National Review Online has done its readers a service by creating the weekly “NR Originals” newsletter, featuring weekly reprints of classic NR articles.  I highly recommend it – this week more than ever – because it highlights the ways in which conservative thought generally, and that of its modern founding father William F. Buckley specifically, evolved over time.

This morning’s installment includes the obituary of Harry Truman (it’s uncredited, but given that it was a presidential obituary, it is not unreasonable to presume that WFB wrote it, or at least approved it). Although it specifically focused on Truman, one particular line really jumps out at me, on the subject of Dean Acheson (all emphasis mine):

The skill and courage with which Truman and Acheson met this enormous challenge — articulating the Truman Doctrine, intervening in Greece, launching the Marshall Plan, feeding Berlin with an air-lift for most of a year — have earned him a lasting place in history.

What’s remarkable about that line is that it gives partial credit to Acheson for four achievements that WFB specifically denied Acheson in one of his very first public writings. In that 1952 Freeman essay, WFB argued, in his response to McGeorge Bundy, that Acheson did not clearly deserve credit for any of them; WFB even cast doubt on the very merits of the Truman Administration’s achievements themselves:

[Bundy] then catalogues, primarily by quoting at eneverating length from Mr. Acheson’s public statements, the standard list of postwar Administration counter-measures to Soviet imperialism.  They are, briefly, the stand of the United States in the United Nations on the evacuation of Soviet Troops from Iran; the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine for Greece; the Marshall Plan; the Berlin airlift; the North Atlantic Treaty; the Korean War.  Many of these programs took place before the appointment of Acheson in January of 1949, yet he is identified with most of them because he gave them his support first as Under Secretary of State and then as a private lawyer. Now, each of these “anti-Communist” measures, with an exception or two, is controversial at least to the extent that the question arises whether it was best exploited, or most shrewdly designed, or most carefully selected from among alternative measures to enhance the strategic position of the free world as against the Soviet Union.  For example, was the airlift the most fruitful means of countering brazen Russian aggression in Berlin?  Was the administration or the constitution of the Marshall Plan as effective as it might have been?  Has our behavior in Korea been intelligent, and has it worked maximum damage, militarily, economically, politically and psychologically, to the Soviet Union?

Those criticisms were published in The Freeman in 1952.  NR‘s Truman obituary ran only two decades later, in 1973.  In that stretch of time — which was hardly marked by ideological convergence among the Left and the Right — WFB came to recognize that his youthful criticisms of Truman and Acheson were misplaced.  When the time came to reconsider past positions, with his youthful (qualified) support of Senator McCarthy firmly behind him and the influence of Whittaker Chambers’s prudence and pragmatism becoming all the more evident in WFB’s writings, WFB was not afraid to publicly change his mind.

Reflecting on this, I can’t help but wonder: which of our conservative leaders today are willing to critically review and reconsider their previously-announced positions?  Which conservatives’ positions and decisions of the last thirty years are subjected to serious, open reconsideration on the Right?

In his book, Michael Steele loudly criticizes Republicans who don’t embrace the Tea Party line,  George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, and Republicans who supported policies with whom he disagrees.

But now that he’s taking fire for his mismanagement of the RNC, he’s invoking Reagan’s so-called Eleventh Commandment:

All I’m saying is cut it out. If we have party differences that are inside the party, let’s deal with them inside the party. You don’t see the Democrats running around trying to beat up their national chairman or embarrass him.

Chairman Steele needs to have a long talk with Pundit Steele; the RNC chairman needs to spend more time raising money and supporting the party — both its conservative and centrist wings — and less time running his mouth and alienating entire GOP blocs.

Not only is Chairman Steele ineffective, defensive, and hypocritical — he’s also quite forgetful! Like the time he forget that he fought tooth and nail for the job that, he now says, he didn’t ever really pursue.