James Burnham died of terminal cancer at his home in Kent, Connecticut, on July 28, 1987, at the age of eighty-one. Debilitated by a stroke that impaired the functioning of his memory in 1978, he had long since ceased to write the fortnightly column "The Protracted Conflict" in National Review, on the masthead of which he had appeared since its first issue in 1955. A reticent man by nature, Burnham by the time of his death was not well known in either the national intellectual community or even in the conservative movement with which he had worked since the 1950s, and many today who are pleased to call themselves conservatives confessed their ignorance of who he was or what he had done. Although Burnham was from the 1930s to the 1950s a highly visible star in the New York intellectual constellation and continued his luminescence among New York conservatives until his stroke, the New York Times did not bother to print an obituary of him. The omission is all the more striking since President Reagan had seen fit to award Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983 and issued a laudatory tribute to him after his death.
