Books, Arts & Manners: The Right Books

William A. Donahue’s The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union (Transaction, Inc., New Brunswick, N.J. 08903; $29.95 cloth; $14.95 paper) is not the first study of the ACLU, but it is the first critical analysis of that organization—and I use the word “critical” here in both senses of the term. In his acknowledgments, the author mentions the fact that Irving Kristol, after reading the first chapter of the manuscript in 1982, appended to his felicitations the warning that finding a publisher would be difficult, as indeed it proved to be. Eventually, Aaron Wildavsky—who has contributed a lengthy foreword to the book —introduced Donahue to Irving Louis Horowitz at Transaction, and the search was at an end.

“For a number of years,” Wildavsky begins,

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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William A. Donahue’s The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union (Transaction, Inc., New Brunswick, N.J. 08903; $29.95 cloth; $14.95 paper) is not the first study of the ACLU, but it is the first critical analysis of that organization—and I use the word “critical” here in both senses of the term. In his acknowledgments, the author mentions the fact that Irving Kristol, after reading the first chapter of the manuscript in 1982, appended to his felicitations the warning that finding a publisher would be difficult, as indeed it proved to be. Eventually, Aaron Wildavsky—who has contributed a lengthy foreword to the book —introduced Donahue to Irving Louis Horowitz at Transaction, and the search was at an end.

“For a number of years,” Wildavsky begins,