When Murray Rothbard first met Frank Meyer in 1954, the two shared the bitter recent experience of their support for Robert Taft, the 1952 Republican presidential candidate thwarted by more moderate elements within the party. Never again did their political allegiances coincide in terms of presidential preferences.
In a series of lost letters from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s discovered among a trove of documents in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse as research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, Rothbard writes, skeptically, to Meyer about the leading Republican politicians of the era.
Many embittered by the wresting of the 1952 Republican presidential nomination from Taft by Dwight Eisenhower regarded Barry Goldwater’s 1964 nomination as the culmination of the work that they had started 12 years earlier. Rothbard was not one of them.
As documented in Justin Raimondo’s An Enemy of the State, Rothbard spoke out against the Republican presidential nominee and delighted in the infamous “Daisy” ad that more or less depicted a vote for Goldwater as a vote for nuclear annihilation.
Meyer, on the other hand, privately lobbied Goldwater to run, performed work for the campaign, and wrote about Arizona’s senior senator in all but two of his “Principles and Heresies” National Review columns in 1964.
Whereas Meyer entertained the possibility of a Goldwater landslide two months prior to the Lyndon Johnson landslide, Rothbard had earlier expressed doubt that Goldwater would even win the nomination.
“Despite your and NR’s running pep-talks,” he wrote Meyer in May 1964, “I can’t believe that the Estab. will ever permit a Goldwater nomination. Imposing delegate totals have been known to fade away under the proper ‘incentives.’ The real question is what do the conservatives do after Gold. has the nomination stolen from him at the last minute? Rally behind the GOP?”
The correspondents saw another of the era’s leading Republicans essentially through the same jaundiced lens. In 1960, Meyer successfully urged National Review’s editorial board not to endorse Richard Nixon. By 1968, riots, crime, and chaos softened Meyer toward the former vice president (by 1971, as one of the Manhattan 12, Meyer withdrew support from the president and wrote all but one of his “Principles and Heresies” columns on Richard Nixon in an almost uniformly negative tone). Like Nixon, Meyer regarded a restoration of order, which he saw as a crucial precondition of liberty, as the primary political issue of 1968.
“I see that you are preparing the groundwork for supporting Nixon,” Rothbard wrote him. “Again, for shame! Is this what conservative principles are coming down to, another go-round with the Prince of Sleazy Opportunists? You didn’t support anyone in the elections of 52, and 56. Why feel that you have to back someone this time?”
Ronald Reagan, the man Meyer vigorously supported for the nomination in 1968 prior to Nixon’s summertime nomination, struck Rothbard as a symptom of a disease in the electorate. So great was the National Review senior editor’s enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan that he engineered a Jeffrey Hart rebuttal to “A Nervous View of Ronald Reagan” by Hugh Kenner that resulted in Kenner, one of the most valuable reviewers in Meyer’s “Books, Arts, and Manners” section, resigning from the magazine.
Rothbard shared Kenner’s and not Meyer’s general view of Reagan.
“As for Reagan, again it seems to me a betrayal of the best conservative principles to support and hail a goddam actor,” Rothbard wrote Meyer. “Surely it demonstrates the accelerating decadence of American civilization that the voters are so addled that they will support anyone who has a favorable image in their minds: and, therefore, actors!”
Who did Rothbard support? He offered the Republican senator Mark Hatfield, who opposed the Vietnam War, at the top of his desired ticket and New York City Mayor John Lindsay as his running mate for the purpose of ridding Rothbard’s hometown of him.
Ultimately, Rothbard volunteered for the fledgling Peace and Freedom Party in 1968. The theorist’s future forays into politics included an active role in the Libertarian Party for much of the 1970s and 1980s and, in 1992, vocal support for Pat Buchanan, whom he, along with Lew Rockwell, described to libertarians as “our ideal candidate.”
The discovered correspondence with Meyer showcases a man to a very great degree invested in current events and politics. Indeed, after describing himself as “98 percent” Randian to Meyer in late 1957, he enumerated reasons for that two percent disconnect, which included the observation that Ayn Rand and her followers “believe it’s a waste of time to discuss political questions in detail, since the really important thing is metaphysics.”
The letters show Rothbard as a writer, thinker, and theorist, but also as a political animal.
Daniel J. Flynn, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and American Spectator senior editor, is the author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer(Encounter/ISI Books, 2025).