BULWARKS OF FREEDOM

...The Negro protests that now grip the South are the direct result of the sit-in movement that began early in 1960...

...On the other hand, he spiritedly defends and explains the privilege against self-incrimination, the right to confront and cross-examine one's accuser, and the right, presently inoperative and generally ignored by attorneys, of a defendant in a criminal case to learn before the trial the evidence that will be presented against him...

...It tell us in addition that he is neither a constitutional lawyer (which is pardonable), nor familiar with constitutional history (which, for a conservative presumably attached to first principles, is inexcusable...

...First, he says, "Even the most dedicated civil libertarian must agree that individual liberties must be subordinated to our security as a nation...

...The Negroes' demand for equality, which Mr...

...Williams condemns, for example, wiretapping, arrest on mere suspicion, confessions illegally extracted by the police, and Congressional investigations whose only purpose is to expose for the sake of exposure...

...The thesis of One Man's Freedom is that we "cannot protect democracy with the tools of totalitarianism...

...Williams also makes the point, which deserves to be repeated over and over again, that it is the poor, the weak, and the unpopular who more often than not are the victims of those in authority who would invade civil liberty and infringe human rights...

...in fact, it is doubtful if there would be a republic at all...

...Without it, the snail's pace of one hundred years, including the six following Brown v. Board of Education, would be unchanged...

...Williams supports, is the transcendent domestic issue today, and every non-violent means to achieve first-class status is legitimate...

...In two respects, however, Williams falls short of his own high standards...

...It was vague concessions of that sort which led to the purposeless evacuation of the Japanese-American population from the West Coast during the last war, and will lead to the collection of all political dissidents in prison camps without any process of law, under the Emergency Detention Act, in the next war—if anyone is left to do the collecting...

...In fact, violence has by no means generally accompanied sit-in demonstrations, and to attribute to them the responsibility for what violence may have occurred, is wholly unwarranted...

...If we grant, however, that Buckley has some knowledge of the text of the Constitution, we can then only conclude that he simply misunderstands the purposes it is intended to serve...

...Williams' recommendations were carried out, there would be precious little freedom left in our republic...

...Composed variously of misinformation and vitriol, the article declares "that if all of Mr...

...devoted eight pages of the National Review to Edward Bennett Williams and One Man's Freedom...

...It is his concern for these bulwarks of freedom—whose features embody the idea of fairness —that Buckley scornfully describes as "an obsessive concern for the suspect or the defendant...

...His essay tells us several things that we already knew about Buckley: that he is glib, insolent, and conservative to a fault...

...Second, in the course of his discussion of racial discrimination, Williams criticizes the Southern sit-in movement which "time and again," he says, "has caused the eruption of violence...

...It is the recalcitrance of the white South, including its resort to violence, that is to be condemned without exception...