Reviews
Tyrell, R. Emmett Jr.
REVIEWS by Emmett Tyrell, Jh. Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered by Russell Kirk. Arlington House, $5.00. Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke. Arlington House,...
...Goebbel's tradition than William Allen White's...
...hold the same sympathy for Dubcek as he held for Benes...
...Beacon Press, $Too Much .00...
...Indeed, his criticisms of conservatism are as underdeveloped as his criticisms of liberalism are overdeveloped...
...From this position he analytically recorded the Czechs' pathos and the Democracies' faint hearted stupidity...
...The resulting study reveals Goldwater's 1964 defeat as a triumph compared with horrid Republican showings in 1958 and 1948...
...In October 1938, as France and Britain's sniveling statesmen attended the Nazi surgeon's amputation of Czechoslovakia, Kennan became secretary to the Prague legation...
...America in the Sixties is a road map for what people who (generally) matter think, complete with caution signs for those perilous stretches of road...
...A new political grouping appears probable...
...Uttering the weakest possible criticisms of conservatism, he never touches on the stronger deeper criticisms of that economy oriented philosophy...
...Continued on Page 10 9 REVIEWS Continued from Page 9 The Future of Conservatism by M. Stanton Evans...
...If the caution signs are hazily marked one should not reject the entire map — it is about all we have, and for all that it is "the most important road mark in recent memory...
...When World War II broke out in September 1939 Kennan, still diplomatically immune, observed hostile armies clatter across violated sovereignties and compiled over three hundred pages of especially provocative reports...
...Most assuredly this book looms as one of the more cogent critiques of contemporary America's intellectual estate, but candor instructs a reviewer to go beyond commending the author's acute portrayal of Liberaldom's oxymoronic trends, his autopsy of Liberaldom's decline from the stringency of John Kennedy to the muddled flimsiness of Robert, and his examination of these ironies inhering with the radical intellectuals which makes them essentially silly...
...Relying on the sacred scripture of Messrs...
...marcuse does not...
...And in an ephemeral age, when these "things" elicit little more than blurred visions from a speeding subway car, their defense appears desirable, even if we must dip two hundred years into history to find those defenses...
...Results from the Republican National Carnival seem to favor Evans...
...Princeton, $6.95In August 1950 George Kennan retired from twenty-five years in the Foreign Service to take residence in one of the nation's most sedate think tanks, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, there to reflect and benevolently transmit his avuncular observations...
...Containing prescient and wary reports of totalitarians' appetites, it contrasts sharply with Kennan's melioristic asseverations on totalitarian Communism...
...In days of yore they could scrawl away at what, within the octave of November's first Tuesday, would become the exegesis of that election year...
...If not for its dominance then for its virulence the critic should apply the same rigorous criticisms to conservatism as to declining liberalism and Berman does not...
...The dominant ideas of our time are liberal, the environment of those ideas has been (somewhat unwillingly) liberal, thus criticism of Liberaldom and its slums, the new left, comes easily...
...Though similar in technique, Evans, unlike Lubell, must, of necessity, rewrite a political history obscured by the incandescent rhetoric of politics...
...Is it because he believes polycentrism has vitiated the totalitarians' appetites...
...Though eloquent in reviewing these crises and in sketching Burke's lifetime in politics, Kirk's book serves as little more than an introduction...
...the problems of all time...
...Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, $5.95...
...In August, when I read these lucid accounts of armor wheeling along the Czech border, of propaganda mills grinding out abusive canards and of pitiful queues of forlorn Czech emigrants, I almost confused them with contemporary East European headlines...
...Without intending to cast aspersions on Mr...
...in fact his writing is so inept one might legitimately question any endeavor the man ever undertook, going back all the way to his most primitive pursuit...
...That eloquent professor of literature Jeffery Hart has reviewed America in the Sixties as "the most important book in recent memory...
...Offloe of the President f My fellow Americana, j As a oard-oarrylng Gnostio, I have for I twenty-two years promised you heaven on earth...
...With this election year the elegiac old scratchings of Establishment fabulists Reston, Alsop, Evans and Novak elicit little more than melancholy memories of obituary columns...
...That political creature, for thirty-six weary years the benign fabricator of pluralities, from which the pundits never quite severed their umbilical cords, has all but expired...
...Drawing from scholarly familiarity with Eastern Europe, impeccable cultivation of diplomatic propriety, and singular awareness of power realities, he sent to Washington reports that, had they been read in Paris or London, would have identified him as trigger-happy, paranoid, and so on...
...Fortunately Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered contains a wonderfully expansive annotated bibliography, and in pursuing it one will gain more comprehensive and critical understanding of Burke...
...America in the Sixties by Ronald Berman...
...Both his research and method are similar to Samuel Lubell's The Future of American Politics which, in 1952, assayed the preceding twenty years' voting tendencies, forecasting trends for the next eighteen years...
...Harris and Gallup, Evans reveals America as far more conservative than Time-Life would have us think...
...It appears other than normal for a seventy-year-old to pose as the Fuller Brushman of sex, rather than its historian...
...M. Stanton Evans, in The Future of Conservatism, eloquently argues that a new political constellation already has appeared...
...Certainly with America's pyrotechnical politics growing in savagery, Burke's exhortations for order over revolution and representative government over tyranny seem a little more appetizing than, say, George McGovern's politics of dynamic passivism...
...Whatever the outcome of 8 November, tensions in the Democratic Party have exacerbated beyond reconciliation...
...help i abolish Original Sin...
...Arlington House, $6.00...
...From Prague After Munich is a kind of literary endophyte growing from his 1968 Pulitzer adorned Memoirs...
...Will j you not join with me to fight the problems ! of our time...
...Then too, the book's rhetoric never matches the exciting happenings which it attempts to describe...
...America in the Sixties surveys the ideas of our time, attempting to recant their environs and show their effect on that environment...
...And alas, this conservative journalist, at the age of thirty-one the editor of the Indianapolis News, exposes fellow scribes as more in Dr...
...And I wondered why Kennan cannot express the same revulsion for today's Russia as he expressed for yesterday's Germany...
...Not even the digitalis of Happy Hubert's Hopeful politics can revive the Roosevelt coalition...
...Careful reading of more elaborate studies by John C. Weston and Peter Stanlis will prepare one for the plunge into Burke's own prose, and today no plunge could invigorate one more than total immersion in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France...
...j I Pontifioally ¦ ? vrr Hubert Horatio Humphrey j HHH:rm j Advisory Staff: The Holy Trinity j Advisor in Residence: William Sloan Coffin 5 Special Assistant to All Involved: Lyndon B. Johnson I Write: PCAOS, o/o Humphrey's Apothecary, ) Huron, South Dakota i _________________._______j 10...
...Hart's memory and with an appreciation for his essential meaning, I shall demur...
...For Burke spent his life defending what T. S. Eliot called "the permanent things...
...Taking a direction opposite to the likes of Daniel Bell and his anti-right tantrum {The Radical Right), Berman's criticism of the new left employs all the ruggedness of a lemon meringue pie...
...And from this book, I conclude that "most primitive" pursuit is thinking...
...Negations by herbert marcuse...
...In Negations herbert marcuse displays tellingly a McLuhan revelation, harshly refracted, "the gullible prefer televised hokum to written bosh, and if a fraud wishes to pander his hokum literarily, he had better know how to write...
...Burke lived too long and touched too much to be recreated in two hundred and fifty pages...
...When one possessing such oh so immaculate liberal credentials as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...
...i Now after rigorous meditation, lasting at least j fifteen seconds, I offer you the answer...
...But then, what civilized sort considers marcuse normal...
...From Prague After Munich by George Kennan...
...certifies Edmund Burke "more satisfying than Paine," and when Papa McCarthy sanctifies Burke as one of his three heroes, times appear ripe for reviewing Burke...
...Some of these have been preposterous, others intelligent, but all refreshingly articulate — two of his eleven books have received Pulitzer Prizes...
...Claiming these reports too voluminous and specialized for reproduction in Memoirs, but sensing their importance as source material, Kennan has published most of them here...
...Still the critic must consider the entire landscape and that includes burgeoning conservatism...
...How fate has conspired...
...The Free Press, $7.95...
...Similarities abound between The Future of Conservatism and The Future of American Politics, yet for the politicians one crucial similarity remains enshrouded in time — is Evans' forecast as accurate as Lubell's history...
...This post-menopause septuagenarian has, in exhorting his oily faced disciples to sexuality and violence, become the new left's Madison Avenuizer of coitus and the club...
...and utter the same strictures for America as he uttered for Britain and France...
...Feeling the elements of this political grouping reside essentially in the Republican Party, he suggests Republicans can design a coalition as ascendant in the 'seventies as the Roosevelt coalition of yesteryear...
...Russell Kirk exhumes them by examining Burke's "four great struggles'': his efforts to obtain conciliation with the American colonies, his participation in contesting the domestic power of George III, his prosecution of Warren Hastings, and his warnings against Jacobinism...
Vol. 2 • September 1968 • No. 1
