BUCKLEY'S NATIONAL BORE

...As I recall it, Mencken's solitary declared exception was Henry Cabot Lodge I.) Now this may not be a totally accurate estimate...

...Jones is the kind of analyst who can offer his readers the hope that a deadlocked Democratic convention will turn to Lewis O. Douglas...

...India is only Nehru...

...To travel with passions like that is a heavy burden for any man...

...The essential weakness, I'm afraid, is in Buckley himself...

...But National Review's audience consists substantially of persons who live in prefabricated dwellings and infest cocktail parties and talk about the "so-called liberals...

...There is an aspect of Buckley and Bozell which gives any reader the hallucination that the editors of Partisan Review have entered into partnership with the editors of the Chicago Tribune...

...It is as though even the paper in their lives had been transcribed by an inferior carbon...

...Textual analysis is a high art, and one which is probably beyond me when I care and certainly unapproachable when I am only bored...

...He struggles across a field made perilous by souvenirs left behind by his sacred cows...

...Arizona is only a motor court that is a way station for J. Bracken Lee...

...As an instance, he employs as his political analyst one Sam M. Jones, whose credentials in this line have not before come to my attention...

...Clark had he died last week...

...Their positive proposals are, as always, for more negotiations, billions more dollars spent with no idea of what it will bring, 'moderation' (Stevenson) and God save the mark, Harriman's ideological rabbit—the Democratic party's 'understanding of people—not only at home but around the world.'" As an editor, he has a high seriousness about the intellectual process and dares to subject those of his readers who are happiest picketing the UN building to the contributions of serious voices from the academies like those of Wilhelm Roepke, Russell Kirk, and Professor John Abbot Clark...

...He can discover, as an instance, that, to encourage free discussion, a New York private school for young ladies invited its inmates to a debate on the topic: "Resolved, that Senator McCarthy's Un-American Activities are justified...

...I have no time to quarrel with ideologues over the possession of the dead...

...Very few Americans handle this sort of thing persuasively, although we do have some talent for going out in the street and looking at people...

...I do not mention this association because I am reacting to any slur against ratepayers of my class, but only because it seems to me a sentence without any consideration of true meaning...

...Now this seems to me in the full, proper, meaningless spirit of the hinder avant-garde...

...Schlamm can quote with approval Mencken's dictum, "A government is at bottom nothing more than a gang of men, and as a practical matter, most of them are inferior men...

...I concede that Buckley could catch me up if I went so far as to say that nobody on National Review has yet felt the compulsion to go out and look at the face of, say, George Meany or Walter Reuther...

...Somehow that has seemed to me beside the point...

...Buckley is reduced to summarizing the struggle of that wonderful, stubborn old man Syngman Rhee to cling to the presidency of Korea unto the death this way: "The contest was ideologically uninteresting, for both major parties are anti-Communist and anti-Socialist...

...They can tell me that John Chamberlain is a servant of the Black Hundreds...

...Yeats wrote a friend that he naturally hoped Franco would win in Spain, but God help him when the Irish volunteers in Franco's army came home victorious...

...He began: "The Thaw may be called a novel only in the sense in which a prefabricated dwelling may be called a home...

...has anyone the heart to wish him confronted again by the fact of fresh defeat...

...what is wanting is their intricate humanity...

...and Buckley has obvious difficulties reconciling William the well-bred with Bill the mucker...

...What is the point is a letter by William Butler Yeats, who was a certified fascist in the thirties and would have been assured a wreath from Prof...

...Certain notions of faith and charity, if not of hope, are essential to it...

...Professor John Abbot Clark can frame a heavy but somehow affecting piece about the decline of humanism in the United States, which Buckley will accept gratefully and then surround with quotations from Senators Bricker and Knowland and Jones' pilgrimages to Georgia to examine the promise of Herman Tal-madge or to Arizona to witness the achievement of J. Bracken Lee...

...Last November, one Robert Phelps contributed a review of Ilya Ehren-burg's The Thaw...

...by itself, ideology does not debar a journal from having something of interest to say about their confrontation and their test...

...The gentleman who detests gentility has a hard road at best...

...The scar of that moment had never left him...

...Willy Schlamm was once only a boy who hoped to lead the Austrian revolutionary movement...

...For that reason, he will always be cursed by the liberals because he once loved and may still love Joseph R. McCarthy...

...Autherine Lucy was stoned from the campus of the University of Alabama...

...But this wonderful animus against the hardening institution of mechanistic liberalism has all too little room to breathe...

...It is a hard thing to read 27 numbers of National Review...

...But persons possessed by ideology are simply uninterested in that sort of thing: to them there are only ideas and no conflicts of the heart...

...And a few weeks later, he printed a letter from a New Jersey lady reporting her joy at finding that: "Senator McCarthy writes forcefully and wittily, and has given us the most quotable line of the year: 'For the worst Secretary of State in American history, it [his book] is only a minor failure.' " It is somehow idle to ask whether this sort of thing is or is not the Lord's work...

...He can read a brochure from The Nation announcing that its new publisher will "continue to side with the intellectual and social non-conformist" and note that the accompanying brochure carries testimonials from "such reckless nonconformists as Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Helen Rogers Reif, Felix Frankfurter, Dag Hammarskjold, and Harry S. Truman—brothers all, in martyrdom, as a result of their lifetime refusal to conform...

...If only all of us could understand that way to just how much of the essential part of ourselves our allies are enemies...

...To be touched by a call for a return to style in our national life and then be offered John Bricker is to lay down one's standard in the moment one picks it up...

...but you somehow settle National Review when you say that it has taken this natural advantage by the scruff of the neck and thrown it away...

...And I hardly think he would permit one style to grate so painfully upon another in the same pages if he were not possessed of the illusion that National Review is a sort of popular front...

...So Buckley left the handling of Stevenson to his hacks...

...now he has settled here trying this one last go...

...I have not explained what a deplorably unenlightened view Buckley takes of, say, the World Health Organization...

...But I think the essential Mencken has something to say about the swamp to which National Review has come so soon...

...He : is a young man capable of considerable esprit...

...He can, when the fit is on him, write and feel no compulsion to rewrite so awful an affront to his own literary sensibilities as this paragraph: "What besides deploring phrases about the fix we are in do Messrs...

...we are all the losers if any man who dares announce so outrageous a judgment is proven right...

...It would have spoken to Oswald Garrison Villard exalting William Jennings Bryan and said that this was marvelous but not Bryan...

...I hope I am not being unfair to this commitment when I summarize it by saying that Buckley appears to have judged McCarthy as an instrument which was indelicate but which appeared to work...

...In all this period, the only event involving a human being and not some piece of paper which appears to have moved the editors of National Review was the death of Henry Mencken, for whom both Schlamm and Clark wrote obituaries...

...about Autherine Lucy, he could find nothing more revealing than the report that her lawyer had sent a message of greeting to the convention of the National Lawyers Guild, which is about to be placed on the Attorney Gener-i al's list of Communist fronts...

...A prefabricated dwelling is a home if there is love in it and nothing if there is not...

...I remember—and hope it no breach of trust and taste to say so—one evening I tarried with Buckley at the home of J. B. Matthews, who is the doyen of professional anti-Communists...

...I am convinced," he wrote, "that if the Spanish war goes on, or if [it] ceases and O'Duffy's volunteers return heroes, my 'pagan' institutions, the Theatre, the Academy, will be fighting for their lives against bigotry...

...It all seems to have been sweated from obscure segments of the New York Times...

...He is most at ease as William the well-bred...

...Jones' product is presented in the sort of print in which it came off the typewriter, a device designed by editorial custom to indicate that it is served so fresh and hot that there is no time either to compose it with care or to set it in normal type face...

...It can't have been that dull a six months...

...It is as though they had decided to detest only half the Philistines...

...I think that misconception might explain the worst aesthetic feature of National Review, which is that it is so badly orchestrated...

...Buckley's National Bore By MURRAY KEMPTON W7TLLIAM F. BUCKLEY'S Na-" tional Review has used up nine months of life and presumably settled into its desired mold as expression of conservative dissent from the liberal rhetoric which dominates our time...

...It is a disaster when men plan and dream and find themselves still in ay ; locked room.il have known too many" of the sort of women who are intense about their membership in Americans for Democratic Action not to feel some bond with almost anyone they hate...

...but then I think it is a rather hard thing to have to read 552 pages of anything purporting to be an American journal of ideas...

...he was back as he was that night—so many changes before— feeling again all its agony and despair...

...Adlai Stevenson fought and hardly appears to have decisively won a terrible battle to preserve his own high concept of public purpose against the reality of American political habit...

...I have no right to enforce upon National Review my own peculiar notions of what is the stuff of journalism...

...in the gray patches of National Review there are occasional pebbles with a certain shine, and most of them are left by Buckley himself in those moments when his sense of irony breaks its conscious check...

...He answered that he had been in Times Square and had seen the flash of their execution in the lights around the building and that was the first and one of very few times he had ever gotten drunk...

...I do not wish him to fail, except in the superficial sense of dying an old man without ever seeing the kind of America he thinks he wants...

...Never to have known passion and bereavement, like Bill Buckley, would have been as fatal to it as to have left all true passion behind like so many of the poor ruins who have chosen their last site with him...

...There must be a certain pleasure in discovering bits like this and allowing one's fancy to gambol as one pleases...

...but a man who holds it can function with it...

...He wrote "Part of Our Time: Some Monuments and Ruins of the Thirties...

...In what was essential, I can only offer the image of Henry Mencken displaying sample copies of the American Mercury to a gathering of the Minute Women of America or dispatching his political correspondent to "a motor court in Arizona" for a raptured confrontation of Gov...

...it is hardly as obscene for National Review to appropriate Mencken as it was for the Communists to co-opt Lincoln to their national committee...

...For Buckley cannot bear to be alone...

...and, if I did, I could not wish him the emptiness of this particular failure...

...Mencken certainly hated everything the state has done for the last 25 years...

...No one who knows the persons he and his associates write about—whether with affection or distaste—could recognize any of them in its pages...

...I know him only as a man who left Life to go straight on The Freeman...

...It was his great strength that he revered no human being since Johann Sebastian Bach and that he had no hostages anywhere...

...I remember James Burnham when Trotsky condemned him to the dustbin of history...

...National Review has this side dedicated to the snubbing of upper-middle-brow culture...

...These editors of National Review think of themselves as alone and outnumbered by the herd...

...f I think I know Buckley well enough to feel that I could pronounce to him nothing cruder than the judg-' ment that his magazine is a bore...

...but there is something in Buckley which shrinks from the intrusion of irony into any discussion of the high serious purpose of his side...

...but National Review is a lesson in the perils of traveling otherwise...

...Stevenson and Harriman have to suggest...

...I have come this far, and I have failed my assignment...

...It is somehow unfair that a man could arouse so many passions and have so little passion within himself...

...Georgia is only Talmadge...

...Each was a person caught in an extraordinary situation...

...Yet, when Dean Acheson wrote a book, Buckley selected to review it Joseph R. McCarthy, who is so contemptuous of formal scholarship that he never appears to have found out that Lenin's first name was not Nikolai...

...as drama critic, Schlamm delights in the destruction of Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets and Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times...

...They say not a word about the axioms and premises—which were of course their own—on the basis of which we flew to the trap at Geneva...

...Their burden was that one reason for the desperation of our present pass is our shortage of Menckens...

...This is certainly true...

...I do not think Buckley would permit it to be scored this way if he so truly loved his audience as to feel that no piece of really bad taste would escape it...

...I was arguing that there are moments in the memory of all men which have to do with the faces and the fates of other men and nothing to do with their labels and that these are the realities of experience...

...but it is saddest of all to read 500-odd pages of commentary on American life and find that so little happened with any juice and blood in it...

...in all that was non-essential, National Review can claim his bones...

...it would have spoken to Bill Buckley damning Dean Acheson and said that this was infamous but it was not Acheson...

...J. Bracken Lee...

...I know their sort because I inhabit a prefabricated dwelling myself...

...Alienation can be of great assistance in dealing with what passes for culture and enlightenment in a period like this one: National Review deserves to exist if only because there are so few organs in this country impatient with the sort of people who have made shrines of the Actors Studio, the Child Study Association, and the Psycho-Analytical Institute...

...to secede can mean to gain detachment...

...yet the effect is compellingly as though no one had...

...it is so obviously below the standard of Buckley or anyone else with the sense of craft...

...Jones, as an instance, is assisted in his peerings by W. Brent Bozell, who between evenings of ineffable gentility spends his days writing speeches for Senator McCarthy...

...be preferable to the average assistant professor of political science who regards him as an enemy of the light...

...He also is accustomed to describe the governor of New York, the senior Senator from Tennessee, and the titular head of the Democratic Party as "Ave," "Estes," and "Adlai," a vulgarism only to be explained as the sort of thing Buckley thinks one has to give one's troops...

...In a desperate essay at my point, I asked Matthews where he was the night Sacco and Vanzetti died...

...Thus George Meany is "a man of raw courage and superior intelligence" when he deals with the Communist issue, and a creature of the "professional left" when he attacks Adlai Stevenson for insufficient passion about civil rights...

...Under this theory, the Editor of The Progressive has sent along its first 27 issues with a request for an extended analysis of its content and tendency...

...Those who dislike the people make a great mistake if they entertain the illusion that they know what the people like...

...as a companion, he can MURRAY KEMPTON is a featured columnist and reporter for the New York Post...

...Journalism is a sullen and hopeless art, whose practitioners are doomed to oblivion at the end and to expire by boredom long before that unless they are sustained by the surprises and shocks and ambiguities in the persons they are assigned to cover...

...What cannot function is a magazine which approves the notion and then offers J. Bracken Lee for our study and admiration...

...There is a virtue in isolation...