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.

The CIA In Modern Memory

The proximate cause of my starting this blog was when, last Sunday night, A&E ran the Jason Bourne trilogy of films based on the Robert Ludlum novels. I never took any interest in Ludlum as a writer, and it wasn't until a few years ago when I saw The Bourne Ultimatum for the first time and recognized that, at least, with all the fights and explosions and car chases and stuff, it wasn't bad entertainmnet. But that was before Crossfire Hurricane and the peeing Russian hookers reached the national consciousness.

We decided to record the whole trilogy when A&E ran it and watched all three over the next nights. What struck me was the image portrayed of the CIA throughout the three films, The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever.

Did Martn Marshall go to Yale? You betcha.

But then I looked back at how the CIA had previoiusly been portrayed in Hollywood, in particular two of Hitchcock's greatest films, North by Northwest (1959) and Topaz (1969). Hitchcock was a creaative genius, a poet in the broad sense, whose imaginative presence in the public consciousness was close to Charles Dickens a century before. Espionage was one of his favorite themes. As a succesful artist, he played off public' expectations. The intelligence agencies were our protectors from Hitler and then the Communist menace (which of course was real, but the agencies' actual record was, shall we say, mixed.)

In North by Northwest, the mama's-boy ad executive Roger Thornhill bumbles into a communist plot to assassinate a non-existent CIA operative, George Kaplan. Kaplan is a great-granduncle of the Russian hookers of 2016, a fiction created in Langley for its own purposes. The communist spies mistake the real Thornhill for the fake Kaplan, and glorious cinema ensues, the Twentieth Century Limited, the corn field, the auction scene, Mount Rushmore. Much of the action is manipulated by a senior CIA operative known only as The Professor, played by Leo G Carroll.

Did The Professor go to Yale? You betcha. Heck, he probably teaches there and recruits Bonesmen. That's why he's The Professor.

We may assume The Professor is also an Allen Dulles protégé. His purposes are obscure, but they're nevertheless benevolent. Despite the inconvenience to Roger Thornhill's privileged life, his descent into the underworld of espionage forces him to grow up and become an unwilling hero, as many of Hitchcock's leading men do in his spy-genre films. Eve Kendall, the female CIA agent who is effectively a prostitute, is also redeemed, and at the end of the film, she and Kendall marry.

The Yalies are in charge, they order things rightly for our good, and it all comes out right, indeed beyond our expectations.

Hitchcoxck's 1969 Topaz, in my view highly underrated and one of his greatest, pursues a similar theme. In the film, the CIA plays a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in revealing the Soviet buildup of nuclear rockets in Cuba in 1962. The CIA agent Mike Nordstrom (John Forsythe) learns of the scheme from a Russian defector, whom he capably extricates and flies to the US from Denmark. The CIA's competence is reinforced by the blustering complaints of the defector, who comically insists the KGB would have done a mucb more professional job.

Nordstrom, eminently competent, works through a French agent, André Devereaux, to bribe a high-ranking Cuban, as well as to use an existing anti-Castro network in Cuba that Deveraux controls via his adulterous relationship with Juanita de Cordoba, widow of a revolutionary hero. Deveraux's actions -- not directly Nordstrom's reponsibility but effectively controlled by him -- keep the dirty work at arm's length from the Yalies in Langley.

Nordstrom, in fact, plays the same role as The Professor. Deveraux's continued efforts threaten his marriage, but his wife's liaison with another Frenchman helps expose a network of Soviet moles in the French government. We must recognize that these moles are at the top of the French elite, graduates of the École nationale d'administration, but corruptible, unlike, say, Nordstrom himself. Or, gee, the Ivy Leaguers back in Langley.

Nordstrom was most likely a protégé of The Professor. But is he a Yalie? Probably not. A little too country-clubby on one hand, a little too much the man of action on the other. Let's give him Dartmouth.. John Forsythe's son Eric was a classmate of mine there. Whatever he is, he's squeaky-clean.

Notice the portrait of JFK behind Forsythe's shoulder in the photo. But let's also recognize we're looking back on 1962 in this film from 1969, a very different time, after race tiots, Viet Nam, the 1968 election, and the arrival of Nixon, with a public character less worthy than that of a used car salesman. Hitchcock is deliberately creating a rosy, nostalgic reference to an idealized past, in which the CIA plays a prominent role that, of course, it never actually had.

The populist Truman strontgly resisted creating the CIA. He despised the OSS director William Donovan, and it was remarked that OSS stood for "oh-so-social". On balance, I think Truman's instincts were correct. Before The Professor, before Mike Nordstrom, the CIA gave us the surprise of Chinese intervention in Korea, its bungling of the Cambridge spy network, its bungling of Southeast Asia, and the Bay of Pigs. I asume both The Professor and Mike Nordstrom played key roles in all of this. Don't you?

But the real question here is why Robert Ludlum, only a decade after Topaz, was able to sell the public on the idea of CIA leadership much closer to what we've now come to know in John Brennan. Martin Marshall is more credible in modern media than The Professor.

“There Is A Providence That Protects Idiots, Drunkards, Children, And The United States Of America”

Whatever becomes of Donald Trump -- he's been declared done any number of times since 2015, remember -- it's worthwhile to keep in mind the remark attributed to Bismarck in this post's title.

There's nothiing unique about Trump as a Republican. Abraham Lincon was regarded as an uncouth, insurgent, and divisive figure throughout his political career. The insurgent Republican tradition continues through Coolidge, Nixon, Goldwater, Reagan, and Newt Gingrich. In that context, there's nothing really new about Trump. I've tried to explain this to my Ivy League schoolmates to no avail. They won't even listen when I try to tell them how similar he is to Harry Truman.

As Bp Robert Barron puts it, we've been here before,

My friends want to maintain a picture of Trump independently whipping the population up into a frenzy of xenophobia and racism, ignoring the fact that legal immigrants and minorities support him in unprecedented numbers. The reality is that Trump is exploiting -- opportunistically if you want to say so -- decades-long trends in US society. These will continue, and others will pick them up, regardless of Trump's fate, and notwithstanding attempts to suppress them. These include:

• Creeping obsolescence of corporate media, including books, magazines, newspapers, film, television, polls, and professional sports
• Decline in value of college educaton and renewed status of blue-collar work
• Terminal decline of main line Protestantism and resurgence of Evangelical churches -- these are by no means new
• Declining trust in elite institutions, including the Ivy League and the CIA
• Overall reddening of the country's political spectrum
• Long-standing tensions within the Republican Party
• The changing nature of the US conservative movement.

I had a blog with this current title in the header for several years before 2011, where I was making much more tentative attempts to grapple with these themes. I've resurrected the title, with almost the same url, because I think I'm returning to many of the same issues.

Before the pre-2011 blog, I was involved in the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement, and in fact during its final agonies, I was approached to become a candidate for the next trustee election. (I had far too much partying in my time there and far too few donations to the alumni fund to take this seriously, and I turned them down.)

During that period, I was one of very few non-students to contribute regularly to The Dartmouth Review, an insurgent publication patterned after Buckley's Nat\onal Review. I learned a lot, but when the alumni trustee movement went permanently south, I suppressed my memories. It looks like I need to bring them back and talk about them, among many other things. (As far as I can tell, my articles there are no longer in the archives.)

As Bp Barron suggests, I've been here before, too. It looks like this effort won't be new, it'll be a resumption, or maybe a resuscitation, after a roughly ten-year detour and re-educaton in Anglicanism, Catholicism, Aristotelianism, post-Reformaton history, and quite a bit else. (I deleted the first Mt Hollywood blog from Blogger in 2011. Apparently some or all of it can be found on archive apps. However, my views then were to some degree inchoate.)

Hang on.