In February 1999, for research he was doing on postwar libertarianism, Brian Doherty interviewed Lew Rockwell. The interview was published in the May 12, 1999, issue of SpintechMag.com.

Doherty: How and under what circumstances did you first become interested in political philosophy/work? Was it of an individualist/libertarian orientation from the beginning?

Rockwell: I've been interested in ideological matters from the earliest age. My father was a Taft Republican, and trained me well. A good thing too, for even as a schoolboy, I argued with my teachers over the New Deal, public accommodations laws, U.S. entry into World War II, and McCarthy's questioning of the military elites (I'd still like to know who promoted Peress).

I told them that Tailgunner Joe should have been attacking the U.S. government all along, because it was the real threat to our liberties. That drove my teachers crazy. None of them would be surprised that I grew up to be a full-time gadfly against the conventional wisdom.

Influences

My influences included Taft, Garrett, Flynn, Nock, Mencken, Chodorov, Tansill, and the scholastic just-war tradition. Though a Yankee, I never subscribed to the Lincoln cult, and I admired the Southern secessionists for taking the original constitutional compact seriously.

For my twelfth birthday a friend of my father's gave me Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. That book taught me how to think in economic terms, and I have been reading in economics ever since, with a special appreciation for the old French liberal school and the modern Austrians from Menger to Rothbard.

Once oriented, I gained reinforcement from a wide range of literature in high school and as an English major. I found property rights in German literature, skepticism against the state in English literature, and a love of liberty in American literature.

I was also taken with Cicero: his love of liberty and the old republic; his celebration of natural elites and opposition to egalitarianism; and, most of all, his fighting, indefatigable spirit. I believed that he was no less right because his principled stand did not prevail. There is virtue in the fight regardless of the outcome. The eloquence and courage of Tacitus influenced me for the same reasons.

Over time, I became aware that I was not only dissenting from the left but also from the conservative establishment, which was embroiled in the Cold War as a first principle. I grew increasingly skeptical of the official right, especially during the war on Vietnam.

Back then, the establishment meant National Review. There were some good people on the masthead, and it wasn't as neoconservative domestically as it later became, but the magazine's position on the Cold War came close to calling for a murderous first strike use of nuclear weapons. I could never understand how a person claiming to understand the merits of liberty and property, much less a person schooled in Christian ethics, could entertain such a bloody fantasy.

Goldwater to the Other McCarthy

In the 1960s, like Murray, my sympathies were with the anti-war crowd (but not the unrelated Age of Aquarius bunch). I liked the willingness to resist, the commitment to principle, the moral tone, the defiance of the power elites. I had been a reluctant Goldwaterite in 1964, but by 1968 I worked briefly for Gene McCarthy.

There were some very sophisticated antistatist writings coming out of the left at that point. This is what distinguished the New Left from the Old Left. The Old Left, at least since the Stalin-Hitler pact, had become cautiously pro-empire and unflinchingly pro-D.C. bureaucracy. To believe in any central planning, as the Old Left did, is to cease to be a radical, of course. It means to love what the bureaucracy was doing and aspired to do.

This is why the New Left was a breath of fresh air. Its orientation was anti-government. It focused on a fundamental moral issue — whether the U.S. government should be waging war on foreign peoples — and it was open to historically revisionist scholarship that demonstrated the evils of the corporate state in American history. The focus was also correct: on the war profits being garnered by the munitions manufacturers, exactly as the Old Right had done in the interwar period. If you read Mises's Liberalism, you see the same ideological disposition at work at a different time and a different place.

In some ways, there was a dovetailing of the New Left and the little that remained of the Old Right. For instance, hardly anyone remembers this, but the right was actually divided on Vietnam.

I remember when Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, harkening back to a praiseworthy Americanist impulse, criticized the war. It was then that National Review turned its guns on the JBS, citing a book Welch had written on Eisenhower some ten years earlier. It was sheer farce. Buckley tolerated dissent on a wide range of issues — even allied himself with anti-Soviet Marxists like Max Eastman and Sydney Hook — so long as he could consolidate a consensus for the buildup of the military state.

The civil-rights movement of the 1960s complicates the picture. My ideological sympathies were and are with those who resisted the federal government's attacks on the freedom of association (not to mention the federalist structure of the Constitution) in the name of racial integration. I never liked Martin Luther King, Jr. I thought he was a fraud and a tool. But when he turned his attention to the evils of the U.S. war on Vietnam, I began to like him. That's also when the establishment turned against him, and soon he was murdered.

These days, the neocons say the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an attempt to remove barriers to opportunity, and only later was distorted with quotas. That's absurd. Everyone, both proponents and opponents, knew exactly what that law was: a statist, centralizing measure that fundamentally attacked the rights of property and empowered the state as mind reader: to judge not only our actions, but our motives, and to criminalize them.

Civil-Rights Juggernaut

The good folks who resisted the civil-rights juggernaut were not necessarily ideologically driven. Mostly they resented horrible intrusions into their communities, the media smears, and the attacks on their fundamental freedoms that civil rights represented. The brighter lights among the resistance movement correctly forecast quotas, though few could have imagined monstrosities like the Americans With Disabilities Act. Of course, they were and continue to be viciously caricatured by the partisans of central power.

By the way, I've recently noticed that mild neoconish critics of the ADA are saying that it too was passed with the best of intentions, and only went wrong later. This is a fantasy based on an impulse to always believe the best of the state and its edicts.

In the early 1920s, Mises said that no man who has contributed to art, science, or letters has had anything good to say about the state and its laws. That is exactly right. Intellectual secession from the ruling regime is the first step to clear, creative thought.

How can all these threads in my personal history be reconciled? What was missing in those days, that the ascendance of libertarian theory in Rothbard's hands later provided, was an overarching framework to explain why war resistance, opposing forced integration, and celebrating individual enterprise were all of a piece. Liberty rooted in private property is the highest political virtue, and its enemy is the consolidated state. I have made that my lifetime credo.

Nixonism

But those were frustrating days and ideological confusion was everywhere. When Nixon was in power, I could not stand him (though I will admit to once having had a sneaking appreciation of Agnew). Like many later political leaders on the right, he talked a good game but expanded government power in ways the left never could have gotten away with.

Affirmative action, the EPA, the CPSC, the CFTC, destruction of the gold standard, massive inflation, welfarist ideology, huge deficits, price controls, and a host of other D.C. monstrosities were Nixon creations — not to mention the bloodiest years of the war. Nixon's carpet bombing of Cambodia, for example, destroyed the monarchy and brought the Khmer Rouge to power. Nixon, Kissinger, and the rest have the blood of millions on their hands.

In intellectual circles, you could find conservatives who would write passionate articles and give riveting speeches on the glories of free enterprise. But then the other shoe would drop. Nixon is the answer, they said, because at least he has his priorities straight: before restoring free enterprise at home, the U.S. needed to be a world empire to defeat the Russian army. The Russian army was defeated, or rather fell under its own weight, and all we're left with is another evil empire. We're still waiting for free enterprise.

Doherty: How did you get involved with Arlington House? When did Arlington House begin, who financed it, what was its philosophy, and why did it die?

Rockwell: In the early 1930s, most libertarian literature was published by mainstream houses. There wasn't much of it, but our ideas did get a hearing. Hazlitt was published in The Nation and the American Century, Garrett appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and Nock was in the Atlantic, while the Southern Agrarians were at the height of the literary profession and Mencken had the American Mercury. American Austrian economists like Benjamin Anderson and Frank Fetter had very high profiles in academia and business. And there was Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune.

Losing Our Outlets

But a decade of the Depression and the New Deal killed off most mainstream outlets. Opposing the federal government became politically incorrect, and publishers didn't want to take the risk of calling down the price-control police or being accused of sedition. The generation that opposed the New Deal's welfare-warfare state did not reproduce itself on any serious scale, and those who remained couldn't get a hearing.

After Roosevelt tricked the Japanese into firing the first shot, the America First Committee, which had been a major vehicle for the resistance, shut down, and after the war, dissident, pro-liberty publishing houses survived only in a handful of places.

Our professors had mostly retired, and our journalists were reduced to the status of pamphleteers. The left enjoyed ridiculing libertarian political commentary because it was so unmainstream, and they were able to point to the existence of all these cranky pamphlets to prove it wasn't serious material. Of course, Trotskyite pamphlets were never similarly attacked.

The only real publishers out there were Caxton, Regnery, and Devin-Adair, which did heroic work, but their distribution channels were limited, and in the latter case, some of the material cranky and tainted. Think about it: it was something of a miracle that Mises's books were able to come to print at Yale University. But we should appreciate the fact that there was massive internal and external resistance to each one.

Kirkian Conservatism

In the middle 50s, as a consequence of Russell Kirk's book The Conservative Mind, the word "conservative" came to describe anyone who was a non-socialist skeptic of federal policy. I was unhappy with the word, because I was a conscious disciple of the pre-war Nock-Mencken-libertarian school.

There was a fundamental difference between the Old and New Right of Kirk's making. Kirk's book celebrated some good writers and statesmen. But he distorted what it was that drove them, which was not the "politics of prudence" but implacable moral and philosophical conviction. The main thrust of Kirk's influence, I believe, was to turn the right against its best pre-war instincts.

In Kirk's hands, conservatism became a posture, a demeanor, a mannerism. In practice, it asked nothing more of people than to acquire a classical education, sniff at the modern world, and privately long for times past. And if there was a constant strain in Kirkian conservatism, it was opposition to ideology, a word that Kirk demonized. This allowed him to accuse Mises and Marx of the same supposed error.

In fact, ideology means nothing more than systematic social thought. Without systematic thought, the intellectual shiftiness of statist impulse gets a free ride. You can't fight the massive and organized powers of statist, centralist, and generally destructionist social forces armed only with a watch chain and an antique vocabulary. Ultimately, the question that must be asked and definitively answered in the world of ideas was posed most famously by Lenin: What is to be done?

On the answer to that question rides the fate of civilization itself. And if those of us who believe in the magnificence of the classical-liberal vision of society do not answer it definitively, we will lose. Seeing this, men like Frank Meyer — who was a libertarian on all matters but war and peace — blasted Kirk as a statist and an irrationalist. In the end, however Kirk's moderatism and escapism prevailed because it was an easier path.

Neil McCaffrey

Rejecting this easier path was Neil McCaffrey, an extraordinary man who later became my friend and professional mentor on many levels. He was a very close friend of Meyer's, as was Murray. Neil had founded the Conservative Book Club in 1964, and built a booming market among National Review and Human Events readers. But he soon noted that there were not enough books for people to buy.

That's why Neil founded Arlington House in 1965, and named it after Robert E. Lee's ancestral home, stolen by Lincoln for a Union cemetery. (I still hope to see it returned some day.) McCaffrey had hoped to create a major publishing house that would bring conservative classics and contemporary titles to a broad public for the first time in the post-war period.

There was a series of books forecasting the death of the gold standard and its consequences, by Bill Rickenbacker and Harry Browne, preeminently. The only bestseller Arlington ever had was Harry's How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation, and I worked as his editor. I also edited George Roche's books, and the works of other many conservative leaders. I was peripherally involved in the publication of Hazlitt's books.

Preeminently, I served as editor for new editions of Mises's Theory and History, Bureaucracy, and Omnipotent Government. Reading those books, I became a thoroughgoing Misesian. I was so thrilled to meet him at dinner in 1968. He was already in serious decline, but it was still wonderful. That is also when I got to know his wife, Margit, who later helped me found the Mises Institute.

Neil and I disagreed about foreign policy, and it was an uncomfortable topic. He was opposed to U.S. entry into the two world wars, and sound on the so-called civil war, but he was a complete cold warrior, like most people of his generation. However, on economics, Mises was his guide. One of his favorite topics was the moral and economic justification of charging interest. He was also a brilliant student of Catholic theology, literature, and history, and a saintly man.

Intellectually, I was a libertarian, but I stayed out of the movement, mainly because I had other interests in the publishing world, and the libertarians struck me as a strange bunch in the early 1970s. It seemed to be more a lifestyle movement than a political one, a problem that still persists. There was a very clear distinction in those days between libertarian intellectuals like Murray Rothbard, whom I admired, and the developing movement at large.

Neil had partners in the business, and he lost control, with Buckley playing a malicious role. The company was sold to Roy Disney in the mid-1970s, and eventually phased out.

By this time, I had gone to work for Hillsdale College. I had known George Roche while at Arlington, and admired the fact that he was both anti-war, having written his doctoral dissertation on 1930s war resistance on the right, and a free enterpriser with Austrian sympathies. At Hillsdale, I started Imprimis and Hillsdale College Press, set up a speakers' series, oversaw public and movement relations, and helped with fundraising.

Murray as Mises's Successor

It was clear to me at the time that Murray Rothbard was Mises's successor, and I followed his writings carefully. I first met him 1975, and knew immediately that he was a kindred spirit. Like all the other living intellectuals I respected, he was on the margins, laboring at a fraction of the salary he deserved, and excluded from conventional outlets of academic and political opinion.

I cannot remember the day that I finally came around to the position that the state is unnecessary and destructive by its nature — that it cannot improve on, and indeed only destroys, the social and economic system that grows out of property rights, exchange, and natural social authority — but I do know that it was Rothbard who finally convinced me to take this last step.

Unfortunately, I could only admire his writings at a distance. I tried to get Hillsdale to invite him to speak, but that was ruled out immediately. I was told that he might be a fine economist, but he was a loose cannon, unconnected from an organized apparatus of conservative thinking.

But what really did Murray in was not his conviction that the state was unnecessary, but his position on the Cold War. Libertarians were said to be tacit supporters of the Sovietization of the world. It was utter nonsense, but this accusation that Rothbard was a "fine economist" but nothing else would dog him until the end. I always saw this as a rationalization to justify fear of a fundamental rethinking of political philosophy and world affairs.

After Hillsdale, I turned to editing a journal of socioeconomic medicine called Private Practice. I worked to integrate the work of the Austrians and apply it to health economics and government intervention in that industry. It proved to be a fruitful mix, and in my mind demonstrated the possibilities of using the Austrian tradition to explain the way the world works in a very practical way.

Ron Paul

Doherty: How did you end up working with Ron Paul?

Rockwell: In those days, unlike today, I had a keen interest in the affairs of Congress: the members of each committee, the legislation that was being considered, and the like. Being a Congressional aide had always been a dream of mine, as absurd as that may sound today. When Ron won his first full term, he asked me to work for him.

We never saw his office as a conventionally political one. It was a bully pulpit to get the message out. We sent out hundreds of thousands of tracts on freedom, inserted amazing articles in the Congressional Record, and drafted libertarian legislation as an educational effort.

As for his voting record, Ron had a clear standard: if it meant stealing people's money, he was against it. If it gave people back the liberty and property the government had taken, he was for it. Most of the lobbyists eventually stopped visiting our offices.

He was always respected by fellow legislators, but they thought of him as a bit off-kilter. It was Mr. Paul Goes to Washington. Politicians view their job as trading votes, getting their share of pork, expanding government, and generally playing the game. They believe they are being productive when they have helped pass more spending and regulatory legislation, and the price for their vote gets high indeed.

Ron was the opposite. He was a standing rebuke, not only to his colleagues but to the entire system. He still is.

Not many people in D.C. understood what Ron was up to. I remember once when a lobbyist came by and demanded that Ron oppose foreign aid to the Philippines on grounds that people there killed dogs for food. Ron was glad to support cutting foreign aid for any reason. He introduced the bill, and overnight he was celebrated by animal-rights activists all over the country.

Of course, the bill didn't pass. It's important to remember that ideology plays a very small role in legislative affairs except as a kind of public relations gloss. If a farming bill is passed by a Republican Congress, it is called the "Freedom To Farm Act." If it is passed by a Democratic Congress, it is called the "Family Farm Fairness Act." The text can be identical; only the coloring changes.

D.C. Scam

Watching this system up close, all my worst suspicions about government were confirmed. When I later started the Mises Institute, I swore that it would not function the way party think-tanks in Britain do: as intellectual veneer to a gruesome system of legislative exploitation.

Washington has its own version, of course, and if anyone thinks Congressmen or their aides study some group's "policy report" on this or that bill, he knows nothing about the imperial capital of the world. Its animating force is not ideas but graft, lies, and power. Those policy studies are for PR. On the other hand, there is a cost to treating the policy game as if it were some sort of intellectual club to which we all belong: it imbues the process with a moral legitimacy it does not deserve.

A scam was perfected in the early 1980s among leading politicians and the think-tanks. A group celebrates a politician's supposed achievements in exchange for which the politician pretends to be influenced by the group. It's all a public relations game. This is a major reason why Murray was never able to work within that system. He had an irrepressible urge to tell the truth regardless of the consequences. Sure, he was a loose cannon, as any cannon should be on the ship of an imperial state.

The Mises Institute

Doherty: What was the genesis of the Mises Institute? How difficult was it to get off the ground?

Rockwell: When I was in D.C., my happiest moments were receiving calls from students who wanted to know more about Ron and his ideas. He had a huge amount of support on Texas campuses. He struck students as smart, principled, and radical. But sending students speeches and pamphlets only took matters so far. I wanted to do more, but as I looked around, I didn't see any libertarian organization that focused on advancing academic scholarship specifically focused on the Austrian School.

Also, I worried that Mises had been losing status as a thinker since his death. Hayek's place was secure because of the Nobel Prize. But the rationalism of Mises, the tough-edged quality of his thinking and his prose, the conviction that economics is a logical system that can justly claim the mantle of science, seemed to be fading.

The free enterprisers were turning toward murkier thinkers, monetarists, positivists, and even institutionalists who had no interest in the grand Misesian project. This also seemed to go along with an unwillingness to consider difficult and radical questions on grounds that they were politically unviable.

The Neocons

There was overlap here with what was happening in politics. Since the early 1970s, the conservative movement was increasingly dominated by former members of the Old Left who had made their way over to the right. These so-called neoconservatives made the switch in opposition to George McGovern's foreign policy "isolationism," but they had not really changed their views on domestic issues.

To give them credit, the neocons always admitted that they hadn't left the Democrats; the Democrats had left them. They openly celebrated the legacies of Wilson, FDR, and Truman — mass-murdering would-be dictators all.

That position needed to be refuted and fought, but instead, a military-minded conservative movement embraced the neocons as allies on the only issue that really mattered to them, the expansion of the warfare state. There was no place for Mises, whose writings on war and statism were numerous and profound, in this new consensus.

There were few alternatives to the Reaganized right. The Beltway libertarians were drifting more and more toward policy and a generalized concern with respectability (the two go hand in hand), and away from Austrian economics and anything that smacked of idealism or a high theoretical concern. Hosting Alan Greenspan at a cocktail party became the goal.

I noticed a similar tendency among scholarship-granting institutions. They seemed interested in subsidizing only Ivy-League students of a soft classical-liberal bent, rather than promoting the concrete development and application of radical thought.

Another approach I rejected was quietism. I've never been impressed with the idea that we should sit back in complacent satisfaction that we constitute the remnant, while others eventually join us or not. Surely ideas do have consequences, but reality dictates that they need passionate scholars to advance them on every front.

An Urgent Need

Hence, Mises as a thinker, who had done so much to resuscitate old-fashioned, tough-minded liberalism, was falling by the wayside, a victim of a movement that eschewed all such unrespectable thinkers. Misesian theory and practice were fading fast. I set out to change that, and to serve a neglected generation of students. Idealism is what stirs the young heart, and the only idealism that seemed to be available to students in those days was from the left. I harkened back to my lifetime love of Mises, of his brilliance and his courage, and talked with Margit about the project. She was thrilled, made me promise to make it my lifetime work, and we got busy.

When I asked Murray to head academic affairs, he brightened up like a kid on Christmas morning. We agreed that the goal should be to provide a support system that would revive the Austrian School as a player in the world of ideas, so that statism of the left and right could be fought and defeated.

The main criticism directed against Austrian economics in those days was that it was not formal or rigorous because it rejected the use of mathematics as the tool for constructing economic theory. But this is absurd. In fact, Murray actually had two majors as an undergraduate: one in economics and the other in math. What was at stake here was not the competence of the Austrians but a fundamental methodological question: can the methods of the physical sciences be imported to the social sciences via economics? The Austrian answer was no.

At the same time, there was a grain of truth in the criticisms. American academia provided no formal setting to study economics from the Austrian perspective. Most of the then-current practitioners were self taught, so even they had a limited perspective on the possibilities of creating an alternative formal system of economics.

I wanted to make up for this deficiency by creating a shadow university setting in which students could study economics under the post-Mises generation of Austrian scholars, especially Murray.

Murray loved our programs. He would teach all afternoon and stay up until 3:00 and 4:00am talking to students about ideas. He was always accessible, laughed easily, and was never foreboding. He learned from everyone around him and rejected the "guru" persona he could have so easily adopted.

Students who came to us expecting a stern setting of judgmental theorizing were shocked to discover something closer to a salon where intellectual inquiry was free and open-ended. It had to be that way to balance out the rigor of the content. Murray's spirit still animates all our programs.

Getting Off the Ground

The funding problem was one I dealt with from the beginning. I had wanted to give Murray a platform, but I quickly discovered that old-line foundations would not help so long as he was on board. They certainly would not support an organization that argued for positions like the abolition of central banking, or funded revisionist historical scholarship and disagreed with the two-party consensus in Washington.

Corporate foundations, meanwhile are not very interested in ideas generally, particularly not ones that threatened the status quo. It's a cliche now, but I also found that big corporations are not the strongest supporters of free enterprise.

I also found that most old-line foundation and corporate money comes with strings attached. And if there is one institutional feature I desired for the Mises Institute, beyond its ideological stance, it was independence.

I did not want to get roped into supporting cranky policy projects like vouchers or enterprise zones, and I did not want to be forced into emphasizing some aspects of Misesian theory simply because they were trendy, while feeling compelled to deemphasize others. I never wanted to find myself censoring an associated scholar because some foundation bigshot didn't like what he was saying.

I wanted to see the fullness of the Austrian program funded and represented, consistently, fearlessly, and regardless of the fallout. The Mises Institute needed to do work that is deep and wide. It needed to be free to support research in areas like economic methodology, which doesn't interest corporations, or blast the newest policy gimmick, a stance that doesn't interest foundations. Finally, government money was not ever a consideration.

In the end, our support has come from individual donors and nearly exclusively so. I had a good-size Rolodex, so I started there. Ron Paul and others signed letters to their lists, which was a big help, and I had enough savings to work a few years without a salary.

We've been in business now for 17 years, and it took a long time to become viable. But we built slowly and carefully, brick by brick, and now have a solid edifice. And we still have our independence, and we still have an edge.

Initial Opposition

Doherty: I've heard intimations that Koch interests attempted to stymie the Mises Institute's development. Is this so, and if so, specifically how?

Rockwell: It wasn't exactly subtle. In the early eighties, Charles Koch monopolized the libertarian think-tank world by giving and promising millions. That's fine, but he was gradually edging away from radical thought, which included Austrian economics, and toward mainstreaming libertarian theory (as opposed to libertarianizing the mainstream) that attracted him in the first place.

I have never understood this type of thinking. If being mainstream is what you want, there are easier ways to go about it than attempting to remake an intellectual movement that is hostile to government, into a mildly dissenting subgroup within the ideological structure of the ruling class.

Murray and Charles broke at this point, and I won't go into the details. But it was clear that Koch saw their break as the beginning of a long war. Early on, I received a call from George Pearson, head of the Koch Foundation. He said that Mises was too radical and that I mustn't name the organization after him, or promote his ideas. I was told that Mises was "so extreme even Milton Friedman doesn't like him." If I insisted on going against their diktat, they would oppose me tooth and nail.

Later, I heard from other Koch men. One objected to the name of our monthly newsletter, The Free Market. The idea this time was that the word "free" was off-putting. Another said that the idea of an Austrian academic journal was wrong, since it implied we were a separate school, and mustn't be. All urged me to dump Murray and then