q: hey catbus what’s going on at the nyrb right now
a: this good writing:
Tanenhaus is a deep student of modern conservatives. He wrote a biography of Whittaker Chambers, a self-professed Beaconsfieldian (Disraeli was the Earl of Beaconsfield), and he has been working for some time on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. This short book is a kind of bridge between his two great projects, and it fits his revanchist–Burkean paradigm. Chambers and Buckley, though friends, began at opposite ends of the “conservative” spectrum. Buckley, who admired Chambers’s witness against communism, tried with all his lures and charms to recruit him as an editor of National Review when it began in 1955. But Chambers thought Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom the magazine championed, would doom Republicans. Besides, he was loyal to his ally in the Hiss case, Richard Nixon, and to Nixon’s meal ticket Dwight Eisenhower, while the magazine opposed them both as impure compromisers. (In 1956, only one National Review editor, James Burnham, endorsed Eisenhower for reelection.)
But Buckley finally wore Chambers down—in 1957, with great misgivings, Chambers joined the magazine. Murray Kempton wrote that Chambers finally went to work for a boss he could respect—which was not saying too much, since “Chambers’s former employers happened to be Colonel Bykov of the Soviet Secret Police, the late Henry Luce, and John F.X. McGohey, ‘then United States Attorney’ for the Southern District of New York.”[2] Chambers soon had to withdraw from the magazine for health reasons, but he and Buckley stayed in constant communication, Chambers advising, Buckley deferential. Tanenhaus makes the case that Chambers finally converted Buckley from a revanchist to a Burkean. Kempton, who studied both men closely, doubts that Chambers’s advice ever really took: “Buckley worshiped and did not listen: the Chambers of his vision is a saint whose icon stands in a Church where his message is never read.”[3]
Tanenhaus traces an inverse symmetry in the progression of Irving Kristol from Burkean to revanchist, and the development of Buckley in the opposite direction.[4] Certainly as late as 1962 Buckley was as extreme as any of those people Tanenhaus condemns as movement conservatives. In that year, Buckley wrote a column saying that if defeating communism entailed nuclear annihilation, the achievement would be worth the price: “If it is right that a single man be prepared to die for a just cause, it is right that an entire civilization be prepared to die for a just cause.”[5] But Tanenhaus thinks that Buckley began to be more realistic during his theatrical campaign for mayor of New York in 1965, after which his views converged more and more with those of Chambers. In an interview with Buckley in 2007, Tanenhaus found him dubious about the “conservatism” of the Bush era—for instance, he was highly critical of the Iraq war.[6]
This book review does not actually go into the finer points of conservatism dying but it does talk a lot about the National Review. There’s a podcast that goes along with it that was very interesting. Anyway, here’s some interesting history.
edit: Here’s a somewhat more ferocious beatdown of conservatism using Tanenhaus as a jump off point.
3 months ago • 1 note
