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Buckley Fiction
Buckley’s latest novel, Getting It Right, takes a look at these two movements and implicitly shows why it was necessary for the excommunication of the Randians and Birchers. Getting It Right chronicles the ideological journeys of two young anti-communist lovers who met at the famous Sharon Summit where Young Americans for Freedom was founded. Leonora Goldstein was a young Randian who went to work as a secretary for Barbara Branden, and Woodroe Raynor who works for the John Birch Society and follows the eccentric General Ed Walker. Walker was a World War II hero who led the federal troops that forcibly integrated Little Rock. He was later forced out of the army for making speeches to troops in Germany that accused many major American politicians and media figures of being Communist. He then went on to protest the federal government’s attempt to integrate Ole Miss. The two figures argue amongst each other showing flaws in both systems and they of course end up getting engaged as respectable National Review conservatives. Unfortunately, their intellectual odyssey to get there was largely uninteresting. Woodrow never buys the more extreme conspiracy theories harbored by Birchers, and Leonora seems always uneasy with Objectivist’s authoritarian and overly ideological stances. Woodrow ends up quitting the Society after reading Revilo Oliver’s piece on the JFK assassination which essentially says Kennedy was as much a criminal as was Oswald. Leonora quits after Nathaniel and Barbara Branden are excommunicated from Rand’s inner circle. Buckley of course focuses on the least pleasant aspects of the John Birch Society and Rand’s Collective. The main focus on Rand is her affair with Branden. When dealing with the John Birch Society, he spends more time on General Walker and Revilo Oliver, a man who was eventually forced out of the Society for his anti-Semitism, than on Robert Welch. Interestingly enough, Oliver originally wrote for National Review and was a close friend of Buckley’s, indeed a member of his wedding party. National Review also editorialized in defense of Walker after he was arrested for his protest. They hoped "that all civil libertarians in the United States will take on the General Walker case, and that President Kennedy will telephone his condolences to him in jail, that being his habit when people involved in racial entanglements are abused by local courts, proving that Mr. Kennedy is willing to intercede on behalf of the victimized, irrespective of race, color, or creed." Obviously if someone wrote anything like that today, the mini-cons at National Review would call for their head. More importantly is the fact that this book only touches on Buckley’s excommunication of the Randians and Birchers. While I don’t think Buckley should have written either group out of the conservative movement, the book still accurately shows the absurdities of some of the John Birch Society’s conspiracy theories, and the cult-like atmosphere of the Objectivists. In fact it was not really the kookiness of the John Birch Society that led to their excommunication. By Buckley’s own account the final straw in writing out the Birchers was Robert Welch’s editorial opposing the Vietnam War. The book does not talk about the outrageous purges of people like John T. Flynn and Murray Rothbard. In fact the only mention of Rothbard is in the context of him being forced out of the Rand’s inner circle. We are told that the major differences between Rothbard and Rand was that Rothbard did not support the Goldwater campaign because "he says political action doesn’t work in a ‘statist society.’" Of course Rothbard supported Thurmond, Taft, and a host of other political campaigns. The reason he opposed Goldwater’s campaign was clearly stated. He believed that while Goldwater was better than Johnson on domestic issues, he would not be capable of making any real reforms with a Democratic Congress and he didn’t wish to make radical changes on many fronts (like abolishing the income tax, anti-trust laws, or social security.) On foreign policy, where the president unfortunately can do quite a bit of damage without Congress, Rothbard thought that Goldwater was more warmongering and interventionist than Johnson. George Orwell famously wrote, "who controls the past controls the future," and this book will surely be used to justify future purges by National Review. So using the precedent of Buckley’s purges, David Frum wrote a cover story in National Review calling for National Reviewians to "turn their backs" on paleos. The next day, he printed a letter by an ex-paleo who wrote that "[i]t’s time that [paleos] went the way of Objectivism and The John Birch Society." Unfortunately for Frum and his cohorts, this parallel is not completely accurate. For one, as Paul Gottfried has observed, the conservative wars described in Getting It Right were waged among parties who agreed on most issues and claimed a common legacy. Paleoconservatives and neocons have absolutely nothing in common. More importantly, regardless of what David Frum and Jonah Goldberg claim, the anti-war right is a diverse group of intellectuals who are dissatisfied with the status quo of the Right. That National Review feels obliged to try to write them out of the movement time and time again testifies to their endurance. March 25, 2003 Marcus Epstein [send him mail] is an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where he is president of the college libertarians and editor of the conservative newspaper, The Remnant. A selection of his articles can be seen here. Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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