MARK STRICHERZ: Big Deal
Hudson, Deal W.
B o o k s I n R e v I e w With the possible exception of Mark Felt, no one is painted more sinister in Gray’s book than Richard Nixon himself, who withheld from Gray his own role in the...
...These damning Oval Office conversations between Nixon and chief of staff H.R...
...John Ryan and Dorothy Day, he states they belonged to the social gospel, social justice wing of the Catholic Church...
...He argues that the Founding Fathers favored not a civil religion, pace Jon Meacham, but rather a “natural theology...
...Mead seeks to explain the Anglo-American rise to world economic and military dominance, and what that dominance means for U.S...
...According to Hudson, Carter favored the secular left and drove away evangelical Democrats...
...This book’s most memorable scene, what Gray termed “the most disquieting half hour in my thirty years of government service,” features Nixon railing at Gray in February 1973, with the disclosures of Watergate mounting, about disloyal bureaucrats and insufficient ruthlessness in the men tasked with ferreting them out...
...He started several sentences, and then stopped, in a cryptic shorthand fashion….It made little sense to me…” The only people who come off well in Gray’s tale are his stalwart attorneys and family...
...their public disclosure, in the summer of 1974, forced Nixon’s resignation within 72 hours...
...Yet Gray’s portrait of Nixon—with whom the acting FBI director had surprisingly few one-on-one meetings—supports the conclusion that the president, for all his deceptions and love of intrigue, never really mastered the arcane details of Watergate...
...He acknowledges that after the federal government enforced civil rights legislation in the late 1960s and ’70s, some allwhite Christian academies in the South were created for racial rather than religious reasons...
...As he points out, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s formulation that “the right to define one’s own concept of existence” is “at the heart of liberty” destroys any concept of universal law...
...It’s worth mentioning that unlike his predecessor Gerald Ford, who declined the opportunity, in December 1977 Carter signed the Hyde Amendment into law...
...The rise of England (and later the United States) came about, to use the words of the English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, due to “the auspicious union of order and freedom...
...With the help of Catholic field staff from the Republican National Committee, the Bush campaign targeted observant Catholic voters, as well as other churchgoers, and won their overwhelming support...
...By and large, Hudson presents the broader religious right movement honestly...
...For the past thirty years,” Hudson writes, “Catholics have been integral to [the movement’s] strategic, political, and grassroots leadership...
...Those faults, however, are not fatal...
...Clarence Mannion, the former dean of the University of Notre Dame Law School, from 1954 to 1979 hosted a national radio show that opposed Communism, Vatican II–style reforms, and abortion...
...As Gray himself puts it, 28 pages in: “I never did learn how to ask the right questions...
...Hudson’s climb up the greasy pole did not last long...
...Bush to numerous Catholic cardito Catholic voters, whose job description included principal outside adviser” for Republicans’ outreach Not long after the two men met, Hudson became “the the Catholic vote in terms of religious observance...
...B o o k s I n R e v I e w American politics overall is lacking, his book is a useful corrective to its many liberal counterparts...
...Mead tries to draw parallels between Oliver Cromwell and Ronald Reagan (both believed that God was on their side and that their countries’ enemies were evil...
...Hudson’s examination of the philosophical underpinnings of the movement is uneven...
...Hudson is unfair to some of his opponents...
...call from Karl Rove...
...Dr...
...Onward, Christian Soldiers contains too many insights and too much honesty...
...Finally, Hudson slights religious centrists and the orthodox—those who believe in cultural conservatism and economic liberalism or populism...
...Take his treatment of Jimmy Carter—yes, Jimmy Carter...
...He acknowledges that secular conservatives treat religious conservatives with wariness and condescension...
...Father Frank Pavone with Priests for Life...
...Catholics founded conservative institutions: Mother Angelica By and large, Hudson presents the broader religious right movement honestly...
...My fear is that Hudson’s readers will be misled into thinking that secular liberals have run the Democratic Party for ages...
...Jack Willke, Lyman Stebbins, Cathy Sullivan, and Eleanor Howe were lay Catholic leaders in the early anti-abortion movement...
...Bush improved on Bob Dole’s overall Catholic vote by 10 percentage points and his active Catholic vote by 7 percentage points...
...He profiles not just well-known figures such as Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Brent Bozell, and William F. Buckley Jr., but also a host of lesser lights...
...poll that Hudson had commissioned that analyzed In december 1998, Deal Hudson received a phone nals and bishops...
...He acknowledges that after the federal government enforced civil rights legislation in the late 1960s and ’70s, some all-white Christian academies in the South were created for racial rather than religious reasons...
...At the birth of the Industrial Revolution, the government of Great god and gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World By Walter Russell Mead (alfred a. knopf, 464 pages, $27.95) Max Weber, Mead, the son of an Episcopal priest, also explains the role of English Protestantism in promoting capitalist vigor in England and the United States, by making society more receptive to the idea that change is good and part of God’s plan, and more patient with the workings of God Save the Anglosphere M a r t e g i l d d e m a y b d r e p m ha y r e v o t o n e e w a , i t n a o r l s n t i “ a . o N y n o h p describe H 2 ow s ard n H e an e so y n’s m great c Sym nd - Eu r ropean riva l ls . British e indu stry and n com c m n erce s t i f o y n a m n t d e z l a t n e c s s e d n a r e k a e w s a w any years ago I heard a radio disc jockey Britain was stron l g enough r to i main ha tain order, bu t it l intensely American...
...Hudson was the editor and publisher of Crisis, a small conservative monthly based in Washington...
...The ventures of British entrepreneurs So imagine my surprise when a few years later I dis- were not dependent on first covered that someone in Hollywood thought that one winning royal favor...
...Where Hudson differs from previous historians of the religious conservative movement is his accent on the movement’s many Catholic activists...
...In mid-2004, the liberal National Catholic Reporter published details of a decade-old sexual harassment case involving Hudson, a former philosophy professor at Fordham, and a female student...
...Something close to the opposite is true...
...Perhaps he has never heard a speech by Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
...The first chapters are a bit clumsy...
...Mead seems to be arguing that believing that God (or at least right) is on our side, and that our enemies are evil, is a uniquely Anglo-American trait...
...For example, Catholic bosses once controlled the presidential wing of the party, nominating Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson...
...His argument emphasizes the role that Catholics played in forming the religious right and the compatibility between Catholic thought and the nation’s founding principals...
...By 2001, Hudson had become “the Catholic gatekeeper” for Bush, advising the administration on appointments and personnel matters...
...While his interpretation of religion in Mark stricherz, a contributor to GetReligion.org and InsideCatholic.com, is the author of Why the Democrats Are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party (Encounter Books...
...authority...
...He could be regarded as one of the movement’s top intellectuals...
...While Hudson writes about Msgr...
...As the tapes whirred, the president spoke with reverence for how the Germans, during World War II, imposed collective punishment to deter sniper attacks...
...That’s why I think it deserves a wide hearing from conservative and religious right activists, politicians, and, yes, fair-minded readers...
...Even so, Hudson exposes postmodern, secular philosophies as little more than a will to power...
...B o o k s I n R e v I e w With the possible exception of Mark Felt, no one is painted more sinister in Gray’s book than Richard Nixon himself, who withheld from Gray his own role in the White House effort to get the CIA to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation on national security grounds...
...Haldeman were captured on the famous “smoking gun” tapes of June 23, 1972...
...Nixon exhibits here, as throughout his first term, a dithering management style and scattered pattern of speech and thought, all of which served him especially badly when scandal engulfed him...
...I view them, as well as several Catholic bosses of the era, as Catholics operating less from a secular ideology and more from contemporary Catholic social thought...
...Rove was impressed with a introducing Gov...
...The president was wild, running his train of thought past his ability to articulate,” Gray recalled...
...Father Joseph Fessio with Ignatius Press...
...And he could easily be misinterpreted as suggesting that the enemies of the AngloAmericans over the past century—the Nazis, the Soviet Union, al Qaeda—were evil not in fact, but only in Anglo-American perception...
...6 6 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R J u n e 2 0 0 8 Big Deal Onward, Christian soldiers: The growing Political Power of Catholics and evangelicals in the united states By Deal W. Hudson (Threshold ediTions, 384 pages, $26) Reviewed by Mark stricherz It’s possible to view Onward, Christian Soldiers as an explanation of how a former philosophy professor became a Republican political operative...
...and Bill Donohue with the Catholic League...
...Above all, he acknowledges a failing on his part not of intelligence, per se, but of shrewdness, a proneness to the very gulli bility that crippled him when he agreed to destroy the Hunt cables, or when he repeatedly accepted Mark Felt’s assurances, face to face, man to man, that he was not leaking to reporters...
...foreign policy...
...After wading through this initial clunkiness, though, the reader is rewarded with some much finer, engaging writing, and some excellent analysis...
...This natural theology grounds morality in human nature and nature’s God, a distinctly Judeo-Christian concept...
...Indeed, Hudson’s book is superior to recent popular titles in this genre—Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy, Randall Balmer’s Thy Kingdom Come, and Damon Linker’s The Theocons...
...Gray acknowledges, for example, that he deceived close friends about the circumstances under which he destroyed the Hunt files...
...Hudson stepped down from his position with the Bush campaign and as publisher of Crisis...
...This dence for this proposition than the fact that Jefferson gave the slaves some rights...
...This ideology animated the Democratic Party when its constituencies were formed into the New Deal or Roosevelt coalition and many Catholic bishops today...
...His own upright moral code, the product of two decades in the Navy, spares no one else, including himself...
...Understanding anti-Americanism, or “Waspophobia” as Walter Russell Mead calls some of its manifestations, is one of the goals of his thoughtprovoking and ambitious book God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World...
...Instead, acteristic sins of the political polemicist...
...I agreed with that assessment...
...Tell that to the ghosts of Democratic bosses Tweed, Hague, Bailey, and Daley...
...exclusively, his book would have been a more impressive achievement...
...with Eternal Word Television network in Birmingham, Alabama...
...Judie Brown with the American Life League...
...Hudson’s efforts succeeded...
...Disclo sure: I am good acquaintances with Hudson and have served as a contributor to Crisis and InsideCatholic.com, his current publication...
...Brandon crocker is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator online living in San Diego...
...of the main themes of that symphony would be per- Echoing the work of fect for the soundtrack to the science fiction space flick Alien...
...He was starting to stutter, almost beyond coherence...
...Similarly, most Americans, who view the United States overall as a beneficent world power, are surprised to find that many people outside our borders see things quite differently...
...at one point, Nixon literally started frothing at the mouth...
...Father Paul Marx with Human Life International...
...Yet Hudson’s original poll was validated...
...Of the Bush campaign’s outreach to Catholics in 2004, he writes that “[n]ever before in the history of American politics had the Catholic vote been so systematically targeted by a political party...
...He quotes conservative and Christian right leaders saying that Ronald Reagan did little to restore America to traditional values, although he defends Reagan as sympathetic to their concerns...
...That’s when he commits the charHudson puts the movement in the context of recent If hudson had focused on the Christian Right While Hudson acknowledges that his book is not an objective history, his account blurs the line frequently...
...6 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R J u n e 2 0 0 8 Reviewed by Brandon crocker...
...In reality, J u n e 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 6 7 B o o k s I n R e v I e w Carter struggled throughout the 1976 campaign and his presidency with reconciling the increasingly incommensurable demands of both constituencies...
...might be true, but Hudson should adduce more eviAmerican politics...
Vol. 41 • June 2008 • No. 5
