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Getting It Wrong, by William F. Buckley Jr.
Regnery Publishing, 2003, 311 pages.
Getting It Wrong by R.W. Bradford
William F. Buckley Jr., who somehow managed to remain the
enfant terrible of conservatism until well into his 40s, now in his late
70s has come up with a new wrinkle on fond memories of youthful triumphs —
not to mention score-settling. Rather than writing a memoir or autobiography,
which would be checked for accuracy by historians, he does his work in a novel,
"Getting It Right," using the license of fiction to cover his inaccuracies. And a
good thing, too.
| | R.W.
Bradford is editor and publisher of Liberty.
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"Getting It Right" is the story of two young Americans, each representing one
of the two heresies that, in Buckley's view, would have prevented the triumph of
the American Right had not someone (Buckley himself) purged them from the
movement.
The first of these heresies was the Radical Right. Its fountainhead was Robert
Welch, a Boston candy company executive who had founded the John Birch Society to
turn the tide against what he and many conservatives saw as the continuing
triumph of the Left and retreat of the mainstream Right.
The other heresy was libertarianism, embodied in Ayn Rand and
her movement. This is odd, in that Buckley considered himself to be a
libertarian, though he always added that advancing the libertarian agenda had to
wait until the evil of communism was defeated.*. From Buckley's perspective, there are two great
flaws in Rand: her advocacy of a totally free market (which Buckley thought would
be hard to sell to American voters) and her atheism (which he thought was
evil). |
| Rather than writing a
memoir or autobiography, which would be checked for accuracy by historians,
Buckley does his work in a novel. |
|
Buckley's battle against the Radical Right was helped along by the fact that
its leadership was, well, nuts. Welch saw a communist conspiracy behind every
leftist policy, even to the point of identifying the mushy anti-communism and
political realism of Dwight Eisenhower as evidence that Ike himself was "a
conscious agent of the Communist Conspiracy." Each year, Welch's magazine One
Man's Opinion (later rechristened American Opinion, though without any change of
editorial outlook) published a map of the world with each country printed in the
appropriate color for its politics. The communist countries, of course, were in
bold red. So were many of the democratic and third world countries, while others
were varying shades of pink. Only a handful of anti-communist dictatorships were
printed in white. And every year, the map got redder and redder. By the early
1960s, for example, the U.S., according to the key accompanying the map, was 60%
to 80% communist controlled.
As time went on, Welch got loonier and loonier, tracing the Communist
Conspiracy back to the Bavarian Illuminati (founded in 1776 and not heard from
since 1798) and eventually back to ancient Sparta; purging the Birchers from the
conservative movement proved a less and less challenging task.
The libertarians were another matter. Libertarianism was then simply an
element of American conservatism. Some conservatives tended more toward
libertarianism, and some more toward traditionalism. But even such leading
traditionalists as Richard Weaver held plainly libertarian views. In addition to
Rand, libertarian leaders included economists Ludwig von Mises, Frederich Hayek,
and Milton Friedman, upon whom conservatives relied for an economic rationale for
rolling back the welfare state, which, in those antediluvian days, conservatives
abhorred.
But it was Rand whose books sold millions of copies and who was attracting
tens of thousands of followers, most of them young and enthusiastic. And it was
Rand who strongly opposed what she saw as conservatism's reliance on religion,
which she believed was simply and obviously irrational. So it was Rand who had to
be purged.
In 1957, Buckley published "Big Sister Is Watching You," a review of Rand's
"Atlas Shrugged." The review appeared in Buckley's National Review, at the time
the flagship of American conservatism. Whittaker Chambers preposterously
denounced Rand as a totalitarian. "From almost any page of Atlas
Shrugged," he wrote, "a voice can be heard, from painful necessity,
commanding: 'To the gas chambers — go!'" Not surprisingly, this episode
helped turn Rand away from conservatism, and conservatives away from Rand. From
the day she read Chambers' review, Rand walked out of any room that Buckley
walked into.
| From almost any page of
Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To the
gas chambers — go!" |
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At the same time, Rand's need for conservative followers was declining. In the
1940s and early 1950s, Rand had necessarily seen herself as part of the Right,
where she could find a sympathetic audience. But the publication of "Atlas
Shrugged" brought her a huge following among ordinary readers and her succumbing
to the flattering attention of one young admirer, Nathaniel Branden, who provided
her the hero-worship she craved.
It was later learned that during these years, Branden and
Rand had a secret sexual relationship. This December-May affair was, not
surprisingly, an unstable one, but even when it came asunder in 1968, it remained
secret. Granted, a perceptive reader of Nathaniel Branden's letter to subscribers
of The Objectivist Newsletter in which he said that Rand had broken with him
after he had made "a tortured, awkward, excruciatingly embarrassed attempt to
make clear to her why I felt that an age distance between us of twenty-five years
constituted an insuperable barrier, for me, to a romantic relationship" might
have noticed that Branden had avoided any mention of whether such a relationship
had existed prior to their break, and surmised that perhaps one
had.* But very few people did notice,
and this was years after the period Buckley writes about. Buckley gleefully
chronicles the bizarre affair, despite the fact that neither he nor anyone else
aside from Rand, Branden and their spouses knew of its existence at the time.
The history of the American Right during this period is full of colorful and
amusing events, many of which Buckley chronicles in his novel. Unfortunately, his
fictional characters are flatly and amateurly drawn, serving only as a vehicle
for chronicling the events. And the accuracy of Buckley's portrayal of the
historic characters is difficult to evaluate. While Buckley knew some of the
dramatis personae very well — his friends who aided in purging the
libertarians and the Birchers — the same cannot be said for Welch, Edwin
Walker (the ex-military leader who flipped out into the netherworld of the
nutball right in 1962), Ayn Rand or the Brandens, all of whose innermost thoughts
he portrays.
| As time went on, Welch
got loonier and loonier, tracing the Communist Conspiracy back to the Bavarian
Illuminati (founded in 1776 and not heard from since 1798) and eventually back to
ancient Sparta. |
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Early in the book, he provides this specimen of Rand's interior thinking:
"She thought of Barbara Branden, her assistant. Dear Barbara. Barbara
was the wife of Nathaniel Branden, her closest associate, the true apostle of
objectivism [Rand's philosophy], very nearly on a par with me in his mastery
of the subject. I saw Barbara wince when I rebuked that stupid student. Will she
reproach me tomorrow? I can tell when she is offended. She doesn't have to say
so. My eyes are all-seeing, my ears all-hearing." This absurd bit of
inner dialogue reveals a remarkable unfamiliarity with its subject. While Rand's
religious opponents gloried in using religious terminology to describe Rand and
her followers, Rand herself never used terms like "apostle." Most absurdly of
all, the notion that Rand thought that her eyes were "all-seeing" and her ears
"all-hearing" is simply ridiculous: although Rand didn't like her followers doing
anything she didn't approve of ideologically, she could not have cherished many
illusions about her ability to detect it. She was always being surprised by
unpleasant discoveries.
Of course, I suppose Buckley might ascribe this flight of fancy to novelistic
license. That's a problem inherent in presenting memoir as historic fiction: the
reader never knows whether the author is reporting what had happened or simply
making something up to move his account along. But Buckley himself denies it. In
a brief preface, he writes that "there is no misrepresentation in this novel,
certainly none intended, and to the best of my knowledge, none crept in." On the
other hand, he admits that "as to be expected in novels, thoughts and sentences
are given to invididuals which, however true they are to character, were not
actually recorded."
Buckley wrote these words in September 2002, when he was 77 years old. He
deserves to be cut some slack. On the other hand, I am not so sure that the
conservatives who are celebrating "Getting It Right" as a history of the actual
persons and events of that nearly-forgotten period deserve the same
consideration.
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| * | He apparently forgot this element of his long term strategy by
1989, when communism went kaput, and hasn't seemed to remember it
since. |
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| * | I myself surmised this. In 1980, I happened to have lunch with
Roy Childs and a number of other libertarians, so I took the opportunity to ask
Childs, "What do you think of the rumor than Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden had a
long sexual relationship?" Childs responded angrily: "That's a dirty lie. There's
not an iota of truth to it. And I know where you heard it. You heard it from John
Hospers. He of all people shouldn't be spreading rumors like that." I later came
to know Hospers, a philosopher who was a friend of Rand's during the late 1950s
and the first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, well enough to
ask him whether he had known of the Rand-Branden affair back when it was going
on, and he told me that he'd never suspected it. I never had any idea what Childs
had meant by "He of all people." |
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