The rise of the right.

BILL RUSHER'S mother and the great Alf Landon came from the same home town, Independence, Kansas, and the two familes were on speaking terms. Alf Landon's humiliating defeat by FDR in 1936 stung the 13-year-old Bill Rusher, who, looking back now, writes, "It is at least conceivable . . . that an unconscious determination to avenge Landon's trouncing provided a good share of the psychic energy that has fueled the rest of my life." It is indeed conceivable. I remember 1936, too. My dad gave me a Landon button to wear to school. I was eight years old. All the kids hooted at me. I took the button off in shame and humiliation. Fifty years later my breath comes in hot gasps as I think about that day.

Rusher embroiled himself in Republican politics while in college and has a network of cronies wide enough and deep enough to set up several Godfathers in business. He has been with NATIONAL REVIEW almost from the beginning. He originated the movement that led to the presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964. He has been a principal functionary, or at least a front-row observer, of almost every manifestation of the birth and growth of the conservative movement. In this book he tells that story, and not incidentally recounts his own development from a callow youth who possessed no religious belief and whose "principles" were adequately serviced by routine Republicanism into a grateful and fulfilled Christian and a political philosopher who has grounded his system on the spiritual dimension of human life. I found the story thrilling.

After all, the conservative movement started from just about scratch. Rusher paints a dark picture of our politics in the 1950s. There was no conservative movement. There were no conservative political journals. Academe, the pulpit, radio, television, newspapers--all non-conservative if not outright socialist, or worse. College lectures series, broadcast talk shows, book-publishing houses, the major tax-exempt foundations, book-review services, newspaper syndication outfits--almost a total wasteland from the conservative viewpoint. And in 25 short years it has all happened. Rusher has savored a passionate revenge.

I do wonder at times if things were really as bleak as Rusher says they were back in the Fifties. Richard Weaver and F. A. Hayek had published their popular blockbusters. Russell Kirk had rocked the world with The Conservative Mind (1953). Henry Regnery had founded a publishing house. Radio brought us Lowell Thomas, Paul Harvey, Ray Henle's Three-Star Extra, Fulton Lewis Jr., Arthur Godfrey (who championed Curtis Le-May and the Strategic Air Command, remember), H. V. Kaltenborn. Newspapers brought us George Sokolsky, Westbrook Pegler, Henry Haziltt. Not exactly political, but certainly sustaining the spirit, were Reader's Digest, the Wall Street Journal, and on and on. And few remember the frankly conservative thrust of many of the great cartoon strips: "Little Orphan Annie" is the most notable. Don't snicker. A mayor of New York City was not above reading the funnies over the radio, every Sunday, "to the kiddies." Norman Vincent Peale had founded Guideposts. The country was chock full of conservatism, but perhaps rushers's point is that we weren't in touch with one another in any organized way.

In his thorough discussion of the "new majority" (of economic and social conservatives, bypassing the dinosaur East Coast elites) Rusher omits perhaps the most startling manifestation of spontaneous "new majority" action at the grassroots: the "tax rebellion." Governor Ronald Reagan Actually started this movement by calling for a study group in 1971, whose work led to the trailblazing tax-limitation petition of 1972. The National Tax-Limitation Committee was founded in 1975; a dozen states have passed tax-limitation amendments to their constitutions; 32 states have called for a constitutional convention to propose a similar amendment to the United States Constitution; the National Tax-Limitation Committee now has more than half a million members and is gaining new ones at a rate of ten thousand per week. In assessments of the strength and direction of the new politics, surely this greatest political committee in existence, and the movement it represents, should be given some emphasis.

Rusher sees "the academy" as the last and greatest field to be won by the conservative forces. True. It would have been fun, though, to discuss the first stages of the battle now joined: to escape federal intervention; and the fast-growing number of fine conservative campus publications.

But these are smallish points. The book is eyewitness history at its very best, written by an attorney trained to see both sides of an issue and utter a balanced opinion, and infused at every turn with the zest and gusto and passion that may have been kicked up first in 1936. And so he ends with wondrous hope:

In our day it has been the task of conservatives to proclaim the imperative of human freedom, to nurture the traditional values of our civilization, and to summon the West to the defense of both that freedom and those values against the formidable challenge of Communism. Those tasks are by no means completed, but it is now at least possible to feel that they are in the hands of a movement capable of completing them.