Dismayed by the direction in which American intellectual conservatism was going, Bozell resigned from National Review in 1963 and assembled the first issue of Triumph in September 1966.
At first, National Review praised Triumph as a fine manifestation of the "church militant" at a time when much American religion had been debased by the worship of false idols.
Triumph sought to emphasize Catholicism as the one true faith as Dignitatis humanae ushered in a new emphasis on religious pluralism and brought an end to the "error has no rights" era.
The editors were already soured by US complicity in the assassination of the Catholic President of South Vietnam Ngô Đình Diệm but were further dismayed by rumors of American use of chemical weapons.
The editors of Triumph were staunch supporters of Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, which affirmed the traditional Catholic teaching against artificial contraceptives in contrast to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
According to Triumph, "If she is to protect herself and she is to abide by her divine mandate to teach all peoples, the Catholic Church in America must break the articles of peace, she must forthrightly acknowledge that a state of war exists between herself and the American political order."
Hart observed that his own sympathy with the initial objectives of the journal was lost when it began to treat the United States as a force of evil comparable in magnitude to the Soviet Union.