Flying High or The Responsibility to Protect

Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater

Author: William F Buckley Jr

If any two people can be called indispensable in launching the conservative movement in American politics, they are William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Buckley’s National Review was at the center of conservative political analysis from the mid-fifties onward. But the policy intellectuals knew that to actually change the way the country was run, they needed a presidential candidate, and the man they turned to was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was in many ways the perfect choice: self-reliant, unpretentious, unshakably honest and dashingly handsome, with a devoted following that grew throughout the fifties and early sixties. He possessed deep integrity and a sense of decency that made him a natural spokesman for conservative ideals. But his flaws were a product of his virtues. He wouldn’t bend his opinions to make himself more popular, he insisted on using his own inexperienced advisors to run his presidential campaign, and in the end he electrified a large portion of the electorate but lost the great majority. Flying High is Buckley’s partly fictional tribute to the man who was in many ways his alter ego in the conservative movement. It is the story of two men who looked as if they were on the losing side of political events, but were kept aloft by the conviction that in fact they were making history.

The Washington Post - Lou Cannon

…a slender but elegiac volume in which Buckley's wit and lyricism soar from beyond the grave. Few readers will mind that several of the chapters are devoted less to Goldwater than to the early days of National Review. As always, Buckley writes well about politics, but the singular achievement of this book is its nostalgic remembrance of an enduring friendship between the author and his subject.

Publishers Weekly

This is the journeyman Bill Buckley. Part memoir, part political history and part reportage, Flying Highsparkles with joie de vivre and syntactical expertise, giving lively accounts of Nikita Khrushchev's historic-and theatrical-visit to the United States, the 1960 Republican convention and fallout, and National Review's heady first years. Readers are made privy to Buckley's behind-closed-doors meetings with other right-wing mavens as they debate the John Birch Society, commission Buckley's brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, to ghostwrite The Conscience of a Conservativeand attempt to propel its putative author Goldwater into political office-only to find themselves dramatically excluded from the 1964 campaign. Although the book's scattered time line is slightly jarring (Buckley jumps between the 1964 campaign and affectionate memories of Goldwater), that does not detract from this book's modest and utterly satisfying pleasures. (May)

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Michael O. Eshleman - Library Journal

William F. Buckley, who died this February, was one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century. Through his magazine, the National Review, the substantive television talk show he hosted, Firing Line, and his voluminous writings (this is his 51st book), he shaped and nurtured American conservatism. One of the defining moments of the conservative struggle was the 1964 presidential nomination of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater's defeat in the election prepared the way for Ronald Reagan, who had actively campaigned for him. Buckley was there from the beginning, first meeting Goldwater and becoming a friend and adviser. He was eminently qualified to write this book, but his note that his work here "is not strictly factual," that he has reconstructed and invented conversations, some of which he was not a party to, is surely problematic. Such an approach is the province of novels, not history. Thus, as a serious political memoir the book must be accepted with a strong caveat. While fans of Buckley will appreciate the charm of his writing, it lacks the energy of some of his earlier work, such as Overdrive: A Personal Documentary. Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus is a worthier choice. An optional purchase for larger political science collections.

Kirkus Reviews

Two conservative icons meet in a well-considered book, as they often did in life. Buckley (The Rake, 2007, etc.), who recently passed away at the age of 82, opens with a charming anecdote of an adventure he and Barry Goldwater shared in Antarctica, long after the latter's unsuccessful bid for the White House in 1964. Ever the scholar-though that was not part of his public persona-Goldwater took the occasion to discourse on ice and Antarctica's abundance thereof. "There is everything there, potentially: the control of the weather; the answer to the fresh-water problem," Goldwater expounded. "A vat of energy greater than the known supply of the world's oil. If I had been elected president, you'd have seen it all come to life." Buckley knew something of that bid, having engineered the making of Goldwater's soi-disant autobiography The Conscience of a Conservative. One impetus for that book was Richard Nixon, who "had the grit and skill of a seasoned politician" and was the GOP's only real possibility in the 1960 race against John F. Kennedy, but who failed to stir Republicans at the convention, much less the rest of the American people. Goldwater, Buckley and his conservative colleagues at the National Review, had the ability to stir emotions-though in directions they might not have foreseen when they commissioned Brent Bozell to ghost-write Conscience in 1959. That book, Buckley notes, came in short and late, but it was a hit all the same, and it afforded a series of talking points for Republicans for the next four years. This book is as much a history of the rightward drift of the GOP, which allowed the likes of Reagan and Bush II into office, as it is of Goldwater himself. As withanything by Buckley, it is fluent and gossipy (the scene involving Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand is a howler), fun to read and newsworthy.

Table of Contents:

Introduction     ix
Prologue     1
Stirrings in Chicago     9
Young Americans for Freedom     21
Early Days at National Review     27
An Unwelcoming Committee for Khrushchev     35
Khrushchev Tours America     39
Goldwater-Bozell: Seeking Victory over Communism     53
Goldwater and the Labor Unions     59
Plotting at Palm Beach     65
Flying over the Grand Canyon     71
Internal Strife: The Baroody Factor     79
"Barry's Going to Run"     85
The Conscience of a Conservative     89
In the Snows of New Hampshire     103
Ebullience in California     111
Rockefeller Looks Ahead     125
Goldwater's Youth Movement     131
The Campaign Strategy     139
"Extremism in the Defense of Liberty"     143
The Ghost of JFK     155
Heading Home     159
The Eve of Disaster     163
Reagan: A Fresh Star     167
The Vision of Karl Hess     171
Eisenhower's Steely Analysis     177
Flying High     183
Coda     189
Acknowledgments     193
Index     197

Book review: Hypoglycemia For Dummies or Vibrational Medicine

The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All

Author: Gareth Evans

The Responsibility to Protect captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill. But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary. R2P emphasizes preventive action above all. That includes assistance for states struggling to contain potential crises and for effective rebuilding after a crisis or conflict to tackle its underlying causes. R2P's primary tools are persuasion and support, not military or other coercion. But sometimes it is right to fight: faced with another Rwanda, the world cannot just stand by.

The New York Times - Scott Malcomson

Evans cuts a fascinating figure on the world stage. Always informed, sometimes alarming, never dull, he has a diplomat's ability to listen and reflect, and a politician's will to dominate a room. He is also an able and prolific writer.