REVIEWS
Jr, R. Emmett Tyrrell
REVIEWS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. In this issue my heretical colleague, John Kelley, has contributed a provocative essay on Russia's intervention in Czechoslovakia, stirring me to reply, not...
...A man earning an average of $6600 per annum will, together with his employer, pour $580.80 into Social Security each year...
...After all, if we are old enough to compete against pajama-clad teenagers in Vietnam, we should be old enough to compete against girls here in America...
...This is a classic diplomatic maneuver as well as a page from recent Russian diplomacy, for you will remember how Russia cunningly took advantage of our 1956 embarrassment over Suez to savagely thwart Hungary's democratic evolution...
...today we bulge with critics...
...Putnam, $6.95 America seems always afflicted with surplus...
...And America would react most prudently — would it not — by encouraging liberal energies awakening amongst the satellite nations...
...This is but another manifestation of a sick society...
...On the other hand, were he to invest $700 yearly (considerably less than next year's Social Security grab) in a private program, this worker would receive three or four times the returns of Social Security, with no penalty for his industry after age sixty-five and no cessation of payments to dependents upon his death...
...And with this cheery note, I retire from the turbulence of Mr...
...He enjoys reading the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his favorite artist is Norman Rockwell...
...But when he concludes propter hoc any American response pointless not to say pernicious, I dissent, feeling such a conclusion fails to consider the contemporary political climate of Eastern Europe...
...This emphasizes one of American politics' more repulsive phenomenon...
...Questioning what might be our wisest response to Russia's invasion of Czechoslovakia, Mr...
...France's abrupt crumbling in South East Asia left a vacuum, that the area's disorganized nationalist movements could not fill and which small, purposeful groups, driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology, exploited...
...And surprisingly it is a far more objective estimate of Humphrey than anything you will read from Norman Cousins leftward...
...But I can not share his attachment for the theory that there exist for each great power csrtain "spheres of influence" in which other great powers will dabble only with great risk...
...Kelley chides) but from a sense of power realities...
...Ryskind's narrative eloquently exposes Humphrey's courageous affirmations in these areas and in others, while the author also exhibits Humphrey's darker side, his penchant for procrastination, his buoyant emotionalism and his irresponsible association with unsavory public figures, Hubert is a lucid, fairly thorough, well documented election year biography, written by a conservative about a liberal...
...In this election Hubert Humphrey, who was heralded as a kind of sage during his days in the Senate, has been treated almost as unfairly as was Barry Goldwater in 1964...
...In short, he feels that our Cold War policy has hampered that freedom of action so necessary to vibrant diplomacy, and I could not agree with him more...
...An argument less easily dismissed by these economic mythologists is that, based on the same investment, a private annuity will pay more than Social Security...
...October 16) calls "the restoration and renewal of the spirit of western civilization...
...Finally (though the passage of time has now rendered this suggestion academic), we should have, if military victory was not then beyond our grasp, immediately taken the necessary military measures to end the war in Vietnam...
...Rusk's world to the comforting certitude of two excellent books...
...Rejecting both the pathological existentialism and sugar-plum rationalizing abutting most of our critics, Buckley has cultivated the more perdurable values of duty and honor plus industry and humor...
...susan sontag shrieks neologisms about an America not even upton Sinclair could have concocted...
...The only alterNatve civilization's side of euthanasia appears to rest in abolishing Social Security in favor of transferring its burden to private hands...
...Kelley notes cogently that America's "containment" — Continued on Page 11 Page 7 REVIEWS Continued from Page 7 obsession has forced it to station seven hundred thousand soldiers in thirty foreign countries, sign forty-two mutual defense treaties, join fifty-three international organizations, and furnish economic or military aid to nearly one hundred nations...
...Present workers are now financing those currently drawing benefits, their tax not going into a trust fund but a misnamed welfare system...
...Agreed...
...Kelley urges will hardly encourage liberals in Eastern Europe...
...Enough critics reside in America to fill every government silo from Maine to Hawaii, and certainly that seems a more desirable place for them than New York...
...His hobbies are child molesting (English professors in Ballantine Hall), collecting wads of chewing gum from the undersides of bar stools, and skiing...
...Certainly one could find in Mr...
...On the other hand he is much — Continued on Page 12 Page 11 REVIEWS Continued from Page 11 fairer in his evaluation than dyseptic Aunt Jane at the New Republic...
...Presumptively such a Pax Americana will not endure forever...
...Thus he archly urges destruction of Red China's nuclear facilities with "poison ivy if need be," he threatens the precious gore vidal, on national television, with violent reordering of his exquisite features, and he pleads the desolate case of a ten-year resident of death row...
...At another point in his essay Mr...
...Kelley fails to notice that diplomats must rank the world's arenas or "spheres of influence" as major and minor...
...In the past we bloated with wheat and corn...
...Certainly until the minor powers of the free world, for instance France and Britain, reviving their confidence in the values of western civilization, defend their spheres of influence, America must continue to exert its power in minor spheres, bearing in mind that a shift of power in minor spheres will effect the power equilibrium in the major sphere...
...Now it is true enough as Mr...
...We must maintain mobile tactical force around the globe, not from a sense of "mission" (as Mr...
...He hopes to be a model when he grows up...
...McQUILLEN Continued from Page 2 Why has the university not allowed us entry into other beauty contests...
...his mind gutted from hallucinogens, alien ginsberg vilifies that legal system protecting Americans from refractory perverts like himself...
...The Alternative magazine is hereby breaking the sex barrier by entering for homecoming queen, D. Peyton McQuillen (social security number 312-52-70018) (4032-37...
...Classifying all arenas of power as equal, Mr...
...He can do all this while writing a nationally syndicated column, debating on "about a million" campuses yearly, and editing the fortnightly National Review...
...He scales down the significance of the Nobel Prize, reasons the futility of asking Communists to speak on college campuses, reminds us of the omnivorous nature of Communism and introduces us to the problems of the city, "the flowering of liberalism" and some of the haunting echoes of contemporary morality...
...THE JEWELER'S EYE by William F. Buckley, Jr...
...It begins with a cautious definition of conservatism and concludes in a nostalgic largo to the author's deceased sisters and father...
...Kelley says that communism, starting around 1948, no longer stood as a monolithic movement, but it is also true that a man governed by Moscow's religion is an enemy of the western democracies and at least a fraternal agent of Russia...
...In the end, Social Security appears beneficial only to those administering it, and Hubert's hopeful alterations could only aid electioneering politicians with a bent towards ever greater promises...
...Britain retired Churchill, France rejected De Gaulle and both suffered what T. S. Eliot considered "a doubt of the validity of a civilization...
...For twenty-three years, this equilibrium has, in a world of hazardous rhetoric, prevented a major confrontation...
...He lists as his social clubs the Saturday Evening Club, the Mystic Knights of the Early Mornings and Pi Omega Omicron (the national loiterer's honorary...
...Most importantly, State should publicize the invasion as a brutal reminder that Russia is the world's primary practitioner of Imperialism and hardly a benign big brother to those emerging nations, who either from naivete or venality, seek its companionship...
...For from New York's television studios, norman mailer, in a haze of middle class Scotch, exhorts suburbia to an even bolder solipsism...
...A missed cue, no matter how obscure, can leave a deep impression on that audience...
...For if this same man dies, his family receives nought for his toils, and if he should reach age sixty-five and wish to remain productive, to the extent of earning in excess of $1600 per annum, his monthly check from Washington dries up to a trickle...
...In this edition of Buckleyana, the author emerges as crucially distinct from those ragamuffins railing away from the thresholds of their asylums at the greatest nation of the world...
...When Mr...
...HUBERT by Allan H. Ryskind Arlington House, $5.98 If a resurrected Watch and Ward Society ever again institutes pornography laws I do hope they will proscribe, along with norman mailer, gore vidal and most television deodorant ads, election year potboilers — hastily scrawled political biographies grooved either to vilify or to exalt candidates for national Messiah...
...D. Peyton is a junior in art history...
...When asked why he sought to be 1968 Homecoming Queen, he wistfully looked out over the popping flashbulbs and, from behind a battery of microphones, said "Let us begin anew...
...Further, as James Burnham suggests, Russia's invasion might hold for America lavish propaganda value...
...The result is a collection of allegations against our time which are relentless, irrefrageable yet, unlike other critics, hopeful...
...A plethora of evidence indicates that American and Russian power in these major spheres is in equilibrium...
...This, of course, assumes that he will live to age sixty-five and that he will retire...
...Kelley describes "containment" of Communism as an element overemphasized by America's Cold War diplomacy...
...Thus, after committing themselves to this gross historical illiteracy, it is hardly surprising that they clutch their skirts over Humphrey's strong anti-Communist foreign policy (once the ADA's raison d'etre) and favor in his stead Papa McCarthy, a monastic isolationist whose ultramontanism trajects out toward Pluto...
...Page 12...
...Thus, Ho Chi Minh's takeover of Vietnam is a blow struck for the soviet world and a loss to the free world, imbalancing the minor sphere of South East Asia and threatening the crucial balance of power in the major sphere...
...no American response sanity's side of nuclear retaliation will effect a "Russian aboutsystem is insurance for the aged...
...If world communism fails to macerate with time, either America must develop a strategic defensive capability greater than Russia's offensive capability or hope for what Frank Meyer of National Review (who will speak at Alumni Hall in the Union Building at 7:30 p.m...
...The world's major spheres of influence come properly under the purview of Russia and America and we crudely refer to these as the Soviet Bloc and the Free World...
...in truth hardly a single non-Russian unit entered Czechoslovakia...
...This is the theory John Galbraith adheres to in criticizing our involvement in South East Asia and it fails to take into account the grievous problems facing contemporary American diplomacy due to the exhausted spirit of the western democracies in a world where the balance of power underlies all diplomacy — not mystically as Jean Jacques Rousseau saw it to exist, but in the realistic sense George Canning, Lord Henry Brougham or even Hans Morgenthau have seen it...
...Eliding over his famous Civil Rights record those old fogies who would not think of being anything but left join in the ignorant lament "the Negro has no one to vote for this year...
...In this issue my heretical colleague, John Kelley, has contributed a provocative essay on Russia's intervention in Czechoslovakia, stirring me to reply, not to the main thrust of his article, which I endorse wholeheartedly, but to certain of its nuances which I find disconcerting...
...Today this problem looms more serious than ever...
...But then amidst all this tommyrot there is William F. Buckley, who breezes about town astride his Honda 50, intrepidly focusing his "Jeweler's Eye" on the political truths of our time...
...This so-called "insurance" is based on the assumption that those now paying for Social Security will, in their seniority, be supported by their descendants via Washington...
...He does this in an elegant style featuring arresting metaphors remarkable for their exquisite refinement and vigor...
...Such mild policies would hardly back the Russians into a serious great power confrontation, yet would unequivocally transmit to the satellites encouragement for their liberal evolution...
...By the terms of his own analogy, Russia's apparent triumph in Czechoslovakia is truly a precursor to its inevitable evanescence of influence...
...and, from the Ivy League, the republic's self-ordained advocates tearfully apologize...
...Ryskind...
...For instance, at the end of World War II France and Great Britain began a precipitous withdrawal from Asia, a withdrawal necessitated temporarily by economic demise (and concomitant military weakness) but, in the long run, made exigent by their spiritual exhaustion...
...The abrasions occur in the minor spheres of influence, in places like South East Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East...
...Thankfully Allan H. Ryskind's Hubert is a potboiler combining legibility with at least a taste of objectivity, and, in this year of exceptional political balderdash, its publication is unique...
...Kelley cautions us to scrupulously avoid what he considers another's sphere of influence he is exhorting us to a kind of isolationism that, due to the nature of communism vis-a-vis the present unhealthy state of western civilization, would imperil our security...
...Yet, America would assuredly radiate this encouragement if it suspended cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union, postponed indefinitely disarmament talks with the U. S. S. R. on the obvious grounds that the Kremlin's word seems to lose something vital in its translation, and finally, canceled that stupid daily flight, considered by U Thant as such a balm to international relations, between New York and the Icebox Kingdom...
...These spheres are more specific than the major spheres, and it is here that the exhausted spirit of the western democracies wrenches America into uncomfortable diplomatic postures...
...Humphrey many more admirable qualities than does Mr...
...If this individual works from ages twenty-two to sixty-five, he will, upon retiring, receive maximum yearly benefits of $3876...
...what he does in between is many things...
...Kelley decides that as the Russian action appears minutely calculated (I wonder...
...The policy of inaction Mr...
...Kelley wisely reminds us now is the time to encourage liberal trends amongst the satellites, for as he emphasizes the Czechoslovakian incident rather than heralding increasingly dismal days for democracy in Eastern Europe parallels the Congress of Verona where repressive forces at the behest of Count Metternich triumphed but momentarily over liberal movements in France, Spain and Italy...
...The State Department should expose the Warsaw Pact "joint action" for the fraud it was...
...Is it because they cringe before progress...
...face...
...But, most liberal economists poohpooh such statistics, assuming, as usual, that the day of reckoning never occurs on terra firma...
...One hardly can feel "insured" upon discovering the entire system has assets of about $20 billion compared to current obligations greater than $420 billion, and that there is no guarantee of future payment...
...Those doubting a man can accomplish all this and any of it well, will want to read The Jeweler's Eye and make their own judgment, for it represents a sampling of Buckley's columns, feature articles, debates, and more serious essays...
...And when he counsels no reaction whatsoever to Russia's Czechoslovakian embarrassment, he again, I feel, fails to take into account that world politics operate on a very wide stage, to a terribly large audience...
Vol. 2 • October 1968 • No. 2
