Books, Arts & Manners: Doubting Thomas

The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785— 1800, by Conor Cruise O’Brien (Chicago, 385 pp., $29.95)

SOME admirers of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s work will think he has gone round the bend. Here he is, telling us that Thomas Jefferson, Father of American Liberty and author of the Declaration of Independence, was in real life a fanatical ideologue, with the deviousness, wiliness, deceptiveness, self-righteousness, and tinge of paranoia that that implies. Moreover, he was a racist of an especially vicious variety who fiercely opposed the presence of Africans in America in any capacity other than as slaves. The twentieth-century statesman he “would have admired most is Pol Pot”; the modern Americans who are his truest ideological heirs are the Ku Klux Klan and extreme libertarian paramilitary groups.

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Forrest McDonald

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Thomas Jefferson

Declaration of Independence

The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785— 1800, by Conor Cruise O’Brien (Chicago, 385 pp., $29.95)

SOME admirers of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s work will think he has gone round the bend. Here he is, telling us that Thomas Jefferson, Father of American Liberty and author of the Declaration of Independence, was in real life a fanatical ideologue, with the deviousness, wiliness, deceptiveness, self-righteousness, and tinge of paranoia that that implies. Moreover, he was a racist of an especially vicious variety who fiercely opposed the presence of Africans in America in any capacity other than as slaves. The twentieth-century statesman he “would have admired most is Pol Pot”; the modern Americans who are his truest ideological heirs are the Ku Klux Klan and extreme libertarian paramilitary groups.