Christmas Stocking - Book Review

Man struggles with his sense of God, and also with his responsibility to order our common life as best he can. One of the most profound intellects to address both of these aspects of the human condition, and especially their intersection, was L. Brent Bozell. He brought to his task not just a ferociously powerful mind but a truly Christian, truly Catholic heart; which latter, he would contend if one asked him, is infinitely more important. Mustard Seeds: A Conservative Becomes a Catholic (Christendom, 399 pp., $29.95) is the highly welcome reissue of a 1986 anthology of Bozell's writings.

Mustard Seeds covers the entirety of a long and eventful writing career. Bozell was one of the key figures in the founding of modern American conservatism; he collaborated with his brother-in-law William F. Buckley Jr. on an early book, served as Washington columnist for National Review, and ghostwrote Barry Goldwater's classic manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative. To read his writings from that era is to be thrilled by the expression of a political faith that must have seemed so unrealistic as to be utterly beyond the pale. In a 1962 essay, for example, he said that the U.S. must find the will to stand up for Western civilization, and that if it does, "the orders will go out . . . to our commander in Berlin: Tear down The Wall." In 1962, outlandish; by 1992, prophetic.

But even in his NR days, Bozell became dissatisfied with the direction the conservative mainstream was taking. One of the most important services rendered by this anthology is that it makes readily available Bozell's magnificent 1962 NR essay "Freedom or Virtue?" -- which remains to this day the clearest and best-written argument for the non- libertarian brand of conservatism. In 1966 Bozell founded a Catholic magazine called Triumph, which persevered until 1975 and from which most of these essays are drawn.

The writings are characterized by breathtaking candor; the very first essay in the book, from 1986, describes the author's bouts of manic depression. Many of the essays are not for the faint of heart; Bozell was quite frank in his radicalism, declaring at one point that he viewed Triumph as "the only serious opponent of the American state." But the rebel who takes his stand outside the system in the name of a higher truth or morality is a fundamentally American type, from Paine and Emerson right down to today's anti-abortion and anti-globalism protesters; in no country are true patriotism and vocal dissent as intimately related as in our own, and this spirit animated Bozell's pen.

Abortion was to Bozell a central issue; he viewed a civil order that permitted it as having lost its legitimacy. But after turbulent years of protest, Bozell's reflections came more and more to transcend the political; in these final years, the concept of mercy was at the center of his thought. The key secular goal of politics, he wrote, is "to try to reduce human suffering in the public sphere. . . . To be sure, the traditional Christian language for defining the purpose of politics employs the vocabulary of justice. But mercy . . . transcends justice, and elevates it through the motivation of love."

Bozell's was the furthest possible thing from a disembodied intellect; he placed his rational capacities completely at the service of his God and his troubled fellow man of the here and now. This found its clearest expression in a brief and compelling 1975 essay, "Thoughts About Thinking," in which Bozell faulted the West for having accepted too thoroughly Aristotle's declaration that the intellect is what truly distinguishes man from other creatures: "The most exquisitely equipped 'rational animal' could not, in virtue of that equipment, believe, or hope, or love supernaturally. Reason does none of these things, nor can it explain them."

To see what happens when a man of great compassion -- one whose highest goal is to live the life of the saints -- also has political insight and a great prose style, read this book.

-- The guilt of Alger Hiss becomes clearer with each passing year, as does the heroism of Whittaker Chambers. Patrick A. Swan has edited a generous and enlightening anthology of some of the best writings to try to make sense of that historic case, in Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul (ISI, 359 pp., $16.95).

The figure of Chambers continues to fascinate, because he had a faith and intellect that were informed -- but not overwhelmed -- by the particular struggles of his time. This was no Ancient Mariner, but a clear-sighted analyst. Murray Kempton, in a 1970 essay reprinted in this book, quotes a May 1959 letter from Chambers to WFB urging that the Right pay more attention to the issue of civil liberties: "Why for example should we leave it to liberals to give tongue against the frightening developments in wiretapping? . . . The Right I feel more and more must find its conscience and make it explicit, first of all to the Right." When a Dick Armey, today, finds common cause with the ACLU on privacy issues, he can thus claim a very distinguished conservative ancestor -- and one whose advocacy was certainly not based on a naivete concerning deadly threats to national security.