How the Right Was Won

Getting It Right, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Regnery, 311 pp., $24.95)

William F. Buckley Jr. is a controversialist with the soul of a peacemaker. In reading his last five novels -- The Redhunter, Spytime, Elvis in the Morning, Nuremberg: The Reckoning, and, now, Getting It Right -- one almost forgets that their author made a career of rupturing so many Establishment spleens. Not only do they collectively paint one of the most loving recent portraits of America, they even show the author reconciling himself to his erstwhile enemies -- the opponents of Senator McCarthy in Redhunter, rock-'n'-roll music in Elvis (against which this reviewer wishes he had held out longer), and, in Getting It Right, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch and Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand.

Well, almost. Both Welch and Rand gave momentum to the centrifugal forces threatening in the early 1960s to pull the conservative movement apart. Rand, a Russian emigre, decocted free-market ideology until any moral sentiment had evaporated from the self-interest. Welch, a successful businessman, explained all the vicissitudes of world events according to the axiom that the Communist conspiracy lay behind them. Both demanded fealty from their followers; both put themselves at loggerheads with Buckley's National Review.

In that sense, and with characteristic cheek, Getting It Right's real protagonist is the author himself, and one happily roots for him throughout. The story begins with Woodroe Raynor, a Mormon from Utah who upon finishing Princeton becomes a spokesman for the John Birch Society. Along the way he meets comely Leonora Goldstein, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, who earns a job doing paperwork for Ayn Rand after reading Atlas Shrugged four times. Becoming disenchanted with their respective idols, they fall out of favor with Welch and Rand, fall in with the National Review crowd, and also fall in love, thereby joining anti-Communism and libertarianism in romance just as NR did in politics.

Interest in the genesis of conservatism in America has grown in recent years, even among liberals -- the bibliography lists some of the most influential texts -- but Getting It Right is surely the most entertaining account of that genesis. All the giants of conservatism's heroic age are here: Barry Goldwater, sporting dungarees and an Aztec belt; Frank Meyer, abusing the telephone lines at midnight; Murray Rothbard, deducing the charisma of anarchism, proving the superiority of anarchism; L. Brent Bozell, furtively ghostwriting Conscience of a Conservative; Harry Jaffa, penning Goldwater's line "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice . . ."; not to mention Welch and Rand themselves.

Buckley has an exceptional ability to empathize with the figures he depicts. He manages to capture Rand's "Objectivist" idiom nearly perfectly: She and her acolytes speak of "the primacy of reason" and of the "mysticism of the mind," and one young Objectivist hangs a photo of the Pill in her living room. ("Why have a photograph of the Statue of Liberty?" she asks rhetorically.) There are even historical figures constructed without materials furnished from personal acquaintance: JFK and Earl Warren come memorably to life.

As a work of history, Getting It Right nicely illustrates historian George Nash's observation that modern American conservatism wore, in various degrees, libertarian, anti-Communist, and traditionalist guise not without some degree of discomfort. In the early Sixties the former two were running amok in the persons of Rand and Welch. To complete the triune symmetry, Getting It Right tells the story of Revilo Oliver, a brilliant philologist who could write in any of twelve ancient languages without typographical error but who later in life formulated an anti-Semitic blood-and-soil nationalism so febrile as even to reject Christianity. His work is a hideous testament to genius gone mad.

Rand, Welch, and their followers make easy targets for ridicule; Getting It Right never descends into lampoon. The novel shows the virtues that caused their success as much as the vices that precipitated their undoing. For Leonora, Ayn Rand had given philosophic voice to the reasons that her parents had uprooted their family to come to a land of boundless opportunity -- Rand's distaste for surnames redolent of Judaism notwithstanding. (Florence King has observed that in the Randian imagination those heroic individuals must all be WASPs.) For Woodroe, Robert Welch had fearlessly analyzed the Communist conspiracy Woodroe had witnessed firsthand as a missionary in Eastern Europe.

Finally, however, Welch's and Rand's exaggerated sensitivity to lese- majeste alienated both Leonora and Woodroe, and most of their other followers as well.* Each would rather have devoured his progeny than seen them grow into independence.

To winnow the kookiness out of right-wing politics required not just philosophic moderation but a great deal of tactical dexterity. One cannot help thinking, after learning from Getting It Right how some libertarians received Whittaker Chambers's famous review of Atlas Shrugged, that -- whatever the faults in Rand's magnum opus -- his attack was somewhat premature. Chambers, for whom history compelled a stark choice between God and man, freedom and tyranny, civilization and barbarism, perhaps did not know quite what to make of Rand, as fierce an atheist as an anti-Communist. He was closer to the truth when he described Atlas Shrugged as a "remarkably silly book" than when he accused it of uttering the subtextual command, "To a gas chamber -- go!" A somewhat milder denunciation might have made libertarians less fractious constituents of the conservative movement.