More than twenty years ago a maverick political scientist named Willmoore Kendall predicted the triumph of conservatism. Upon the 1963 publication of Kendall's
The Conservative Affirmation, his former Yale student William F. Buckley Jr. called him "one of the most superb and original political analysts of the 20th century," but even Buckley shook his head at what appeared to be Kendall's "baffling optimism."
During the '60s, Kendall stood apart from the mainstream conservative movement which he accused of being anti-populist and of "storming American public opinion from without" by wrongly assuming that the American people were essentially corrupt and "always ready to sell their votes to the highest bidder." Kendall believed that Americans would come to actively realize the conservatism, which they had always actually lived. Seventeen years after his death in 1967, Kendall's predictions come to fruition.
During his lifetime, Kendal distinguished himself as a Rhodes scholar, outstanding teacher (many years a Yale political science professor as well as visiting professor at many other major universities), journalist (a senior editor of National Review), State Department and CIA bureaucratic chief and author of numerous articles and books on military intelligence/psychological warfare, classical political philosophy and the American political tradition.