The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy

"Well, two things. One, I love William F Buckley Jr as a human being and as a presence in our public life. I was at a tribute once to Buckley and I said if I could be five per cent as effective on behalf of my own ideas as Buckley was on behalf of his, I would consider my life an enormous success. There was something about his open spirit that just appealed to me very much. You get the spirit of Buckley in some ways better in his fiction, and he wrote a lot of fiction. I was debating which novels to put on the list – he had a wonderful series based on a CIA agent called Blackford Oakes, a wonderful name for a CIA agent. The first one, I think, was called Saving the Queen. I have read religiously every Buckley spy novel as it came out. Spy novels would have been good to put on the list as a reflection of the Cold War Buckley. The reason I put the McCarthy book on the list is because Buckley came to public attention first, of course, with his book God and Man at Yale , but also with his robust defense of McCarthy in the 1950s. He and his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, wrote a book called McCarthy and His Enemies, which was a favourable view of Joe McCarthy. This book is interesting because 45 years later, in novel form, is Buckley kind of coming to terms with his old view of McCarthy. You see his sympathy for McCarthy and his anti-communism, but he also gives you a sense of McCarthy’s flaws. If you’re a Buckley-phile, it’s fun to read this novel and think about the journey Buckley himself went through and it’s also just a great way to get a Buckley-eye on the 1950s and what the 1950s were like. I’m sorry this novel is out of print. I hope great organisations like this can bring books back into print. I doubt he would be an enormous fan of Sarah Palin, though you could occasionally imagine him sticking up for her for fun. There is that side of Buckley where he not only had a sense of what conservatism was, but what it ought not to be. But the other part of him was that he did maintain cordial relationships, often argumentative relationships, with a lot of people on the left. I think on the back of one of his novels he had the good sense of humour to put a John Kenneth Galbraith quote that said something like, ‘I am so pleased that Bill Buckley has turned to the art of fiction where his talents have always lain’, or something like that. Firing Line is a TV show whose format I wish we could bring back. What is so intriguing about Firing Line is that Buckley would invite someone he profoundly disagreed with and debate with him or her, usually respectfully. There were some lefties – Al Lowenstein, for example, the former congressman and anti-war activist, was somebody Buckley admired very much. Lowenstein was on the show a lot and Buckley liked to argue with him. He liked to argue with Michael Harrington, the socialist. He loved to argue with John Kenneth Galbraith. It’s an approach to argument we’ve lost. What you have so often now on so-called argument shows is simply parallel assertions, competing sound-bites. That’s different from argument where, as Christopher Lasch put it, you have to enter imaginatively into the ideas of your opponents if only to refute them – but in the process you put your own views at risk. Buckley believed in that kind of argument and we need more of that."