<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: Buckley's account of the most turbulent era of the 1950s may not be the most unbiased available, but it facilitates introduction to the McCarthyism. The Redhunter is a thoroughly readable novel in that it deals intelligently with an immensely complex topic and manages to successfully convey McCarthy's human traits and idiosycracies at the same time. According to Buckley, McCarthy incessantly muttered, "How'm doing?" to his aides in search of affirmation. Buckley does not purport to provide a traditional historical novel. In this case, though, the embellishment was appeciated. I desired an introduction to McCarthyism, and I was not disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: The Truthhunter
Review: Fiction can sometimes be more revealing than a bare recital of fact. (One need only think of Dickens' novels and how he described 19th century England to see how this can be so.) Buckley's book accomplishes this with his portrait of Senator Joe McCarthy. The novel's subplot, involving the fictional Harry Boncteau (sp?), is compelling, and is woven nicely into the overall story. The McCarthy Buckley describes is ambitious, blind to some aspects of human nature, and prone to excess, but basically good, and, as we now know, right in his basic thesis: Communists had systematically penetrated American institutions, with subvursive intent. Art imitates life in Buckley's portrayal of the seething class hatred for McCarthy on the part of the Left/Establishment. It was/is part and parcel of their animus toward anyone who dared to expose the truth: Nixon, Chambers, and sepecially McCarthy. This novel, which I read in one sitting, finishing in the wee hours, is both compelling literature and thought-provoking in terms of it's ideas. Hopefully, with Soviet archives open and their records validating much of what he said, this book will become the basis for a reexamination of a controversial American life. -Lloyd A. Conway
Rating:
Summary: A great book about a less than great man
Review: If you're a conservative with a lot of liberal friends than you know all about the Great McCarthy Excuse, the leftist argument that essentially runs as follows: "Well, sure, Bill Clinton may have permanently corrupted the American political system and killed innocent civilians in pointless military campaigns designed to keep him from getting impeached, but hey, at least, he wasn't Joe McCarthy!" Nearly fifty years after his disgrace and death, Joe McCarthy remains an all-purpose boogeyman to be trotted out whenever it appears that the Republican Party might be on the verge of making a valid argument. Never mind that McCarthy was a former Democrat and, outside of his anti-communist crusade, was known as a bit of a tax-and-spend liberal. Never mind that conservaitve intellectuals were some of the first denounce him even while such liberal icons as the Kennedy Family continued to support him. Nope, McCarthy is the all-purpose right-wing demon of the leftist imagination and nothing's going to change that. And anything done wrong by a "liberal" will apparently always be justified by the memory of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin.
If you're like me, you got wise to the shallowness of that argument early on and soon became rather irritated at the way the name "McCarthy" was used an all-purpose justifyer for any amount of fuzzy-headed thinking. That's what makes William F. Buckley's novel, The Redhunter, such a joy to read. Telling the story of Joe McCarthy's rise and fall, the book never defends the man's excesses (and, indeed, no true conservative would ever defend the trampling of civil liberties seen during the McCarthy era) but at the same time, never makes the mistake of using McCarthy's mistakes to downplay the very real treat that Stalin's Soviet Union and its totalitarian brand of Marxism posed to the world. And, most signifigantly, it is perhaps the first and only book -- fiction and nonfiction -- to actually make an attempt to show Joe McCarthy as a deeply flawed human being as opposed to some mustache-twirling villian from a '30s melodrama.The book tells two parallell and intersecting stories of two young men. The first concerns Joe McCarthy himself. Beginning with his own rise to power from a small-town Wisconsin pig farmer to a member of the U.S. Senate, the book paints a sympathetic but still very critical picture of the man. McCarthy comes across as neither a saint nor an ogre but instead a rather insecure if charismatic man who, paradoxically, dealt with his insecurity by entering politics and trying to get every voter to love him. Once in the Senate, McCarthy proves himself to be less than an intellectual giant and, desperate not to lose the love of the voters, latches onto the anticommunist movement as a way to save his own career. The book makes no secret that McCarthy was often exagerrating when he spoke of his evidence of "communists" in the State Department and it is also unflinching in showing that McCarthy didn't have the backbone to stand up to the more unscrupolous aides who attached themselves to his star (especially Roy Cohn, who appears only fleetingly in the book's final sections). McCarthy's crimes are portrayed not so much as crimes of malice but instead as crimes of stupidity and Buckley is very deft in showing how 1950s liberals cannily exploited that stupidity to obscure the truth about communism and further their own goals. Its a rather compelling and totally valid interpretation of the era that, in these politically correct times, is rarely allowed to be heard and Buckley is to be commended for finally allowing this view to see the light of day. The other main character is Harry Bentecou, a young academic and anti-communist who is an obvious stand-in for Buckley himself. Harry becomes an aide to McCarthy and sadly watches as the Senator's excesses get out of control and lead to both his downfall and the temporary descrediting of the American anti-communist movement. If Harry's scenes occasionally reek a bit of melodrama, they still present one of the great untold facts of American political history and that is that the modern conservative movement was founded by often-ridiculed anti-communist intellectuals like Harry. This is the movement that would be presumed dead after the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 just to eventually make a triumphant come back with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Full of sharply drawn characters and perfectly realized scenes, the Redhunter is perhaps Buckley's finest novel to date. With humorous but devastating portraits of such historical figures as Eisenhower and especially Dean Acheson, The Redhunter is a valuable book that gives us a compelling view of history that, unfortunately, we aren't usually allowed to consider. All in all, a triumph that will be loved by conservatives and liberals willing to read with an open mind.
Rating: 
Summary: White-washed Redbaiter
Review: NO STARS Left out is the fact that what "I have here in my hand" was a bunch of papers with NOTHING on them. No list of communists. Not one. An important fact to "forget". Left out, also, is the fact of how easy it was to get a divorce in the county where JM was a judge; and how, when an investigation was opened, the courthouse burned down. Left out was Senator JM's defense of Nazi SS troopers who were to be executed for murdering American prisoners during the Battle of the Bulge. BB mentions the battle, but this fact escaped his notice. Left out was the fact that JM did not catch one communist. None. As in "zero". I couldn't finish this book. According to BB, there were communists everywhere. Page after page of this nonsense. Find a more objective book with the true facts about Joe McCarthy. Novel? This is a right-wing fairy tale, with the ogre as hero.
Rating: 
Summary: The Truth Hunter
Review: The novelist can sometimes unfold truth before a reader's eyes in ways that a historian cannot. This is well known: Dickens' "Bleak House" was perhaps as much a critique of classical economics (a la Mill) as a novel, for example. Buckley's latest work is in that tradition. Rehabilitating Senator Joe McCarthy is a long-overdue labor. This novel painted a compelling picture of a three-dimensional hero, warts included, who lived a quintessinal American success story, until his fall. There is no doubt in my mind that certain elements in our society will view with disfavor a novel that seeks to humanize one of the all-time bogeymen of the Left. The objective reader will have to give careful thought to the thesis of this book, however. That thesis is that there was organized Communist penetration of our government, that their intentions were treasonous, and that McCarthy did right and good in exposing them. He went to excess, but his sins pale next to those of the Establishment types who ignored the threat, and who probably viewed it with sympathy. (Class haterd seeps from many of the characters in the book, both historical and fictional, for the upstart chicken farmer from Wisconsin who shook up their little world.) Political considerations aside, I read it in one day, staying up until the wee hours to finish it. This is a classic yarn, and a compelling page-turner. -Lloyd A. Conway
Rating:
Summary: A good effort
Review: The Redhunter tells the story of Joe McCarthy, one of the most hated persons in American History. The books does a good job of describing the career of McCarthy, how demagoguery and alcohol ruined his career and how ultimately he did much more harm to his cause than good. The book is somewhat sluggish when dealing with the personal life of Harry Bontecou, a fictional aide to McCarthy. It is from Bontecou's point of view that we see the rise of fall of McCarthy.
Rating: 
Summary: A view you don't hear much.
Review: Until I read some of the reviews, I thought that Harry was a real person. It seemed to tell a reasonable tale that you never hear because everyone seemed to think McCarthy was a nut. Well from what history really tells us is that a lot of it was true. Like the atomic secrets from reading "The Making of the atomic Bomb" by Richard Road to finding out how they were copying all our industrial processes from spys in civil production plants. I got that from "Dark Sun" from the same author. I found the story to be interest like the problem with Harry and his girl. Also I didn't know the whole thing fell apart because of that David Schine thing. What a load of crap that was. What I didn't like about the books were all the obscure references. I'm only not 60 so I didn't recognize everything that was going on. I felt like I had to do research while I was reading the book. The author could have helped by adding a notes section in the back to explain the references like I have seen in books like Crime and Punishment or The Jungle that explained some of the references of the time.
I don't know why there was such a big deal about McCarthy after this. You may enjoy it if you don't know the history.
<< 1 >>
|
