Books in Brief

Reagan: A Political Biography, by Lee Edwards (Viewpoint Books, $1). The electoral victories of Ronald Reagan proved that reports of conservatism’s demise had been greatly exaggerated. They also supplied the Republican Party with its most interesting major personality in many a decade. Seldom has a political figure been pushed to the forefront of Presidential speculation so rapidly and with such apparent success. How and why it happened is the subject of an informative and well-assembled book which yields the conclusion that Reagan’s appeal derives from what he says quite as much as from his justly celebrated way of saying it. The California electorate, it appears, is fed up with big government, welfarism, and rampant crime. Reagan’s emphasis on these issues, seconded by performance, is the secret of his success—proving that a shiny package does very well in politics as elsewhere, but that there must also be something inside it. Now it seems the rest of the naton is also beginning to respond to the Reagan combination of handsome exterior and philosophical substance. Edwards has thus provided a valuable introduction to what may be the most important development of the next political season.

M.S. EVANS A Pride Of Prejudices, by Vermont Royster (Knopf, $6.95). The venerable editor of the Wall Street Journal beseeches us not to label him a “conservative” or a “nineteenth-century liberal” since “Absurdity is no respector of political philosophies or the centuries of man.” Okay. But his essays from the Journal’s editorial page, collected here, make their salient points for such virtues as grumbling, ethics even for government officials, St. Thomas Aquinas, and two-year terms for congressmen, and against such evils as the government’s “war on poverty,” the way the war in Vietnam is being fought, and the tendency to teach “not equality in virtue but in license”—all of which suggests that the “conservative” or “nineteenth-century liberal” reader will not find too many of his own prejudices upset by Mr. Royster’s non-ideological prejudices. He sees his essays as “a throwback to a former time,” to “the man who simply wrote as a good conversationalist might talk on whatever topic came to mind.” My particular delights were his excursions in defense of solitude, against do-gooders of all varieties (“Miss Carrie was as honorable as the witch hunters of Salem when she went about chopping up saloons”), and on the functions and duties of the journalist. On this latter topic, he writes that “A journalist owes nothing to those who govern his country. He owes everything to his country.”

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Reagan: A Political Biography, by Lee Edwards (Viewpoint Books, $1). The electoral victories of Ronald Reagan proved that reports of conservatism’s demise had been greatly exaggerated. They also supplied the Republican Party with its most interesting major personality in many a decade. Seldom has a political figure been pushed to the forefront of Presidential speculation so rapidly and with such apparent success. How and why it happened is the subject of an informative and well-assembled book which yields the conclusion that Reagan’s appeal derives from what he says quite as much as from his justly celebrated way of saying it. The California electorate, it appears, is fed up with big government, welfarism, and rampant crime. Reagan’s emphasis on these issues, seconded by performance, is the secret of his success—proving that a shiny package does very well in politics as elsewhere, but that there must also be something inside it. Now it seems the rest of the naton is also beginning to respond to the Reagan combination of handsome exterior and philosophical substance. Edwards has thus provided a valuable introduction to what may be the most important development of the next political season.

M.S. EVANS A Pride Of Prejudices, by Vermont Royster (Knopf, $6.95). The venerable editor of the Wall Street Journal beseeches us not to label him a “conservative” or a “nineteenth-century liberal” since “Absurdity is no respector of political philosophies or the centuries of man.” Okay. But his essays from the Journal’s editorial page, collected here, make their salient points for such virtues as grumbling, ethics even for government officials, St. Thomas Aquinas, and two-year terms for congressmen, and against such evils as the government’s “war on poverty,” the way the war in Vietnam is being fought, and the tendency to teach “not equality in virtue but in license”—all of which suggests that the “conservative” or “nineteenth-century liberal” reader will not find too many of his own prejudices upset by Mr. Royster’s non-ideological prejudices. He sees his essays as “a throwback to a former time,” to “the man who simply wrote as a good conversationalist might talk on whatever topic came to mind.” My particular delights were his excursions in defense of solitude, against do-gooders of all varieties (“Miss Carrie was as honorable as the witch hunters of Salem when she went about chopping up saloons”), and on the functions and duties of the journalist. On this latter topic, he writes that “A journalist owes nothing to those who govern his country. He owes everything to his country.”