THE RIGHT BOOKS

When, following the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States, Holmes Alexander packed away his typewriter after a 35-year stint as a political columnist, he had the satisfaction of knowing not just that he was getting out while the getting was good (“It seemed a better ending than dropping dead like George Sokolsky or pooping out like David Lawrence”) but that the country was in better hands (“last chance”) than it had been at any time since that postLabor Day Tuesday, 1945, when he had taken a reporter’s job with the Baltimore Sun (“Joy it was in that day to be alive . . . and to be aged 39 was very heaven”) or a year later, when, having discovered that all roads lead to Washington (“watchtower of world history”), he took up residence there. In Never Lose a War: Memoirs and Observations of a National Columnist (Devin-Adair, $14.95), published with a Foreword by Barry Goldwater, a veteran conservative commentator recapitulates a distinguished journalistic career, giving special emphasis to those pressure-points at which it impinged most closely on the history of the Republic with which it was dialectically fused.

Holmes Alexander’s tenacious, courageous brand of conservatism is distinctly old-fashioned, the apparent tautology going only to show that fashionability in political opinion bears no necessary relationship to political wisdom. The author’s mentors were, besides his father (“Don’t press me,” the elder Alexander had remarked, in reply to his son’s comment that it was “sort of sad” that President Roosevelt had not lived to enjoy V-E Day), H. L. Mencken and the isolationist historian Charles Beard, from whom he learned partial truths about the desirable role of the United States in the world; truths that, although they do not provide an answer to every contemporary situation or even a complete solution of any of them, nevertheless supply much-needed balance to current thinking on international issues.

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When, following the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States, Holmes Alexander packed away his typewriter after a 35-year stint as a political columnist, he had the satisfaction of knowing not just that he was getting out while the getting was good (“It seemed a better ending than dropping dead like George Sokolsky or pooping out like David Lawrence”) but that the country was in better hands (“last chance”) than it had been at any time since that postLabor Day Tuesday, 1945, when he had taken a reporter’s job with the Baltimore Sun (“Joy it was in that day to be alive . . . and to be aged 39 was very heaven”) or a year later, when, having discovered that all roads lead to Washington (“watchtower of world history”), he took up residence there. In Never Lose a War: Memoirs and Observations of a National Columnist (Devin-Adair, $14.95), published with a Foreword by Barry Goldwater, a veteran conservative commentator recapitulates a distinguished journalistic career, giving special emphasis to those pressure-points at which it impinged most closely on the history of the Republic with which it was dialectically fused.

Holmes Alexander’s tenacious, courageous brand of conservatism is distinctly old-fashioned, the apparent tautology going only to show that fashionability in political opinion bears no necessary relationship to political wisdom. The author’s mentors were, besides his father (“Don’t press me,” the elder Alexander had remarked, in reply to his son’s comment that it was “sort of sad” that President Roosevelt had not lived to enjoy V-E Day), H. L. Mencken and the isolationist historian Charles Beard, from whom he learned partial truths about the desirable role of the United States in the world; truths that, although they do not provide an answer to every contemporary situation or even a complete solution of any of them, nevertheless supply much-needed balance to current thinking on international issues.