Principles and Heresies

One of the hazards of political journalism is knowing personally a man whose ideas one is criticizing. There is something about knowing him as a real human being that makes it amazingly difficult to give his ideas proper intellectual quietus. All the more difficult, then, when what is under consideration is the political and ideological right-about-face of a man who is a former colleague of many years’ standing and still a close personal friend.

In the first half dozen or so of Garry Wills’ recently initiated syndicated columns, he has boxed the radical compass. There is no important element of the current Left syndrome that he has not touched upon in defense or apology. They are all there: scorn for Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell—to say nothing of Kissinger and Moynihan; support for immediate unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam; contempt for any thought that Soviet power threatens the world (“the silly abstract talk of war rooms, which must sound very impressive to Richard Nixon, with his silly Fifties’ mind”); essentially sympathetic apology (even if written in the uncommitted style of the New Journalism) for the Black Panthers, the “kids,” the drug culture.

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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One of the hazards of political journalism is knowing personally a man whose ideas one is criticizing. There is something about knowing him as a real human being that makes it amazingly difficult to give his ideas proper intellectual quietus. All the more difficult, then, when what is under consideration is the political and ideological right-about-face of a man who is a former colleague of many years’ standing and still a close personal friend.

In the first half dozen or so of Garry Wills’ recently initiated syndicated columns, he has boxed the radical compass. There is no important element of the current Left syndrome that he has not touched upon in defense or apology. They are all there: scorn for Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell—to say nothing of Kissinger and Moynihan; support for immediate unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam; contempt for any thought that Soviet power threatens the world (“the silly abstract talk of war rooms, which must sound very impressive to Richard Nixon, with his silly Fifties’ mind”); essentially sympathetic apology (even if written in the uncommitted style of the New Journalism) for the Black Panthers, the “kids,” the drug culture.