Right from the Beginning. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1988 by James Fallows

Buchanan and his friends cheered for Notre Dame the way the blacks had cheered for Joe Louis. They played sports at the CYO and in the Catholic League. They went to parochial schools all the way through--and then to college at places like Georgetown, Fordham, and St. John's. "Even though I was first in my class in the premier Catholic school in the city, the Ivy League was never an option," he says. It would have been too expensive for a family with nine children ("and there were no Ivy League recruiters hanging around Gonzaga, no affirmative action scholarships to Harvard and Yale for deserving Catholic boys"). But even if it had been free his parents would never have permitted him to go where he might "lose his faith." Buchanan eventually went to Columbia's journalism school for graduate work, and years later he seethed when he discovered that the Columbia admissions office had crossed out all the theology and moral philosophy grades on his Georgetown transcript, amounting to 40 hours of course work, when computing his "real" grade point average.

If you're any younger than Buchanan, this near-total isolation of Catholic life is impossible to remember and hard to believe. This is so even though there is abundant literary evidence, most recently Philip Roth's memoirs, that until the sixties most white ethnic groups, not just Catholics and Jews, lived in sealed-off societies. Buchanan's book is a useful reminder of why John Kennedy's election was such a big deal for Catholics and the country in 1960--and of how rapidly the whole issue of "dual loyalty" for Catholics in politics (would they answer to the Americans who elected them? or to the Pope?) evaporated after that. The rest of the country quickly crossed this divide, speeded along by Kennedy's assassination, the post-Vatican-II liberalizations in the church (which Buchanan detests), Catholics' rising incomes, and their over-all assimilation. Professionally Buchanan is fully assimilated but emotionally he is not.

I don't mean that he has "dual loyalties" but that he clearly has not forgotten the feeling of being different, of having Columbia condescend to his hard-earned moral philosophy grades. This leads him to rail, like Joe McCarthy, against the decadent establishment--but it also gives him a healthy antisnob edge, in clear contrast to so many other half-British-sounding, smarty-pants young conservatives. (In his book, Buchanan praises the biggest smarty-pants of them all, William F. Buckley, for holding the conservative movement together during the fifties, but there's something fishy about his tone. Except for being a right-winger, Buckley epitomizes everything that Buchanan hates: snobbishness, pretension, sneering down at the average Joe. Never in a million years would Buckley want Buchanan along on one of his trans-Atlantic sailing trips or for a week of skiing at Gstaad. Buchanan's effusive compliments to Buckley have the sound of extra-fervent prayer from one who is embarrassed about having an impure thought--namely, that it would be great if Buckley were a pinko so Buchanan could rip into him for his foppish ways.) As a teen-ager, Buchanan loved to crash fancy parties with a group of tough friends. "I would present myself at the front door, neatly groomed in a coat and tie, introduce myself to the parents, suggesting I was from Landon or St. Alban's, the elite prep schools, or maybe pre-med at Princeton."