Rick Brookhiser on National Review Online

Rick Brookhiser on National Review Online http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com Rick Brookhiser en-us © National Review Online 2009. All Rights Reserved webmaster@nationalreview.com (NRO Webmaster) Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:38:33 -0400 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:38:33 -0400 NRO RSS Generator v1.0 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 5 http://www2.nationalreview.com/images/nro_rsslogo.jpg Rick Brookhiser on National Review Online http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com 144 80 National Review Online Our sails are set, our work is done. -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NThiNGIyNjU0YjU5NmIzMGVkNDRlOGFhMGE1ZjM4Njc= Leave her, Johnny, leave her! We'll go ashore and have a run. It's high time to leave her! Right Time, Right Place has been out for six months, and will march on I hope for much longer. But now this blog goes to sleep. I will post any future thoughts or publicity in The Corner. Thanks to all who wrote in. And to any who haven't bought the book yet, it's only a click away.  <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NThiNGIyNjU0YjU5NmIzMGVkNDRlOGFhMGE1ZjM4Njc= Sun, 20 Dec 2009 19:26:26 -0400 WFB's Choice for NRO's Care to Shop -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODQ3NWVmYTBiNmQ1ZDAxZDFiYTcwOTg2NzM0YzAyZjY= <blockquote> "You know," [the headmaster] said, "we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term!" "I thought that would be about the number." "As you know I'm an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the 'complete man' any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?" "Oh yes," said Scott-King. "I can and do." "I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn't conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?" "Oh yes. Often." "What I was going to suggest was -- I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?" "No, headmaster." "But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead." "Yes, headmaster." "Then what do you intend to do?" "If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world." "It's a short-sighted view, Scott-King." "There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take." </blockquote> This is the climactic dialogue of a story -- "Scott-King's Modern Europe," by Evelyn Waugh -- that WFB praised numerous times. It was my introduction to Evelyn Waugh (see pp. 29–30 of Right Time, Right Place). I could quibble with Scott-King, but it is still a terrific story. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODQ3NWVmYTBiNmQ1ZDAxZDFiYTcwOTg2NzM0YzAyZjY= Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:14:14 -0400 Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere: -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTY5Mjc2ZTRiMDIwMTQyYWZiYWY0NmIzYmI3ZWI2NGI= ‘Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go? Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes? For now I see the true old times are dead, When every morning brought a noble chance, And every chance brought out a noble knight. Such times have been not since the light that led The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh. But now the whole Round Table is dissolved Which was an image of the mighty world; And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds.’     And slowly answered Arthur from the barge: ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me? I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within Himself make pure! but thou, If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Tom Guinzburg, old Yale friend of WFB and Van Galbraith, recited these lines from Idylls of the King at Van's memorial service, April 24, 2008, at the Colony Club, 20 days after WFB's memorial mass at St. Patrick's. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTY5Mjc2ZTRiMDIwMTQyYWZiYWY0NmIzYmI3ZWI2NGI= Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:48:06 -0400 My first editorial conference was the summer of 1976. -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTRlZDNhYWIwZDkyNGFmZWZhYzQxMGNjYjJlZDA3ZDk= <blockquote> When we finished Bill assigned each topic to a writer, consulting the scratchings -- he frequently asked [his sister] Priscilla what it was he had written -- of his notes. To me he assigned a labor union matter, items on Chile and Cambodia, and the obituary of a historian I had never heard of. He ended the meeting by lightly slapping the table and saying, "Entonces" (Spanish for "Well, then"). We returned to our desks to start writing. . . . . I was told I would be getting clips from the research library, a three-man staff in yet another office: articles cut from the major newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. </blockquote>  (Right Time, Right Place, p. 36.) Since then, I estimate I have written five thousand NR editorials and paragraphs. One of the three men of the research library, and the only man of that library for the last decade or so, who supplied the clippings and checked the facts of me, and every other writer, was John Virtes, who attended his last editorial conference this Monday, and whom we celebrated at a party tonight around the corner from our offices at Cask Bar + Kitchen (167 E. 33rd St.). John not only rode herd on our editorials, he checked the assertions of every article, book review, and brain wave in the magazine. He did it with diligence, stubbornness (necessary: writers are an arrogant lot), and patience. You can work at a place for one-third of a century and still not know its secrets. Only tonight I learned that John had a list -- in his head, but I am sure as graven as the Tablets on Mt. Sinai -- of writers who needed special attention (i.e., they were careless and sloppy). The names on that list remain secret. We wish John a happy retirement, but what does the future hold for us? Who will spell Peter Orszag? Zbigniew Brzezinski? Will Rich, unreminded, think that the Yankees are a so-so baseball team, or Mike decide that Proust is a boring old poufter? None of us will forget what a pleasure it was to work with John, and what he did for us. Well done, and thank you. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTRlZDNhYWIwZDkyNGFmZWZhYzQxMGNjYjJlZDA3ZDk= Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:16:56 -0400 Shrink Bashing -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODBhMzAzNWE5YzBhYzY4NTI4MzQ5MDZiYzQ1Yjk4NzQ= . . . a venerable Right World sport. My colleague Kevin Williamson recently bowled an inning on the Corner: <blockquote> Psychotherapy is pseudoscience. At its least destructive it amounts to idle chatter; at its worst it is a reality-displacing religion substitute . . . </blockquote> One of the lone defenders of Freud in NR's pages was Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, motivated in part, I suspect, by Austrian patriotism. But Erik also appreciated Freud's anti-utopian view of human nature. I suggest my own views of psychoanalysis on p. 56 of Right Time, Right Place: ". . . psychoanalysis [is] an old-fashioned, if not dying art. Now the science heads and the insurance companies give us hierarchies and pills to make us free and happy." For Jung, see p. 71. For Bill and Pat's encounter with a Rorschach card, see pp. 88–89. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODBhMzAzNWE5YzBhYzY4NTI4MzQ5MDZiYzQ1Yjk4NzQ= Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:12:30 -0400 Best Song Ever -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Yzk5NzhkNjVhYmVmZDFmYWE2MTIzNjY4NTA3ODY4YmI= I describe singing it on p. 29 of Right Time, Right Place, and now a friend has sent me a clip. You can hear it, here:  <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fidlTS8o-Vc">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fidlTS8o-Vc</a>. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Yzk5NzhkNjVhYmVmZDFmYWE2MTIzNjY4NTA3ODY4YmI= Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:01:57 -0400 Run to the New-born God -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTE5NGNmNDlkYjVmOTIwNTgxYjkwMzUxYTI5MmQyMmM= WFB included one of his favorite essays on Christmas, "Christmas in Christendom," by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, in <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0672512408">Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?</a>, his 1970 anthology of 20th-century conservative thought. Here is the first graf. <blockquote> A note of haste sounds clearly in the staggering text of St. Luke: the shepherds run to the new-born God as would an army of men, upon the breaking out of peace after a long war, run to their hearths and to their own. </blockquote> Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? has 25 pieces by 24 authors (Whittaker Chambers wrote two). As a young conservative and WFB fan, I read the book as if it were a sacred text, and the authors a tag team of evangelists. In time, I would get to know and know of many of them: I would work with Jim Burnham and Jeff Hart; I would see a fair amount of Ernest van den Haag, Harry Jaffa, and Garry Wills; I would meet Hugh Kenner and Russell Kirk; and I would come to know one of Brent Bozell's sons and both of Frank Meyer's. Frederick Wilhelmsen's contribution was enjoyable, and irksome. "Christmas in Christendom" begins with a strong lede, moves on to a history of the holiday, then ends with a swipe at Cotton Mather and colonial Massachusetts that is about as intelligent as H. L. Mencken. Wilhelmsen's piece first appeared in Triumph, the rejectionist Catholic magazine of the late sixties. Triumph did not believe, with Mel Gibson, that the throne of St. Peter was vacant, but it had no use for American theory or practice. The earthly incarnation of its ideals was Carlism (don't ask). I have described the impression that WFB's (and NR's) Catholicism made on an outsider in Right Time, Right Place (pp. 46–7, 202–3). Bill picking "Christmas in Christendom" for a book that might be read by, say, Protestants, was just part of the mix. Triumph had no use for WFB, of course; to them, he was a kind of RC Uncle Tom. Bill, taking no offense, accepted Wilhelmsen's piece into his mental universe. Yet one of the first pieces in Bill's anthology was "E Pluribus Unum: The American Consensus," by John Courtney Murray, the American Jesuit who introduced the Catholic church to American constitutionalism, including religious liberty, thus laying the groundwork for Vatican II. Now Murray believed he was showing a family resemblance between American ideals and beliefs that his church had long held. Until I am enlightened, I will stick with the more obvious, America-centric interpretation of events: There was a missionary effort, if not by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, then by its 18th-century heirs and their neighbors. The Catholic church, and the world, benefited. That was the catholicism of Bill's Catholicism. He could appreciate Wilhelmsen's poetry, but he inhabited Murray's world (and James Madison's). Merry Christmas. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTE5NGNmNDlkYjVmOTIwNTgxYjkwMzUxYTI5MmQyMmM= Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:04:35 -0400 Pleased, Proud -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTY3ZjczOWFjMGE4NzBkNDhiNTM3NWQ0ZDJhZWZhZWM= Pleased that I got my copy of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0151010897">Pops, by Terry Teachout</a>, which I will read this weekend. (Do you have yours?) Proud of a passage he showed me ahead of time: <blockquote> [Armstrong] knew true happiness and shared it unstintingly with his fellow men, who responded in kind. Richard Brookhiser tells of how, when doing battle with cancer, he was unable to listen to any music other than the Goldberg Variations and Louis Armstrong: "Bach said everything is in its place; Armstrong said the sun comes shining through." It was a response that Armstrong would have appreciated. </blockquote> So Pops is the first book to cite Right Time, Right Place. What fine company to be in. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTY3ZjczOWFjMGE4NzBkNDhiNTM3NWQ0ZDJhZWZhZWM= Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:36:27 -0400 Evening at the NYHS -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTU5NmFjMWJkZWZhZGE0ZjVkYzM2MmM4NzgwODJjYjg= After gracious intros by Dr. Louise Mirrer, Rich and I had a fine talk about WFB, NR, and Right World then and now. Rich asked a question that had never come up in the six months since Right Time, Right Place was published: Describe Bill as a New Yorker. I spoke of his run for mayor in 1965, the occasion for one of his best books, probably my favorite: The Unmaking of a Mayor. His race was in part a stunt, in order to get the brand out. But it was a stunt with a serious core, because Bill saw a city that was just entering the valley of the shadow of death that would stretch right up to 1993, and decided: It does not have to be this way, and here is it how it can be better. This showed his practicality, and his ability to seize an occasion. Urban policy was, to put it mildly, not high on the agenda of the conservative revival. Barry Goldwater famously said New York should be sawed off and floated out to sea (he was speaking of the politics of Nelson Rockefeller, but still . . .). Bill worked here and lived here much of the time, and he wanted to address the problems he saw before him. The most interesting question from the audience came with a note of disappointment. The questioner showed his Right World birth certificate, saying that he had read Up From Liberalism when he was 17. But hadn't conservatism gone downhill since Ronald Reagan? I found myself giving two answers, one timeless, one occasional. Timeless: The control of the House by Republicans, mostly conservative, from 1994 to 2006 resulted in a lot of corruption: trimming, pork, K Street connections, Don Sherwood strangling his mistress. (Kevin Williamson memorably said at one editorial conference, "Don't strangle your mistress." This has the simple gravity of George Washington's Rules of Civility. "Strangle not your mistress, neither kick nor bruise her, for it shows an ill temper.") In order for those years to be something more than a failure, they must also be a lesson. Conservatives are men, men are prey to temptation; there will always be sins, but watchfulness can make them fewer. Occasional: Between 1989 and 1991, Soviet Communism collapsed. I describe the great days on pp. 161–2 and 164–6 of RTRP. Great days, and great shocks, for what would come next? We are still figuring that out. Many Communists remain, of course (in China they are Cronyists). Putinistan, a/k/a Russia, is still a bad actor. How bad was Saddam Hussein? We fought two wars against him. Should we have? NR and most conservatives said yes, though there was debate. Then there is 9/11. That week, I saw that this was the new Thirty Years' War. But knowing that does not determine strategy and tactics. James Burnham spent almost 40 years, from his break with Trotsky to his stroke in 1978, trying to game-plan the struggle against Communism. Many, many of us will spend many, many hours and days doing the same for the Jihad. Some occasion. I signed books and greeted fans of NR past and present. A good time was had by me, I hope by all. And so to bed. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTU5NmFjMWJkZWZhZGE0ZjVkYzM2MmM4NzgwODJjYjg= Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:01:13 -0400 Reminder -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGIwMjk2OTQzMjRlMDBiZWExYmIzMGMzNGI4OWU2NTk= Who: Me, Rich, and WFB (in spirit). Where: New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West (@ 77th St.). When: Tuesday, December 8; 6:30 conversation, 7:30 signing of Right Time, Right Place. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGIwMjk2OTQzMjRlMDBiZWExYmIzMGMzNGI4OWU2NTk= Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:29:01 -0400 Be There or Be Square -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjZiMTZiN2M1OTQxOTAxZDM1MzdjODI5NTAwYjFjZGY= Rich Lowry and I will have a conversation about Right Time, Right Place on Tuesday, December 8, at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West (@ 77th St.). We talk at 6:30 P.M.; book signing afterwards. How soon our lives becomes history. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjZiMTZiN2M1OTQxOTAxZDM1MzdjODI5NTAwYjFjZGY= Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:13:01 -0400 Hillsdale P.S. -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmIzZTk5Y2U3YjZlMjQwYTkyNDI2NGVmNWM3ZTliMzk= No more meals at the Chicago Water Grill in Jonesville. It burned (hat tip: Tracy Simmons). <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmIzZTk5Y2U3YjZlMjQwYTkyNDI2NGVmNWM3ZTliMzk= Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:18:27 -0400 So David Brooks Likes Bruce Springsteen -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmFhNjc2NDdiYTIyNTkxZGNlY2M3ZDhmNmNmNDA4N2U= Then he agrees with Eric Alterman, who threw his sneakers onstage at a Springsteen concert sometime in the late seventies. That proves that these two are a crucial handful of years younger than I am, since the only Springsteen song I own is his duet singing "Pink Cadillac" with Jerry Lee Lewis on Last Man Standing: a CD which I did not buy to listen to Bruce Springsteen. My own tastes were set in stone in 1965–66, and I describe the effects in Right Time, Right Place (p. 20) -- including pastiche (p. 57). I believe I could recognize every Top 40 song from those years. Then my interest in rock simply shut off. I continued to notice musicians as newsmakers, but apart from accidents -- watching MTV for the first month that my wife and I had cable, thanks to which I heard Madonna -- they passed in silence. The antics of the industry (grossness, seriousness) had something to do with the death of my interest, along with the poverty of the form and the lack of talent of most of the practioners. Most, not all. Good music gets written, here and there, but the odds running the other way are immense: like a salmon swimming up the Columbia River, if the Columbia River were only eight inches wide. The Hillsdale student who drove me to the airport after my gig two weeks ago said he was a senior, a political philosophy major, and a fan of classic rock. Does classic rock go back as far my period, I asked. He said it did, and we deplored the ubiquity of lousy Beatles covers that you hear in every coffee house. Then, he said, he had had to examine his preferences in light of Plato's analysis of music and its power over the soul. I could hear the thrumming of the Straussian Interstate as he spoke, and I warned him to be always mindful of Plato's envy of artists: He can't stand the fact that Homer is a better writer than he is, and he may have the same resentment of musicians. Which may mean that I argued against myself. Rock on. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmFhNjc2NDdiYTIyNTkxZGNlY2M3ZDhmNmNmNDA4N2U= Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:22:01 -0400 With Rogue in Vogue . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTU2NTE3NTdkYWM5NjYzMWIzMmMyODEwMmUzMDU0ZWE= . . . it's fair to re-ask Bill Moyers's question: Is Sarah Palin like WFB? Moyers asked it critically, but many conservatives have asked it in a sympathetic spirit: What would WFB think of the former governor? I answered Moyers by talking about Palin as a political force of nature. I did not address the planted axiom of his question, which is that politicians should be intellectuals. Why? Whether you define "intellectual" austerely (philosopher, artist) or in the marketplace (advocate and arbiter of ideas, as WFB was), it is not at all clear that intellectuals do well in politics. Bill Moyers worked for Lyndon Johnson, but LBJ was not Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Johnson got his start in politics as a follower of Franklin Roosevelt, but FDR was not John Dewey, or even H. L. Mencken (boy, wasn't he). The most recent American intellectual politician was probably Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of WFB's cross-ideological friends. But his career was a long betrayal of his thoughts. The founding era saw a crop of intellectual politicians: Franklin, Jefferson, and all the authors of the Federalist Papers held office. So did the Progressive era: Wilson, TR. So the bright guys have batted .500: great for baseball, not so great for dollars and cents and life and death. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTU2NTE3NTdkYWM5NjYzMWIzMmMyODEwMmUzMDU0ZWE= Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:14:13 -0400 NR Scooped WaPo by Thirty Years -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTlkM2I3N2NhOTFkZGNjNjZiMzViZWI1NzFhNmYxYTQ= Today's Washington Post has <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/23/AR2009112303966.html">a story</a> on the strange new respect for nuclear power. <blockquote> Nuclear power -- long considered environmentally hazardous -- is emerging as perhaps the world's most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it. It has been 13 years since the last new nuclear power plant opened in the United States. . . . The Obama administration and leading Democrats, in an effort to win greater support for climate change legislation, are eyeing federal tax incentives and loan guarantees to fund a new crop of nuclear power plants across the United States that could eventually help drive down carbon emissions. </blockquote> Thirty-one years ago Bill Buckley asked me to assemble an issue of National Review devoted to nuclear power. The background was the oil crisis of the late seventies. The centerpiece of the issue was a long interview with Bernard L. Cohen, professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh; we had many other pieces besides, analyzing the economics of nuclear power and the insufficiency of other alternative energy sources. The issue appeared in February 1979. Next month the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania had its famous accident. I describe the fall-out (so to speak) in Right Time, Right Place, p. 81. <blockquote> There were no deaths or injuries at Three Mile Island (the Soviets would show us how that was done at Chernobyl). But the accident made nuclear power a hopeless cause. The Village Voice reported a glowing fish in the Susquehanna; the New York Post ran with the headline A CLOUD MOVES CLOSER. The China Syndrome, a thriller about the evil nuclear power industry, would be nominated for four Oscars. The work National Review did was true and important, but futile. </blockquote> Opposition to nuclear power became a left/liberal touchstone. It was an easy spin-off of the No Nukes peacenik campaigns of the late seventies and early eighties. I have no doubt that the Soviets did whatever they could to encourage it (laughable, considering their own command-economy incompetence). But the animus continued, under its own green power. Until now. WaPo quotes some old British enviro who is now pro-nuke. "Climate change is the bigger threat, and nuclear is part of the answer." Pardon me if I don't say welcome aboard. The science has not changed in 30 years. The fears of the anti-nuclear-power crowd were always overblown. France and Japan used nuclear power extensively and safely, even as we slammed on the brakes. You read it here first. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTlkM2I3N2NhOTFkZGNjNjZiMzViZWI1NzFhNmYxYTQ= Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:54:47 -0400 NRpalooza -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzMwMDhlYjI2Yzk5NmQzNGJhMmFiZTE5NDBiZTMyN2M= Rich Lowry and I discuss WFB and RTRP December 8 at the New-York Historical Society. Details TK. (And don't forget that hyphen.) <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzMwMDhlYjI2Yzk5NmQzNGJhMmFiZTE5NDBiZTMyN2M= Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:45:04 -0400 Pat Buckley Gun Club at Hillsdale . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzNhZDY2NTI4NmU4NDg4NzVmMjNhNTlmNzI1NjY3OGM= . . . for young ladies? There is talk of it. I will keep you posted. BIll and Pat were responsible for my first 20-gauge (RTRP, pp. 238–9). I think she would be pleased by Hillsdale's memorial, and also say, "They'd better be effing good shots."  <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzNhZDY2NTI4NmU4NDg4NzVmMjNhNTlmNzI1NjY3OGM= Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:55:29 -0400 What a Friend We Have in Cheeses -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTU3YTNjNmIxZWVmN2JkNmMzOTJiMjI3YzQxNmRlZmM= As I bid farewell to Hillsdale, I bid farewell to the cuisine of southern Michigan. Right Time, Right Place describes the fare at Paone's back in the day (pp. 36–7), which was neither simple nor light, but this was something else. There are cheese-free zones: Hillsdale College itself; the Chicago Water Grill in Jonesville; El Cerrito and the Coffee Cup Diner in Hillsdale. If you come, seek them out. I am grateful for the hospitality of everyone at Hillsdale, and for the attention and eagerness of my students: Casey Cheney, Michal Elseth, Cory Ewers, Mark Hensch, Joshua Rice, Maria Schmitt, Catherine Simmerer, Betsy Woodruff, and Marieke van der Waart. À la prochaine. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTU3YTNjNmIxZWVmN2JkNmMzOTJiMjI3YzQxNmRlZmM= Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:15:22 -0400 Stimulus That Works -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2U2MmI5Y2I3MjhlNGIwYzhhMzk2OWFjN2YyOWIwOGQ= I saw one of my Hillsdale journalism students last night and asked her how the assignment I had given on Monday was going. She said she was leaving it until the deadline (Wednesday afternoon). There spoke the true journalist: We don't stir until the gun is at our heads. For an account of a three-legged race involving Colin Powell; John O'Sullivan, Linda Bridges, and me; and a 1:00 PM deadline from NR's printing plant, see p. 197 of Right Time, Right Place. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2U2MmI5Y2I3MjhlNGIwYzhhMzk2OWFjN2YyOWIwOGQ= Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:59:12 -0400 Qs at Hillsdale -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2IyZGNmMmU3YzI3OWI3YzhkNDllMzAzN2QzZWVlZGI= Sarah Palin; Who is the new WFB? WWWFB Do about NY-23? I gave my talk on Right Time, Right Place at Hillsdale, the exoteric face of the journalistic lessons I am imparting to my students. Many of the questions had come up before. When asked about Sarah, I answered with Cole Porter: "She's got that thing . . ." The question is, how will she do the work of self-education that Ronald Reagan, and George Washington -- who, in their different ways, also had that thing -- did? We shall see. Who is the new WFB? Nobody, I said, repeating myself. Autres temps, autres Merlins. New messes require new wizards to show the way to heroic action. What would WFB think of the race in NY-23? One more time, with feeling: This was the kind of race the Conservative Party of New York State was meant for. I see that Doug Hoffman has unconceded. Good luck to him, now or next year. The most interesting question was, Was Right Time, Right Place meant to express a sense of alienation from my mentor, my friend, my (lost) leader? I almost cut off the gentleman who asked it. Surprises, disappointments -- these are not set-ups for alienation, but incidents of adulthood.". . . the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time." The place, and the people. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2IyZGNmMmU3YzI3OWI3YzhkNDllMzAzN2QzZWVlZGI= Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:03:44 -0400 My Apologies -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzFkMzlhNTIzNjZmN2QxMDU3NGUwOTg2MzNlYTlhZTE= . . . for <a href="http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTMyYzVkOTMxNWI3NzVlZWYxMDRjZWEyNWI1Nzg5NzM=">suggesting that President Obama is thirteen</a>. I was lured to the insult by the jingle of symmetry. Our president's real problem is that he shows the strengths, and the compulsions, an earnest belle-lettrist (say, 27). Some effective presidents have been younger than thirteen: Cecil Spring-Rice famously said that Teddy Roosevelt was "about six." I said a similar thing about WFB: "His delight was a boy's, even when the taste was a connoisseur's and the judgment a man's" (Right Time, Right Place, p. 2). <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzFkMzlhNTIzNjZmN2QxMDU3NGUwOTg2MzNlYTlhZTE= Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:22:52 -0400 Media Bias? -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmQzZWRjMzc1YWE1NjdiOGM3MDkzMzdmNDEzZWU2MDY= Tracy Simmons, director of the journalism program at Hillsdale, and longtime friend and NR-nik, showed me an old Firing Line, one of the series that is being reissued by the Hoover Institution. This pitted WFB vs. David Susskind, debating the headline of this entry: Is there a bias to the media? This was a show from 1966, Firing Line's first year, when RKO, the sponsoring network, called it "The Fight of the Week," as Neal Freeman said in an earlier comment on this blog. There was no Brandenburg fanfare yet (and it was sorely missed). Nor did Bill use a clipboard--his notes were laid on a Jetson-ish sidetable (futurism usually refines the fashions of the moment). David Susskind was a popular liberal talk-show host of the day. I was most struck by his rug; it looked like a swatch from my late mother's Persian lamb coat, about as inconspicuous as the Monty Python hair-piece sketch. My poor sex--since we can't arrest male pattern baldness, can't we accept it with dignity? The debate between Bill and Susskind proceeded on two levels. On the central point--picked, the liner notes inform us, by Susskind--there wasn't much movement, although Susskind did admit that media generally reflected the movement of the country, which he said was "progressive." Bill called that an important concession, which it was. At another level, Bill sought to extort respect from his opponent, by a combination of respect and disrespect. He said some gracious things about Susskind in his intro, and his dry, droll tone eschewed mere vituperation. But he also zinged Susskind repeatedly (if there was a contest to be Mr. Eleanor Roosevelt, he said, Susskind would win it). The implicit message was, Take conservatives seriously, or I will keep doing this. The point was not to convince Susskind in that show, or ever, but to convince the TV audience, and the nation at large. In large measure, Bill succeeded, and that job doesn't have to be done again. The task before us is to demonstrate our relevance by showing that we better understand America's problems, and the range of possible meliorations. And that we're still funny. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmQzZWRjMzc1YWE1NjdiOGM3MDkzMzdmNDEzZWU2MDY= Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:10:59 -0400 I was talking with a bright Hillsdale student . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTMyYzVkOTMxNWI3NzVlZWYxMDRjZWEyNWI1Nzg5NzM= . . . who was thirteen years old on 9/11 (see pp. 219–224 of RTRP for how that day went down at National Review). This is the ordinary march of time. More unusual, and more interesting to us now, is whether our current president is thirteen years old. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTMyYzVkOTMxNWI3NzVlZWYxMDRjZWEyNWI1Nzg5NzM= Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:53:36 -0400 "We had lunch at the Guardsman, a bar . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGE3ODY5NjRlZWYzN2E2M2Y5NzU0ZDM5MDNhMDg1NTI= . . . around the corner from National Review that gave you free drinks if you had fought at Imjin River." So I described my first meeting with Terry Teachout, it must be close to 30 years ago, in Right Time, Right Place (p. 92). "Terry was a little reserved, a little anxious, bursting with attention, eager to show how much he knew. None of us ever needed persuading of that; the proof was always on the page." Now this promising young man has published <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0151010897">Pops</a>, a biography of Louis Armstrong that is being hailed everywhere. Read it, and enjoy. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGE3ODY5NjRlZWYzN2E2M2Y5NzU0ZDM5MDNhMDg1NTI= Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:34:23 -0400 What Worked for Me Might Work for You -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGY4YTQ4MzZhMTdkOGI2MmIzZGM3MDBkYWU1YWIyNmU= From November 9 to November 18 I will be teaching journalism and writing at Hillsdale College. Specifically, I will be a Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism. Since Right Time, Right Place is, among other things, a how-to -- the journalist's life, as told by one who has had one -- my courses will, in part, be RTRP 2.0, the Liveware version. Since Eugene C. Pulliam was Dan Quayle's uncle, I may have to explain how I wanted to defend Quayle from my colleagues in 1992, and why I failed (pp. 175–6). <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGY4YTQ4MzZhMTdkOGI2MmIzZGM3MDBkYWU1YWIyNmU= Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:16:05 -0400 Baltic Night at the Yale Club -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmEzMmI2ZmExNzkwZjI4NzllN2I0ODgzNWUwMjE5YjQ= Last night I met a friend of Ojars Kalnins, the Latvian-American whose strange fate is recounted in RTRP. For many years National Review and (oddly) the State Department were the only people who, apart from the Baltic-American community, kept alive the notion that Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were legitimate countries, wrongly annexed by the Soviet Union. After the fall of Soviet Communism, they regained their independence, though Russia labors to sap it. My new Latvian acquaintance told me that he likes to ask Swedes, What was the second-largest city in the Swedish empire in the 17th century? Primed by his question, they cleverly answer: Riga. Then he tells them the correct answer: Stockholm. Riga was larger back in the day. Embattled countries get to play one-up. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmEzMmI2ZmExNzkwZjI4NzllN2I0ODgzNWUwMjE5YjQ= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:17:46 -0400 Better Than a Poke in the Eye with a Sharp Stick -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDI2ZDBmMmM3NWU1YjhhZmQ4OGNjNzQ4ZmI4MWQ1MDA= D. R. Tucker quoted the introduction to Right Time, Right Place--"In the age of Obama, conservatism is in retreat . . . but it will be back, and its ups and downs are of interest to conservatives, their enemies, and ordinary Americans"--then asked if Tuesday meant we were back. I answered, "It was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick." Much, much more needs to be done, but winning is different from losing, and often better. He also told me after the interview was over that RTRP reminded him of Almost Famous, the coming-of-age movie about a teenage rock journalist. There is no Penny Lane, but instead there is my wife, Jeanne Safer, whom Mark Riebling called "the third character." <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDI2ZDBmMmM3NWU1YjhhZmQ4OGNjNzQ4ZmI4MWQ1MDA= Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:44:39 -0400 No God, but Two Men at Yale -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmE0YmYyOTQ2NTg2NTA1MjFkYmQ3OWQ2ZjZmYmNmZTE= Tomorrow night I will discuss RTRP at the Yale Club (50 Vanderbilt Avenue, NYC). Drinks and snacks at 6 PM, me and WFB at 6:30. Members only. Thank God it's not at Skull and Bones, I couldn't come. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmE0YmYyOTQ2NTg2NTA1MjFkYmQ3OWQ2ZjZmYmNmZTE= Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:46:11 -0400 A Chance to Celebrate VA and NJ -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWM2NjYyOTM3NTdmY2Q2NjhkMmNiZDU1Yjk1NTc5YjI= Tonight I am on "The Notes" with D. R. Tucker on Blog Talk Radio, 8:30–9:00 PM EST. What was the swallow for Reagan's spring? Probably Jack Kemp, who first came to national prominence with the Kemp-Roth bill late in the Carter years (see pp. 104-5, and 151-2 of Right Time, Right Place). <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWM2NjYyOTM3NTdmY2Q2NjhkMmNiZDU1Yjk1NTc5YjI= Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:43:14 -0400 Rush: "It will inspire and motivate you." -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGEzYzAwN2IxZDc2NDIxNGE0NjI1MjIyN2Q1OWNhMzQ= A plug from Rush: <blockquote> The name of the book, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement. Richard Brookhiser. As a powerful, influential member of the media, he sent me an advance copy. It's been out awhile. It is written from somebody close up and a true disciple believer of conservatism and William F. Buckley Jr. I'll tell you, if you liked the Reagan sound bites from his Goldwater speech yesterday, treat yourself to Brookhiser's book because it's a trip back to the foundations of conservatism today and it will inspire you and motivate you. </blockquote> The occasion for this was a discussion of NY-23; Rush had noticed my post a few days back in the Corner. Query: Did Rush mean to write, "As a powerful, influential member of the media, he sent me an advance copy," or  "As a powerful influential member of the media, I was sent by him an advance copy"? Both, of course, are true. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGEzYzAwN2IxZDc2NDIxNGE0NjI1MjIyN2Q1OWNhMzQ= Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:02:50 -0400 Moyers, Me and WFB -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2I2ZmE0OTUxMDU2ZWI1ZjkxM2RlNDExY2Q2NGE4NDY= ...on Bill Moyers' Journal (PBS), Friday. 9 PM in NYC. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2I2ZmE0OTUxMDU2ZWI1ZjkxM2RlNDExY2Q2NGE4NDY= Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:45:36 -0400 A (Pregnant?) Pause -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGUzMjVjY2E3MzcyNmJjZjU1NTVkMTY4ZDU3NTU4ZWM= Eve Tushnet and I were talking about WFB and she asked me which public intellectuals I admired today. (I dislike the phrase, but it is current, so let it pass.) I came up with three names -- George W. S. Trow, for Within the Context of No Context; Camille Paglia, for the opening chapters of Sexual Personae; and V. S. Naipaul, for what, everyone knows -- but thought, even as I did so, that there is something melancholy about that list. Trow is dead; Paglia and Naipaul are with us, but repeating or at best building on work of earlier decades. One could think of other names -- Paul Berman on terrorism; the post-9/11 Christopher Hitchens when he is not tootling in the Atheist Salvation Army Band -- but it does suggest that we are waiting for the next thing.  Two caveats: Good things remain good even though they are old; and even old things are new to those who discover them for the first time. When I discovered National Review the major columnists -- James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn -- had been pulling their oars in the magazine for 15 years, some of them for longer than that elsewhere (see chapters 1 and 2 of RTRP).  That didn't stop me from learning a lot from them. Still, if you see a strange, interesting man talking to himself . . . <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGUzMjVjY2E3MzcyNmJjZjU1NTVkMTY4ZDU3NTU4ZWM= Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:00:26 -0400 The Yale Political Union turned 75 . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU2YTk2MDNkNjRjMzFiMTJhODgxNzNhMjQwNTI5NWI= . . . and one of the pix in its gala dinner program showed WFB and George McGovern debating before the Union in 1980. I describe that debate on p. 99 of Right Time, Right Place. Also on view at the dinner Saturday night, in the Presidents' Room in Woolsey Hall, were posters and pictures announcing or depicting other Union guests: Jerry Falwell, Allen Ginsberg. There was also an early shot of WFB speaking. His body language in formal situations was like a matador's or a dancer's -- shoulders back, chest up, spine slightly bent. It was nervous in both the 18th- and 21st-century senses of the word: strong and vigorous, but also high-strung. Speaking was always work for him, exciting but intense. After the dinner, I attended the Bacchanalian Orgy of the Party of Right, where I told members of the classes of 2009 to 2012 what WFB had done for us -- pleasant work. The Chancellor's cup helped too. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU2YTk2MDNkNjRjMzFiMTJhODgxNzNhMjQwNTI5NWI= Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:37:17 -0400 Bill Moyers' Journal -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmU5YTQxZDkzNDkxODUwZTVhYzRkNjZmZGVmZTMzNWI= I discussed Right Time, Right Place and WFB with Bill Moyers Thursday, to air October 30. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmU5YTQxZDkzNDkxODUwZTVhYzRkNjZmZGVmZTMzNWI= Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:04:55 -0400 Laudator Temporis Acti -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTI0ZDYxYjM1OTA2MjdmMjFlZTMxZjg1NjMxYjA5NmY= Victor Davis Hanson and John Derbyshire have written variations on an old winger theme, Professor Hanson on <a href="http://www.victorhanson.com/">his blog</a>, John in his brand-new book, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0307409589">We Are Doomed</a>. I have read the blog, not the book (I look forward to the book party Monday), but John's title seems clear enough. The Latin phrase -- "a praiser of things past" -- is from the Ars Poetica of Horace, and it is not meant to be flattering. The praiser is depicted as a querulous crank. But the mood is an ancient and universal one, which we all feel at moments. It can be expressive and entertaining. I have never liked it as an attitude towards life, though, chiefly because of its dishonesty. Professor Hanson has manifested this dishonesty in an unusually direct way, which is enitrely to his credit: He laments, on his blog, the decadence of modern movies, TV, fiction, and sports, and says he hardly consumes any of them anymore. But he consulted with the makers of 300, the movie about Thermopylae, which sold a zillion tickets. Now he can righteously say that 300 was a little indie film, not a Hollywood schlockbuster, so his point survives, and it does, but only relatively. I host documentaries for PBS, and I will bet him a copy of Thucydides that his little indie film had a bigger budget than any of mine. So he plunged into the culture and made an impact -- as, on a different level, do I. But, leaving aside this exception, why is the laudator temporis acti insincere? What should he do if things were really as bad as he says they are? He could kill himself. Some cultures honor this choice -- ancient Rome, samurai Japan. He could also kill himself slowly, with drugs and booze and venereal disease, and other cultures -- Romanticism -- honor that choice. But if he is not so dramatic, then he should just stay home. Why rail? No one will listen, and if they do, nothing can be done. The laudator temporis acti honors the past moment and disdains the moments to come, but says nothing about the present moment, which he is determined to enjoy (in his case, by writing, or praising).  He does well, but he argues badly. So to his arguments, however sharp or clever, I say, feh. I was looking at Up From Liberalism the other day, one of my favorite books of Bill's, and it ends with Whittaker Chambers, Bill's favorite author, who could be a very gloomy writer. But he also wrote, "To live is to maneuver. . . . And, of course, that results in a dance along a precipice . . ." "We cliff-dancers," added Bill, "resolved not to withdraw into a petulant solitude, or let ourselves fall over the cliff into liberalism, must do what maneuvering we can . . ." I did not understand that when I first read it at age 13 or 14. I am beginning to now. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTI0ZDYxYjM1OTA2MjdmMjFlZTMxZjg1NjMxYjA5NmY= Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:52:10 -0400 The War on Rush -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGJhY2Q1YmJiYjgyN2RjNTcwY2NlNTRhMzE1OGJlNDQ= Sometimes it seems like I can understand the headlines by reading Up From Liberalism (1959). This was the first of Bill's books that I read (see pp. 11–13 of Right Time, Right Place). For the war on Rush, I turned to the foreword by John Dos Passos. <blockquote> The "liberal" mentality which Mr. Buckley puts over a barrel in this book is, I am beginning to suspect, the ideological camouflage of the will to power of [a] new ruling class. I can't find any other explanation of these fits of hysteria, these fixations which time will prove to have been irrational. . . . Only some such phenomenon as the solidarity and esprit de corps of a class recently risen to power can account for the lynching spirit aroused against those who have sought to dislodge any fraternity member, whether bureaucrat or college professor, columnist or commentator, from an entrenched position of power. This disparity between the provocation and the reaction is, as the emotions of the moment cool, what stands out more and more as the characteristic trait of the "liberal." </blockquote> Me: The class is not recently arisen to power -- 1959 was 50 years ago -- but the shaky old are perhaps as insecure as the newly arisen. In Rush's case, the fit was designed, not to defend a comrade, but to strike an alien aspirant to mainstream prominence. Otherwise, Dos Passos could have written this at 10:00 this morning. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGJhY2Q1YmJiYjgyN2RjNTcwY2NlNTRhMzE1OGJlNDQ= Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:55:05 -0400 See for Yourself -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzlmNjFhYjVkOTgwYzMxNzQ2ZmE1YmRjYjgwY2Q2MWQ= My RTRP talk at Claremont is online <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk05VildHts&feature=related">here.</a> The paintings behind me, whatever their merits, are ill-suited to video. People have said the same about my jackets and ties. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk05VildHts&feature=related"></a> <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzlmNjFhYjVkOTgwYzMxNzQ2ZmE1YmRjYjgwY2Q2MWQ= Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:52:18 -0400 Why Are Jews Liberals? -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDhlM2Y4NWI1NjA1Yzg0NDVhODNhM2YzMTJkZDQ4MGU= Two of the events on my Left Coast swing were sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition (Beverly Hills and Alamo, CA). At the latter, Norman Podhoretz's question was posed to me. My short answer was, I do not know. I can see why Jews would be left-of-center in Europe, where the right was associated with churches that were established, or persecuting. But that is not the case in America. As George Washington told the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights." (Did any public figure ever have a higher slugging average?) I also mentioned the thesis of Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter in their book <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j 156000889X">Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians and the New Left</a> (I see on Amazon that they did a later paperback that drops the "New"). Rothman and Lichter argue that Jews gravitate to universalizing movements, such as Marxism, as a form of protection -- if we are all workers together, maybe no one will pick on us. They note that this strategy has been followed by other minorities in other parts of the world -- Christians in the Middle East, Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia. More interesting to me in Right Time, Right Place is what became of Jews during my lifetime. I arrived in New York in a summer afternoon -- 1977 -- of Jewish popularity and prominence. Ed Koch became mayor, Woody Allen was still funny, Saul Bellow won a Nobel he had earned. Jews were cool (see pp. 56-7). It seems unrecoverable now, almost unimaginable. This process I understand, somewhat. Much of it is Israel-driven. Years of anti-Israel Soviet propaganda did their work, and do it still, even as many of the stars whose light we see at night have actually gone out. The 1967 and 1973 wars were deeply humiliating to the Red Army: all those tanks chewed up by Israeli Shermans. Steps had to be taken, and were. Liberals, for their part, grew conflicted about defending a David that behaved like a Goliath. Was Exodus supposed to lead to Ariel Sharon? Finally, Israel acquired allies that simply embarrassed liberals, especially Jews. Liberty Baptist is a long way from Walter Benjamin. For whatever reason, the tide has turned. In the Bush years "neoconservative" and "Straussian" simply meant, in common political parlance, "Jewish warmonger," and this languague came chiefly -- apart from Pat Buchanan and a few Paulnuts -- from mainstream liberals (see pp. 170 and 230-231). The fever has abated somewhat since the election of Barack Obama, though I wonder if it will it spike again as Afghanistan drags on. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDhlM2Y4NWI1NjA1Yzg0NDVhODNhM2YzMTJkZDQ4MGU= Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:37:38 -0400 "This Book Can't Be Beat . . ." -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTNmOTM3MDlkYjliOTJjOTY0NzdmY2I2MzUxNDhhNWQ= ". . . as an intellectual coming-of-age memoir coupled with an insider's view of an important political movement and its leaders." The <a href="http://www.indystar.com/article/20091011/LIVING20/910110307/1306/ARCHIVE/+Right+Time++Right+Place++Coming+of+Age+with+William+F.+Buckley+and+the+Conservative+Movement+">Indianapolis Star's review</a> of RTRP is out. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTNmOTM3MDlkYjliOTJjOTY0NzdmY2I2MzUxNDhhNWQ= Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:12:50 -0400 Lose Jobs, Live Better! -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTQ0ZWJmZjhlMDYwYzZlZWQ0M2ExNmFmYjkxMjFkOTg= Riding past Oakland en route to an RTRP book event in Alamo last week, I was told that our rush-hour commute was relatively quick, thanks to the economy. Not an argument the Obama administration will want to make, though I do remember Dan Rather saying, after reporting a Reagan-era dip in inflation, that merchants would be able to charge less for their goods. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTQ0ZWJmZjhlMDYwYzZlZWQ0M2ExNmFmYjkxMjFkOTg= Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:15:20 -0400 Obama's Nobel -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZThkODZlNGRkMTlkODY0ZDAzMzcyYWNiZGIwYzVmNjE= The one time WFB praised Sartre was when he declined his Nobel. Bill found his reasons -- it was a capitalist, imperialist prize -- all wrong, but he found the individualism of the refusal bracing. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZThkODZlNGRkMTlkODY0ZDAzMzcyYWNiZGIwYzVmNjE= Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:53:39 -0400 It Ain't Over Until . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTAzMzkyYmQ0YzQyNzFiZGE5N2M5MjY5NGVlMTZlMjM= One of the pleasures of talking about RTRP is learning new tales of Bill. Tony Hall, one of the audience at the Pacific Research Institute event in San Francisco, told me a great one about Bill debating Mayor Alioto on Firing Line (Hall was a young aide). Alioto was splendidly turned out in high Italian style. He also answered very long -- not to the point, but verbosely enough to keep Bill's responses hemmed in. He made one grave mistake, alluding to Bill and other conservatives as Irishmen. Hall said that throughout the show, Bill sized Alioto up. Then, as the last break ended, he leaned forward and murmured, "All right, paesan, I'm going to take the gloves off." By putting it that way, he already had. A flustered Alioto crumpled. So debates are not always won by pure intellect. No need to tell Socrates -- he already knows that. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTAzMzkyYmQ0YzQyNzFiZGE5N2M5MjY5NGVlMTZlMjM= Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:08:43 -0400 Secrets of Writing, Revealed -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDBjZDc1MDI1OTc4ZmU4YzBhNmJiMDdkZjI3MzFiMGM= One of the questions that came up in Claremont, Calif., on my Left Coast swing was, How does one become a (better) writer? I gave three practical exercises. Writing. Practice does not make perfect, unless you are Keats, but it makes you better. Write and write and write, to deadline if possible (that compels you to write faster). Reading. Read good writers. Steal shamelessly. In time, and with luck, the dross of imitation will fall away, and you will be left with your own alloy. (WFB was a model to all who wrote for him, though we couldn't -- and shouldn't -- have become junior WFBs ourselves). Editing. (Don't you mean being edited? -- Ed.) Having your flourishes struck away is a necessary experience. It is good to have to take one hundred words out of a piece because an ad got bigger; better to have to put the words back and add another hundred because the ad went away. The students were very impressive, and I had the pleasure of the company of Charles Kesler, sometime NR-nik, old friend, and longtime teacher, to me, and to many others. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDBjZDc1MDI1OTc4ZmU4YzBhNmJiMDdkZjI3MzFiMGM= Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:15:50 -0400 This is Your (and America's) Life -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGIyYjAwMzU0YjgyZDcxN2Q3Yzg1YmQ4M2Q0MjI4NTQ= Talking about WFB at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley today was like hero gridlock. Brecht said, unhappy is the country that needs a hero, and one knows what he meant. But there is enough unhappiness in life always to require them. Touring the splendid library before the talk, I felt, first, the vertigo of one's life becoming history. Pop nostalgia gives a variant of this feeling -- we all watched the Brady Bunch! (I didn't, but still.) This was real history, which I had experienced. There were sections of the Berlin Wall; I got a chunk in a lucite cube at a party at the German consulate (no East or West any more) in New York City shortly after the Wall fell. There were shots of Reagan at the 1984 convention; I covered it. There was a replica of his Oval Office; Mona Charen showed me the real one after hours, and of course she and many of my friends, older and younger, got to see it much more often. I felt, second, the pastness of the past. The Reagan Library has the airplane that was Air Force One for every president from Nixon to GHW Bush (how did the Reaganites nab it?). When you see all the gear (including the football) behind the cockpit, you realize that all of its functions could be performed on your cell. The telephones attached to the arms of seats look like Stanley Steamers, or ox yokes. A hardy perennial bloomed in the Q&A after my talk. After reading RTRP (and Chris's book), one man felt "disappointed" with Bill. Do we really expect perfection of those we admire? I said, unless you're writing the Gospels, you will have disappointing things to say in any biography. Few will portray a man who was also as lively, as high-spirited, and as generous as WFB. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGIyYjAwMzU0YjgyZDcxN2Q3Yzg1YmQ4M2Q0MjI4NTQ= Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:42:45 -0400 Ahmadinejad, Lantsman! -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWNlMjQyM2ViNDMyNTcwY2U4YjQyNzc2OTRiZmJhYzc= Will Ahmadinejad be at any of my Republican Jewish Coalition events? Or is he in the Iranian Guard Jewish Coalition? <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWNlMjQyM2ViNDMyNTcwY2U4YjQyNzc2OTRiZmJhYzc= Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:07:15 -0400 Right Time, Left Coast -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWFjY2IyMmU4NmE2ZTAzNTVjMGY3YTkyNjgwZWZhY2I= I will be making five stops in California discussing Right Time, Right Place. Monday, October 5, 1 PM -- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation, 40 Presidential Drive, Simi Valley. Contact Melissa Giller (mgiller@reaganfoundation.org). Tuesday, October 6, 6:45–8 PM -- Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont. Contact Bonnie Snortum (bonnie.snortum@claremontmckenna.edu). Wednesday, October 7, 5:45–8 PM -- Beverly Hills Library, 444 N. Rexford Drive (sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition). Registration at the door. Thursday, October 8, Noon -- Ritz-Carlton Terrace, Terrace Restaurant, 600 Stockton St., San Francisco (sponsored by the Pacific Research Institute). Contact cchin@pacificresearch.org. Thursday, October 8, 7 PM -- I'll be speaking at a private home in the East Bay, this also courtesy of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Contact Doris Ohayon (dohayon@rjchq.org) for details. Right Time, Right Place is a biography and a memoir, but it is also about the conservative movement, and heaven knows California could use a little conservative movement these days. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWFjY2IyMmU4NmE2ZTAzNTVjMGY3YTkyNjgwZWZhY2I= Sun, 04 Oct 2009 10:22:58 -0400 Safire, WFB, Buchanan -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmZjMWE2ZGQzNDE0N2UxMzIwNDQzMDEzYmJjMTEyYjY= When Hurricane Pat first blew through Rightworld late in 1991, WFB greeted it with one of his most consequential late articles: "In Search of Anti-Semitism." I discuss the context, the article, and the fall-out, political and personal, on pp. 168–172 of Right Time, Right Place. William Safire had this to say at the time: <blockquote> I was in that band of warhawks at which Pat loosed his cannon this year, labeling us "the amen corner" of the Israeli Defense Ministry -- as if the threat to the U.S. from Saddam was a concoction of world Jewry. That was a charge of dual loyalty, below the political belt. Pat knew it: Catholic Americans had to endure similar charges of "Romanism" for a century until the election of J.F.K. buried such notions of secret papal domination. I withheld my reaction in hopes that a columnist with impeccably conservative credentials, and not Jewish, would make the call. William F. Buckley, an early Buchanan hero, has just done so in the National Review, finding the pattern of Pat's past remarks impossible to defend from a charge of anti-Semitism. That's a sound, if pained, judgment. </blockquote> (Me): It was a judgment that had to be made, and that WFB had to make -- and he did it. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmZjMWE2ZGQzNDE0N2UxMzIwNDQzMDEzYmJjMTEyYjY= Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:42:37 -0400 Vladimir Nabokov Used Cue Cards -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjFiZGE0MDlhMmRkMDc2MGE0ZDVlYWEzZWU3OWM1OTc= . . . reports the back-page essay in the New York Times Book Review, when he gave TV interviews. But fans of "Firing Line" already know this. Nabokov, a friend and neighbor of WFB's in Switzerland, refused invitations to appear on "Firing Line" on the grounds that everything he said in public had to be written first, and he was such a slow writer that an hour's worth of answers would take too much time from his fiction. Peter Robinson tells this story in his collection of transcriptions of the best of "Firing Line." Bill got other writers: Borges, Norman Mailer, James Dickey. Borges, an odd bird, was less odd in person: his interview with Bill, humane and wise, strikes me as better than all but a handful of his stories. I have seen a clip of the Mailer interview, like one of those sports highlights where a quarterback gets sacked or a catcher spiked by a runner sliding home. I saw the James Dickey interview when it was broadcast; Dickey had the virtues and vices of a Southern literary man, fluency and emptiness. I have seen two "best of" "Firing Line" tapes -- one in 1999, shown at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York at the valedictory party for the show, the other in 2005 at our 50th-anniversary party in DC. Are they available on YouTube? The Allen Ginsberg bit is available by itself; the Jesse Jackson bit is equally funny. Talking, as the Times essayist said, is not the same skill as writing. Dr. Johnson, whose tricentennial we celebrate this year, could do both. And like Bill, he talked for victory. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjFiZGE0MDlhMmRkMDc2MGE0ZDVlYWEzZWU3OWM1OTc= Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:44:16 -0400 Obama gives a bad speech . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODFkZjI0MDcyODJlZGIyMDQ2NTlmNDQ5YWZhOGU4Nzk= . . . so let's hammer Bush's Second Inaugural Address. Rich has made George W. Bush's Second Inaugural a favorite punching bag. I have my reservations about it too, but over time the speech, and Bushism generally, hold their own (see pp. 228–30 of Right Time, Right Place). An America, or an American conservatism, that does not know its principles and its aspirations, and their grounding in human nature, does not know much, and risks being relegated to the clean-up crew role assigned to it by Sam Tanenhaus. A good starting point for reflection on these matters, and also one of impeccable paleoconservative credentials, is The Ethics of Rhetoric, by Richard Weaver (1953). I discovered it the summer I interned at NR, 33 years ago. Chapters III and IV, "Edmund Burke and the Argument from Circumstance" and "Abraham Lincoln and the Argument from Definition," should be required reading. A quick check on Amazon.com suggests that Weaver's book is out of print (my copy is an old Regnery paperback). A project for ISI? <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODFkZjI0MDcyODJlZGIyMDQ2NTlmNDQ5YWZhOGU4Nzk= Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:41:48 -0400 Mark Green for Public Advocate -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjYzOTg2MThiMDc1OWRhMWE2ZThkNmExM2M2NWYzOWM= "What is your favorite spot in New York?" is the last question <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/nyregion/23qadvocate.html">the Times asked</a> contestants in the Democratic-primary run-off for the post of public advocate. Mark Green, long-time liberal, who was a cross-examiner on Firing Line back in the day, says, "I love the vitality and vibrancy of Union Square Park. Any weekend and any night." Ditto, even eight years ago (see pp. 223-4, RTRP). I agree with Mark Green on nothing else. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjYzOTg2MThiMDc1OWRhMWE2ZThkNmExM2M2NWYzOWM= Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:49:56 -0400 NYC on the Frontline -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGRhOTVmNGExOTE0Nzg4YTg4YzhhYWNjMTYwZjdhZTY= The Queens/Denver plot aborted (or not?) by the FBI and the NYPD reminds us that the Terror War is not history. The plotters appeared to be targeting mass transit, as the mass-murderers in Madrid and London also did. I described 9/11 in chapters 13 and 14 of Right Time, Right Place -- its effect on the world, America, and New York City. One new reality is that civilians thousands of miles from the battlefield may actually be on the battlefield. We can't forget that fact, yet neither should we let it rule our thoughts. It is a feature of our times, as long as the Terror War lasts. Eight years ago I guessed that it might be a new Thirty Years' War. Twenty-two more to go . . . <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGRhOTVmNGExOTE0Nzg4YTg4YzhhYWNjMTYwZjdhZTY= Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:04:55 -0400 My favorite Irving Kristol story . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDUyNmYxYjhmMzc4ZGNjZjcwZDgzZWQ5YjFkZDhkOTY= . . . also involved James Burnham. Kristol told it in an article in the New York Times Magazine many years ago. In his City College days, Kristol was a Trotskyite; Burnham, then a philosophy professor at NYU, was quite an eminent one. The Soviet invasion of Finland threw the believers into confusion because Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union, as a workers' state, albeit a corrupted one, should be supported. Kristol attended a two-day-long meeting at which only four speeches were given. Burnham's, at a brisk four hours, caused many to question his "seriousness." Even then, Kristol could see what was seriously wrong with his comrades. One of his life tasks was to redirect liberal intellectuals. In this he only partly succeeded (the documentary Arguing the World gives an interesting view of Kristol's efforts and the resistance he encountered). His other task, to spread sensible ideas to ordinary people, and to show them how many of their ideas were sensible, went better. In the mid-seventies his columns in the Wall Street Journal opened lots of eyes, and reinforced those of us who were already looked right. Wally Olson used to give us public readings of them at Yale, when he was not reading Lysander Spooner. R.I.P., and condolences to his family. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDUyNmYxYjhmMzc4ZGNjZjcwZDgzZWQ5YjFkZDhkOTY= Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:42:33 -0400 Time -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjUxZWQ3NDE5ZDNhNGRlZWVkYTJiZjRmY2RmNmNjYmY= I thought, after Saturday's show, how much time I must spend, not just on what Bill did -- author, columnist, TV host -- but why it mattered. <blockquote> Postumus, Postumus, the years glide by us, Alas! no piety delays the wrinkles,    Nor old age imminent,       Nor the indomitable hand of Death. </blockquote> <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjUxZWQ3NDE5ZDNhNGRlZWVkYTJiZjRmY2RmNmNjYmY= Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:36:42 -0400 WGAN-AM/Portland, ME -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWM2YmI2ZmVkYzE0ZmNiZDliZTAxM2FmZWY1NWViOGE= I will be talking about Right Time, Right Place with John McDonald, 8:30-9:00 AM, Saturday the 12th. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWM2YmI2ZmVkYzE0ZmNiZDliZTAxM2FmZWY1NWViOGE= Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:00:25 -0400 Tell Me, Grandfather, About the Sixties -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2U2OTVhMDcxYThhNzAzNjNkZDE5MjI4NzQ3ZTUwOTk= A reader, impressed with RTRP's description of Keith Mano's "Gimlet Eye" columns -- "Anyone who wants to know what the seventies and eighties felt like only has to read these bulletins, traveling for twenty light-years now but still blazing" (p. 113) -- asks if I can recommend anything comparable about the sixties. Tough question. The sixties were so lurid that exaggeration and skewing is almost unavoidable. My friend Jonathan Leaf has written a corrective, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1596985720">The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties</a>. But before you read the correction, groove in the mainstream. I recommend What Really Happened to the Class of '65?, by Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky, a journalistic stunt that is much more; and <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0553380648">The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test</a>, Tom Wolfe's best non-fiction book. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2U2OTVhMDcxYThhNzAzNjNkZDE5MjI4NzQ3ZTUwOTk= Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:11:36 -0400 Wills, Tanenhaus, WFB -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTE5ODQ2YmZmMGY0NzIyMDUzMTI1NWEzN2FjYzY0NjM= Garry Wills and Sam Tanenhaus voice a theme of liberal WFBology in <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23033">Wills's review</a> of Tanenhaus's <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1400068843">The Death of Conservatism</a> in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Wills writes: "Tanenhaus thinks that Buckley began to be more realistic during his theatrical campaign for mayor of New York in 1965. . . . In an interview with Buckley in 2007, Tanenhaus found him dubious about the 'conservatism' of the Bush era -- for instance, he was highly critical of the Iraq war." There are some small points to make about this: Garry himself questions how much Bill moved to the center after 1965; there was plenty that all conservatives disliked about Bush II. But one of the main events of that era was the Iraq War, and Garry, Sam and other liberals honor Bill for turning against it. Two points: 1)  Bill spent much of 2005 and 2006 writing that the Iraq War was lost, over, a bad job. I give instances on p. 232 of Right Time, Right Place, and I could easily have given more. The fact is indisputable. What do we make of it? What I make of it is that it was a major failure of Bill's judgment, as great as his support for segregation in the 1950s (see pp. 12, 33). I believe the two failures are linked by an indifference, inherited in the first instance, atavistic in the second, to the rights and well being of dark people. 1950s Bill did not care that white people oppressed black people, 2000s Bill did not care that brown people tormented brown people. Why liberals like Wills and Tanenhaus should share the second indifference is for them to ponder. 2) By the end of his life, Bill snapped out of it, supporting the surge and telling the last directors' meeting he attended that the struggle against jihadists was our world war (p. 241). Tanenhaus is a conscientious writer, and I expect his biography of WFB to note his last position, though as an anti-war liberal he must deplore it. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTE5ODQ2YmZmMGY0NzIyMDUzMTI1NWEzN2FjYzY0NjM= Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:59:16 -0400 Communists in Government -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzQ5OTk1MTBjYmE5YTEzODk4YTViYWQ4NTg1ODYyMDk= National Review can't criticize Van Jones per se, since so many of our founding editors had Communist or radical pasts. In Right Time, Right Place I discuss James Burnham's Trotskyism (p. 39), Frank Meyer's Communism (p. 44), and the possible effect these had on their relationship. One story I did not tell was told me by John Chamberlain, our first book-review editor, and the sweetest of men. He was a fellow traveler of Communism when he was daily book-review editor for the New York Times. One day he was in an elevator at the Times with Walter Duranty, who said that there was indeed a famine in the Ukraine, though he chose not to write about it. Chamberlain, to his credit, repeated this information in a review of a book on Soviet affairs. Duranty demanded that Chamberlain be fired, and he would have been if a third Times man, who had also been in the elevator, had not confirmed Chamberlain's account. This spared his job, though to the Times's discredit, it did not cause Duranty's to be forfeit. Note to Jones: Our Communists recanted. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzQ5OTk1MTBjYmE5YTEzODk4YTViYWQ4NTg1ODYyMDk= Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:52:49 -0400 "Compellingly captures the editorial world . . . -- By: NRO Staff webmaster@nationalreview.com (NRO Staff) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmQ0MzBlMTdkMWYyNWNmZGNlNmE0ODU4ZWFmODJmMzQ= . . . of Buckley’s National Review." <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2009/bc0904jp.html">City Journal's review</a> of Right Time, Right Place, by James Panero, is out. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmQ0MzBlMTdkMWYyNWNmZGNlNmE0ODU4ZWFmODJmMzQ= Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:50:34 -0400 "All Consuming and Crazy-Making" -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGU2ODBlNzZhNzNiOThlMDEwYThmYWZhZTQ2OTRmM2I= My description of the modern presidency (p. 105) reminded a reader of George W. Bush "as he was whisked to and from the Rochester, N.Y. airport on the way to a speech -- falsely promoted as an open town meeting style event -- at Canandaigua Academy a couple of years ago. The chillingly dramatic personal security arrangements, which started two weeks before the event, buried any chance that Mr. Bush would hear authentic public commentary. I thought then that thinking persons, elected to that office, must miss the benefit of private citizen feedback." The best discussion of this serious problem is in Forrest McDonald's <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0700607498">The American Presidency</a> (1994), in his dark and (if you have a certain sense of humor) darkly amusing last chapter, "Afterthoughts." <blockquote> Among other recent developments in the presidency has been the severing of contact with ordinary humans . . . Until the major parties declined into being little more than the means of perpetuating the ritual system of elections, the old-fashioned political bosses had the ear of the president. The likes of Chicago's Richard Daley, Ohio's Mike DiSalle, and New Jersey's Frank Hague knew their constituents' hope and dreams and fears, and until the early sixties they could and did see to it, directly or indirectly, that the president remained in touch with what they knew. Similarly, until approximately the same time, presidents actually saw and talked with real people. [But] by the mid-sixties, assassination, mass demonstrations, riots, and violent crime had made casual contact too perilous to tolerate. Subsequent presidents, when they traveled through a city, were driven in what amounted to army tanks disguised as limousines. </blockquote> The problem actually begins much longer ago. George Washington was accessible to a degree that we cannot imagine -- any presentable person could show up at his weekly receptions, and some weeks none bothered to come -- but he too could be misinformed. He took trips to every state of the union to gauge popular opinion on how well he and the new government were doing. He was gratified by what he heard. But he did not travel to the Appalachian back country, and so was perhaps unprepared for the explosion of the Whiskey Rebellion. It is a problem that's not going away, and e-chat won't solve it. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGU2ODBlNzZhNzNiOThlMDEwYThmYWZhZTQ2OTRmM2I= Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:27:11 -0400 Ted Kennedy, WFB, and Celebrity -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWIwZDkyNGZkZjNkMjE4MzU2ZTcwZjk4MzgwMGQwNjQ= One of the saddest moments in my NR career concerned Ted Kennedy, WFB, and the power of celebrity, specifically television. I was subbing for WFB's long-time right hand and assistant Frances Bronson one day (that is, I was sitting in her chair, I was not replacing her) when a deeply distressed woman came to call on Mr. Buckley. Such people often wrote, but occasionally they would appear in person. She had the remains of good looks; she also had with her two sons, not teenagers, but old enough to understand, in part, what was going on. The CIA, she said, was broadcasting through her television, and she wanted Bill and Ted Kennedy to make them stop. I told her story in RTRP (p. 62) as an instance of the pathos of mad people who attach themselves to celebrities as salvific figures. But it occurs to me now that there is another layer. The truth was not as bad as she feared, but it was bad enough: The CIA was not broadcasting through her television, but television was. Bill did as much as anyone to improve that medium (certainly more than Ted Kennedy and his 99 colleagues could). But the battle is endless. As Philip Rieff said, it's impossible to win the culture war, though it is possible not to lose. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWIwZDkyNGZkZjNkMjE4MzU2ZTcwZjk4MzgwMGQwNjQ= Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:25:36 -0400 Buckley's Gift -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGNhNDJhMGM0MmNjMWI5YTM5Y2Y0YjE5NGIxOGM5ZWU= <a href="http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2009/08/25/lieberman-opens-the-door-to-democratic-retreat/">Dick Morris thinks</a> Joe Lieberman's critique of Obamacare "may prove to be a pivotal turning point in the congressional debate over the increasingly unpopular proposal." I argue in Right Time, Right Place that WFB's endorsement of Lieberman in his maiden Senate run in 1988 was both "his last direct intervention in politics" and also "one of his most effective." WFB decided that the only way to beat the liberal Republican incumbent, Lowell Weicker, was to back the Democrat -- also liberal, but less full of himself. (This shows you just how full of himself Weicker was.) I describe the race on pp. 154-5; WFB and Lieberman's near-loss in 2006 on p. 232. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGNhNDJhMGM0MmNjMWI5YTM5Y2Y0YjE5NGIxOGM5ZWU= Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:11:15 -0400 Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGQ2MTkzNDMwZmViMTlhMWRmMTdmMjA1YWEwNzVlY2E= My vignette of Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter (and Bill Clinton) at the 1980 Democratic convention in Madison Square Garden is on pp. 86-7 of Right Time, Right Place. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGQ2MTkzNDMwZmViMTlhMWRmMTdmMjA1YWEwNzVlY2E= Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:01:36 -0400 The Answer to Pat's Question -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDQxNGM1MzhmY2MyNDQyNTM3NmY2NTcwZTlmYTgxMzA= "Are we still in the United States?" (p. 238, Right Time, Right Place). Yes, but in the eastern Catskills, right on the edge of the gray no-service area you used to see on maps in stores that sold cell phones. I will be there a week; if thoughts occur I will post them, but don't expect them. Meanwhile enjoy grilling, town halls, and the bugs that tell kids it will soon be time to go back to school. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDQxNGM1MzhmY2MyNDQyNTM3NmY2NTcwZTlmYTgxMzA= Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:43:41 -0400 The Reason Why -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDk2YTAzYjkwYTc4MGYwOWFlODg2ZTUzMjVkZmE2MTM= Missing from my techno-discussion were the most important reasons WFB would Tweet, which are psychological (they are almost always left out of techno-discussions): He had irrepressible enthusiasms, and powerful disdain. Epicurus would not Tweet. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDk2YTAzYjkwYTc4MGYwOWFlODg2ZTUzMjVkZmE2MTM= Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:51:37 -0400 WFB's Short Words and Sentences -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjBhOGIxMzUyNjM3YjU3ODg1MTc1MGMyYjA2MmQ3Mzk= From a column (2/14/92) on GHW Bush after Jonathan Yardley called him "His Supreme Preppiness": "What c-r-a-p." <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjBhOGIxMzUyNjM3YjU3ODg1MTc1MGMyYjA2MmQ3Mzk= Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:46:27 -0400 Would WFB Tweet? -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODQwODU0ODkyZDRiYmQyMTZiZjE5Njk2MGY4ODQ0YmU= I found myself tracking technology in RTRP, from phone switchboards with cords and plugs (pp. 67-8) to getting our files to the printer after 9/11 via a fax line to an out-of-state friend with T1 service (p. 221). So what about Twitter? It can certainly seem like the latest techno club without a velvet rope, a rendezvous of the incorrigibly second-rate: these days, sons of presidents become president, wives of presidents become secretary of state, and daughters of failed presidential candidates Tweet. It was also true of WFB, as it is or will be of all of us, that he formed certain habits and kept to them, however far the world moved on (he used WordStar until his last day on earth, and needed a second PC kludged onto his main one to translate it; see also p. 119). So would Bill Tweet? Let's look at the record. He wrote a three-day-a-week syndicated column that invoked his life or his acquaintances I would guess maybe one in five times; he had a column in National Review, Notes & Asides, in which he printed correspondence on all manner of subjects, from linguistic trivia to customer relations (a phrase from one of his responses in the latter category became the title of Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription, a Notes & Asides anthology);  and he wrote two books, Cruising Speed and Overdrive, about single weeks in his life. Twitter may be one of those innovations that is gone next year, and seem as ancient as Betamax in five. But yes, I imagine WFB would Tweet. Techno trivia point: Bill once told me that Russell Kirk, he of Olde Mecosta, was in certain things an even greater technophile than Bill, and had an electric typewriter before Bill did. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODQwODU0ODkyZDRiYmQyMTZiZjE5Njk2MGY4ODQ0YmU= Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:02:27 -0400 Why I Love My Wife -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Yjk3MjAwOGRlZDgxN2M4ZWI5NWFmN2U5ZDc2MTFjMDc= . . . even though she's a liberal (one reason). Jeanne Safer appears here and there in Right Time, Right Place, often saying important things (her discussion with Newt Gingrich is on p. 195). One reader called her the "third character." Here is what the third character has to say in an <a href="http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2009/08/17/vick/index.html">interview in Salon on forgiveness</a> (the peg was Michael Vick). "Safer, for instance, deems it her 'ethical duty' not to forgive the 9/11 terrorists. 'My blood pressure is not disturbed and I'm not giving myself cancer by saying there are certain things I must not forgive. What hurts your health is to forgive superficially and really still feel angry deep down.'" <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Yjk3MjAwOGRlZDgxN2M4ZWI5NWFmN2U5ZDc2MTFjMDc= Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:15:56 -0400 Bob Novak, R.I.P. -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmFmY2Y5M2UwMTYzN2MyNWM0YTc4YmI3NTdhNjM5MTE= Bob Novak appears only twice in RTRP, briefly and not at his best. Certainly one of the most remarkable things about Novak for conservatives was his doughty support of supply-side economics. Arthur Laffer, Robert Mundell, and NR's Alan Reynolds pioneered the idea, but Jude Wanniski and Bob were its most indefatigable evangelists. Bob said it would restore the GOP to its position of champion of the working man, which it once held under the leadership of Mark Hanna -- a justification that was in itself pure Novak: immersed in the minutiae of American political history, and taking a contrarian position (Hanna figures in the textbooks of mainstream New Deal historians as the evil Svengali of William McKinley). R.I.P. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmFmY2Y5M2UwMTYzN2MyNWM0YTc4YmI3NTdhNjM5MTE= Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:31:57 -0400 Kunstler's Hair -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDNjNjNmMTc4YWU2YWFkMDI0NjY3MTIzYjY1ZGUxM2Q= <div> An ex-liberal writes: "I wanted you to know that within seconds of reading the review of your new book in First Things, I impulsively hit 'Buy Now' as I too often do on my Kindle.  Minutes after that, William Kunstler’s hair repaid the price of admission . . . . "I used to represent the 'other' -- Liberal Party, Democratic Party, etc.  Then things got complicated, best epitomized by reading Hayek (whom one of my Yale professors had dismissed as 'a crackpot, even by University of Chicago standards').  To my shock, I discovered that this crackpot offered the best explanation for how most things in the world actually get done.  I used to be jealous that the ideas all seemed to come from your crowd, and that liberals were living on their past.  Now I worry that the doctrines have hardened on both sides, and neither side has ideas.  In any event, I don’t fit in either political package deal. </div> <div> "Meanwhile, may the whole world hit 'Buy Now.'" The reference to Kunstler's hair is from a description of an episode of Firing Line on p. 11 of RTRP: "I remember an encounter with the radical lawyer William Kunstler. Kunstler's hair looked like stuffing from a sofa." I agree with my correspondent that attitudes, and to some extent doctrines, have hardened on all sides during the Clinton/Bush/and now Obama years; disagree about the dearth of ideas us-wards (I am surrounded by colleagues full of them). I certainly agree with "Buy Now." </div> <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDNjNjNmMTc4YWU2YWFkMDI0NjY3MTIzYjY1ZGUxM2Q= Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:23:54 -0400 WFB vs. the Health Birchers -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTI4YWViZTZkODczNTk3NmY0NTA4NDI1NmJiNWM2Zjc= That's how John Harwood of MSNBC and Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times appeared to frame it, at least. Here is the transcript of their on-camera exchange this weekend: <blockquote> HARWOOD: Well, Sam, I want to switch gears and get a little different perspective. I know you’ve got a book coming out in September, The Death of Conservatism, you know an awful lot about the patron saint of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley. What do you suppose Bill Buckley would think of the nature of the arguments that are being made against the Obama health care plan right now, death panels and all the rest? TANENHAUS: Well, you know, one of the great contributions Bill Buckley made to conservatism was to move it toward the center. And one way he did that was to repudiate in a very forceful way what was then called the lunatic fringe, people who made-- HARWOOD: The John Birch Society-- TANENHAUS: The John Birch Society was a very powerful organization in the early 1960s and its leader Robert Welch had called Dwight Eisenhower a Communist. And they weren’t necessarily a dangerous group, but what they did was discredit serious conservative arguments and we may see in the days ahead where serious responsible Republicans and conservative thinkers say if they’re going to make a forceful argument the country can accept, they’ll have to cut themselves off from this more extreme view. </blockquote> Me: This is the whole exchange, so it's obviously a quick take. Sam Tanenhaus is a liberal scholar of Rightworld, author of Whittaker Chambers (1997) and prospective author of a full-dress bio of WFB, on which he has been working for several years. He is also a friend of mine. The big mistake he makes here is to locate "the lunatic fringe" on an ideological axis, and to equate seriousness with "mov[ing] toward the center." When Bill tried to expel Birchers or Randians from the conservative movement, it was not because they were too far right politically, but because they were out of this world. It was impossible to analyze Communism if you thought, as the John Birch Society did, that everyone who misunderstood or underestimated the Communist threat was under Communist control; and it was impossible to build a successful American political movement if you believed, as Ayn Rand did, that every living theist (I think she made a partial exception for Aquinas) was a mind-blanking whim worshipper. You could sell a million novels -- Atlas Shrugged still marches on -- but you could not translate myth into political action. Some of the intra-right struggles that WFB engaged in were ideological. When his brother-in-law Brent Bozell moved to Spain and embraced Carlism (a nineteenth-century royalist Catholic movement), he rejected both the American Revolution and the Peace of Westphalia. I suppose Bill's position, relatively speaking, was more "centrist" than Brent's, but it was a center that America and much of the West had found long ago. But turning out for town halls is not lunatic, giving congressmen a hard time is not lunatic, and worrying about the effects of rationing is not lunatic (Mickey Kaus is not a lunatic). Bill would rap arguments he thought were shoddy or bonkers, but the man who backed Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan would not shy from a fight, and the man who railed at "decisions made between nine and five in Washington office rooms, where the oligarchs of the Affluent Society sit, allocating complaints and solutions to communities represented by pins on the map" (Up From Liberalism) would find plenty in Obamacare to fight about. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTI4YWViZTZkODczNTk3NmY0NTA4NDI1NmJiNWM2Zjc= Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:34:12 -0400 A Blackford Oakes Movie -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzA2ZDQ0MWViYzQ3MDA2MTZjNzVkYThlY2M2Y2IyMmU= But suppose a movie had been made of Saving the Queen, or some other of WFB's spy novels? I know such a thing was under discussion (how seriously? I never knew any details, and I also don't know enough about Hollywood to know what is serious). Suppose it had gotten made, and suppose it had been enough of a success to have stimulated a sequel? The movie(s) would have added another brick to Bill's reputation. What could such a feste burg gain from more bricks? And yet we see that even a media figure as omnipresent as Bill was, is now unknown to ordinary non-political people in their twenties, in a way that he was not unknown twenty or thirty years ago (unknown people were not invited on Laugh-In, or imitated by Robin Williams). The reason is not far to seek: Firing Line went off the air in 1999, and those who live by the electron die by it. A movie, or a series of movies, would have kept the name afloat in pop culture. How important is that? Any self-conscious public figure would tell you, somewhat important. Bill could have written his books from a pillar like St. Simon Stylites, and they might have been exactly the same books, yet he spent his life in the arena, and the marketplace. The unmade Oakes movies remind us of the contingency of reputation. We can do an awful lot on our own, and few of us did more, or did it to greater effect than Bill. The rest is left to lightning strikes. The other career option, which Bill also pursued, was excellence. "Some have relied on what they knew, / Others on being simply true. / What worked for them might work for you." <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzA2ZDQ0MWViYzQ3MDA2MTZjNzVkYThlY2M2Y2IyMmU= Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:34:12 -0400 Johnny Depp's Next Role -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Mzg1YmNiMjkxZGM1ZWMxZmIzYWJjMTE2OGVmOGQ2ZjI= "I was wondering if you have considered turning this into a movie?" asks Harris Vederman, midway through RTRP. "Your colleagues at NR were amazing and your eye for details makes me feel like I worked there also." The journal of opinion version of The Front Page, or perhaps The Devil Wears Prada. I could see Johnny Depp as a young WFB, and Meryl Streep as an older Pat, though they could not play together. But who would be Ernest van den Haag? John O'Sullivan? Mike Potemra? Casting is harder than you think -- almost as hard as putting together a magazine. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Mzg1YmNiMjkxZGM1ZWMxZmIzYWJjMTE2OGVmOGQ2ZjI= Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:51:16 -0400 WFB and the Town Hall Protests - II -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTI2YWUxMWM0MDNjZjhmNTgzMzAwZmU0OWVmMzc3NTE= To my list of WFB's targets in the fifties (Yale, Ike), the sixties (the Great Society), and the seventies (Nixon), I should have added his home-state senator, Lowell Weicker (R., Ct.), whom he took out in 1988. I tell the story in RTRP on pp. 154-5. One detail I did not include: The bumper stickers that Pat and her cook Julian passed out in the local supermarket said LOWELL WEICKER MAKES ME SICK. Works even better for Obamacare. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTI2YWUxMWM0MDNjZjhmNTgzMzAwZmU0OWVmMzc3NTE= Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:35:31 -0400 WFB and the Town Hall Protests -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjUzZWE0ZjY5MjI1MWUzZTNlYTRiNGI3Y2Q5MDhhNzk= Liberals like to use WFB as a stick to beat other wingers, especially after death made him unable to refute them:  He was not as these publicans. Bill's inclination, and his project, was to take the high road. But there was a lot of aggressive driving on his high road. He spent his college years tormenting the administration of his college, then wrote a book about it after he graduated (<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=089526692X">God and Man at Yale</a>). He helped fill Madison Square Garden to protest President Eisenhower's hospitality to Nikita Khrushchev, and he poured scorn on President Nixon's trip to Communist China while he traveled in the presidential press corps (see pp. 25-6 of Right Time, Right Place for an account of how that trip struck me at age 17). Looking through The Jeweler's Eye, a 1968 collection of columns, I see this crack at Richard Goodwin, one of the Great Society's intellectuals: "I do not mean to sound disrespectful of Mr Goodwin, because I am not. I merely fear him." Cross-examining congressmen or Tea Partying? Maybe not. But WFB knew how to view with alarm, and how to drive his point home like a rapier. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjUzZWE0ZjY5MjI1MWUzZTNlYTRiNGI3Y2Q5MDhhNzk= Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:00:57 -0400 "Right Time, Right Place held a personal interest for me." -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDdmNjA4MmFjOGEwNmUyMzViYjRjNTQ2YTIyODQwZmY= "I never met WFB, but admired him. A life-long Republican, I lived for years on the fringes of what you called 'rightworld.' For twenty tempestuous years (1963–83) I was Republican counsel and chief counsel on the Committee on Education and Labor of the U.S. House, vainly trying to stem the tide of the Great Society. I served under five ranking Republican Members, the fourth being John Ashbrook of Ohio, a national leader in the conservative movement. I had worked closely with John for years before he rose to the top position on our side of the Committee, and he was my favorite boss. We actually accomplished some things in the early days of the Reagan presidency. John's untimely death in 1982 left me saddened and disheartened, and I shortly retired into private practice. "These are not good times for us conservatives, or for our country. But history teaches many lessons, including patience; we shall yet have our chance to set things right."--Charles W. Radcliffe Thank you, Mr. Radcliffe, for your memory of working with John Ashbrook (see pp. 26-7, 42 of RTRP for more on that important early conservative leader), and for those words of wisdom. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDdmNjA4MmFjOGEwNmUyMzViYjRjNTQ2YTIyODQwZmY= Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:17:08 -0400 A Contrary View -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjJhNDc3NmRiODAyMDI5MzMyYzgzNGZkZjViMDcwZDg= <blockquote> You quote William F. Buckley: I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. Great words indeed, and this libertarian social democrat couldn't agree more. However, you neglect to note that Buckley would have been quite pleased to see a return to eight-year-olds working in coal mines, without any protective equipment; how dare the government tell the mineowners whom they can hire? This form of slavery -- and it is certainly slavery -- and its modern equivalents bothered him not a whit. So can we agree that Buckley, heir to an oil fortune, was deeply and righteously concerned with HIS freedom and that of his class; and utterly unconcerned with freedom for others. Which is to say -- not really concerned with freedom at all, but only with power over others, his own and that of his class. </blockquote> Me: This is more energetic than convincing. The words of Bill's I quoted (from Up From Liberalism) don't provide any grounds for restricting child labor. Then why does the "libertarian social democrat" say he "couldn't agree more"? But after agreeing with them, he disagrees with them, because he decides that they spring from Bill's class biases. Bill admitted modifications to his libertarianism great and small; that's why he often squabbled with more dogmatic libertarians. But the "Don't Tread on Me" spirit was there to the end. Maybe the most startling column he ever wrote (I don't have it by me, but I'm sure it was in the 21st century) was spurred by a report that a DA in Oregon had taped a prisoner confessing to a priest. Bill said that Catholics should resist this by violence if necessary. He should have added that Methodists, Jews, and atheists should join them. The DA got smacked by superiors, so the call to arms was moot. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjJhNDc3NmRiODAyMDI5MzMyYzgzNGZkZjViMDcwZDg= Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:34:28 -0400 Must Reads -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWY1NWJkMDIxNDIyMzI2NjNmN2ZlYjY2MTU5MDg2Njg= One question the Wahington Fellows asked last night: What five articles in National Review's first 54 years must they read? I suggested: 1) The editorial reax to 9/11. 2) The editorial reax to the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991. 3) I couldn't think of any specific piece of coverage of Goldwater's gallant run, but suggested they flip through 1964. 4) Whittaker Chambers's review of Atlas Shrugged . Still ticking people off after half a century. I pointed out that, while I know what Chambers was saying, the lady never wished to send actual people to actual gas chambers. Trivia point: Odd, given their antipathies, that both Rand and Chambers admired Victor Hugo. Don't know what Chambers thought of tap dancing. 5) Editorial reax to Hungary, 1956. I also added 6) anything by Keith Mano, the best writer we have ever published. I see my list is heavily geopolitical. Over dinner afterwards, Ramesh suggested the lead para in the issue after LBJ's first taking the oath of office. I wonder what five other NR-niks might come up with? My thanks to all the fellows, and to Kate O'Beirne and April Ponnuru for a terrific evening. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWY1NWJkMDIxNDIyMzI2NjNmN2ZlYjY2MTU5MDg2Njg= Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:40:13 -0400 Washington Fellows -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjRkMzM1Njk0OTA5MTUwODAxOTM2N2EwYmQwMDBkZGI= Tuesday night I will be meeting the inaugural class of the Washington Fellows, a program of the National Review Institute. Their bios are <a href="http://nrinstitute.org/washington_fellows.php">here</a>. We will go where the in crowd goes, and I will be talking about Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington and Right Time, Right Place. Charles Kesler gave the first talk a month ago, so I face a high bar. This sort of program hardly existed when I was coming up, though they soon proliferated (see pp. 69, 107 of RTRP)--one of the many changes in Right World over the last forty years. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjRkMzM1Njk0OTA5MTUwODAxOTM2N2EwYmQwMDBkZGI= Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:53:19 -0400 'The author is a friend and colleague . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTFiODRkMDk1MjVmYzU3OWU0YmIwOTJjZTJiMTAyMWY= . . . of long standing, and his book discusses many other friends and colleagues. With the disclosures out of the way, I can proceed to the judgment: There is no better book about William F. Buckley or National Review, and it is a good, quick sketch of the conservative movement's last few decades."--Ramesh, First Things. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTFiODRkMDk1MjVmYzU3OWU0YmIwOTJjZTJiMTAyMWY= Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:56:12 -0400 The Scandal of New York -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjljZDE5NzYyZGU1NDE2NWVhODA5NDc1ZmFlNzc1OGE= At my talk at Mohonk Mountain House this afternoon there was a woman from East Irondequoit. As I say in Right Time, Right Place, Irondequoit is a suburb of Rochester, and I went to Irondequoit High School, the public high school of the western part of town. Her high school was Eastridge. It turned out we were in the same class (1973). In sports, our high schools were the fell incensed points of mighty opposites. Here, over three decades later, we were lantsmen. Many of her family, like my father, had worked for Eastman Kodak. I told her what I had recently heard: that the biggest employer in Rochester now is the University of Rochester. This struck us both as scandalous. No reflection on the U of R, which is a good school. But the big three of our youth, for Rochester and its suburbs, were Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch & Lomb--cameras, copiers, lenses. We didn't even think that the old big three should still be the big three, but we would have liked them to be replaced by some other makers or doers, not by a school. For years, the supporters of higher education in New York state, private and public, argued that an educated workforce would be good for business. Now, in much of the state, educating people is the only local business. My earliest introduction to the economics of welfare spending came from a passage in Up From Liberalism, WFB's third book, which used New York as a case study. Subway riders in New York City want a low fare, which requires subsidy payments from the taxes of upstate apple pickers--who, in turn, demand subsidies from subway riders. (I describe the impression this lively sketch made on me in RTRP.) But the balance of power in New York state has now shifted, or rather, broken. There are no regional checks and balances. Great Society liberalism, pioneered by New York City and aped everywhere in the state, has triumphed, and the taxes it exacts have crippled all businesses. An entrepreneur with an idea for a start-up would be insane to begin in New York. And indeed few do. This is the structural scandal of New York state, behind Eliot Spitzer and the Emperor's Club, or the feral farce of the New York State Senate -- the slow, fatal bleed of business and talent and hope. Some of our problems have gotten better since WFB first contended with them; some (jihadists) are new. Others have gotten much, much worse. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjljZDE5NzYyZGU1NDE2NWVhODA5NDc1ZmFlNzc1OGE= Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:02:04 -0400 Saturday I Speak . . . -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzliMjk1Nzc4NjljZmIyMWVhYTRhMGRhZDMzMjA5Y2I= . . . in one of the loveliest rooms in America, the Parlor of Mohonk Mountain House. The 140-year-old resort, outside New Paltz, N.Y., is still owned and run by the family that founded it. The building is a glorious eclectic Victorian pile. Although it is not in Catskills, but on the Shawangunk Ridge nearby, it is truly the last of the old old Catskill resorts. I described what it looks like and what it all means in my second book, The Way of the WASP. I will be talking about Right Time, Right Place in the Parlor at 4:00 in the afternoon, but if you spend your time looking at the walls and ceiling, I will understand. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzliMjk1Nzc4NjljZmIyMWVhYTRhMGRhZDMzMjA5Y2I= Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:41:10 -0400 Those Naked Student Pix -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDQ3ZjU2OGZmNjgwM2JiYzNhZGMxNzAyOWE0ZDM2YTY= Fred Schwarz and Roger Clegg sent links to sites which discuss the pictures of naked college students taken at Yale and many other institutions at mid-century. The <a href="http://tafkac.org/collegiate/ivy_league_nude_photos.html">article Fred links to</a> is unsigned, but I remember it as the piece by Roger Rosenbaum I read years ago. My memory lost some details: the villainous crackpot behind the scheme was not a Yale prof but an anthropologist named Sheldon. But his inspiration was eugenicist. He wanted to study what he called somatypes -- physical types which he had named (ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph). The one person Rosenbaum interviewed who had a good word for the project was Camille Paglia, who said she likes looking at secondary and primary sexual characteristics (my paraphrase). Her interest is aesthetic and erotic, not master-race-building. WFB's concerns as a student activist, recounted in his first book, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=089526692X">God and Man at Yale</a>, were economics and religion. He mocked Yale's anthropology courses for their impiety (some say Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; some say Rain God). But he also noted the solvent effect that cultural skepticism could have on everyday morals. Over the years liberals gave WFB a pass on all this because they decided he was a cool guy. They didn't when he was young, though  (McGeorge Bundy called him "twisted with hate"). And any student or pundit who says such things now is dismissed as a Christer yahoo. The <a href="http://www.spellboundblog.com/2007/08/07/controversial-photos-archvists-choices-and-journalism/">naked student pix</a> show that the campus establishment WFB decried fifty-plus years ago was not just Keynesian, agnostic, and anti-anti-Communist, but had some very wild fellow travelers indeed.  <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDQ3ZjU2OGZmNjgwM2JiYzNhZGMxNzAyOWE0ZDM2YTY= Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:40:57 -0400 WFB and Zarathustra -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWUxMTUzZDlmM2M2ODBjYzk1ZWI5ZTg4ZjAyNTJlOGE= The Nietzscheans are joining the party. A friend writes that he thought of WFB "after a weekend of photographing thousands of pix of dancers. 'I will not have a God that does not dance' and Buckley had too much passion to be called a maneuverer. Notwithstanding his visage of a cold and rational automaton, he was the ultimate dancer, pursuing not moves as in chess but fantastic leaps and pirouettes in inspiring and breathtaking discourse . . ." The line about Bill maneuvering refers to Whittaker Chambers's injunction, often quoted by Bill, that to live is to maneuver. The quotation about the dancing God is from Thus Spake Zarathustra. Like every college graduate of a certain age, I have the Viking Portable Nietzsche, purple with the walrus mustaches, translated by Walter Kaufmann, who gives the line as: "I would believe only in a god who could dance" (First Part, "On Reading and Writing"). I imagine Bill could do the prom and society-wedding thing, though I never saw him dance or heard him speak of it. He was certainly a performer, though. The way he put together an editorial section--see pp. 35-9 of Right Time, Right Place--was performance art. Cruising Speed and Overdrive, his books about single weeks in his life, were meta-performances: performance pieces about the performance piece that was his life. Unlike Nietzsche, he hoped his performances were dedicated to a higher purpose not given by himself. He loved Anatole France's story about the juggler whose act pleased the Virgin Mary, and hoped he might do likewise (pleasing at the same time his family, his country, and the spirit of liberty). As for me, I think that in Nietzsche we lost to syphilis and philosophy a great writer of liner notes. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWUxMTUzZDlmM2M2ODBjYzk1ZWI5ZTg4ZjAyNTJlOGE= Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:41:52 -0400 More WFB Skinny Dipping -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTI4NTY5Y2NmNTYzOTk1ZTI1NTQ4YTZhZGIwMzQwZWY= Pain and skinny dipping is all you people care about. Neal Freeman explains the Yale angle of the latter. <blockquote> Your blog is becoming pleasurably habit-forming, which I suppose is the idea. Bill had an almost-lifelong thing with skinny dipping. It wasn't so much an LBJ-style, let's-get-basic thing, as a nobody-here-but-us-Yalies thing. By the time you got to New Haven, it was no doubt a more civilized place. But up to -- I'm guessing -- the mid-Seventies, it was standard practice for Yalies to skinny dip in the Payne Whitney swimming pool. It was also standard if scandalous practice for the university to photograph all incoming students in the nude, front and side. The Internet has proved disappointing to some for failing to exhibit these artifacts. Let's see . . . in addition to various Buckleys and Bushes, those archives would include, among others, a Kerry, a Cheney, a Dean, a Lieberman, a Clinton and a Rodham. </blockquote> Neal, class of '62, is right about the changing folkways of Yale. I never went to the Payne Whitney pool, but I never heard it was clothing optional. The practice of photographing students had also fallen by the wayside, though it was the subject of outraged pieces in Yale-centric publications from time to time. I believe it originiated in the crackpot notions, vaguely eugenicist, of aYale faculty member back in the day. (Can I get some synergy with the Liberal Fascism blog on this? If Jonah doesn't know, then Ron Rosenbaum is the self-appointed expert on such matters.) I would only offer two corrections to Neal's note. LBJ used his body parts, and bodily functions (speaking to aides while he was on the toilet, etc., etc.), to humiliate and dominate. While not denying that there was some pulling of rank going on with Bill, I think his aggressive impulses were easier to take, and easier to blow off, because he was a fundamentally happier, and better, person. If it was a Yale thing, then what did it mean for Ross Douthat, son of Harvard? <blockquote> Fight, fight for Yale, the sons of Eli are out for glory. On to the fray, we'll tell to Harvard the same old story. The cry is On, on they come, we'll raise the slogan of Yale triumphant. Smash, bang, we'll rip poor Harvard, whoop it up for Yale today. </blockquote> <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTI4NTY5Y2NmNTYzOTk1ZTI1NTQ4YTZhZGIwMzQwZWY= Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:34:21 -0400 Pain and Jesus -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDMyZWUyMDRhMWQxYWVlNzcxMzQ2MzA3ZDM4ZTlmOGI= This line -- “Pain is like water; it finds every crack in your character and makes it wider” (Right Time, Right Place, p. 211) -- seems to have struck a nerve. Eve Tushnet wrote me about it last month. Now the Rev. Victor Austin, theologian in residence at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in NYC, writes: <blockquote> As water, freezing, expands the cracks in a rock, so pain finds the cracks in our soul and would break us . . . . It seems to me that Jesus' cruciform agony showed his remarkable consistency of character; still forgiving, still providing. (The focus on his pain, as in the film The Passion of the Christ, is not the focus of the Gospel. Still, the fact of the pain is there, and with it the fact of his integrity.) </blockquote> Any serious religion or philosophy has to grapple with the problem of pain, because every person does. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDMyZWUyMDRhMWQxYWVlNzcxMzQ2MzA3ZDM4ZTlmOGI= Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:47:42 -0400 Skinny Dipping with WFB -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2NhNTMxMmRjMDc1YjgwM2UxZTA2MjM4OTE4ZTJkYmI= So, visiting Laura Ingraham's website, I see that I buried the lede, which is why she has a bazillion gazillion listeners, while I have, oh, none. She did indeed ask me if Bill skinny dipped with his interns. She was riffing off an account by Ross Douthat of such an episode on a cross-Sound sail that Bill, Ross, and I forget who else took. I don't like boats, so I only went on Bill's once, and all I remember was that he cooked our fries by dumping an entire stick of butter in the pan. So I did not risk incurring the curse of Canaan (Genesis 9:20-25). But I told Laura that the story did not surprise me at all. Bill was formal in circumstances that required it. If you were a guest on Firing Line, you always got your proper honorific -- Mr., Prof., Gov. But when Bill was relaxing, and where are you more relaxed than at anchor, and there were no horses to be scared, why not? John Quincy Adams, an even more formal man, could shed clothes when appropriate. His diary records that on June 13, 1825, the first year of his presidency, he went canoeing on the Potomac. Halfway across the boat sprung a leak and sank. "I had ample leisure to reflect upon my own indiscretion." He made the far shore, where he "took off my shirt and pantaloons," and swam, waded, or sat "naked basking on the bank at the margin of the river," until a carriage came to fetch him. What was good enough for sixth president was good enough for the first editor of National Review. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2NhNTMxMmRjMDc1YjgwM2UxZTA2MjM4OTE4ZTJkYmI= Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:12:38 -0400 A Nice Time with Laura -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmFmMzM3ZGU4NzkwM2JiMTVjNjJmNmQ0MDViMGQyMmM= ...whom I congratulated on her newly adopted son, Dmitri. I spoke some Russian, but since the only Russian I know is from songs I have sung we did not get very far. My offering was a line from "Borodino," the old army marching song attributed to Lermontov. (It appears on p. 29 of Right Time, Right Place). When the Communist Party fell from power in the old Soviet Union, I sang "God Save the Czar" on WNYC, the public radio station here. In other circumstances, they might have appreciated it in a ghosts on the roof sort of way, but that day they seemed rather glum. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmFmMzM3ZGU4NzkwM2JiMTVjNjJmNmQ0MDViMGQyMmM= Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:06:09 -0400 Descent into anti-Semitism -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGNiNjhmODU5MTBkZTM1NDE5ZmU5NTAyMjEyMGU5NDc= A good review in the Washington Post Sunday of RTRP by Justin Moyer. He gaves a wrong impression however when he says that I chronicle WFB's "descent into...simmering anti-Semitism." Bill's 1991 NR article, "In Search of Anti-Semitism," and the book of the same name that followed in 1993, tried to flag and denounce anti-Semitism on the left and the right. Not for the first time, Bill saw a danger before most other people did. It would make as much sense to write of Lincoln's descent into slavery and secession. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGNiNjhmODU5MTBkZTM1NDE5ZmU5NTAyMjEyMGU5NDc= Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:05:48 -0400 I Will Be on Laura Ingraham -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODU0YWIzNzYxYTk2NTVhYWE4MzhkM2RjMjM4ZGEyYmI= Monday, 11:15 (EST). Laura and I--and Ann Coulter and Eric Alterman--go back to the dawn of MSNBC, before the bydrophobia set in. For a description of those days see pp. 143-4 of Right Time, Right Place. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODU0YWIzNzYxYTk2NTVhYWE4MzhkM2RjMjM4ZGEyYmI= Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:24:52 -0400 Audio of Milt Rosenberg Interview... -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OThhMWFjNDk4MGQ3NjE4NzYwZmE1YzU0Y2Q4MTg5OGY= ...<a href="http://www.wgnradio.com/shows/ext720/wgnam-ext720-unabridged-brookhiser,0,4493660.mp3file">here</a>. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OThhMWFjNDk4MGQ3NjE4NzYwZmE1YzU0Y2Q4MTg5OGY= Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:28:10 -0400 When irish Eyes are Smilin' -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2QyM2ZhZjQ2YTg1OTk4ZTI5ZWViYzU2YzE2ODJlNWY= Richard Vigilante was in town to promote George Gilder's latest, The Israel Test (Richard Vigilante Books). We had drinks at the Cipriani bar in Grand Central. Rich, who is both an old NR-nik and an old friend, is one of the people who knows almost everyone mentioned in Right Time, Right Place, which he said he enjoyed, though not as much as his wife Susan (nee Tunney). "Italians are said to be good at getting even; the Irish say, The hell with that, let's get mad" (p. 138). <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2QyM2ZhZjQ2YTg1OTk4ZTI5ZWViYzU2YzE2ODJlNWY= Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:15:03 -0400 I will not cede more power to the state. -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Njg0MDI0MzZiMzUyNjcwMGExY2ZhMTgyMTIyMzhkYTU= <blockquote>I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yestereday at the voting booth.</blockquote> —Up From Liberalism, William F. Buckley Jr. Great stuff: when Bill wrote it (1959), when I read it (1968), and now. All we would have to change is that General Motors is the state. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Njg0MDI0MzZiMzUyNjcwMGExY2ZhMTgyMTIyMzhkYTU= Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:47:29 -0400 Who is the New WFB? -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmZiNjY1OGZjZjA5ODBjODRjM2NiM2I2MmVjODE1YjE= Dennis Prager asked me this question today as we talked about Right Time, Right Place and the current scene. I gave an answer, though I felt a bit like Ralph Kramden going hamana-hamana. You can see aspects of WFB here and there: as an editor, Rich pilots his bark; as a journalist, one thinks of George Will, Ramesh, Ross Douthat; as an electronic personality, one thinks of Rush as a fellow master of a medium. But the short answer is that no one is WFB, and the corollary of that is that no one is any great figure of the past. Humanity falls into types, but each one of us has enough peculiarities to be individual, and our different circumstances make us moreso. There will never be another WFB, in part, because the times require (or if that is too deterministic, respond to) different figures. I ring the changes in RTRP on Bill as a father--of a movement, of (symbolically and intellectually) me. George Washington was the Father of his Country. There won't be another, until America becomes a new country or countries, and those Founding Fathers will be as different as their nations. When Lincoln was heading for his inauguration, he said his task was harder than Washington's. Arguably it was, and arguably he was the greater man. He was certainly different--and there haven't been any next Lincolns either. Back from history to the present, this means we all have to be ourselves. One hopes, our best selves. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmZiNjY1OGZjZjA5ODBjODRjM2NiM2I2MmVjODE1YjE= Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:46:44 -0400 Dennis Prager -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTU1YzYwMWVjNjg1YzJmZmFmMDIwNTczOWQyMzc0MjQ= I will be on Dennis Prager Tuesday, from 1 to 2 PM EST. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTU1YzYwMWVjNjg1YzJmZmFmMDIwNTczOWQyMzc0MjQ= Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:42:34 -0400 Seattle Cancels Again! -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmI4ZWUyMjE1MzFmYzYzODA1ODE4M2U1Yjk5YmYzMzI= Must be the weather. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmI4ZWUyMjE1MzFmYzYzODA1ODE4M2U1Yjk5YmYzMzI= Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:55:32 -0400 Seattle Rescheduled -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWY0NjNlZTZmOGNiNWM0ODRjZmJlZDc5NTQ3ZGUwNTA= I will be on KTTH with David Boze Monday from 9 to 9:30 AM (Pacific Time). <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWY0NjNlZTZmOGNiNWM0ODRjZmJlZDc5NTQ3ZGUwNTA= Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:54:39 -0400 WFB, Cozzens, Nabokov -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2UwODM5MWI4MzI2ZDJlMjkzMTBkZjQwMGE2Y2ZlZDI= In Chicago last night at the Hunt Club I gave an answer to a question that I have to qualify. Was Bill interested in fiction or poetry, I was asked, and I said bluntly, No. I was contrasting him with Bill Rusher, who had very strong poetical tastes (Swinburne, Housman, Santayana) and who liked to read his favorites aloud, or recite them from memory. I don't believe I ever heard Bill quote a line of verse, or mention fiction he liked (or disliked). But he did write about fiction from time to time. He reviewed James Gould Cozzens's By Love Possessed for National Review, and panned it, when Cozzens was at the height of his reputation. Interestingly, Bill attacked him for using too many recondite words. Bill was not shy with nine dollar words himself, but he called Cozzens a "rare word exhumer." Dwight McDonald cited Bill's review approvingly in his own hostile--and career-destroying--review of By Love Possessed in I think Commentary. Bill also talked about fiction. Sam Tanenhaus told me once about interviewing NR colleagues of Whittaker Chambers for his Chambers biography. He not only spoke to Bill, but also to younger NR-niks of the late fifties--John Leonard, Garry Wills. Garry recalled discussing Lolita with Chambers, and added that Bill would not have read such a book. But Sam knew, from his own researches, that it was Bill who tipped Chambers to Lolita in the first place. I also remember from years of reading "On the Right" that Bill slammed John Cheever's Falconer and praised John Updike's The Coup. So I led my Chicago audience astray. I still wouldn't say that belles lettres was a main interest of Bill's, but he had an omnivorous mind, and whatever crossed his path he consumed. His great artistic passion, of course, was music (see pp. 95-6 and 240-1 of Right Time, Right Place). <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2UwODM5MWI4MzI2ZDJlMjkzMTBkZjQwMGE2Y2ZlZDI= Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:38:42 -0400 Tonight in Chicago -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWMzMTE0ZDNiY2UyZGE1ZmEzYzAyOTZkNTY3NmNhNDU= I will be speaking and signing copies of Right Time, Right Place at the Hunt Club, 1100 N. State Street, from 6-8 PM, under the aegis of the Chicago friends of the New Criterion. Arma virumque. <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWMzMTE0ZDNiY2UyZGE1ZmEzYzAyOTZkNTY3NmNhNDU= Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:53:34 -0400 You Know What WFB Looked Like -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTIyMDJmNmQ1MWMzNGY0OTZmZTQyNDU0ODc4NGI1MjA= The guy on the left is me in the spring of 1977, a few months before going to work at NR full time. I posted this shot once before, and identified the man on the far right, but he was so mortified that I will not do so again. <img src="http://www2.nationalreview.com/dest/2007/11/17/image001.jpg" border="0" alt="" /> <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTIyMDJmNmQ1MWMzNGY0OTZmZTQyNDU0ODc4NGI1MjA= Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:57:29 -0400 On Air in Chicago -- By: Rick Brookhiser webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rick Brookhiser) http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzAxMTQ3OTA2MzYxOTM2YmFkY2ZmMmViMDcyZmNiODA= I will be on Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg, WGN-AM, Wednesday from 9 to 11 PM (Central Time). <hr width=100% size=2> http://brookhiser.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzAxMTQ3OTA2MzYxOTM2YmFkY2ZmMmViMDcyZmNiODA= Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:58:57 -0400