"Jeffrey Hart, Conservative Stalwart Who Denounced Modern-Day GOP"

This was the title of Buckley associate Jeffrey Hart's obituary in the Washington Post in early 2019. Dartmouth classmates contacted me as soon as the news broke. I think it's fair to say that for the time he taught there, from the early 1960s to 1995, Hart in many ways was Dartmouth. By the time of his retirement, his lectures had to be held in the largest auditorium facilities available.

I was always more ambivalent. I went to graduate school in English at the University of Southern California, where partly under Hart's influence, I specialized in eighteenth century. But early in my time there, the professors who became my mentors took me aside. They'd been looking at my Dartmouth transcripts and had seen all the courses I'd taken from Hart. They explained to me in not quite the same words that Hart was a public dilettante, someone not to be taken seriously. Indeed, one of those who spoke to me was Donald Greene, acknowledged at the time to be Mr Samuel Johnson. Hart was celebrated in the Dartmouth farewells as a Samuel Johnson scholar -- I began to learn soon enough that Hart's Johnson expertise was nothing more than reading droll passages from Boswell to his packed lecture halls.

I think Hart's success, if he had it, was to convince a generation of students that Samuel Johnson was just another public dilettante, on a par with Burke, who was one, and Hart's model, Buckley. Greene, on the other hand, saw Johnson as something more like a pre-Freud Freudian, which Greene thought was perfectly OK. On a lifetime's reflection, I think Johnson was a deeply tormented figure, problematic intellectually on the same plane as David Hume, though for different reasons -- like Greene himself, Johnson was someone who had effectively left Christianity behind but was still low church.

I have no idea what Hart would do if I tried to submit a paper to him about this. But the Jeffrey Hart I knew in the 1960s was not the Jeffrey Hart in the photo above. The hair is shaggy and unkempt, and although the lower part of his face retains the tight-lipped deadpan, the eyes have a farawsy stare. The photo at left is from 1966, when he was teaching my sophomore survey. The photo above, which shows him reading from a newly-publisshed When the Going Was Good, must date from 1982.

Why the difference? Hart in 1966 is firm and clean-cut; Hart in 1982 is shaggy and haunted. The 1960s Hart converted to Catholicism from Episcopalianism in 1968, an example that at least partly inspired my own move much later. Yet the obituaries point out that he divorced his first wife in 1981, which may well explain his condition in the 1982 photo. He married his second wife in 1984, which brings us to a conundrum. The Post obituary says,

As a scholar of 18th-century English literature, Dr. Hart was guided by the orderly writing and minds of historian Edward Gibbon, essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson and political philosopher Edmund Burke. He admired the conservative values of tradition, cultural stability and social decorum.

Well, Johnson's writing and mind were anything but orderly, but leaving that aside, what about the disorder in Hart's personal life, probably reflected in his appearance as of 1982? Divorce and remarriage are not Catholic or orderly things at all. And the disorder in Hart's family continued. His son Ben, touted in histories of the Dartmouth Review as a founder while he was a Dartmouth student, went on not to become an important intellectual, but to build a career as a direct mail consultant, authoring such books as How To Write Blockbuster Sales Letters.

Worse, Ben's first wife, having divorced him, wrote a blog and became a syndicated columnist, author, and speaker as Betsy Hart, building her career writing of her ex-husband Ben Hart's betrayals and the dilemma this posed for her as a modern woman.

Hart himself in later writings insisted that the women students he'd taught at Dartmouth were fully entitled to have abortions there -- after all, they'd come to Dartmouth to build careers, not to raise kids. Tradition, cultural stabiliy, and social decorum indeed. Edmund Burke indeed.

In 2004, Hart endorsed John Kerry for president. In 2008, he endorsed Obama. Buckley kept him on at National Review as senior editor and even gave him writing projects there until Buckley died in 2008. His successors quickly fired Hart. I had some dealings with him, more or less indirectly, in the mid 2000s when I wrote for the Dartmouth Review during the alumni trustee controversies. His obituaries uniformly reported that he passed away from complications of dementia. I had the impression that the staff of the Dartmouth Review was covering for problems in that area even at that time.

I try to talk about all this when I now and then run into my schoolmates from the 1960s. But Jeffrey Hart to them is Dartmouth. To ask questions about Hart is to ask questions about Dartmouth. They won't have it.

Would William F Buckley Jr Be A Never Trumper?

Buckley died in early 2008, before the Obama phenomenon, but my fast answer is "yes".The more considered answer will take this post, one tomorrow, and possibly more. With his contemporary Hugh Hefner, he developed a new kind of persona in the 1950s, the publisher as public dilettante. His depictions in media rotuinely show him vamping and mugging for the camera to a remarkable degree, but it's always a question of tone and style, not substance. He espoused Catholicism, but he never did it with any particular rigor, and it's difficult to know if the Buckleys were Catholic in any readily distinguishable way from, say, the Kennedys.

By the same token, the intellectul figures the National Review embraced included Edmund Burke, whom I've always tended to regard as another public dilettante. While his political writings are best known, he also wrote on the sublime (an essay that I think is better and more important than the other stuff). But he had no center, which is why the early Obama administration could claim to be "Burkean", and well-known conservatives like David Brooks would buy it. Would Buckley have as well? There's reason to believe it, which I'll go into.

But probably more important is that Buckley was an Ivy Leaguer with connectons in the CIA. According to Wikipedia,

Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (or UNAM) in 1943. The following year, upon his graduation from the US Army Officer Candidate School (OCS), he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In his book Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of Franklin Roosevelt's honor guard upon Roosevelt's death. He served stateside throughout the war at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Gordon, Georgia; and Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

. . . In 1951, along with many other Ivy League alumni, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he served for two years, including one year in Mexico City working on political action for E. Howard Hunt, who was later jailed for his part in the Watergate affair. The two officers remained lifelong friends.

This indicates that Buckley's family had considerable social standing, although it should be noted that another Buckley contemporary, Paul Moore Jr, though of equivalent social standing and another Yalie, served at Guadalcanal and was decorated for heroism. This was not Buckley.

It should also be pointed out that between the late 1930s and the late 1940s, the Ivies loosened their Jewish quotas (Princeton also began to admit African-Americans) and adopted greater rigor in selecting student applicants. Prior to the late 1940s, attendance at an Ivy was determined heavily by social standing, and even now, quotas of various sorts continue, and it is understood that some number of any entering class has slots reserved for legacies, the children of major donors, and other influential figures.

David Brooks (isn't it interesting that he keeps reappearing here?) wrote in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There that the adoption of College Board tests in the late 1940s made the Ivies and equivalent elite universities true meritocracies. This, of course, neglects that if anything, since that time, they've adopted increasingly secretive and intricate quota systems that in fact discrininate against merit.

Although Buckley criticized Yale in his first book, God and Man at Yale, his disagreement was essentially with how the faculty viewed its mission. He doesn't seem ever to have questioned the position of Yale and other Ivies as bastions of the right sort of people -- indeed, the sort of people who are entitled to run things behind the scenes. David Brooks, an upwardly mobile post-SAT product of the University of Chicago, would see himslf only very slightly differently as a member of that sane class.

Brooks, of coursee, sees Obama, his advisers, and presumably other leftists as worthy members of that class, too. The problem, it seems to me, is with the basic assumption, that there's a class of people entitled to run things. I'm not at all sure that Brooks and Buckley disagree here, and they would disagree only mildly on who those people are. And both must certanly agree that the CIA, a locus of the Deep State, is fully entitled to run things. Buckley's spy-novel hero, Blackford Oakes, is not Jason Bourne.

These are 20th century assumptions that drove much of national policy in administrations of both political parties, with only a few exceptions (Nixon was one. As Alger Hiss sneered at him, “I attended Harvard Law School. I believe yours was Whittier.") Oddly, Buckley's tone was often not far from Hiss's.

Tomorrow I'll look at a close Buckley associate, Jeffrey Hart, who outlived Buckley long enough to becme an Obamacon but, suffering from dementia in his last years, probably had no opinion on Trump.