[3] After graduate-level studies in Romance languages at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Kendall became a Rhodes scholar in 1932, enrolling in the philosophy, politics and economics program at Pembroke College, Oxford.

[15] A friend, Professor Revilo P. Oliver, gave him credit with convincing him to enter political activism by writing for National Review.

[16] After Yale, Kendall lived in Spain and France for a time, and briefly taught at several universities in a non-tenured role.

[7] In the 1930s, Kendall held left-wing views, for instance supporting the proposed Ludlow Amendment that would require a national popular vote for entering a war.

[17] Combined with his anti-Communism and anti-interventionism, the two years immediately preceding World War II influenced Kendall to move right politically.

[18] Kendall voted for Republican challenger Wendell Willkie against Democrat and incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election; in a letter to a friend shortly after the 1946 midterm elections where Republicans made gains in Congress, Kendall expressed hope of "a Congress really asserting its prerogatives" against the executive branch.

On those grounds, he supported racial segregation, for example, if the society of Southern states found that acceptable to their consensus, they should be allowed to impose it.

[17] After long being skeptical of religion, Kendall converted to Roman Catholicism in 1956, in part due to the church's centuries-old traditions and opposition to Communism.

[22] Additionally, in his 1963 book The Conservative Affirmation and various articles, Kendall opposed open society and moral relativism, particularly the philosophy of John Stuart Mill.

According to Kendall, "any viable society has an orthodoxy—a set of fundamental beliefs, implicit in its way of life, that it cannot and should not and, in any case, will not submit to the vicissitudes of the market place.