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Getting It Right

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If you have George H. Nash's /The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945/ on your bookshelf and have thought its themes fertile for a novel of manners, William F. Buckley Jr.'s /Getting it Right/ is the book for you. It presumes substantial familiarity with the figures and institutions that shaped the modern right, so readers who have not followed conservatism's internecine philosophical struggles will find little in this book that anchors their interest. Those well-acquainted with the patriarchs of such fixtures as National Review and Young Americans for Freedom will appreciate /Getting it Right/ as an illuminating chronicle of an ideological revolution of which Buckley is one of the last surviving witnesses. The book is also a fitting companion to /The Redhunter/, Buckley's novelization of the rise and fall of Joe McCarthy, as both books contribute an important perspective to the emergence in the 1950s of an anti-Communist eddy that helped invigorate an ascending conservative movement.

During this era, Buckley, Russell Kirk, Whitaker Chambers, and others were defining, in the pages of National Review, the parameters of conservatism as we understand it today. In so doing, they strove to establish their breed of conservatism as the dominant ideology of anti-Communism, while such firebrands as Ayn Rand and the John Birch Society's Robert Welch adopted a fiercer, more confrontational demeanor. /Getting it Right/ is Buckley's account of how Rand and Welch estranged themselves from the emerging conservative silent majority. Buckley is fair to both and displays a keen understanding of how Rand and Welch each captivated their respective sects. Presently, Rand's legacy is more enduring and I expect that Buckley's portrayal of Rand as a shrew who may have "created an entire . . . philosophical system[] to deal with her own psychological problems" will earn this book hysterical reproachment from those who still adopt Rand's "Objectivism" and style themselves Randian heroes. But Buckley has in no sense whatsoever adopted the Aaron Sorkin model of political fiction wherein one makes ideological opponents look silly by putting words in their mouths that they would never speak. Buckley clearly acknowledges Rand's literary brilliance and her gift for rigorous analytical deduction. He uses her personal implosion as an object lesson in how the most studious fidelity to capitalism and freedom cannot yield genuine happiness without a corresponding commitment to the traditional social virtues.

But did this have to be a novel? Not until the final pages will readers develop much affection for the major fictional characters, each of whom serves as little more than a deus ex machina to hurry along the narrative. The author was a major participant in many of the events chronicled, and history would have been better served by a well-documented first-person account than by a half-fictionalization in which Buckley at times clumsily renders himself as a supporting character. The novel's copious citations to National Review editorials also harmonize rather poorly with its literary form. Yet the struggle for the soul of American conservatism does have the character of an epic. The drama reaches its crescendo at the 1964 Republican National Convention when a defiant Barry Goldwater declares, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." By itself, the sentiment was and is beautiful, but Buckley places it in context, and, as always, stands athwart history, yelling Stop.

Being from Utah, this book attracted my curiousity when the book jacket showed the main character, Woodroe was a Mormon. It is not too often that you see a name author choose to make someone of my faith the center of a story.

I was disappointed that Mr. Buckley did not seem to conduct the level of research one would except from someone of his stature. The number of inacuracies about Mormons and Utah is surprising. Couldn't he get a NR intern to do some basic fact checking? Some things are minor like his mentioning the University of Salt Lake City which does not exist, or that Woodroe is from a town north of the Salt Lake. Look at a map, there are no towns on the north end of the Great Salt Lake.

Most incredible are the situations he puts Woodroe in early in the book when he is serving as a missionary. LDS missionaries always work and travel in pairs, but Buckley totally ignores this basic tenant so he can get his main character into situations that would not happen to a normal missionary.

Later in the book it turns out that Woodroe is not all that commited to his faith. Buckley could have developed his character better to show why this happened.

I am not as familiar with the other institutions that he tackles in the book (The JBS and Ayn Rand) but if he was as sloppy in representing them as he was the Mormons than there is probably more fiction in this work than meets the eye.

"Getting It Right" is a historical novel by the godfather of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr. I don't think I've ever read a historical novel written by one of the actual participants, but here's one. Buckley was present at the creation of "the vast right-wing conspiracy:" the post World War II conservative movement (that would later remake American politics) as it took form in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Buckley tells the story of two extremist groups that could have derailed the new insurgency: the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand's "Objectivists."

Buckley's protagonist is Woodroe Raynor, who we first meet as a young Mormon missionary in 1956 in Austria, along the Hungarian border. I must say young Woodroe's mission is unlike any I experienced as an elder. He lives with a young American couple, teaches English to the natives, and builds houses on the side. It could be that Buckley is familiar with more recent LDS humanitarian missions, or he may be thinking of the effort led by Elder Ezra Taft Benson immediately following the second world war, or he could be making up this part of the story out of whole cloth. But it's very unlikely that a 19 year-old elder would have served a non-proselyting mission like this in 1956. Then there's the little manner of his girlfriend, Teresa, who he sleeps with. She is Hungarian, and she draws him into the 1956 Hungarian revolution against the Communist Russian occupiers. Woodroe is shot trying to help refugees escape, and Teresa turns out to be a double agent. This political and sexual betrayal helps make Woodroe a convinced anti-communist.

Woodroe then attends Princeton University where his mentor is professor Theo Romney, a Mormon from Utah who is the only conservative on the history faculty. His hobby is painting from memory as massive mural of the Wasatch mountains. Together they meet the circle around Robert Welch, a wealthy candy manufacturer who founds the fiercely right-wing John Birch Society in 1958. Buckley doesn't display much curiosity about distinctive LDS beliefs. He assumes for the purpose of his narrative that Mormons believe in Jesus and are bound by a code of comprehensive morality, which makes them Christian enough for him. Buckley must have noticed during these years the fervency and numbers of LDS members involved with the John Birch Society. A little later in the novel Woodroe attends a local meeting of the Birchers in Salt Lake, where Ezra Taft Benson is seated on the dais.

Meanwhile a young Jewish woman, Leonora Goldstein, becomes involved with the intimate circle in New York City around Ayn Rand, the novelist and libertarian philosopher. There she witnesses at first hand the sexual intricacies of Rand and her very married lieutenant Nathaniel Branden (later one of the fathers of the "self-esteem" movement.) Buckley is witheringly satirical about the Randoids. He targets their cruelty, self-deception, and intellectual arrogance. (The very title of the novel could be a double-entendre about the romantic entanglements of the various right-wing characters.) The word "creepy" comes up more than once in referring to the Objectivists. It's pretty outrageous material, but
Buckley appends a "Notes" section where he lists the sources for every chapter (when he's not relying on his own recollections.)

Woodroe progresses through the JBS and begins to meet some its more colorful characters. There's Major General Edwin Walker, who tries to seduce Woodroe even as Lee Harvey Oswald fires a shot at Walker through a glass window. Then there's Revilo Oliver, an academic classics genius who spins increasingly elaborate, paranoid conspiracy theories to explain every bad aspect of American life. (Both these men were real people who Buckley came to know.) Woodroe becomes appalled by the racism, meanness, and downright looniness of the Birchers and breaks with them. He writes to Theo Romney:

"Us folks from Utah aren't racists. I never even felt the urge to look down on Jews and Negroes. So many people do. You commented in your course how the Chinese railroad workers were treated when they crossed 'God's country'. That's *our* God, Theo. Other Christians get it almost right. We get it *all* right."

Woodroe goes to work for Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, which is vividly described. We also meet along the way Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, a young Alan Greenspan (who was a Randoid), and other prominent figures from the time. Buckley himself appears as a supporting character. So does this make "Getting It Right" a Norman Mailer ish "nonfiction novel"?

Woodroe meets yet another Mormon, Than Koo, a refugee from Communist terrorism in Vietnam. The climax of the novel comes when "National Review" in 1966, Buckley's hugely influential magazine, publishes a special issue denouncing the JBS as dangerous and deranged in its paranoid analyses of America. The novel ends as Leonora leaves the Objectivists, becomes a Catholic, and becomes engaged to Woodroe, who is leaving to fight in Vietnam. I see a sequel in the works.

Buckley's Mormons are defiantly idealistic, even as they are backsliders who drink and cohabit with their girlfriends. They are tolerant, compassionate, and committed to truth. Although their forceful presence in the JBS suggests they are susceptible to unwise fanaticism. Buckley captures well the feverish intoxication of extremist ideas, of how systematic ideologies take flight from reality. (Buckley seems to imply that some Jewish people has a similar cultural predisposition for Rand's cult.) Buckley himself has always been a model of civilized humanity. He comes across an an emotionally intact, jolly man who is able to successfully integrate faith and reason.

It appears that in recent years Buckley is constructing a fictional narrative history of post-war America in his novels "Nuremberg", "The Redhunter", "Spytime", "Elvis in the Morning", and this volume, which fairly screams "to be continued." For sheer literary value these novels are no threat to the "American chronicle" novels of Buckley's old nemesis, Gore Vidal. Vidal creates deeper characters, more involving plots, and infuses his history with stinging wit. But his political views grow more extreme and paranoid the closer he gets to his own lifetime. Buckley's books radiate sanity and reasonableness and they are pretty funny in their own right. Plus he is arguably the most influential American journalist of the past 50 years. Some may find his books too abstruse for their tastes. Me, I eat 'em up like candy.

This book really had an impact on my thinking. When in graduate school I was really taken with the objectivist school of thought. I fancied myself a libertarian, and thought that I was SO sophisticated. Really I had discovered a sure fire way to get A's on public policy papers by using a simple formula for virtually every problem. The argument is simply this: the government has a monopoly on the use of force; therefore the government is exceedingly dangerous. Free-markets operate without coercion. The end.

As a younger conservative, I wasn't all that familiar with the John Birch crowd. Older teachers in the faculty room often accused me of being a "Bircher" because I was a conservative. This book introduced me to the more hysterical elements of anti-communism.

So where does modern conservatism come from? It seems to me that this book is an allegory, not a history. It is no mistake that the former Objectivist and the former Bircher get married in the end, and he goes off to fight in Vietnam. In a way, this is exactly what happened to the conservative movement. Philosophically speaking, the modern conservative coalition is made up of social conservatives and libertarians, among others. This book is effective as an allegory showing this philosophical development. Artfully done!

Getting It Right
by William F. Buckley, Jr.
(Regnery, 302 pps.)

As a political activist whose views have been described as "extreme right-wing" (although I would argue that the Libertarian party annoys the Left and the Right more or less equally), I am naturally interested in how the American Right evolved, from the beginning of the Cold War to the present. It was for that reason--and not, Lord knows, because I expected any stylistic treatthat I looked forward to reading "Getting It Right." Unfortunately, as is usually the case with Mr. Buckley's historical fiction, the book would have been far more interestingindeed potentially a classichad the author presented it as non-fiction, either history or personal memoir. As fiction, this book is a bit of a snore.

Mr. Buckley just can't write fiction very well. I would guess that this is because he doesn't ask to be coached, and none of his circle dares coach him unbidden, and in any case his novels sell well enough regardless of their literary quality. His fansof which I am one, when he sticks to journalism and criticismlive in hope where his fiction is concerned. However, I have finally given way to despair.

"Getting It Right" gives us a terrific subject: the story of how two very different "right-wing" movementsthe anti-Communist John Birch Society and the "objectivist" cult of Ayn Randdiverged and sometimes co-operated and between them pretty well destroyed the possibility of a libertarian revolution, leaving the United States to degenerate into the authoritarian collectivist society it has become.

The book is also blessed with a strong cast of historical characters: the imperious Miss Rand; the ever-more-paranoid Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society); Welch's ally, the bizarre Gen. Edwin Walker; the anti-Communist academic Revilo Oliver; self-help guru Nathaniel Branden; Sen. Barry Goldwater; cameo appearances by John and Robert Kennedy and Earl Warren.

Unfortunately, the subject matter and the historical charactersthe most interesting components of the bookare treated with an almost insulting superficiality. The author spends far too much time on a fictional protagonist, Woodroe Raynor, whose background is so improbable as to make the reader roll his eyes almost immediately: a Mormon missionary, not yet 20 years old, he is miraculously caught up in the Hungarian revolt of 1956, an event that convinces him of the inherent evil of Communism. His romantic interest (if you can call it that) throughout the book is a Randian acolyte: Leonora Goldstein, the idealistic daughter of refugees from Hitler's depredations. The woodenness, the utter lack of emotion with which these two approach their relationship (which begins in the late 1950s and culminates in their engagement at the end of the book, in the mid-1960s) is quite illustrative of Mr. Buckley's chief flaw as a novelist: his apparent discomfort with anything to do with "feelings."

I sometimes criticize writers (women writers in particular) for being overly occupied with the illustration of emotion, but Mr. Buckley goes to the other extreme. He acknowledges that people feel this way or that way, and admits somewhat grudgingly that people have sexual intercourse, but he's most reluctant to go any farther than that. In his rather sketchy illustration of the relationship between Woodroe and Leonora, one sees little or no affection, and certainly no passion. They behave to each other more like an undemonstrative but secretly incestuous brother and sister than like a courting couple.

Even more egregious is Mr. Buckley's description (or nondescription) of the sexual liaisons between Miss Rand and her sometime heir apparent, Branden. Such an affair did, notoriously, take place, but it's difficult to form an original movie, in one's mind's eye, of what the postmenopausal and emphatically hideous Miss Rand must have looked like, with her clothes off, doing the nasty with a chap some 30 years her junior. A gruesomely detailed written descriptionand we all know how funny Mr. Buckley can be, when he wants to bewould not have gone unappreciated. An even greater challenge for the author, which Mr. Buckley likewise shirks, would have been to make the reader understand why a young man might want to swyve the aging diva of objectivism in the first place.

In describing the end of their affair, Mr. Buckley commits one of the most elementary errors of fiction-writing. Here is how he describes her reaction to Branden's decision to end their sexual relationship:

"Nathaniel had seen her cross before. He had seen her critical. But he had not seen her uncontrollably, titanically, murderously angry. It was like a great tidal wave smashing everything in its path, including skyscrapers, the white cliffs of Dover, and the Maginot Line. When finally he escaped upstairs to Barbara, they wept together. But before they had come near to exhausting their reserves of mutual consolation, the telephone rang, and lo! it was Ayn. She wanted to speak with Barbara.

"She did so at great length. Any told how she had misestimated Barbara's husband. She had thought him a true man, on the scale of the great men she had created in fiction. He was less than that. Far less. He was despicable."

Any graduate assistant English instructor at any college in the United States would have handed that passage back to Mr. Buckley with the sharp admonition, "Show me, don't tell me!" Unfortunately, just as no friend of Barbra Streisand or Tim Robbins or Ed Asner is going to tell them that their political views are wrongheaded, no friend of Mr. Buckley's is likely to presume to teach him how to write fiction. Thus his next novel, if there is a next, is certain to be yet another exercise in half-assedness.

--Joseph Dobrian

Getting It Right is a fascinating and entertaining tale that captures a unique part of American history. It also carries a message about American Conservatism.

The first thing to note about Getting It Right is that it is, in essence, historical fiction. Buckley is using his front row seat in the development of the modern American Right to weave a novel. The building blocks are the actual events, conversations, and lives of those involved. The fiction is what Buckley calls the "joiner work" that knits the story together.

The focus of this fascinating story is the turbulent decade from 1956 to 1966. The plot centers on the lives of two young people, Woodroe Raynor and Lenora Goldstein, whose paths first cross in 1960 at the founding conference of the Young Americans For Freedom in Sharon, Connecticut. But two unique sections of the American Right are highlighted through the lives of these two individuals: the John Birch Society (via Woodroe) and the objectivists centered around Ayn Rand (via Lenora). As the story develops, you see how the burgeoning conservative movement attempted to define itself and how its members tried to deal with the events and ideas of their times.

Both Woodroe and Lenora struggle with how the groups they are associated with, the Birch Society and Objectivism, fit in the larger world and the Right in America. As the story develops we begin to see how each group seems to have a fatal flaw. Welch can't seem to understand that the failures of American foreign policy and politics are not simply the result of some grand conspiracy theory wherein the communists are masterminding everything. Woodroe begins to see this when he realizes how kooky some of Welch's associates are and how unwilling the society is to recognize progress, differing viewpoints, or even honest failure. Ironically, he begins to find himself in the course of the Barry Goldwater campaign.

If Welch's extremism was tied to public events, Rand's extremism begins to reveal itself in her private life. Rand's arrogance and self-centeredness leads her to see Objectivism as her unique gift to the world; something she controls and owns. She treats the people in her life the same way. Using her philosophy as an excuse, Rand initiates an affair with Nathaniel Braden despite the fact that he is married to one of her closest associates. When Nathaniel tires of an affair with someone twenty-five years his senior Rand brings the weight of her furry and power down on him and erases him from her life. He goes from second in command and future heir to totally ostracize without so much as a complaint from his fellow objectivists.

We are left with two questions: how is the book as a novel and what is its message for conservatism? As a novel Getting It Right is on par with Buckley's previous works. The characters are interesting and lively. The plot moves with a good pace but this is not a thriller or a mystery. No, Buckley's novels are really a series of vignettes and character sketches. He paints the picture by describing the key events and ideas that make up a characters life. The result is interesting, if not spectacular, historical fiction. The fifties and sixties were interesting historical periods and it is entertaining following two young people as they try to make their way through those turbulent times.

What gives this book added pleasure is Buckley's unique perspective on the events, people, and ideas of this particular slice of history. The history involved, and Buckley's place in it, leaves you wondering what he is trying to say with this book. In the end, I believe, Buckley is defining the center of the American Right by outlining the failings of the extremes. If the conservative movement was to succeed it had to set limits, as to what it stood for and how it would communicate and participate in the American political arena. This was, and is, an awkward and difficult process. It is a process that Buckley, as editor of National Review, was intimately involved with and concerned about. There are still those who hold a grudge because of the decisions made during that time (just ask an objectivist about Whitaker Chambers book review of Atlas Shrugged).

With this book Buckley seems to be reaffirming the decision to, in essence, cast aside the Birchers and the hard core Radians; to define the mainstream conservative movement as having limits. What proved the undoing of both Robert Welch an Ayn Rand (in Buckley's view) is their inability to set limits in their own personal and intellectual lives. Both Welch and Rand come across as too smart for their own good. Their intelligence and charisma allows them to build a growing and influential following but their personal demons and lack of restraint soon lead them to extremes and to the edge of the conservative movement. What was missing from both movements was a sense of balance and a deeper knowledge of human nature. This search for one answer above all, this Gnostic quest for an overriding key to history, is both dangerous and inimical to conservatism. In Getting It Right, Buckley seems to be arguing that Welch and Rand abandoned conservatism rather than having been ungraciously kicked out.

If you are at all interested in the history of the Modern American conservative movement, or if you are fascinated by the characters and events of this time period, I recommend Getting It Right. It is a fascinating and intriguing historical story and Buckley's unique brand of historical fiction brings it to life in an enjoyable and accessible way.

I enjoyed this book, but not as a novel. It is better read as a light, but accurate history of the times. Buckley lived through this period and avows that he has given an accurate portrayal, albeit in novel form. I had viewed the John Birch Society as more radical than is portrayed here and much more racist oriented. I have read several of Ayn Rand's works and enjoyed them, but never realized the seriousness it had as a political movement. Buckley's adventure novels are much better written, so I have to assume he was more intrested in telling the inside history as he saw it. It would be interesting to find out how he views the powerful grip the Christian right and the moneyed business interest now have on the party - in relation to this jockeying for power.

Excellent historical novel. Buckley, the Renaissance man in gear as an entertaining, witty, talented underrated in a dumbed down culture, novelist. It isn't about Mormons, it's about a key historical moment in the history of our country. The novel is artfully written and quite fair and accurate about events non-mormon.

In "Getting it Right", William F. Buckley dramatizes the disillusionment of two young conservatives with the John Birch Society and the Objectivist philosophy respectively, two movements which the author excommunicated from "respectable" conservatism in the early days of National Review. The premise had potential, but quickly founders on Buckley's surprisingly pedestrian writing and his spiteful portrayal of political enemies who stood for ideals far more noble, intelligent and ideologically coherent than the weak and cringing kosher counterfeit that Buckley and the National Review has been trying to pass off as true conservatism for 5 decades. In the end, all this silly book represents is an old man trying to justify the misdeeds of his youth. By extensively quoting Ayn Rand and Robert Welch however, the perceptive reader can't help but contrast their insights with the confusion and corruption of mainstream conservatism, and note that Buckley has inadvertently provided evidence of his and his movement's own intellectual and moral bankruptcy.

Like many young men over the past half century, my first taste of conservative politics began in the pages of National Review. Learned, witty and confident in the superiority of its positions, the movement's flagship organ gave voice to the nebulous conservative instincts that were an organic product of the place, time and class in which I was brought up. At the head of our army of happy warriors was our idol, the aristocratic, charming and intellectually formidable William F. Buckley, who would regularly skewer Democratic game with a smile and a polysyllabic insult. Gradually though, I began to notice some troubling things about the National Review and its founder. Compromise crept into the magazine's positions. Republican electoral success began to take precedence over the advancement of conservative policies and candidates. Strange writers appeared who, although making all the right noises about the social issues that drove the rank and file, seemed primarily concerned with Israel and the imposition of doctrinaire free trade policies. Eventually, even that ritualistic nod to heartland conservatism was abandoned, as conservative writers in good standing began to be blacklisted as "extremists" and banished from the movement. The leader who I had once regarded as bold and brilliant, I began to despise as a simpering, stuttering, compromised coward who would gladly throw his friends and allies to the wolves for a few pats on the head from his neocon masters. I saw the very definition of conservativism changed before my eyes, to the point where the magazine now endorses big government, mass immigration, and foreign aggression in the pursuit of fatuous and/or treasonous goals. A magazine that can condemn Pat Buchanan for racism and praise Leon Trotsky (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-schwartz061103.asp) is no longer deserving of the name "conservative". My mistake was in thinking that the National Review's betrayal of its own ostensible principles was a shocking apostasy from a previous ideological purity, when in fact the magazine (and by extension, its editor) had served as a Trojan Horse in the citadel of the American right-wing almost since its inception.

To be sure, the level of the magazine's collaboration with the enemy has been at an all-time record high these past 8 years or so, but the signs were there from the beginning. As early as 1958, the brilliant Dr. Revilo Oliver, one-time friend of Buckley's and a character in this novel, noticed the National Review's
"...tendency toward frivolity and superficiality. It was not only assuming the mannerisms of the pseudo-literary cliques that flourish in the squalor and miasma of the world's largest Jewish city, but- despite or because of the preponderant influence of editors who claimed to have defected from the Communist Party- it increasingly minimized or ignored the existence of an alien directed conspiracy in the United States. It consistently implied that what was happening to our nation was a spontaneous and native aberration, to be combatted with witticisms and sophisticated tolerance, as though it were no more important than quarrels over literary standards..." (From America's Decline: The Education of a Conservative pg 153).

It was that coddling of domestic enemies, deliberate blindness, and lack of seriousness in the face of an existential threat that led Oliver and others to form the John Birch Society. The JBS later had its own problems with infiltration and subversion, but at the time of this novel's setting, was the leading American voice of anti-communism and pure conservative ideology. You see, Buckley's main problem with the JBS and Ayn Rand was that their virtues exposed his shortcomings.

Objectivism, whatever its philosophical or religious problems, was an intellectually formidable, coherent and consistent philosophy of life, while Buckley's conservatism consisted merely of a chaotic and sometimes contradictory ragbag of disparate organizations and demographic groupings: libertarians, Christians, big business, Jeffersonians, militarists, nationalists, resentful Whites, Constitutionalists, anti-Communists of all stripes, et al. Objectivism represented the lucid ideology that Buckley's movement never had. The JBS on the other hand, as true conservatives who learn from facts and history, understood the immensity of the Communist threat and had the courage to fight it- whatever the New York Times might think- and expose it wherever it was found, even at the very centers of American power. The JBS represented the guts, discernment and honesty that Buckley's movement never had.

Ever eager to be granted respectability and approval from the liberal powers-that-be, Buckley was more than happy to stab these erstwhile allies in the back, ostensibly for being "extremist". Thus, Buckley was able to claim the crown of the American right, for what that's worth. And the reasons this book gives for these two movements being deemed untouchable by Buckley and his handlers? Well, Ayn Rand had an adulterous relationship once (what that has to do with the validity of Objectivism, I don't know.) And the JBS's sin was an editorial written by its founder after the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident, questioning the government's motivations and will to win in Vietnam, pointing out how the government deliberately forfeited victory in the Korean War, and asking how Vietnam would be any different. Knowing how that war turned out, I would ask you to read these words of JBS founder Robert Welch and ask yourself if he was extremist or prescient:

"And what on earth makes anybody think that the increased activity in Vietnam has purposes that are basically any different? [From the Korean War]...Where we could have won a decisive victory within three months from any time that our generals were given the green light to go ahead?...Why on earth should this Vietnam operation not turn into a larger and longer and more infamous Korea?...Or that any war carried on against the Communists by Robert Strange McNamara or Dean Rusk is going to be any different from the one they sponsored in the Congo- or more recently in the Dominican Republic- where the net result was the destruction or demoralization of as much as possible of the native anti-Communist strength?...And this gambit fools the American people into thinking that we are serving some purpose, other than exactly what the Communists want, by what we are doing in Vietnam. Naturally the Communists have been doing everything they could to advance the theme that it is our patriotic and humanitarian duty to "stand firm" in Vietnam, and to keep on increasing our forces and our involvement there as the war is "escalated"- exactly according to their plans- into a greater Korea...Will we never learn from experience?"

One last criticism: the slime-ball Buckley thinks nothing of slandering General Walker by having his character make a pass at the male protagonist, but Buckley doesn't mention how "good guy" National Review conservative Marvin Liebman came out of the closet in later years.

In the 1960's, my grandmother was a member of the John Birch Society. In the late '90's, I considered myself a devoted objectivist. So when i saw a work of fiction focusing on a relationship between a Bircher and and objectivist (assumedly to make fun of both) I had to read it. The result? It was a mildly entertaining, and somewhat disappointing historical novel.

Woodrow Rainer is a committed young member of the John Birch Society as a result of him having been shot by communists in Hungary. Leonora Goldstein is a young woman entranced by Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism who ends up working for one of objectivists biggest players, Barbara Branden. While the novel centers around Woody and Leonora's budding romance, it is more concerned with chronicling each character's trials and tribulations in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, the Goldwater presidential campaign, and the burgeoning of the cold war. Gradually we see both Woody and Leonora become disenchanted with each movement and their black and white views of the world.

The biggest disappointment in this book was the imbalance of attention given to Woody's situation at the expense of Leonora's. The chapters on Woody and the Birchers are quite interesting and detailed. When it comes time to get to Leonora, though, Buckley does little more than rehash the details of Ayn Rand's affair with one of her colleeague's, Nathaniel Branden, and their subsequent schism. Leonora is hardly mentioned at all and while the Rand-Branden affair is fascinating, it is better detailed in both Nathaniel and Barbara Branden's respective autobiographies.

The second disappointment is that Buckley seems so concerned with detailing historical events and incorporating them into his novel that he forgets trying to develop his characters. WE understand precious little about either Leonora or Woody by way of their motivations and drives. This is particularly disappointing as the novel is about two groups - Bircher's and objectivists - that verge on cult-like and paranoid styles. It would have been interesting, then, for Buckley to try and profile not WHAT Woody and Leonora do, but WHY they do it.

Otherwise, the book was entertaining, thought-provoking, and a much needed jab at two paranoid idealisms that helped to shape (in good and bad ways) the conservative mind of the 1960's. Despite giving the book only three out of five stars, I would reccomend it to those who are curious about how the conservative landscape was shaped, or are curious about why people do or did join such 'extreme' organizations as the John Birch society of objectivism.