The Coming Race War in America. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 31, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Mr. Al Neuharth, the publisher emeritus of USA Today, advised his readers, "This is a book that will scare the bejesus out of most of us." He is talking about Carl Rowan's The Coming Race War in America. "[Rowan] makes a scary case that hatemongers are hurling us toward an inevitable racial Armageddon."

In the event you haven't time to read this column to the end, let me reassure you right away that there is every reason for all of us to be scared by Jesus, Who ordained that we should lead better lives than most of us do, but there is no reason for the bejesus to be scared out of us by the book in question, which is alarmist, silly, and quite stupid.

Mr. Neuharth, in his review, repeats the names of the ten principal "hatemongers" in America. It is at times like these that one sighs for the better days when the libel laws could be invoked. Among the top ten hatemongers in America, if you will believe Carl Rowan --which you will do if you take leave of your senses -- are Newt Gingrich and Richard Cohen (of the Washington Post). Why is Newt Gingrich a hatemonger? "For a generation we have seen a law-enforcement version of genocide: our failed drug war has incarcerated, or destroyed the reputations of, a fourth of the young black men in this country. And now we hear a Democratic President, Bill Clinton, endorse 'boot camps' for first-time violators of the law. And Newt Gingrich urging a 'wartime' stance in which the Federal Government builds detention camps. Welcome to the old South Africa and Nazi Germany!"

The opening line in Mr. Rowan's book is, "Sensational, inflammatory journalism has never been my style. I have never written dire prophecies of human disasters except when there was compelling evidence that calamity was at hand."

Well, is such evidence at hand? Yes, it is all over the place, says Mr. Rowan. There is "the cruelly bigoted rhetoric that often befouls the well of the House of Representatives." The "swastikas and Ku Klux Klan symbols that festoon our military barracks." That what our barracks? Decorate our barracks?

But that is the way Mr. Rowan writes. Here he is on Ronald Reagan. "No President in my lifetime ever played the race card to such political benefit as Reagan did. His fulminations about welfare, his loud support of states' rights, his publicity stunts --including opening a re-election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil-rights workers (two Jewish, one black) had been murdered -- helped to rip most of the South away from Democratic control."

If you can be brought to believe that President Reagan opened his re-election campaign in a town in Mississippi because three civil-rights workers had been murdered there, intending to identify himself with the cause of the murderers, then you are ready to believe that Carl Rowan has his wits about him.

"What I will never forget or forgive is that Reagan had no minorities of consequence inside his campaign team. His Cabinet had only one black man in it, and he was embarrassing. And worst of all, Reagan went eight years refusing to talk to any civil-rights leaders."

Now get this, the very next sentence. After Reagan's "refusal to talk to any civil-rights leaders." Ready? "When I asked him why, in 1988, he invited me to lunch." That is how difficult it was for a prominent black to get a look at President Reagan. You call him up, he asks you to lunch.

What did he say at lunch?

"They criticized me upon my election, so I just said, 'To hell with 'em."' There are several possible reactions on the part of the reader. 1) Rowan misquoted Reagan. (People who know Reagan well know the intensity of his commitment to racial equality.) 2) Reagan said it, in the sense of: "What can I do with civil-rights leaders who insist on being hostile to me?" And 3) Reagan said it and went on to guard against the kind of interpretation Rowan has of course put on it.

It goes on. Irving Kristol "dispenses quota crap." "In September, the newspaper of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, declared Reagan its favorite candidate, asserting that 'the Republican platform reads as if it were written by a Klansman."' Well, Mr. Rowan's book reads as if it were written by a besotted simpleton, which it was.