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Reconstructing Conservatism
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14202 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1988 |
2,430 Words |
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Paul Gottfried
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WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.
Patron Saint of the Conservatives
John B. Judis
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988
528 pp., $22.95
RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING
Patrick J. Buchanan
Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1988
392 pp., $18.95
John B. Judis' unauthorized biography of William F. Buckley has created more of a stir than its author ever expected. The May 2 issues off Time ran a feature essay on both Judis and his work of almost ten years. As his friend, I was flabbergasted to see his photograph printed in Time as I was distractedly thumbing through the magazine during dinner. The greatest surprise may have been seeing him in matching suit and tie, something which led me to pour sugar on my hamburger.
Having read the book and some of the comments about it in National Review as well as in Time, it seems to me that Judis has struck the golden mean. Though a certified leftist and the Washington editor of In These Times (a publication that Time, in tendentious understatement, calls a "leftward news-magazine"), Judis at least in this book has (unlike Time) restrained his own tendentiousness. He has written a highly accessible but extensively researched biography of the most conspicuous and certainly the most articulate political intellectual in America during the second half of the twentieth century. And though he disagrees with almost all of Buckley's political stands, he presents them intelligently, sans parti pris, and with obvious sympathy for his subject's personality.
Judis correctly shows the formative influence of Buckley's upbringing on the early phase of his career as a controversialist: from the time he served on the editorial board of the Yale Daily News through the publication God and Man at Yale in 1951 to his launching of National Review in 1955. The counterrevolutionary Catholicism of William F. Buckley, Sr., particularly his view of communism as the antithesis of the Christian West, affected all his ten children in varying degrees. The fact that the Buckleys traveled together constantly and maintained several residences, in, among other places, Venezuela, South Carolina, and Connecticut, created a close, lasting bond between Buckley and both his siblings and his parents. The overshadowing role of his father, who became for the entire household a respected patriarch, is something the younger Buckley has often noted. Significantly, the specifically Catholic aspect of the elder Buckley's conservatism became in his son a more ecumenical tendency. In God and Man at Yale, for example, the young Buckley expressed concern about the eroding Christianity of the Yale Divinity School, but it was to Protestant readers that he addressed himself in such a way that his own Catholicism was never made apparent. And while viewing Marxism as the enemy of Western spirituality, Buckley has usually linked all believing Christians and Jews to a broad religious heritage that he seeks to uphold against Marxism.
Judis emphasizes other critical turning points in Buckley's political-intellectual development: his encounter with the conservative populist Willmoore Kendall as a student at Yale and his
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