American conservatives. (Meyer published his sides of the exchange in his own collection, The Conservative Affirmation.)

Bozell died in 1997 after several illnesses. His son, L. Brent Bozell III, spoke of those struggles when eulogizing him: Manic depression by itself is enough to break the spirit of any man, but Pop was no ordinary man. He suffered from peripheral neuropathy, sleep apnea, osteoporosis, degenerative disk disease, asthma, and Alzheimer's. One by one they came, and when it seemed that no part of his body had been left untouched yet a new illness was diagnosed. We wondered how he could endure so much, accept this torture with such nobility, with never one word of complaint.

[edit] Quotes

"A conservative electorate has to be created out of that vast uncommitted middle—the great majority of the American people who, though today they vote for Democratic or Modern Republican candidates, are not ideologically wedded to their programs or, for that matter, to any program. The problem is to reach them and to organize them."

[edit] Works

(contributor) The Best of Triumph. Lawrence, E. Michael, ed. Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press ISBN 0-931888-72-7.
McCarthy and His Enemies (with Buckley, William F., Jr.) Chicago: Regnery, 1954. Reissued as ISBN 0-89526-472-2.
The Warren Revolution. (New York: Arlington House, 1966.)
Mustard Seeds: A Conservative Becomes a Catholic. Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press ISBN 0-931888-73-5.