Notes & asides.

* June 29, 2004

Memo to the staff of NATIONAL REVIEW

As you may have read in the New York Times, I will tonight step down as chief executive officer of NATIONAL REVIEW, yielding my place to Ed Capano. Rich Lowry will stay on as editor, and Dusty Rhodes will be chairman. I write this note to say how utterly confident I am in the capabilities of my successors, and I know they are grateful to all of you who have labored in our grand little vineyard, chasing down history and making it.

Ever, WFB

[The editors of NATIONAL REVIEW will comment on Mr. Buckley's retirement in the next issue, which will also include excerpts from his autobiography, Miles Gone By, published July 15.--Rich Lowry]

* WFB's introduction of David Brooks, Manhattan Institute luncheon, June 8

It was too good to be true that David Brooks would be allowed to come and go through public life without vivisection, but then that which is too good to be true doesn't happen, does it? I had the good fortune to meet today's speaker when he came to NATIONAL REVIEW as a young editor, before going off to disport with the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. And of course a year ago he was given prime journalistic acreage, a regular column in the New York Times.

During these years he has written widely, even coining a term to describe a certain class of Americans, the Bobos. These are bourgeois Bohemians, and recorded as living in Paradise. The reviewer in USA Today called this book "a breezy, well-argued explanation for why affluent well-educated people crave Sub-Zero refrigerators." Christopher Buckley called it "an absolute sparkler of a book which should establish David Brooks as the smart, fun-to-read social critic of his generation." That's nice, even if he inherited the title after an act of parricide.

And of course we are here to celebrate the book's sequel, On Paradise Drive.

Now, this book has driven some people, apparently normal, quite round the bend, for instance Michael Kinsley--though he isn't, really, normal enough to appreciate David Brooks. Kinsley began his review by remarking that Brooks has been "every liberal's favorite conservative." He explains: "This is not just because he throws us a bone of agreement every now and then. Even the most poisonous propagandist"--Kinsley cites Bill O'Reilly--"knows that trick. Brooks goes farther. In his writing and on television he actually seems reasonable. More than that, he seems cuddly." Kinsley goes on to suggest that of course this is a grave misimpression.

Well, I don't really think it is. I think David Brooks is cuddly. Twenty years ago, just graduated, he came to NATIONAL REVIEW to work. Recalling that experience some years later, he wrote that he found the magazine "a convivial ship." It hadn't always been so, he wrote. "In the early days, apparently, NR was like a crowded valley in the Appalachians, with rifle fire from shed to shed." What happened? "We were all so wrapped up in admiration for managing editor Priscilla Buckley," he explained in his essay, "that we weren't in a mood to feud." He was too self-effacing to remark that Priscilla had found him cuddly, while the rest of us spent our time conspiring to prevent him from tossing too many bones to the liberals.

David is of course sharp as a tack, but his good nature is almost always on exhibit, and he knows that political conversation can be hard to do, if you commit the effrontery of presenting a sociological vision of modern America entirely ignoring the coordinates of Marx and Freud. He is aware of the problem. He wrote recently, "I realize it's now practically illegal to have modulated views about anything related to the Bush administration"--but even so, Brooks wrote, he thought the economists who gave Bush passing grades were justified in doing so.

Indeed, a year ago he got right off that fence astride which conservatives seeking to be tolerated sit. He wrote: "Have the Democrats totally flipped their lids?" He quotes Senator Robert Byrd: "This republic is at its greatest danger in its history because of this administration." And David quoted Bill Moyers on the Bush agenda: "I think this is deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America." Bill Moyers must have meant to say, "as much destruction of the United States of America as hadn't already been done by Ronald Reagan," at whose funeral on Friday world leaders will gather to mourn the loss of the American president who discovered supply-side economics.

But America destroyed isn't David Brooks's America, which he describes in his readable new book as having its problems--what else does one expect? We are a problem-solving nation, so in order to exercise our national skills, we have to begin by having problems. But David Brooks loves his country, looks its quiddities in the face, and writes with amusement and some serenity about the nearest thing there is to paradise on this planet, in a quite cuddly way, and this brings distress to much of the critical community. He has done much to reciprocate what his country has done for him, and his friends, I have reason to know, are always in his debt.

--WFB