Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: How a Descendant of the Bozell Right-Wing Clan Ended Up as a Capitol Hill Insurrectionist
February 23, 2021
The Trump “Big Lie” Capitol Hill insurrection of January 6 (Blink O'fanaye)
By Bill Berkowitz
Over the generations, few families are as recognizable within the conservative movement as the Bozell family. Leo B. Bozell built a successful advertising agency, and although he was a supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt, he evidently was profoundly anti-union. His son, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., became a flaming anti-communist, a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy and The John Birch Society. His son, L. Brent Bozell III is part of the generation that evolved into what became known as the New Right, which arose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 presidential campaign, and began to assert its political power in the 1980s, and 90s. Bozell III is the founder of the Media Research Center, whose stated aim is “to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media,” also operates the Newsbusters web site.
Now, along come Leo Brent Bozell IV. Brent Bozell’s son was recently arrested in connection with his participation in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, has been charged with illegally entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct and impeding an official session of Congress.
You can only imagine the post-arrest phone conversation: III to IV: III: “What the f**k were you doing in the Capitol? Don’t you know we yammer about liberal s**t, we don’t actually do s**t!”
The New Republic’s Timothy Noah provided an excellent sketch of the Bozell family chain, starting with the original L. Brent Bozell, who “went by the much less pretentious moniker Leo B. Bozell (1886-1946). … [and] started out as a newspaper reporter in Wichita, Kansas, rose to become city editor of The Omaha News, and in 1921 cofounded Bozell & Jacobs, an advertising agency that represented Nebraska Power, Mutual of Omaha, and Boys Town, with a fellow newspaperman. …Bozell & Jacobs also branded Boys Town with the slogan, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother,” a phrase so timeless that in 1969 the Hollies would turn it into a hit song.”
Leo Bozell died a wealthy man, whose business “had offices in Omaha, Indianapolis, Dallas, Houston, and Shreveport. Bozell’s New York Times obituary described him as past president of the Omaha Chamber of Commerce, a lieutenant colonel in the Nebraska State Guard, a leader of Community Chest and Red Cross campaigns, and a vestryman of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. That’s more or less what it meant to be an American conservative during the first half of the twentieth century. Still, Leo and his wife were Democrats and remained so after Franklin Roosevelt became president.”
Leo’s son L. Brent Bozell, Jr. (1926-1997) “grew up in greater comfort than his father. Where Leo had attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence, his son, who went by ‘Brent,’ went to a Jesuit prep school in Omaha, where he won a $4,000 scholarship for a speech that called Roosevelt’s New Deal ‘totalitarian.’ After a World War II detour into the Merchant Marine, Brent enrolled at Yale, joined the debate team, became best friends with William F. Buckley, converted to Catholicism, and collected bachelor’s and law degrees. …Brent became president of the Yale Political Union as a self-declared conservative and gave up his vestigial commitment to world federalism. The following year, he married Buckley’s sister Patricia. (These details, Noah notes, came from the 2014 biography Living on Fire: The Life of L. Brent Bozell, Jr. by Daniel Kelly.)
Both Bozell and Buckley were keen on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist and scapegoating antics and in 1954, they “published a book titled McCarthy and His Enemies that concluded a ‘case-by-case breakdown’ of McCarthy’s accusations ‘clearly renders a verdict extremely favorable’—a judgment that even then was so plainly erroneous that it could only have been arrived at by two extremely bright young men in love with disputation. Brent then suggested to his conservative publisher, Henry Regnery, that he follow up with a book proposing that the U.S. start a war with the Soviet Union, which had developed a nuclear bomb five years earlier. Regnery was unenthusiastic, so instead Brent helped McCarthy defend himself in the Army-McCarthy hearings and then joined McCarthy’s Senate staff, where he remained until McCarthy’s death from cirrhosis in 1957.”
Brent, “a contributor to Buckley’s National Review with the first issue in 1955. … despaired that Dwight Eisenhower was ‘a liberal president’ and predicted gloomily that the Soviets would win the Cold War. To Brent’s credit, he dissented from a National Review editorial (“Why the South Must Prevail”) that defended white Southerners’ denial of the vote to African Americans on the grounds that Caucasians were ‘the advanced race.’” Despite this disagreement, Bozell was expelled by Buckley after “he defended the John Birch Society.
Brent ghostwrote Barry Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, … [which] became a surprise bestseller in 1960. “By now, Brent had blossomed into a full-fledged reactionary. He moved to Spain and became an apologist for Franco’s fascist regime. Then he moved back and lost a Maryland congressional primary race to the liberal Republican Charles Mathias. After that, he moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains and devoted most of the rest of his life to attacking Vatican II.”
L. Brent Bozell III (1955-present), has become a ubiquitous part of the modern-day conservative movement. “If Leo’s preoccupation was to build a successful business and Brent’s was to build an intellectual foundation for movement conservatism,” The New Republic’s Timothy Noah wrote, “Brent III’s was to build a series of organizations to perpetuate that movement.”
A key figure in the New Right’s information infrastructure, L. Brent Bozell, has founded several enterprises, including Parents Television Council – which helped turn Janet Jackson's nipple-baring "wardrobe malfunction" during the halftime show at the 2004 Super Bowl into a year-long pro-censorship orgy -- and CNSNews.com, and is probably best known for the Media Research Center (MRC). He started out “at the National Conservative Political Action Committee, or NCPAC, a direct-mail fundraising shop founded by Terry Dolan, Roger Stone, and Charles Black that was instrumental in defeating four prominent liberal senators in 1980: George McGovern, Birch Bayh, John Culver, and Frank Church,” Noah reported.
Over the years, the MRC has pounded out a steady drumbeat against the liberal media. Although caught up in a few scandals, including the fact that he had a ghostwriter (Tim Graham) write his columns for him, Bozell has nevertheless survived within the right-wing hate-o-sphere, receiving millions of dollars from such reliable right-wing foundations as the Adolph Coors Foundation, Castle Rock Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Mercer Family Foundation.
A late-to-the-party supporter of Donald Trump -- calling him “the greatest charlatan of them all” – after taking a fundraising hit, Bozell jumped on board with guns blazing. He denounced the media’s hatred of Trump, and in August 2020 he started warning about the left’s plot to steal the election.
After the Capitol assault, Bozell said, “You can never countenance police being attacked. You cannot countenance our national Capitol being breached like this. I think it is absolutely wrong.”
Which brings us back to Brent Bozell IV. While we do not know much about Leo B Bozell IV, Noah reported that “he lives in Palmyra, Pennsylvania. … coached girls’ basketball, … at a school in Hershey called St. Joan of Arc. (This was confirmed by the Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg.)”
As of last week, according to Penn Live, “NewsBusters, which bills itself as ‘America’s Media Watchdog,’ did not mention the younger Bozell’s arrest on the site’s section on the Capitol Hill riot as of Wednesday morning. One of the lead stories on the site, published Tuesday afternoon, was headlined, ‘MSNBC Propagandist Maddow Strategizes on How to Destroy GOP.’ Another was titled, ‘NYT Discreetly ‘Updates’ Their Own Fake News on Capitol Police Officer’s Death.’”
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