The American Spectator

The Spectacle Blog

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.