BOOKS
McCARTHY AND HIS APOLOGISTS
McCARTHY AND HIS ENEMIES. By William F. Buckley, Jr., and
L.
Brent Bozell. Regnery. $5.00.
A couple of years ago, William F. Buckley, Jr., Yale '50,
wrote a book,
God and Man at Yale,
that surprisingly made the best–
seller lists for a while. Maybe there are more Yale men around than
one likes to think, maybe the lavish promotion financed by the author's
wealthy father was responsible. Or perhaps the public was intrigued
by the novelty of a brash and iconoclastic young intellectual challenging
the academic powers-that-be from the right, for Buckley's complaint
was that Yale is now a hotbed of irreligion and what he called social–
ism-i.e., Keynesian economics and New Deal liberalism. At any rate, the
unexpected success of the book-helped along by a notably obtuse
counter-campaign by the Yale authorities-plus his own clever pen and
tongue soon made Buckley into a
promi~nt
spokesman for the lunatic
fringe of "anti-Communism" (the quotes re not accidental). His com–
bination of cynicism, opportunism, and f
icism was effective, if dis–
turbing. When a friend asked him how he could defend on a radio pro–
gram Lait and Mortimer's gutter-sniping
USA Confidential,
he replied,
"I don't like the way the book is written any more than you do. But
it's on
our
side.... And anyway you've got to write that way to reach
a big public." He also wrote an article in the
Freeman
arguing that "we
must support McCarthy" despite his "manners" because his demagogy
is (a) no worse than that of Roosevelt and Truman (which I deny),
and (b) it is effective. "Young Mr. Buckley is getting into low com–
pany," I wrote in an examination of his career in
The Reporter
for
May 27, 1952, and expressed a fatherly hope he would straighten out
as he grew up.
The hope has alas not been fulfilled. Now he and his brother-in-law
have written an apologia for McCarthyism that has made the best-seller
lists as did
God and Man at Yale.
But unlike that book, whose style was
lively and whose thesis, though exaggerated, was at least plausible (since
Yale like most universities has indeed sadly fallen away from the faith
of our forefathers in God and free enterprise), the present volume
is
dull in style and weak, not to use a less polite term, in its main conten-
