Frank Meyer on the Communist Bogey-Man

Frank S. Meyer is by far the most intelligent, as well as the most libertarian-inclined, of the National Review stable of editors and staff. Of all the National- editors and contributors, for example, Meyer is the only one to lend his name to the recently organized Council for a Volunteer Military, which calls for abolition of the draft (and even though Meyer is not unequivocally against the draft for all times and places.) But, tragically, Meyer is also, of the war-mongering crew of intellectuals on the Right, perhaps the most frankly and apocalyptically war- mongering of them all (with the possible exception of L. Brent Bozell.) Meyer’s libertarian inclinations are fatally warped by his all-consuming desire to incarcerate and incinerate all Communists, wherever they may be. Meyer is, therefore, an interesting example in microcosm of the swamping of any libertarian instincts on the current Right-wing by an all-pervading passion for the Great crusade to exterminate Communists everywhere.

Volume 3, Number 2; Spring-Summer 1967