Wes,
Thanks for your spirited (and completely justified) defense of Stan Evans. Seems Radosh has reverted to his old Trotskyite Leftist habits.

I think that NR is reverting to its patrician WASP
roots, and taking revenge on the Irish upstart who
dared attack them.

Same reason why Nixon is hated, because he went after
the WASP Hiss.

John Lukacs tells how children of inmigrants repaid the
original disdain given by the elite by adopting a
strident nationalism and denouncing as traitors WASPS
who did not conform to their version of nationalism.

Have you wondered why McCarthy is thought of in connexion
with the Hollywood purges, instead of his attacks on
the State Department? Hollywood was Jews, and that evoked
a set of reactions. But the State Department was WASPS.

McCarthy was punished for daring to attack the elite
blatantly - and Nixon was, for the same reason.

And NR dreams of being admitted into that elite.

So McCarthy goes under the bus.

a review of this nature is a badge of honor coming from a nut like radosh

By contrast, I highly recommend John Willson’s thoughtful and thorough review of Evans’ book in the current issue of Chronicles, a magazine that all readers of this website would enjoy and should subscribe to.

After 42 years and a lot of extra money in gifts,I even went to the 25th aniverserary dinner, I dumped it.Who could take the lunacy of these Jewish neocons,all Israel all the time.I used to think Podhoetz and the Kristols were somewhat sane,they went totally over the bend in the early 90’s.Buckley was a disgrace when he fired Joe Sobran,I should have got rid of the magazine then.

Excellent article that echoes Coulter’s.
Given that Frum is a major player at NRO and Goldberg (Now a LAT columnist) is the review surprising?  NR and Goldberg are trying to continue its tradition of purging conservatives thought unacceptable to the NYT. But it no longer has a monopoly on the conservative thought and is no longer taken seriously by most.  They “Fired” Coulter and she simply called them “girley boys” and has gone on to make millions.

I canceled my subscription years ago, and only skim through NRO occasionally.

“I think that NR is reverting to its patrician WASP
roots, and taking revenge on the Irish upstart who
dared attack them.”

Radosh. Hmmm… Now there’s a fine old WASP name.

Sometimes, in our eagerness to shield ourselves from trendy opprobrium, we garble the facts – and provide cover for those least deserving it.

McCarthy is hated not because he attacked institutions – the Army, the State Department and so on – but because he attacked Marxists and Soviet agents who had infiltrated those institutions. That is why our elites, in academia and media, will always despise him.

It isn’t backward, or racist – or anti-Semitic - to tell the truth…

The key phrase “useful for insights into neo-con and inside the beltway thinking”..........One does not need a copy of NR to divulge these great Skull and Bones Mysteries. Simply pull out the greenbacks you intended to send NR way and lovingly ponder them a moment. This is all you need to know about neo-con and inside the beltway thinking. If you have a few shares from a variety of weapons manufacturers, pull those out and eyeball those too, they further add relevant insights. If at long last, you are not quite clear in your perceptions of the neocon philosophy, watch “Apocalypse Now” while drinking a Fifth of Southern Comfort and before you pass out, read a little Kafka . When you awaken, you will have a hangover that will pound the definition of neo-con into your quaking skull.

The NR suffers hardening of the arteries and while it may be useful to scan it at times, it can be done for free in the library. It really is like having an old friend descend into Alzheimers.

As to McCarthy, one simply has to remember his trusty legal council Roy Cohn, a useful assassin if ever there as one.

God help you if Ann Coulter is a source of anything at all besides bile.

The Evans book is a masterpiece - I not only read it, but gave it as a gift to my mother, who was a big supporter of McCarthy back in the day. And it’s been a long time since I’ve regarded NR as anything other than another moderately leftist publication, virtually indistinguishable from the other NR. The Radosh review was disgusting, but not surprising.

@San Fernando Curt,

The very fact that McCarthy is perceived as hated proves your point.  Marxists if nothing else are best at changing what our perceptions of something or someone are.  So the result is that to defend McCarthy is completely out of bounds

Conservative historians have not a written a history in which McCarthy and the death of John Kennedy were seen in historical context. The death of JFK by the communist Oswald proved McCarthy right, that communism was a danger to America. Instead liberals defined Oswald a lone frustrated crackpot.

ADRIANA IS CORRECT.  THE MCCARTHY ERA MUST BE UNDERSTOOD IN THE CONTEXT THAT JEWS (RIGHTLY OR WRONGLY) WERE DISPROPORTIONATELY INVOLVED IN THE ENTIRE PERIOD, PARTICULARLY IN HOLLYWOOD.  THUS, RATIONAL DISCUSSION OF THE MCCARTHY ERA IS IMPOSSIBLE.  APART FROM HITLER AND HIS ENABLERS, NO 20TH CENTURY FIGURE IS MORE DESPISED BY THE JEWS THAN JOSEPH MCCARTHY.

“Instead liberals defined Oswald a lone frustrated crackpot.”

Actually, left/liberal “historians” have championed the idea that Oswald was the hapless pawn of an enormous conspiracy run by American intelligence agencies at the behest of the American ruling establishment. Or international power brokers. Or the Tri-Lateral Commission. Or… Masons. Chupacabras. …Bigfoot?

But in the almost 45 years since the assassination, no evidence has surfaced of such a conspiracy, or the hyper-complex, still-ongoing cover-up necessary to obscure it, so left/liberals have slowly been edging away from it. Simply: There is no chance that such a fantastic “Twilight Zone” scenario could ever be proven true. Enormous conspiracies and cover-ups, especially those supposedly involving everything from the Texas Highway Patrol to the Supreme Court, involve a lot of people – specialists, enforcers… spies. Fact is, people talk. Over time, they spill the beans. More to the point: They sell out. For money. This is especially true of intelligence agents. If high-level spooks never got greedy and rolled on their own countries, the term “espionage” would not exist.

In the almost half-century since that dark day in Dallas, no one has narc’d; no one has sold out. There aren’t even credible scraps of second-hand testimony – recollections of death-bed confessions and the like. Nothing.

But this handy bit of science fiction accomplished two goals: It got the communist Lee Harvey Oswald – and thereby his defining dogma - off the hook. And it created fissures of doubt about the principles of this country’s government. After all: If our institutions are untrustworthy, are they valid? Are they legitimate?

I think Oswald committed a history-twisting crime for his own motives, to sate his own demons. His story – and this country’s tragedy – became yet another chewy little bit of propaganda for the left. When the course of history’s saga doesn’t fit the dogma – lie and obfuscate, tar and malign. When reality contradicts the defining fairy tale, never give facts an even break.

McCarthy was our senator,we Wisconsin Catholics all loved him.McCarthy was no antisemite but he was done in by his 2 gay Jewish assistants Cohn and Shine. The poor slob never saw it coming.I had a chat with Buckley at a political dinner in late 1991, just after Buchanan annouced.We talked about McCarthy,Buchanan and how his father was a strong isolationist.Then a couple of months later he writes that awful screed about Buchanan and antisemitism.I never saw it coming,I should have dropped the magazine 10 years before I did.

As someone who for years has been urging his friends
to put away their bad habit of subscribing to the
“neocon rag,”, it seems to me that NR would
continue to function, even if everyone took my advice.
It is heavily subsidized to provide a kind
of Old Right front for neocon projects and interests;
and its role, as I try to show in my book on the
(non) conservative movement, is to create the illusion
of journalistic continuity between the 1950s
founding generation and the current neocon
ideological hegemony. NR performs that function quite
well, although it probably slipped up by allowing
Radosh to beat up Evans. But that might have been
ordered from the top, in order to make an example of
someone who never broke from the “movement” but
who had once been quite far on the right. I can’t
imagine that those advisors and sugar daddies who give Rich, Ramesh, and Miller
their marching orders to Ramesh and Rich
have anything but hatred for M. Stanton Evans.

Buckley was a disgrace when he fired Joe Sobran,I should have got rid of the magazine then.

Amen, brother. That was the last straw for me. I never renewed my subscription after that.

...Buchanan and how his father was a strong isolationist.

To keep the Pod People happy, Buckley even denounced his own Father’s antisemitism.

Sobran’s great piece on his response to Buckley canning him

http://www.federationofstates.org/buckley.htm

While speaking of Joe Sobran, please offer your prayers for him.

He’s in dire health straits!

Spartacus that is a great piece by Sobran about Buckley.Buckley has a lot to answer for.

My NR subscription (a gift) will shortly lapse and HE won’t be far behind.

Be sure to read Murray Rothbard’s, Betrayal of the American Right.

About Oswald, well, the guy looked like Anthony Perkins
of “Psycho” fame, so of course, he had to be a lone
crackpot…

I am an admitted fan of FOXNews, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck.

I have tried lisening to these people and for the life of me cannot figure out why anyone would. [my opinion] I have never learned anything worthwhile from a pundit.

Ever since National Review began in the 1950’s, there has always been a question as to where the funding for this costly, money losing venture came from. Many assumed that Buckley, because of his CIA background was getting money under the table from the government.

Now I reaslize that it was probably coming from somewhere else entirely.People working as National Review who were staunch in their support of Israel were the recipients of numerous financial windfalls.

Chief among these were lucrative book contracts for books that would never even remotely make up their publishing costs. Access to the media, epecially TV, was another gift to those at NR who toed the line.

And then there were the lecture fees. These were quite interesting.Favored people at NR made great incomes off lectures that, oddly enough,always seemed to be sparsely attended even though the tickets had been sold out.

Of course, we now can see that such book advances and the lecture fees were nothing more than laundered bribes for those who toed the line.

Yes, Buckley’s actions toward Buchanan and Sobran were disgraceful.  And his reward?  To be lectured by Norman Podhoretz on an NR cruise, for Buckley’s lack of enthusiasm for the war in Iraq.  It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

“McCarthy is hated ...because he attacked Marxists and Soviet agents who had infiltrated those institutions.” - San Fernando Curt . Close, but no cigar. You are on the right track. McCarthy is hated because those folk were “God’s chosen people,” Jews. That was not his fault, but any of the tribe cannot be exposed or criticized. The racist ideology of the media does not permit this. It is past time when the founders of this nation have to develop a kinship similar to that of the Jews who always ask, “Is this good for Jews?”. When we subscribe to a publication or vote the primary question should be, Is this good for Christian Americans? Fire can only be fought with fire.

You misunderstood me.  It was not Jews that McCarthy
was after, though it was made to look that way. He was
not the one who went after Hollywood, a Jewish enclave
(created by Jews,who scorned by the elite, went about
creating a new elite - movie stars - whose party invitations they would
control). McCarthy attacked the State Department, and
that was not a Jewish enclave.

Much worse, he attacked WASPs, and it was not so much
that the WASPs wanted to protect Communism as that they
wanted to deal with their own privately.

It was a story of class and ethnicity. Then McCarthy’s
anti-communism was tangled up with populism and
nationalism - and those two are always dangerous when
you are not watching.

buckley eventually abandoned all of his friends and allies in order to ingratiate himself to anything posing as the establishment. history would have been far kinder to him had he died in the 1970s. in his case, living longer was a bad career-move.

Radosh’s attack on Evans’ book tells us more about today’s National Review than either McCarthy or Evans.  Self-inflicting irony is something that neocons have in common, and Radosh’s review in NR is priceless. I used to worship NR in the 1980’s, then when Buckley took his 30 pieces of silver in the early 90’s, I never renewed.  Since then National Review and NRO have been as irrelevant to me as the War of the Roses.

Ron Radosh has done some good work on the Spanish Civil War, but this article cannot be excused.  It shows the sad state of National Review.

I first subscribed to NR in 1960, and the Tenth Anniversary Issue in 1965 was one of the finer political works that I ever read.  This issue greatly influenced my life and outlook.  Alas, I cannot find that issue after all these decades and many moves and life changes.

I sorrowfully dropped my subscription in 1992 after the Buchanan and Sobran debacle.  I followed both in “The Wanderer.” but Sobran’s health declined so much that he had to abandon his column in that weekly newspaper.

I do pray for Joe Sobran, but I understand that his prognosis is poor.

I started in 1960 as well but hung on till 2002,was I stupid thinking it would get better.When Florence King left it was a sign that nothing good was going to happen.

San Fernando

I basically agree with you that, despite the assumption by many Americans that Kennedy’s assassination was part of a broad conspiracy, there is no convincing evidence to support this view. Nevertheless, I think it is worth keeping an open mind on this matter. For example, the CIA still refuses to release the Joannides files, and supposedly much other relevant information. One has to wonder why.

I don’t agree with your claim that: “Enormous conspiracies and cover-ups, especially those supposedly involving everything from the Texas Highway Patrol to the Supreme Court, involve a lot of people – specialists, enforcers… spies. Fact is, people talk.” There are many examples of large conspiracies that have been successfully concealed (eg Manhatten Project). Fact is that often in large conspiracies most of the participants are only fed information on a needs-to-know basis, and those whose knowledge is more extensive have a strong incentive for keeping quiet.

Ian,

In the days following the Hiroshima bombing in 1945, communiqués between Tokyo and inspection personnel at the scene referenced “the New Mexico bomb”; obviously the Manhattan Project was not THAT well-kept a secret. In fact, from the material in any library in the world, we can learn that among the world’s intelligence “community” there are very few “top secrets”. Clandestine operations are kept quiet on a you-scratch-my-back-and-I-your’s basis and by “hardening” plots - surrounding them with numerous phony, decoy operations. Meanwhile, someone, somewhere is always selling out.

It has been almost a half-century since Dallas, and still there is no evidence of a conspiracy. None. Conspiracy/cover-up aficionados are reduced to poring over minutiae of the case, and sifting obsessively through coincidences – real and imagined. That intelligence files remain closed signifies nothing; the files simply may reference agents still alive and still operative, or paid-off stooges still employed overseas.

At some point, even with the most compelling of tales we have apply two standards. First, from Carl Sagan: Extraordinary claims REQUIRE extraordinary proof. And, from Albert Einstein, “it’s good to have an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out.”

There are real, sinister conspiracies out there. But mostly, they occur right in front of us, as we gape on dumbfounded. Everyone knows we were trapped in the Iraq War by lies and corruption – just ask Michael Sheuer and Sibel Edmonds. But no one in the mainstream makes a big deal about it. We have, after all, “Dancing with the Stars” to stupefy us. If a bomb falls in a desert village, and nobody gives a damn – is it a crime?

NR and Goldberg are trying to continue its tradition of purging conservatives thought unacceptable to the NYT.

Of course, if Buckley and Bozell published “McCarthy and His Enemies” today, *they’d* be purged by NR.

No one should be surprised by anything Ronald Radosh does or says.  He led the attack on “The Pied Piper.” my biography of Allard Lowenstein, in The New York Times, which much of the same venom.  It’s all ‘Horse Radosh,” of course, but it comes from Radosh’s divided self.  Once a banjo playing lefty who worshipped Pete Seeger, he turned neo-con when the so-called big news came out that Seeger had once been a Communist.  Having argued that the Rosenbergs’s were guilty, he was ostricized by his former lefty friends, so he turned increasingly to the expedient right.  Now, trying to reestablish his relationship with the academy, which had banished him, he has used NR to bolster his anti-anti-Communist credentials.  This is a guy with absolutly no convictions.  When Seeger finally acknowledged that supprting Stalin had been a big mistake, he jokingly said that Radosh could now find another cause and might actually grow up. This review should come as no surprise.  Radosh made all sorts of absurd accusations about “The Pied Piper,’ and resorted to personal attacks. It’s the way this phony functions.  Don’t take it personally.  A low life like this knows only how to denigrate his superiors, whether he is taking aim from the right or the left.  He has become a literary hit man, a hired gun helping those who want history rewritten, whatever their motives.  The best thing to do with Radosh is to ignore him. The guy is low life.