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Most accounts of Cold War history cite a few pivotal writings from the years 1945-1953 as canonical texts for defining and understanding the conflict. These include Winston Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” speech (wherein he warned of the “Iron Curtain” descending across Europe), George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and subsequent “Sources of Soviet Conduct” article in Foreign Affairs, the Clifford-Elsey Report, and the NSC-68 strategy document authored by Paul Nitze for the Truman Administration. Although the details differed, each of these, in its own way, laid out a “theory of the case” on the nature of the Soviet communist threat, how the United States should counter it, and how the conflict might be resolved.

Almost wholly neglected in most such accounts is a trilogy of books penned by James Burnham in these years: The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism, and Containment or Liberation?. Yet as historian James Byrne’s impressive book James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography contends, in these three works (published in 1947, 1949, and 1953, respectively), Burnham earned a preeminent perch in the pantheon of Cold War thinkers. More perceptively than anyone else at the time, Burnham warned presciently of the Kremlin’s aggressive imperial ambitions, recognized Soviet communism’s acute vulnerabilities, and counseled a vigorous American arms build-up and ideological counteroffensive that would eventually lead to the Soviet Union’s demise. In hindsight, these observations may seem obvious, but at the time, they were anything but.

Among many other statesmen, Ronald Reagan read Burnham extensively. He drew on his ideas in devising the strategy Reagan would later employ as president in the 1980s to wage and win a peaceful victory in the Cold War. On Burnham’s death in 1987, Reagan paid tribute to Burnham as “one of those principally responsible for the great intellectual odyssey of our century: the journey away from totalitarian statism and towards the uplifting doctrines of freedom.” In awarding Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom four years earlier, Reagan told Burnham and the White House audience that “I owe him a personal debt, because throughout the years traveling the mash-potato circuit I have quoted you widely.”

Burnham is largely forgotten today, except among some scholars and conservative intellectuals. Such amnesia is a loss, both for history and our present moment. Byrne persuasively renders Burnham as a thinker of first-order influence in his own time and a prophetic voice who anticipated and described our contemporary convulsions several decades before they came to pass. Though foreign policy remained his abiding focus, Burnham’s collective works spanned a vast intellectual landscape that encompassed political theory, sociology, economics, philosophy, and history. Besides his Cold War manifestos, he also wrote classic books on organizational theory and democracy, as well as works on Machiavelli, liberalism and its fragilities, and the tension between executive and legislative power in the American political system.

Burnham’s many intellectual comrades and sparring rivals (sometimes the same person, depending on the month) included giants such as Leon Trotsky, George Orwell, Reinhold Niebuhr, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Raymond Aron, and John Kenneth Galbraith. His books The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (1941) and Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964) read as prescient foreshadowings of our current upheavals. In the former book, Burnham (in Byrne’s summary) “conceives of an elite privileged class that would use the state to advance its social, economic, and political interests” and “control who enters their ranks” as a means of maintaining its hold on power. Orwell drew on The Managerial Revolution’s concerns in crafting his dystopian classic novel, 1984. Then, in The Suicide of the West, Burnham lamented how liberalism contains the seeds of its own demise, in its focus on proceduralism rather than meaning, its anemic self-confidence, and its insufficient fervor in confronting its ideological adversaries.

Byrne also places Burnham among the founding fathers of the modern American conservative movement, alongside better-known intellectual luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, and Brent Bozell, as well as political leaders such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, both of whom were much influenced by Burnham. Burnham joined Buckley in 1955 as one of the inaugural editors of National Review, where Burnham remained – in Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus’s words – the magazine’s “principal theoretician” for the next three decades.

Byrne proffers two intellectual keys to understand Burnham’s thought: evolution and division. On his evolution, the standard shorthand locates Burnham among the many thinkers who converted from communism to conservatism. Other such fellow travelers include Whittaker Chambers, Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, and so forth. Byrne argues, persuasively, that there was a more complex evolution in Burnham’s thought: from Marxist, to Machiavellian, to Burkean (leavened with some flavors of Madisonian insofar as Burnham came to embrace the distinctiveness of the American experiment, at least for a season). Yet this evolution included a twist: in entering each successive incarnation of his intellectual journey, Burnham never entirely jettisoned the previous phase, but rather layered his new convictions on top of residual parts of his old ones. Thus, as Byrne describes, after leaving communism, Burnham retained a Marxist sense of dualism and dialectic; following his Machiavellian sojourn, Burnham continued to view the wielding of power as the central factor in human affairs; even as a Burkean, the mature Burnham remained the dour pessimist he had been in his callower days.

Division is the central argument that Byrne makes for understanding Burnham. On the first page, he lays out an insight that he returns to often in the book: “two James Burnhams did exist: one an embryonic neocon, and the other a paleoconservative paragon.” Throughout his life, these “two Burnhams” existed in tension within a divided self. The former was ascendant when Burnham felt hopeful about the values of the West and confident about the projection of American power. The latter would predominate during seasons when Burnham despaired of the deficiencies of democratic capitalism and the West’s self-flagellation.

Readers who first encounter Burnham in these pages can be forgiven for finding him rather fickle, if not an outright flake, for his many tergiversations. A strength of Byrne’s analysis is that he treats each of Burnham’s evolutions seriously, yet still traces some consistent themes throughout his life and thought. In Burnham’s partial defense, anyone whose public career spanned five decades, a global depression, a World War, a Cold War, numerous other hot wars, and nine US presidencies would be bound to shift and adapt in his thought.  

Burnham spent almost his entire life as more of a thinker than a doer. One of his intellectual virtues was a ruthless consistency in following every position he held to its logical end and advocating accordingly. Yet this often trapped him in the intellectual vices of unrealism and even recklessness, such as his cavalier exhortations for the United States to launch nuclear attacks on, variously, the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and other communist foes. Later in life, at least, Burnham realized his taste for the luxuries of punditry over the responsibilities of statecraft. Byrne relates that following a 1973 meeting with Henry Kissinger, Burnham confessed to the Secretary of State that “I feel that I do now see more clearly both the objectives you keep in mind…If I occasionally have doubts about some of those steps…it may quite possibly be, I realize, because my ideas, unlike yours, do not have to meet the daily and pitiless test of action.” Byrne observes that “Burnham recognized that he could more easily preach hardline ideas from afar…the alleged Machiavellian conceded his ideas were not always practical; his words should not always be taken at face value.”

The one notable and intriguing exception came in the years 1949-53, when Burnham left his position as philosophy professor at New York University to serve in the CIA during its earliest, most maverick years. Byrne’s treatment of this season of Burnham’s life is enticing but incomplete, with but cursory mentions of Burnham’s involvement in countering Mao’s new communist regime in China or the 1953 coup in Iran that replaced Prime Minister Mossadegh with Shah Reza Pahlavi (an episode that the best scholarship now shows was driven much more by the Iranians themselves than by the CIA, the latter being at most a supporting player). Burnham’s main CIA responsibilities appear to have been in the realm of political warfare, particularly overseeing the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its efforts to forge Western intellectuals in a united front against communist ideology. One wishes that Byrne had devoted more research to Burnham’s CIA service. While Byrne points out that many CIA records during this period remain classified, a substantial tranche of sources have become available in recent years (including oral histories, declassified US Government documents, and secondary sources) that Byrne could have consulted.

Byrne calls his book “an intellectual biography,” and it contains both the strengths and shortcomings of that genre. Its foundational virtue is treating Burnham seriously as a thinker. Several chapters offer summary analyses of Burnham’s books – all capably rendered, with balance and insight – but with less attention paid to either the broader world at the time or to Burnham’s own interior world. The book offers a probing, appreciative (though not uncritical) treatment of his thought, yet the man’s times and the man himself remain rather opaque. It is telling that the book’s footnotes contain only a few citations to Burnham’s papers in the Hoover Institution’s archives. With more extensive research in that collection of Burnham’s correspondence, Byrne could have probed more deeply into Burnham’s many friendships and feuds as dimensions of his intellectual life. For example, what were his relationships like with his National Review colleagues, such as Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, and especially his complex partnership with the iconic William F. Buckley Jr.?  Byrne mentions that Burnham was indifferent to social conservatism and ambivalent about free enterprise. Did such heterodoxy cause him angst or provoke tensions with his National Review colleagues who professed all three legs of Meyer’s conservative fusionism?

For that matter, what about Burnham’s family? Byrne notes a broken engagement early in Burnham’s life that left him with scars of betrayal, but his later marriage to his wife, Marcia, gets only a footnote, and his three children are never mentioned. More fundamentally, in the intellectual realm, on Byrne’s thesis of the “two Burnhams”: how aware was Burnham of these interior tensions, did he try to reconcile them, and, for that matter, would he recognize himself in the book and agree with Byrne’s description of him?  

These cavils should not take away from what is otherwise a worthy treatment of a distinguished and consequential thinker. Indeed, it is perhaps a tribute to Byrne that this reader finished the book not relieved that it was done, but rather hoping for more.

William Inboden is the Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Texas at Austin. A scholar of American foreign policy, his most recent book is The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink.

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