Books, Arts & Manners: Not without Smear

Not without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism, by Richard Gid Powers (Free Press, 554 pp., $30)

READING Not without Honor, I was reminded of the tongue-in-cheek comment of Wilmot Lewis, then dean of foreign correspondents in Washington, about Elliott Roosevelt’s book on FDR: “The boy did not understand what the men were talking about.” The history of anti-Communism in America is the subject taken up by Richard Gid Powers, but it is too complex to be left to someone who clearly knows little about the Russian Revolution—in the first paragraph of his book he has the social democrats overthrowing the Tsar and the Bolsheviks overthrowing the social democrats—and even less about the record of both the anti-Communists and the Communists in the United States.

RT

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William F. Buckley Jr.

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Not without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism, by Richard Gid Powers (Free Press, 554 pp., $30)

READING Not without Honor, I was reminded of the tongue-in-cheek comment of Wilmot Lewis, then dean of foreign correspondents in Washington, about Elliott Roosevelt’s book on FDR: “The boy did not understand what the men were talking about.” The history of anti-Communism in America is the subject taken up by Richard Gid Powers, but it is too complex to be left to someone who clearly knows little about the Russian Revolution—in the first paragraph of his book he has the social democrats overthrowing the Tsar and the Bolsheviks overthrowing the social democrats—and even less about the record of both the anti-Communists and the Communists in the United States.