Like a number of the founding senior editors of "National Review" magazine, Meyer was first a Communist Party USA apparatchik before he converted to political conservatism. His experiences as a communist are reported in his book "The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre" in 1961. He began an "agonizing reappraisal of his communist beliefs" after he had read F. A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" while he served in the US Army during World War II, and he made a complete break in 1945, after 14 years in active leadership service to the Communist Party and its cause. Following the war, he contributed articles to the early free market periodical "The Freeman", and he later joined the original staff of "National Review" in 1955.