Willmoore Kendall

Willmoore Kendall (1909 – June 30, 1967) was an American conservative writer and a professor of political philosophy.

Kendall was born in 1909 to a blind minister in Oklahoma. He learned to read at 2, graduated from high school at 13, from the University of Oklahoma at 18, and published his first book at 20. In 1932, he became a Rhodes scholar and studied at the University of Oxford.

He became a Trotskyist and went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. His experiences with the Spanish Republic led him to renounce his former communism. In 1940, he obtained a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois writing his dissertation upon John Locke on Majority Rule, under Francis Wilson. He served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and stayed on when it became the CIA, in 1947.

He joined the Yale University faculty in 1947, where he taught for 14 quarrelsome years until Yale paid him a handsome sum to resign. In 1961, he surrendered tenure and departed. Among his students was William F. Buckley, Jr. with whom he participated in the founding of National Review; as a senior editor, he constantly fought with the other editors (it is said that he was never on speaking terms with more than one person at a time). A friend, Professor Revilo P. Oliver, gave him credit with convincing him to enter political activism by writing for National Review.

He later converted to Roman Catholicism, taught at the University of Dallas, was a founder of the politics program, and was co-founder of the doctoral program there. He stayed at that institution until he died of a heart attack, in 1967.

Kendall is the model for the character Jesse Frank in S. Zion's 1990 novel Markers.