Books in Brief

They’d Rather Be Right: Youth and Conservatism, by Edward Cain (Macmillan, $5.95). This book hasn’t exactly got a thesis, other than that all members of the right wing should stop instantly whatever they are doing and form instead a brotherhood to implement the ideas of Peter Viereck and Clinton Rossiter—or, rather, venerate them, since no one could implement their ideas, any more than anyone could frame a swatch of ether. Mr. Cain’s secondary thesis is that there is no substance to contemporary conservative thought, as witness Mr. Cain’s failure to find any there, the conclusive demonstration. But mostly it is one more book about the dramatis personae of the American Right (how many such have appeared in the past year? Five? Ten?), worse written than most, better researched than most, and with this irritating difference, that Prof. Cain, unlike the journalists who have written most of the other books, twiddles his gold tassel all over the place, and proceeds to talk patronizingly about men who are manifestly his superiors in learning, style, understanding, and experience (I am referring to certified, Ph.D. scholars). Prof. Cain apparently considered a career in mathematics, and notes that his “delightful statistics professor” at Boston University must have rejoiced in his decision to specialize in another field. Mr. Cain chose Government (Ph.D., Columbia), and we are invited to assume that what was mathematics’ loss is Government’s gain, the fallacy of the contrapositive into whose seductive embrace this delightful reader declines to succumb. I don’t know what career I’d have urged on Mr. Cain, though manifestly his

THE RED CHINA LOBBY

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They’d Rather Be Right: Youth and Conservatism, by Edward Cain (Macmillan, $5.95). This book hasn’t exactly got a thesis, other than that all members of the right wing should stop instantly whatever they are doing and form instead a brotherhood to implement the ideas of Peter Viereck and Clinton Rossiter—or, rather, venerate them, since no one could implement their ideas, any more than anyone could frame a swatch of ether. Mr. Cain’s secondary thesis is that there is no substance to contemporary conservative thought, as witness Mr. Cain’s failure to find any there, the conclusive demonstration. But mostly it is one more book about the dramatis personae of the American Right (how many such have appeared in the past year? Five? Ten?), worse written than most, better researched than most, and with this irritating difference, that Prof. Cain, unlike the journalists who have written most of the other books, twiddles his gold tassel all over the place, and proceeds to talk patronizingly about men who are manifestly his superiors in learning, style, understanding, and experience (I am referring to certified, Ph.D. scholars). Prof. Cain apparently considered a career in mathematics, and notes that his “delightful statistics professor” at Boston University must have rejoiced in his decision to specialize in another field. Mr. Cain chose Government (Ph.D., Columbia), and we are invited to assume that what was mathematics’ loss is Government’s gain, the fallacy of the contrapositive into whose seductive embrace this delightful reader declines to succumb. I don’t know what career I’d have urged on Mr. Cain, though manifestly his

THE RED CHINA LOBBY