Richard Brookhiser in the late 1960s was a clever young student in upstate New York, unconventional only in being somewhat more conservative and more bookish than his peers, when he unexpectedly entered history by mailing to National Review a drily skeptical essay on a student protest at his high school. He lived in a pleasant suburb of Rochester. His parents were respectable, law-abiding, and dutiful middle-class Americans. They demonstrated this most flamboyantly by voting Republican. Rick himself was conscious of belonging to no minority, visible or invisible. He was clever and therefore on the escalator of post-war American meritocracy. Otherwise, …