The Thomas Nelson company sent me AmSpec alumnus Jeremy Lott’sWilliam F. Buckley. I will write a full review later, but I have just begun the book and can already tell that Lott is going to bring attention to some underappreciated territory.
His hook is that Bill Buckley was more or less a prophet. His aim is to show how Buckley’s faith influenced his life and his politics.
Only nine pages in I have been treated to the following quote by JFK in response to a Harvard speaker who crowed that the school had never graduated either an Alger Hiss or a McCarthy. JFK roared, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with the name of a traitor!” (Whatever happened to the Kennedy’s?)
Of course, the book is not about JFK, but about WFB, and I am sure from what I have read so far that the effort will be a worthy one.
September 7th, 2010 | 10:44 am | #1
Reality is that JFK politically wouldn’t only be to the right of the entire Democratic party today, he would be to the right of a good percentage of the Republican party.
His politics today are lost in the haze of the tabloid aspects of his personal life, the self-serving re-interpretation of his views by the Ted Sorensens of the world and the conspiracy theory alternative universe surrounding his assassination. Who knows what his politics would have been if he had lived. Perhaps he would have drifted left like RFK did later in his life. His assassination certainly altered the trajectory of the politics of the 60s so it is difficult to say. But the reality of what his politics were during his lifetime are very different than the popular perception.