Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created
Neo-Conservatism
By Ben J. Wattenberg
(Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press, 362 pages, $26.95)
The year was 1966. Lyndon Baines Johnson presided over a gloomy
post-Camelot America. His whiz kid special assistant and
Time cover boy, the Rev. Billy Don Moyers, brought the
author of an optimistic demography book to the White House for an
audition. Moyers liked what he heard from the freelance author
and took him to meet the president, who happened to be dressed in
his silk pajamas in preparation for a nap. Thus began the beltway
career of a B.A. in English and drama from Hobart College. Ben
Wattenberg, not an academic as so many have assumed, combined
shrewd instincts and a devotion to statistics into a life in
“data journalism.”
Moyers, by the way, pops up at various points in the book.
Wattenberg can’t seem to be able to believe that the former aide
to LBJ decades later became the same man who recently claimed the
right would mount a coup if Kerry won in 2004. He is thankful to
Moyers for bringing him to the White House and appalled at the
same time.
The book is both an autobiography of Wattenberg and a light
history of neoconservatism. The two go together. Wattenberg, who
grew up in a community disproportionately sympathetic to
socialism in New York, is one of many Jewish intellectuals who
found themselves first trying to move the Democratic Party to the
center and then, in many cases, settling among Republicans.
Wattenberg never went all the way to the GOP. He worked for LBJ,
Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson before becoming a fixture in
the think tank world. Unlike his fellow neocon Daniel Patrick
Moynihan (who became a reliable left vote in the Senate), though,
he could not reliably support the Democrats, either. It turns out
Wattenberg is a rarity in Washington. He is a swing voter.
Though the title is Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals
Created Neo-Conservatism, it isn’t quite apt. Wattenberg
weaves neoconservatism into his life story, but in this volume,
the political movement is really part of his story rather than
the other way around. However, rehabilitating neoconservatism is
part of the mission. The longtime AEI (American Enterprise
Institute) fellow is eager to remind readers that there is more
to the movement than aggressive foreign policy. While it’s true
that neocons began as liberals faced with growing disappointment
in the Soviet experiment with Communism, they were also concerned
about the degradation of American culture.
One of Irving Kristol’s most memorable aphorisms is that a
conservative is simply “a liberal mugged by reality.” The
reference to mugging was not merely metaphorical. Crime became a
compelling issue in Vietnam-era America. Wattenberg reports that
his own mother was mugged once. His father was mugged twice. His
son was mugged twice. His sister-in-law was murdered. A key
belief that distinguished neocons from liberals of the time was
that “law and order” is not code for racism, but rather that it
is the code for civilization.
The specter of Barack Obama lurks behind a number of the book’s
confident proclamations about the future of neoconservatism.
Wattenberg is bullish on the concept and believes that soft
liberals are poison to the Democratic Party while tougher
liberals win the prize. Is Obama more like the tough cold warrior
Kennedy or the softer McGovern? One suspects Wattenberg would say
Obama is the exception that proves the rule.
Obama also comes to mind when Wattenberg writes about President
Jimmy Carter. For example, Wattenberg explains:
“As an unknown, he [Carter] gained a dream situation for a
candidate: the ability to describe himself as he wished to be
known.…That is why money is so important. It buys the ability…to
paint a portrait of a candidate as he or she wants to be known.”
Those words could have been written precisely for the
president-elect.
THE BEST TREASURES in the book center on Wattenberg’s many
experiences in Washington life. In one instance, Wattenberg found
himself debating Milton Friedman, which he found profoundly
disturbing because Friedman had the “unnerving” debate tactic of
chuckling in a barely audible fashion while his opponent spoke.
Wattenberg reports he felt a consistent urge to check whether his
zipper was open.
He also recalls Scoop Jackson (a devout Christian)
enthusiastically telling a Jewish audience how his mother
instructed him to “love the Jews.” Wattenberg had to explain to
the senator how that kind of talk made Jews uncomfortable.
Some of his anecdotes are earnest and touching. Traveling with
Hubert Humphrey, Wattenberg heard the candidate take an audience
through an unscripted and heartfelt guided tour of the Pledge of
Allegiance with his eyes shining. Humphrey had been instrumental
in inserting the words “under God” in the pledge. He told
audiences those two words “gave real meaning to human dignity.”
Wattenberg’s book goes in a number of different directions. It is
sometimes an autobiography, sometimes a movement history,
sometimes a compilation of anecdotal tales of time spent with
famous men, and sometimes a lift of the curtain to expose the
wizard behind political television and syndicated columns.
Despite this stew of different ingredients maintaining their own
flavor, Fighting Words is consistently smart and
entertaining. It is somewhat ironic that a man who has long
focused on examining the data to explain the issues, has written
a personal history that explains so much about the last
half-century of American politics.
