lilburne's Full Review: William F. Buckley - Getting It Right: Library Edi...
This is William F. Buckley’s latest novel. Buckley seems to be going through a period of reflecting on the past, especially those parts of the past in which he was involved. Perhaps he is having intimations of mortality. What a loss to the country if he dies! He is one of the few public intellectuals whose literary style is actually engaging and fun to read.
Not that this novel gives Buckley much opportunity to use his distinctive writing style. The narrative is fairly conventional. The subject of the novel, however, is interesting enough to hold the reader’s interest. The novel is about the early years of the modern conservative movement. As Buckley immodestly but correctly believes, modern conservatism’s origins correspond closely to the founding of Buckley’s magazine *National Review* in 1955. Senator McCarthy had been censured and, in a classic case of guilt-by-association, the cause of domestic anticommunism was set back because it was associated in many people’s minds with McCarthyism. The “conservative” presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower was characterized by acceptance of the New Deal legacy and by what Buckley and many other conservatives deemed to be insufficient militancy against the Communists in foreign policy.
*National Review* aspired to be the rallying point of American conservatives who rejected Eisenhower’s tepid version of conservatism. In the first decade or so of its existence, the magazine waged a two-front war: On the one hand, it criticized the political and cultural leadership of the country during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations. On the other hand, it sought to excommunicate from the conservative movement certain people whose doctrines or activities were deemed unacceptable: Right-wing anti-Semites, advocates of a noninterventionist (“isolationist”) foreign policy, the paranoically anti-Communist John Birch Society, and the atheist political cultists who followed Ayn Rand. *National Review’s* crusade had a lot of success in its first decade, so it’s no wonder that Buckley wrote a novel about that period.
The narrative in the novel does not focus directly on Buckley and *National Review,* although both Buckley and his magazine make many cameo appearances. The novel’s protagonists are two young conservatives who meet and fall in love while at the same time moving toward conservative enlightenment.
Woodroe Raynor is a Mormon who, as a young man, is assigned by his church as a missionary in 1950s Austria (It’s interesting that Buckley, a Catholic, has one of his heroes go to a Catholic country to proselytize on behalf of a distinctly non-Catholic religion). In a side-trip to nearby Soviet-occupied Hungary, Raynor becomes sympathetic with the movement for liberalization in the Hungarian government. Raynor meets, sleeps with, and falls in love with a hot Hungarian chick. Then, in 1956, the Soviet Union sends troops into Hungary to crush the reformers and reimpose hard-line Communism. Raynor gets shot by Communist troops. The United States stands by and does nothing. The hot Hungarian chick turns out to be a spy working for the Russians, and she never appears again in the novel. Traumatized by this experience, especially by the failure of the United States to intervene, Raynor goes to work for the John Birch Society, an anticommunist group whose founder, Robert Welch, sees Communist conspiracies everywhere. The John Birch Society is one of the targets of *National Review’s* campaign to drive the nuts out of the conservative movement.
Meanwhile, Leonora Goldstein, a young Jewish intellectual, joins the Objectivist movement centering on novelist Ayn Rand, another target of *National Review.* Rand, in her novel *Atlas Shrugged,* in her public lectures, and in her talks in her inner circle, talked about the virtues of unregulated capitalism, the evils of government meddling in the economy, the evils of any form of altruism (a curse word in the Randian vocabulary) and the absurdity of all religion, except Objectivism, of course. Rand assumes the role of a prophetess in the Objectivist movement, refusing to tolerate any dissent from her opinions on any subject. Goldstein is so impressed by Rand that she not only goes to work for the Objectivist movement, but changes her last name to Pound, in a Randian gesture of assuming a heroic new identity (I suppose that the name “Pound” is based on the British currency on the same name).
Raynor, the Birchite, and Pound, the Objectivist, first meet at a conference of young conservatives held in Sharon, Connecticut, William Buckley’s family estate. The young delegates at this conference form an organization called Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). This was at the very beginning of the 1960s. Today’s 60s nostalgia buffs don’t focus much on the activities of idealistic young conservatives like those in the YAF, perhaps because idealistic young people are supposed to smoke pot, become socialists and idolize Che Guevara, not smoke tobacco, become conservatives and idolize Adam Smith.
The narrative tends to be somewhat spotty and jumpy as it tries to cover developments in the conservative movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although the story is tied together by the growing relationship between Raynor and Pound, there is not much of a sense of continuity as the book goes from the romantic intrigues in Ayn Rand’s circle to the anti-integration riots in Oxford, Mississippi to the Kennedy assassination to the Barry Goldwater campaign. I imagine that Buckley wanted to get all these key events into the novel, and the attempt to do so sometimes seems a bit forced, but perhaps that’s a hazard of any historical novel. In any event, the need to cover key historical events precludes any attempt to craft a tight narrative.
Buckley says that all the characters (including, presumably, the two protagonists) are real people. There is even a section of endnotes at the end of the novel, giving Buckley’s sources for the events in each chapter. Apparently, everything is real except for the dialogue and the sex scenes.
Concerning the latter, let me say that I was disappointed. As I mentioned in a review of one of Buckley’s other books, Buckley can usually be relied on to include some good kinky sex in his novels. Who can forget the sex scene with the Queen of England in *Saving the Queen?* But in this novel, the sex scenes are fairly ordinary and dull. No kinkiness at all. Still, I suppose we should be grateful that a conservative Catholic writer deigns to include *any* sex in his novels.
This book has a triumphal tone as it recounts the optimistic beginnings of the American conservative movement. As the novel ends, we are in the late 1960s, with conservatism seemingly going from strength to strength. But this is misleading. I hope Buckley intends to do one or more sequels about the conservative movement, because this book completely omits any hint of the tragic events to come. The tragic events I mention are
(a) the “conservative” Reagan Revolution in which the federal government stayed as big as had ever been and the mainstream conservative movement suddenly reconciled itself to big government, including such former targets as the Department of Education and the Department of Energy,
(b) the long and unedifying fight against President Bill Clinton, focusing on the President’s moral failings while failing to roll back, in any significant way, the growth of the central government, despite the Republican capture of Congress,
(c) the de facto evolution of the mainstream conservative movement, including *National Review,* into an arm of the Republican Party, excusing or even justifying that party’s big-government agenda,
(d) the rejection of the Cold War notion that a large American military establishment is only a temporary and regrettable necessity caused by the need to oppose Soviet Communism, and the endorsement of an open-ended, big-government agenda of policing the whole world,
(e) the vehement denunciation, in *National Review* itself, of that minority of conservatives who actually still believe in the original principles of their movement, such as limited government.
These events make the story of the conservative movement extremely tragic, and make it painful to read about the optimism of the novel’s heroes back in the movement’s early years.
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