The National Interest

Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 336 pp., $35.00.

Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 440 pp., $45.00.

Norman Podhoretz, Why are Jews Liberals? (New York: Doubleday, 2009) 352 pp., $27.00.

Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism (New York: Random House, 2009), 144 pp., $17.00.

IN OCTOBER 1951, Yale celebrated its two hundred fiftieth anniversary, graced by .the presence of the chancellor of Oxford University (who happened to be Lord Halifax, the “appeasing” foreign secretary of the late 1930s, and very nearly prime minister instead of Churchill in 1940), the chairman of United States Steel and other such dignitaries. But like Banquo’s ghost, a shadowy figure cast a pall over the celebrations.

A “brash, brisk, indecorous young man,” as one observer called him, who had graduated the previous year, now returned as a terrifying specter to haunt New Haven. He was, of course, William F. Buckley, Jr., who died last February aged eighty-two, nearly six decades after he timed that first book deliberately to spoil the party. God and Man at Yale was a magnificent display of ingratitude, a polemical denunciation of the author’s alma mater for indoctrinating the sons of “Christian individualists” as “atheistic socialists,” a succès fou—and a portent.

In any community at any time there are always people who could be called conservatives, and in The Conservatives, Patrick Allitt gives a readable and informative overview of different strains of American conservatism, from the Federalists to the End of History (even if it doesn’t quite seem to have ended so far). And yet “before the 1950s,” as Allitt says, “there was no such thing as a conservative movement in the United States.” It is not far-fetched to see God and Man at Yale as the starting gun which began that movement. The political consequences during Buckley’s lifetime would be dramatic.

With conservatism today in the doldrums, this is a good moment from which to look back at the movement, with its antecedents, its birth, its triumphs and now, if Sam Tanenhaus’s title The Death of Conservatism is correct, its demise. Buckley’s early career makes a useful point of departure, and we have a scintillating running commentary on that career that was provided at the time by that marvelous journalist Dwight Macdonald. Reviewing Buckley’s first book in 1952 (in a “fatherly” spirit “from the vantage point of Yale ’28”), he was part impressed, part amused, part skeptical. Skepticism would turn into an exceptionally penetrating critique as he examined Buckley’s next book, McCarthy and his Enemies, in 1954, and then the newborn National Review (NR) in 1955. Not only was Macdonald’s analysis mordantly witty and acute; more than a half century later, what he said then may also help explain present conservative woes, in particular by way of examining the numerous internal contradictions that have beset the movement from the start.

JUST AS now, Republican and conservative America was at a low ebb at the end of the 1940s. In his sparkling essay, Tanenhaus writes of “the heliocentrism of our two-party system as it has evolved over the past century and a half,” which has meant “long cycles—roughly thirty to thirty-six years—of one-party dominance.” There have been relatively few periods when the major parties were even in close competition. And so, as the journalist and pollster Samuel Lubell said, “our political solar system” has not been characterized by “two equally competing suns, but by a sun and a moon. It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out; while the minority party shines in reflected radiance of the heat thus generated.”

In fact, the first such period lasted far more than thirty-six years—the very long Republican ascendancy of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries which was one of the legacies of the Civil War. The GOP of that age by no means resembled the English Tory Party or any of the incipient rightist parties in Europe, and one of our problems is that American politics really don’t correspond to European terminology or concepts; even that dangerous metaphor of Left and Right, inherited from the French Revolution, which can be misleading enough in the European context, often doesn’t fit America at all.

Whether or not it was “right wing,” the Republican platform of that heyday combined protective tariffs to shield budding American industry, a sound gold-based currency—“the cross of gold” on which mankind was crucified, according to William Jennings Bryan, three times the losing Democratic presidential candidate—and, from the end of the century, an increasingly aggressive or even imperialist foreign policy. The Republicans throve on this mixture. From Lincoln’s 1861 inauguration, a mere two of fifteen presidents were Democrats (and one of them was Woodrow Wilson, who won in 1912 only thanks to the raging Bull Moose, Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party intervention), while the GOP reigned in the White House in all for fifty-six of seventy-two years.

That ascendancy ended with a dramatic swing of the pendulum. From 1932, the Democrats won the White House in five successive elections: the “twenty years of treason” of more fervid conservative imaginations. While Franklin Roosevelt brought in the New Deal, led the country through the Depression and fought a world war, the GOP was seemingly unable to find a coherent response to the challenges of severe economic depression and war, and languished in opposition.

More broadly, as the last century reached its midpoint, conservatives everywhere faced a deep challenge. In Europe conservatism had too often shaded into nationalism, and then into what the French call “integral nationalism,” or fascism, which had been crushed in battle and morally discredited beyond redemption. Socialism of one kind or another, Marxist or democratic, seemed the wave of the future across much of the world. After the dominant role played by the Red Army in defeating Germany, Soviet Russia was looked on with renewed admiration by some of the Western intelligentsia, and the victorious democracies had themselves practiced what Winston Churchill, in an earlier conflict, had named war socialism, hugely increasing the power of the state. In 1945 the British electorate followed war socialism with peace socialism, and even the Tories, like the emerging Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe, accepted the necessity of statist planning and welfare.

ALTHOUGH HE was anything but a Christian Democrat, Buckley was a fervent Roman Catholic, and yet seemingly unfamiliar with the teaching of his Church; he must have been taken aback when God and Man at Yale was roundly denounced by the Catholic press. He “succeeds in contravening Catholic moral doctrine as applied to economics and politics on almost every topic he takes up,” pronounced the Jesuit magazine America, shocked by a man whose social philosophy was “almost as obnoxious to a well-instructed Catholic as the assaults on religion he rightly condemns,” while the Church-owned Boston Pilot was equally dismayed by his “attempt to identify the heresy of economic individualism with Catholic or Christian doctrine.” Those critics meant the Vatican’s teachings, enshrined in Pope Leo XIII’s great encyclical “Rerum Novarum” and regularly reiterated thereafter, which condemned both state socialism and laissez-faire. Christian Democracy in Europe had absorbed those teachings; Buckley and NR, with their hatred of all welfare except when the poor were actually starving (if then), had not.

In American parlance, the politics of a centrally directed economy and a high-taxing, high-spending welfare state had come to be known as “liberalism.” But further to confuse matters semantically, that was the exact opposite of the classical nineteenth-century European Liberalism extolled in the 1927 book of that name by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (who would later be, in Macdonald’s view, almost the only intellectually respectable figure to send greetings to the newborn NR). From the start, the conservative movement abhorred the liberalism—à l’américaine—of the New Deal, whose inheritance President Eisenhower broadly accepted, much to the conservatives’ chagrin.

In truth there were deep tensions within this new movement’s ungainly amalgam of nationalism, social traditionalism, religious piety, small government and low taxes. One logical path would have been isolationism, an American tradition that persists to this day, with the conservative nationalist Patrick Buchanan and the conservative libertarian Congressman Ron Paul alike opposed to the Iraq War, and interventionism in general. But the strongest emotion of all animating the new conservative movement was militant anti-Communism, and this “put National Review in the paradoxical position,” as Allitt observes, “of hating big government in all areas except the one in which it was becoming biggest of all, defense.”

IF NOT quite oxymoronic, “American conservatism” is surely problematic. The whole spirit of the country is inherently, intensely optimistic, and no activity or disposition is more un-American than the pessimism that suffuses European conservatism. A few American conservatives such as Peter Viereck—a fierce early critic of Buckley—were philosophical pessimists, but then when this rare sensibility did assert itself in America it was not exclusively conservative. It was in some measure shared by other Americans a very long way from the Right. Buckley’s career was well predated by the radical anti-Stalinism of the Partisan Review crowd and other New York intellectuals, and then the liberal anti-Communism of men like Reinhold Niebuhr and Lionel Trilling. After the reality of the twentieth century, they could no longer maintain the naive progressive optimism of an earlier generation; and although their hatred of Soviet Communism was as deep as NR’s, and better informed, it did not turn them into reactionaries.

As its starting point, Michael Kimmage’s thoughtful and stimulating book The Conservative Turn takes the random chance that Trilling and Whittaker Chambers were friends at Columbia in the 1920s, and that Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey is an undisguised roman à clef about Chambers. Oddly enough, it was published just before Chambers became internationally famous for delating Alger Hiss, and Trilling said that when he wrote the book he had never even heard of Hiss. Himself a former Communist operative, Chambers renounced the cause, and then gave his electrifying testimony in 1948 that his former friend Hiss, a sometime State Department official, had been a Soviet spy. While conservatives applauded Chambers for showing how far the American government had been infiltrated by Commies, liberals were outraged, and denounced him as a wicked liar. When Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950, he was seen by the Left as an innocent martyr falsely accused, a view which persisted for many years, but has long since ceased to be honestly held. The conservatives capitalized on this victory: Buckley befriended Chambers and brought him aboard NR as a writer. But the movement would overplay its hand.

IN FEBRUARY 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man until then little known outside Wisconsin or Washington, where he had only been in the Senate for three years, had erupted onto the national stage with his Wheeling speech, claiming to have “in my hand” a long list of Communists “still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” As Tanenhaus truly said in his fine earlier biography of Chambers, that speech “began the most destructive chapter in modern American political life.” Chambers and a few other honorable conservatives warned that McCarthy was as dangerous as he was mendacious, but Buckley conspicuously ignored those warnings.

He defended and supported McCarthy, and in most opportunistic fashion. “Young Mr. Buckley is getting into low company,” Macdonald warned at the end of his first essay, and Buckley’s next book, McCarthy and His Enemies, written with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, confirmed those forebodings. This disingenuous defense of “the most unscrupulous demagogue in American public life today” was deathlessly described by Macdonald as a book “replete with nice discriminations and pedantic hair-splittings, giving the general effect of a brief by Cadwallader, Wickersham & Taft on behalf of a pickpocket arrested in a subway men’s room.”

Plenty of wiser foes of totalitarianism, including Macdonald, saw what too many conservatives refused to see—that McCarthy had gravely damaged the honorable anti-Communist cause. (One idiosyncratic English Tory saw it too. Evelyn Waugh not only declined to write for NR; in a letter to Buckley that must have surprised him, he said that McCarthy was “a regrettable figure,” and that McCarthy and His Enemies “will not go far to clear his reputation.”) This was an unhappy start for a conservative movement which wanted to claim any sort of moral superiority, and the conservative ascendancy within the GOP would see plenty more lapses from high principle. McCarthy was not the only low company in which the movement would find itself.

IN ITS early years NR showed no enthusiasm at all for the causes of civil rights and desegregation, the central questions in American domestic politics. For Macdonald, a true conservative was “someone like that admirable Republican” John Marshall Harlan, the Supreme Court justice of the late-nineteenth century who wrote a lone dissent against the majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which lamentably made “separate but equal” the law of the land.

No bleeding heart, Harlan had once supported slavery and denied he was any “friend of the Negro.” But he took the founding texts of the Republic with absolute seriousness and insisted that “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” By abject contrast, NR refused to support even the Court’s belated final recognition in Brown v. Board of Education that Harlan had been right, muttering that segregation “is a problem that should be solved not by the central government, but locally—in the states . . . and in the hearts of men.” As Macdonald said, “A true conservative appeals to the laws or, if desperate, to tradition, but certainly not to the ‘hearts of men.’”

This set a sorry tone for the conservative movement, and thereby for the Republicans once conservatives gained control of the party. Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 might have seemed a Pyrrhic victory when he was routed in November, while Buckley’s own run for mayor of New York the following year looked more of a tease than a serious political venture; and yet, as Tanenhaus says, Buckley’s campaign provided a bridge forward to Ronald Reagan’s victory in the Californian gubernatorial election in 1966. The movement was on the march.

If Richard Nixon’s relations with the movement were uneasy, and if George Bush the Elder was never “One of Us” (in the phrase attributed to Margaret Thatcher, whether or not she ever actually said it), Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Younger were. But although the Republicans would be in the White House for twenty-eight of forty years after 1968, they took more unlovely paths to get there.

After NR’s equivocation over civil rights, the GOP adopted a “Southern strategy” which was a coy euphemism for appealing to white racists. This strategy worked, for a time. When Lyndon Johnson heroically passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he said that the South would be lost to the Democrats for a generation, and it proved longer than that: last November, white Southern men were the only group to vote for John McCain by a large majority. But the Democrats have shown that it’s possible to win nationally on a convincing scale without those votes, or without such compromises, not to say with a candidate who existentially defies the Southern strategy.

IN PART because Bill Buckley himself was funny and irreverent, could be personally engaging (when he chose), and had a pleasing taste for ecumenical friendship across political divides, he and his magazine have in some ways been leniently judged. Buckley insisted that from the founding of NR he had “declined association with anti-Semites,” and he has been praised, by his son Christopher among others, for having cleansed the conservative movement of “kooks”—the fanatics and racists. It’s true that Buckley disowned the John Birch Society (whose ardent members were convinced that President Eisenhower was a Soviet agent), and that Chambers wrote a devastating assault in NR on Ayn Rand.

But then most of the American Right had eschewed anti-Semitism after Hitler (most American Jews had eschewed Communism). Even the Irish Americans were more restrained than they had been in the 1930s, when Social Justice, Father Coughlin’s Jew-baiting magazine, was sold at parish porches after Sunday Mass. And yet NR’s record is more occluded than Buckley’s claim suggests. An alarming example was the magazine’s coverage of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the senior SS officer who had played a central part in the extermination of the Jews and had escaped after the war to the Argentine where Israeli agents tracked him down and brought him to trial in Jerusalem, amid frenzied media coverage.

There were respectable juristic grounds for questioning a trial held by a state for deeds committed when that state had not so much as existed, but that wasn’t what angered NR. This “pernicious” event was serving “an international apparatus of vengeance,” the magazine complained, adding brutally that “the Jewish community is not lawmaker for the world.” The trial was “a studied attempt to cast suspicion upon Germany. . . . It is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims.”

Those effusions cast an ironical light on the later rightward voyage of a significant part of the Jewish intelligentsia, who have now found a home in the Republican Party. To be sure, that party itself has changed since the days when the Eisenhower administration was not so much detached from the new Jewish state as well-nigh hostile, and the GOP now outbids the Democrats whenever possible in unconditional support for Israel. But then the meaning of one potent word has also changed.

“THE NEO-CONSERVATIVES of our time reject the propositions on materialism, Human Nature and Progress,” Macdonald wrote in 1943. He had in mind Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels and James Burnham (whose own political trajectory from Trotskyism ended at National Review). Then nine years later Macdonald noted the interesting fact that “three leading spokesmen for the neoconservative tendency that has arisen among the younger intellectuals” were hostile to Buckley, this time intending August Heckscher, McGeorge Bundy and Peter Viereck. As late as 1986, when the historian Theodore H. Draper criticized “Neoconservative History” in the New York Review of Books, his targets were latter-day cold warriors like Jeane Kirkpatrick, and he didn’t so much as mention the Middle East or Israel.

That would be impossible if anyone were writing about neoconservatism today. After several kaleidoscopic shifts, “neoconservative” now seems to have a settled meaning, and even ethnic overtones. Robert Kagan is irate because when Europeans say “neoconservatives” they mean “Jews,” and David Brooks of the New York Times puts it more wittily when he says that “neocon” has become an abbreviation, in which “con is short for ‘conservative,’” and “neo is short for ‘Jewish.’” But it is indeed no secret that the original impetus for what today is known as neoconservatism (as opposed to whatever was represented by Mosca, Heckscher and Kirkpatrick) came from a group of Jewish intellectuals who had begun their political lives on the left, some as Trotskyists, but who started to wander rightward from the 1960s; and that chief among the proximate causes for this turn was the estrangement between Israel and the Left, mirrored at home by the poignant estrangement between Jewish America and African America.

WHICH BRINGS us to Norman Podhoretz’s latest book. Well now. A man who once wrote an essay called “My Negro Problem—And Ours” will never be shy of in-your-face titles, so he doesn’t mess about when it comes to asking Why Are Jews Liberals? He is talking here about Jewish Americans, and their continued inclination, which so exasperates him, to “earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” It’s quite true that, from Roosevelt to Obama, Jewish Americans have voted Democrat by margins ranging from substantial to huge, and in every poll they evince sentiments more liberal than the average. Even on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the West Bank settlements, the generality of Jewish Americans are more conciliatory than is the official (albeit self-appointed) Jewish-American leadership.

And yet European experience by no means supports any idea that Jews must always stand on the left as though genetically conditioned to do so. Of course some did, but from circumstance, especially their own circumstance. “The persecution of the Jewish race,” said the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, had deprived society “of an important conservative element and added to the destructive party an influential ally.” This was an important insight, which Isaiah Berlin amplified in suggesting that when Marx preaches uncompromising class war, “it is the centuries-long oppression of a people of pariahs, not of a recently risen class, that seems to be speaking in him.”

Where Jews continued to be persecuted, as in czarist Russia, many not surprisingly turned toward radical or revolutionary politics, Disraeli’s “destructive party,” but that was not true where they were better treated, and especially when rising nationalism offered them a new threat. In the course of a high-school canter through Jewish history, Podhoretz mentions Emperor Joseph II of Austria and his 1782 Edict of Toleration, without seeing its full significance. As the English historian A. J. P. Taylor said, when Joseph emancipated the Jews, he “called into existence the most loyal of Austrians. The Jews alone were not troubled by the conflict between dynastic and national claims: they were Austrians without reserve.” Maybe there is an analogy there with another “multinational” country across the Atlantic. The Jews became the most American of Americans, likewise untroubled by conflicting claims, at least until one came along in the form of Zionism.

WHILE PODHORETZ frets over the incorrigible liberalism of Jewish Americans, he may really be asking something else: why haven’t they followed his own rightward path, and his own logic? For very many years past Podhoretz has said that he judges any issue by the simple test “Is it good for the Jews?” although he has his own idea of what “good” means, and he invokes a string of begged questions. Above all, he and his allies assume as if it were beyond argument that the interests of the United States and Israel—and the interests of Jewish Americans and Israelis—must always coincide, which is in reality very debatable. He would doubtless think it wimpish if any Jews tried to take a broader view and occasionally asked whether “it is good” for their country, or even humanity.

Now and again Podhoretz’s relentless manner can become a little wearing, a nagging monomania which puts one in mind of the old story about the Englishman, the Frenchman and the Pole asked to write essays on the elephant. The Englishman writes “How to Shoot an Elephant,” the Frenchman writes “The Sex Life of the Elephant” and the Pole writes “The Elephant and the Polish Question.” Ask Norman Podhoretz for his own contribution, and in no time at all he’ll have written “Nice Tusks—But Is the Elephant Good for the Jews?”

In his survey of the decades after 1945, Allitt mentions the new libertarians, including that interesting writer Murray Rothbard, author of For a New Liberty. He once wrote a ferocious attack on Podhoretz (enlivened with some choice Yiddish abuse of “this schmendrick”) in the now-defunct magazine Inquiry, in which he made an astute point. Podhoretz insisted on always asking “Is it good for the Jews?”; but what if, in response to this insistence, “American non-Jews, who are after all in the vast majority, begin to gauge foreign policy on the basis of the question: Is it good for the gentiles?” Some solipsistic neocons have yet to grasp that.

QUESTIONS OF ethnicity aside, a European’s first response to neoconservatism is likely to be, “more neo than con.” Whatever else they may be, the American neocons of today have nothing at all in common with traditional conservatism, least of all English Toryism, pragmatic, pessimistic, skeptical. The English conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott said that conservatism was not a doctrine but a disposition; neoconservatism is a doctrine and a half.

If one wanted a simple slogan for true conservatism it might be the opening line of V. S. Naipaul’s masterpiece A Bend in the River, which Patrick French used as the title of his remarkable (and remarkably candid) biography of the great novelist: “The world is what it is.” That is something the neocons have never understood. They deal with the world not as it is but as they think it should be, and display an inability to distinguish between “is” and “ought” worthy of the doctrinaire Marxism which some of them once professed. And they also sometimes evince both the lack of scruple and the detachment from reality once associated with the Bolshevik Left.

Not so dissimilarly from those earlier conservative compromises with McCarthy or white voters, the neocons have pursued their own “Southern strategy”—the embrace of Christian fundamentalists, who support Israel for hair-raising eschatological reasons of their own (awaiting Armageddon, End Times and Rapture, which may or may not involve the annihilation of a large part of the Jewish people). Every survey shows that such Southern Evangelicals are decidedly more anti-Semitic in outlook as most of us understand it than Northern Episcopalians and Quakers. But they stand by Israel, and that, says Podhoretz, is all that matters.

One last paradox has been too little discussed. Six years ago anyone who suggested that the perceived interests of Israel might have had anything to do with the Iraq War was immediately branded an anti-Semite. But Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate (and himself originally a supporter of the war), now breezily tells us that:

Many neocons believed that turning secularized Iraq into a third pro-Western democracy in the region would cause other authoritarian regimes to topple. As it liberalized, the Middle East would cease to provide a breeding ground for terrorism. Arabs would also come to accept the presence of Israel, something the mostly Jewish neoconservatives cared about especially.

This deserves an essay all to itself, but for the moment I shall merely say that any idea that making the Middle East more democratic would make it safer for Israel is the most fantastical political notion since the Bolsheviks claimed that the dictatorship of the proletariat would lead to a classless society and the withering away of the state.

Many of these twists and turns are related in Tanenhaus’s very clever and illuminating essay, up to the “most decadent phase” conservatism has yet experienced, by which he means Newt Gingrich’s short-lived triumph in 1994. A little low comic relief was provided by the way that, while this gang demanded “a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family,” quite a few Grand Old Partygoers seem in practice to have modeled themselves on the Washington right-winger in Joseph Heller’s Good As Gold (who explains what happened to his first wife: “She got a year older, Bruce. And there was that thin scar from her Caesarean.”). That apart, the sheer uncreative destruction of the “Gingrich revolution” seems in hindsight closer to Pol Pot than Edmund Burke.

NOW CONSERVATISM is still in a destructive mood, and facing yet another crisis that may not be all that transient. Despite his woes, from health care to Afghanistan to the Cambridge constabulary, an attractive and eloquent young Democratic president is still self-confident at home and abroad even, and for all their point-scoring off Obama, the Republicans are in greater disarray than they may ever have been before, fractious, demoralized and baffled. By last November poor John McCain felt like Richard II, “a mockery king of snow, standing before the sun of Bolingbroke”—or rather of Barack—“to melt myself away in water-drops!” Since the election, the GOP has been quite bereft of ideas, not knowing which way to turn, or to whom (if Sarah Palin is the answer, what on earth can be the question?).

“We have long needed a good conservative magazine. (We have also long needed a good liberal magazine.) This is not it.” That was the verdict on the newborn National Review by Macdonald, disdainful of its middlebrow vulgarity and banality, its provincialism (“the voice of the lumpen-bourgeoisie”), and the fact that “they call themselves conservatives, but that is surely a misnomer” when they were really “McCarthy nationalists,” or plain reactionaries. And he made a more telling point still. “The Left—to use NR’s quaint terminology—has a set of ideas and ideals in which they can believe, which seem to them intellectually consistent and morally attractive. . . .” Macdonald knew all about this, having been through the political mill in person, successively a vague liberal, a fellow traveler, a Trotskyist, an anarchist-pacifist and an anti-Communist (which rapid transformations “some have seen as indicating an open mind, others as evidence of levity”).

But while he no longer found the Left’s ideology either morally or intellectually satisfying, it was still more plausible “than the Right’s crude patchwork of special interests.” That will remain true until American conservatives can learn a little Tory skepticism and empiricism, and rediscover the wisdom of Burke, Madison and Tocqueville; and there is little sign of that at present. “The revival of a true, principled conservatism,” Macdonald wrote more than fifty years ago, “would be of the greatest value today.” It would be of greater value still now.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author, whose books include the acclaimed Yo, Blair! (Politico’s Publishing, 2007), The Strange Death of Tory England (Allen Lane, 2005) and The Controversy of Zion (Perseus Books, 1997), which won a National Jewish Book Award.