Wednesday evening, I attended a book-signing party for Richard
Brookhiser's Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age With
William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, hosted
at the Foxhall Road home of David Frum and Danielle Crittenden.
(Tell
Jeffrey Lord not to worry -- I've already been deprogrammed,
although I can't speak for Quin Hillyer and James Bowman, who
also attended.) I've posted an account of the soiree,
with photos, at the
Hot Air Green Room.
Brookhiser's book is quite obviously focused on Buckley, who once
designated Brookhiser his chosen sucessor at National
Review but later, declaring that his young protege
lacked "executive flair," shunted him aside. As he tells his
story, however, Brookhiser relates many other things, including
this from page 30:
Throughout high school and college I kept sending pieces to
National Review, one or two a year, and most of them
kept being published. National Review suggested I send
a humor piece to the Alternative, a monthly in
Bloomington, Indiana; its tone was simultaneously meaner, and
more fey, and they became the second place to run me.
The Alternative, of course, became The American
Spectator, and -- along with such familiar
names as R. Emmett Tyrrell, Wlady Pleszczynski and Tom
Bethell -- the magazine makes subsequent appearances.
Indeed, on page 96, Brookhiser credits Tyrrell for coining "the
tersest definition of Reaganism that I ever heard . . . 'Fight
Communism; cut taxes; the pieties.'"
All in all, Brookhiser has written a book that will be
enjoyed equally by those old enough to remember what Communism
was (and that it was once considered very right-wing to want
to fight it) and by those too young to know what it was like when
offices were redolent with the aroma of cigars and
echoed with the clatter of typewriters.
