Contemporary Authors

• Evolution of the Modern Presidency: A Bibliographical Survey Washington American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (Washington, DC), 1977
• The Keys to a Successful Presidency Heritage Foundation (Washington, DC), 2000
• Governor Tom Kean: From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 9-11 Commission Rivergate Books/Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2006
• The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game Basic Books (New York, NY), 2008
• A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2017

1. A man and his presidents : the political odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. LCCN 2016953816 Type of material Book Personal name Felzenberg, Alvin S., author. Main title A man and his presidents : the political odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. / Alvin S. Felzenberg. Published/Produced New Haven : Yale University Press, [2017] Description xviii, 417 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm ISBN 9780300163841 (hardcover : acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PN4874.B796 F45 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. The leaders we deserved (and a few we didn't) : rethinking the presidential rating game LCCN 2010483844 Type of material Book Personal name Felzenberg, Alvin S. Main title The leaders we deserved (and a few we didn't) : rethinking the presidential rating game / Alvin S. Felzenberg. Published/Created New York : Basic Books, [2010], c2008. Description ix, 486 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780465018901 Shelf Location FLM2014 083531 CALL NUMBER E176.1 .F43 2010 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) CALL NUMBER E176.1 .F43 2010 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. The leaders we deserved (and a few we didn't) : rethinking the presidential rating game LCCN 2008005058 Type of material Book Personal name Felzenberg, Alvin S. Main title The leaders we deserved (and a few we didn't) : rethinking the presidential rating game / Alvin S. Felzenberg. Published/Created New York : Basic Books, c2008. Description xi, 442 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780465002917 0465002919 Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0810/2008005058.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0901/2008005058-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0901/2008005058-d.html CALL NUMBER E176.1 .F43 2008 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2014 085940 CALL NUMBER E176.1 .F43 2008 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 4. Governor Tom Kean : from the New Jersey statehouse to the 9-11 Commission LCCN 2005024908 Type of material Book Personal name Felzenberg, Alvin S. Main title Governor Tom Kean : from the New Jersey statehouse to the 9-11 Commission / Alvin S. Felzenberg. Published/Created New Brunswick, N.J. : Rivergate Books/Rutgers University Press, c2006. Description xvii, 558 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0813537991 (hardcover : alk. paper) 9780813537993 (hardcover : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0519/2005024908.html Shelf Location FLM2015 062596 CALL NUMBER E840.8.K33 F45 2006 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) Shelf Location FLM2015 074032 CALL NUMBER E840.8.K33 F45 2006 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 5. The keys to a successful presidency LCCN 2001316924 Type of material Book Main title The keys to a successful presidency / edited by Alvin S. Felzenberg. Published/Created Washington, DC : Heritage Foundation, c2000. Description vi, 161 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0891950931 (pbk) CALL NUMBER JK516 .K43 2000 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER JK516 .K43 2000 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6. Evolution of the modern presidency : a bibliographical survey LCCN 77008022 Type of material Book Personal name Greenstein, Fred I. Main title Evolution of the modern presidency : a bibliographical survey / Fred I. Greenstein, Larry Berman, Alvin S. Felzenberg, with Doris Lidtke. Published/Created Washington : American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, c1977. Description xv, [369] p. ; 28 cm. ISBN 0844732516 CALL NUMBER Z7165.U5 G74 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER Z7165.U5 G74 Copy 1 Request in Rare Books - Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242)

• Politico - https://www.politico.com/arena/bio/alvin_s_felzenberg.html

  Arena Profile: Alvin S. Felzenberg
  Alvin S. Felzenberg
  Alvin S. Felzenberg was the principal spokesman for the 9/11Commission. He served in two presidential administrations, as an adviser to the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and on the majority staff of the U.S. House of Representatives. In the 1990s, Felzenberg was New Jersey's assistant secretary of state. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. Felzenberg has been a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and Visiting Professor in Politics at Princeton University.

  Felzenberg teaches at Yale University, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University’s Graduate Program in Political Science. He has appeared as a commentator on major public affairs television shows, including CNN’s “Crossfire,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” and many others and has contributed to the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and National Review Online. His most recent books include "The Leaders We Deserved and a Few We Didn’t: Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game" (Basic Books, 2008) and "Governor Tom Kean."

• Yale University Press - https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300163841/man-and-his-presidents

  View Inside
  Price: $35.00

  May 2, 2017
  448 pages, 6-1/8 x 9-1/4
  34 b/w illus.
  ISBN: 9780300163841
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  DescriptionReviews

  A new understanding of the man who changed the face of American politics

  William F. Buckley Jr. is widely regarded as the most influential American conservative writer, activist, and organizer in the postwar era. In this nuanced biography, Alvin Felzenberg sheds light on little-known aspects of Buckley’s career, including his role as back-channel adviser to policy makers, his intimate friendship with both Ronald and Nancy Reagan, his changing views on civil rights, and his break with George W. Bush over the Iraq War.

  Felzenberg demonstrates how Buckley conveyed his message across multiple platforms and drew upon his vast network of contacts, his personal charm, his extraordinary wit, and his celebrity status to move the center of political gravity in the United States closer to his point of view. Including many rarely seen photographs, this account of one of the most compelling personalities of American politics will appeal to conservatives, liberals, and even the apolitical.
  Alvin S. Felzenberg served in two presidential administrations and was principal spokesman for the 9/11 Commission. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and is the author of The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t). He lives in Washington, DC.

• Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation - https://coolidgefoundation.org/the-foundation-historic-site/foundation/national-advisory-board/alvin-s-felzenberg/

  Alvin S. Felzenberg
  Alvin S. Felzenberg was the principal spokesman for the 9/11 Commission. He served in two presidential administrations, held several high level staff positions at the U.S. House of Representatives, and, in the 1980’s, and served as New Jersey’s Assistant Secretary of State. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. Felzenberg has been a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Garwood Visiting Professor in Politics at Princeton University.

  Felzenberg currently teaches at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. He has appeared as a commentator on major public affairs television shows, including CNN’s “Crossfire,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

  Felzenberg’s writings have appeared in the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, National Review Online and elsewhere. His most recent books include The Leaders We Deserved and a Few We Didn’t: Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game (Basic Books, 2008) and Governor Tom Kean: From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 9-11 Commission (Rutgers University Press, 2006). His article, “Calvin Coolidge and Race: His Record in Dealing with Racial Relations in the 1920’s” appears in the New England Journal of History, Volume 55, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 83-96.

• University of Pennsylvania - https://penntoday.upenn.edu/experts/alvin-felzenberg

  Alvin Felzenberg
  Presidential Historian, Lecturer
  Annenberg School for Communication
  University of Pennsylvania.
  Dr. Felzenberg, an American presidential historian, is the author of The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game.

  Alvin S. Felzenberg is an American presidential historian, political commentator, and public official. He was Principal Spokesman for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission. Felzenberg is currently Director of Communications for the Joint Economic Committee for the United States Congress.

  Felzenberg was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has lectured at Princeton, Yale, George Washington and Johns Hopkins Universities. In addition, he serves as a regular contributor to U.S. News and World Report and the National Review.

  MEDIA CONTACT
  Julie Sloane | 215-746-1798

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_S._Felzenberg

  Alvin S. Felzenberg
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Alvin S. Felzenberg is an American presidential historian, political commentator, and public official. He was Principal Spokesman for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission.[1] Felzenberg is currently Director of Communications for the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress.

  Felzenberg served as the Special Assistant and Adviser to the National Broadcasting Board of Governors, as consultant to the Secretary of the Navy, and as Director of Community Outreach and Public Liaison for the Office of Secretary in the U.S. Department of Defense during the administration of George W. Bush.[2] From 1982 to 1989, Felzenberg was assistant secretary of state of New Jersey in the administration of Governor Thomas H. Kean

  Felzenberg was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.[3] He has lectured at Princeton, Yale, George Washington, and Johns Hopkins Universities. Since 2007, Felzenberg has been visiting lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

  He is the author of The Keys to a Successful Presidency, Governor Tom Kean: From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 9/11 Commission, The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game,[4] and A Man and His Presidents — The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.[5]

  Felzenberg is a regular contributor to several periodicals, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, U.S. News & World Report, The Weekly Standard and National Review.[6][7]

  Felzenberg holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in politics from Princeton University and an M.A. and B.A. from Rutgers University.

  He previously served as Administrative Assistant to U.S. Rep. Jim Saxton.[8]

  References

• Conservative Book Club - https://www.conservativebookclub.com/profile/alvin-alvin-s-felzenberg

  Conservative Book Club » Alvin S. Felzenberg
  Alvin S. Felzenberg

  FacebookTwitter
  Alvin S. Felzenberg was the principal spokesman for the 9/11Commission. He served in two presidential administrations, as an adviser to the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and on the majority staff of the U.S. House of Representatives. In the 1990s, Felzenberg was New Jersey’s assistant secretary of state. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. Felzenberg has been a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and Visiting Professor in Politics at Princeton University.

  Felzenberg teaches at Yale University, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University’s Graduate Program in Political Science.

  He has appeared as a commentator on major public affairs television shows, including CNN’s “Crossfire,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” and many others and has contributed to the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and National Review Online. His most recent books include “The Leaders We Deserved and a Few We Didn’t: Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game” (Basic Books, 2008) and “Governor Tom Kean.”

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Print Marked Items
All Buckley's presidents
George William Flutter
New Criterion.
36.1 (Sept. 2017): p75+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Foundation for Cultural Review
Full Text:
Alvin S. Felzenberg
A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
Yale University Press, 448 pages, $35
A man so credentialed as Alvin Felzenberg, formerly die Director of Communications for the Joint
Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, an adviser to the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and a
majority staff member of the U.S. House of Representatives, might be given to the platitudes expected to
bubble up from the swamp along the Potomac before the current attempt at drainage. Instead, the lucid and
deft insights in his account of William F. Buckley Jr.'s adventures with various presidents are happily
riveting, and untainted by the cynicism that political life confuses with sophistication. This study, based in
large part on the Buckley Papers now filed at Yale, traces the evolution in Buckley's estimation of
characters and causes from his early isolationist days, and reveals an intensity of influence, especially
during the Reagan years, about which Bill was sometimes surprisingly private and at other times artfully
coy.
One cannot help but expect worthy insights from an author who, in another commentary a few years ago for
Politico, satirized those who said Reagan was an "amiable dunce"; Ford could not walk and chew gum at
the same time; Ike could not read the newspaper when his lips were chapped; and Lincoln, of course, was a
fool, who wasted visitors' time telling vulgar stories. Estimations like that sound very like the recent
condescensions of "Never Trumpers," let alone the denizens of Hollywood and university safe spaces for
whom the smart presidents were Carter and Obama, even though they dug us into, as Felzenberg put it,
"massive holes, or enlarged those they inherited ."Then there was Felzenberg's assessment of the former
president once packaged by the media as a clone of Cicero and William Jennings Bryan: "If imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery, what can be said of plagiarism? President Obama's second State of the Union
address contained enough recycled ideas and lines lifted from speeches of others to make historians wince."
That the legacy of the founder of National Review emerges from the analysis of Felzenberg unscathed and
even affectionately remembered says a lot about the fair mind of the author and the charming character of
the subject. Of the tatter's early life and formative influences, and especially his father, more than enough
has been written elsewhere, and so the introductory chapters here serve only to set the table for the feast.
Save for some references, the book could stand well without those pages.
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Unspoken but clearly evident is the maturation of Buckley from what one might dare to say was an overly
confident and somewhat pompous youth to a classical gentleman, if such can be defined in the Newmanian
sense as one who cultivates the best in others, ingratiates all sorts of personalities, humbles others without
humiliating them, and is "merciful to the absurd." We are given a lot of details about the singular instance
when Bill had no mercy for Gore Vidal, but there is nothing new here, as Bill himself wrote about it at
length, as did Vidal in a more vituperative way. Bill Rusher, the longtime publisher of National Review, and
more astringently conservative than his mentor as years passed, avowed to this writer that Vidal was the
closest he had ever come to a convincing Anti-Christ. One suspects that Buckley would have been in accord
with that, if not inclined to frame it so theologically.
Like Joe Kennedy funding and promoting JFK's undergraduate effort, Why England Slept, Bill's father Will
Buckley was falsely alleged by McGeorge Bundy to have underwritten God and Man at Yale. The book was
Buckley's passport to fame, limited at first to a small but influential social circle, with its theme that at Yale,
a cipher for the whole academic establishment, "secular humanism and moral equivalency had become the
prevailing ideology that set the tone for what was taught in its classroom." The reaction of the university's
beclouded president, A. Whitney Griswold, and much if not most of the faculty, simply proved Buckley's
diesis. Felzenberg's record of their behavior would be even more humorous were it not for the lurid shape
that secular fascism has taken in present-day academe. Writ large, with Eleanor Roosevelt as a choice
exemplar, die progressive establishment "tended to believe that human beings were perfectible, social
progress predictable, truths transitory and empirically determined; that governments could be put at the
service of scientific principles; and that equality in condition was both desirable and attainable through state
power." Of the early television talk-show host David Susskind, the worst insult Buckley could hurl was that
he was a "Mr. Eleanor Roosevelt." This reviewer did programs on both The David Susskind Show and
Firing Line, and found Susskind muddled but amiable; while his politics may have been naive, a man who
saw action on Iwo Jima and Okinawa is not to be dismissed. After he interviewed Harry Truman, Mrs.
Truman would not invite him to her home because he was Jewish. Having journeyed from the received
social myopia of his father's social set and generation to become a critic of the blithe prejudices he imputed
to Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan, Buckley would have done many acts of reparation for Mrs. Truman's
behavior.
While Buckley was on his way to preparatory school in England, his father stopped the car at Heston
Aerodrome to watch Neville Chamberlain wave a piece of paper and declare "Peace for our time." As a
second lieutenant stationed in Fort Benning, Georgia, Buckley was summoned as an honor guard to escort
the coffin of Franklin Roosevelt into the train in Warm Springs. In starting his career he took the counsel of
Herbert Hoover. That seemed to have set a pattern for "being there" at seminal moments as if he were
ordained to be a real-life Zelig. None of those scenes escaped his analytical eye, helping to give him the
perspective to measure events and judge personalities with an objectivity beyond the temptations of
polemics and a wisdom beyond his years.
Buckley could have had nearly any position he wanted in Reagan's administration, having been Reagan's
mentor during his conversion from New Dealism and his cicerone through the labyrinth of conservative
philosophical schools. Reagan called Buckley his "tutor," and Buckley did not demur. Save for occasional
dalliances at the United Nations and other offices, Buckley favored the role of "eminence grise," which he
preferred to call presidential ventriloquist. The two were close enough friends to agree to disagree on such
issues as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty and the Panama Canal, and that collusion
overwhelmed dealings with other presidents.
There may have been a lack of perspective in Buckley's disdain for the Eisenhower years, but that was when
he was first feeling his oats at the birth of die rambunctious National Review. His sense of that period
somewhat changed as did his analysis of Joseph McCarthy, and his energies soon were redirected to die
Goldwater movement. If somewhat quixotic as a psephologist, he profited much from the sober counsel of
Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, and there is some humor in Felzenberg's account of how Bill
cleared the way through the "nuttiness" of the John Birch Society and the stealth attacks of Robert Welch. In
1968, Nixon was the pragmatic choice, but the following years of Keynesian economics and Ostpolitik
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excited a constant barrage of criticism from Buckley's typewriter. Perhaps it was precisely because the
Bushes were culturally sympathetic, that their respective policies, especially the perceived utopianism of
"nation building," were more irritating than had they issued from types less of the establishment. By the
Clinton years, Buckley was looking for repose, but he was not too tired to predict that the brand of "New
Democrat" would demobilize "all those military units that aren't absolutely needed to protect the spotted
owl." There would be no threat to American security, since the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that
there would be no one to surrender to.
Revelatory in die correspondence that Felzenberg has unearthed is the close and constant friendship
Buckley had with Nancy Reagan. He was convinced that she was much underestimated in her political
acumen, which is curious since she was far from the political and social conservatism of her spouse. Some
of the letters are even gushy, and one wonders how much of that was by calculation. More curious is die
paucity of Felzenberg's material on Pat Buckley, Bill's wife of nearly fifty-seven years. Reagan and Buckley
were equally besotted by very strong wives, neither of whom easily engendered die affection of many
others, and who did not think it an insult to be called intimidating. Nancy and Pat were often in almost daily
telephone conversation, and a fly on die wall would have stories to tell. But it is understandable that such
would be oral history, not found in die files of die Buckley Papers.
Buckley was not an innovator. He was too classically formed to want to invent new things rather than give
new life to things that have perdured, however desiccated they may have lain for a while. Non nova sed
nove. Likewise, his erudition was suspicious of politics for its own sake. His model was Cincinnatus, who
left his plough to save the Republic and then returned to it, all the while cultivating the best which has been
thought and said. He was not the sort of "policy wonk" for whom the crafts of political control are the end
rather than the means to the end. There are among his self-described disciples those would watch cable
television news rather than listen to Bach. They replicate die clumsy sophistry Buckley skewered in God
and Man at Tale. In that context, this book is bittersweet for it describes a man whose works and writing, as
Felzenberg says, "helped change the world."
reviewed by George William Flutter
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Flutter, George William. "All Buckley's presidents." New Criterion, Sept. 2017, p. 75+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505839912/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=65539dea.
Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505839912
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Felzenberg, Alvin S.: A MAN AND HIS
PRESIDENTS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Felzenberg, Alvin S. A MAN AND HIS PRESIDENTS Yale Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 5, 2 ISBN:
978-0-300-16384-1
An admiring look at the career of William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), public contrarian.Presidential
historian Felzenberg (Annenberg School for Communication, Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Leaders We
Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game, 2008, etc.) praises the
"elegance, humor, wit, and grace" that Buckley brought to his many roles as "writer and editor, debater,
publicist, organizer, political candidate, activist, and networker extraordinaire." From his student days at
Yale until his death, Buckley publicized and honed an unwavering conservative ideology, which Felzenberg
asserts offered "a respectable alternative" to the nation's pervasive "liberal orthodoxy." Arguing that
Buckley was hugely influential, the author more convincingly portrays him as an audacious gadfly and
provocateur. The sixth of 10 children, he learned early how to speak his mind and garner the attention he
coveted. Even as a schoolboy, Buckley "was judgmental about others and was anything but shy about
voicing disapproval of people and views he disliked." That behavior persisted throughout his life, as he
attacked communism, atheism, and liberal values. He supported Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist
campaign, and he was "strident in his criticism of Dwight D. Eisenhower" as well as his successors, with
the notable exception of Ronald Reagan. Until late in his life, he vehemently opposed efforts to protect the
civil rights of African-Americans. Whites, he insisted, were "the more advanced race" and therefore
"entitled to govern." An ardent Catholic, he condemned homosexuality. Besides a prolific output of books,
Buckley founded and edited the National Review, a magazine, Felzenberg writes, with only "minimal"
influence on national policy. TV appearances showcased Buckley's "quick wit, magnetic personality, and
well-developed media savvy," turning him into a celebrity. His notoriety expanded in 1966, when he
launched Firing Line, a TV program featuring feisty verbal combat. The author does not consider Buckley
as a brother, father, and husband (his wife, "his best friend" and supporter, is hardly mentioned), focusing
instead on his relationships with politicians. A well-delineated portrait of an impassioned conservative.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Felzenberg, Alvin S.: A MAN AND HIS PRESIDENTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668636/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=75758152.
Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668636
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Ratings sweeps
Jay Cost
National Review.
60.19 (Oct. 20, 2008): p70.
COPYRIGHT 2008 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game, by Alvin S.
Felzenberg (Basic, 480 pp., $29.95)
A ETERAN of two Republican presidential administrations, Alvin Felzenberg offers a novel rating system
for the U.S. presidents. It differs from those produced by such scholars as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in both its
methodology and its results.
Methodologically, the ratings are based not on a survey of academics, but rather on the application of six
criteria. Each president receives a grade (one to five) for three personal qualities (character, vision, and
competence) and three areas of policy output (economic policy, "preserving and extending liberty," and
foreign policy). These grades are averaged to produce a president's score.
Felzenberg's results are frequently surprising: Eisenhower, Reagan, and even Ulysses S. Grant find
themselves in the top ten. FDR has fallen out of the top five, Thomas Jefferson has dropped to the middle of
the pack, and Andrew Jackson now sits in the bottom third. These twists-- combined with Felzenberg's
lively prose and his incisive narrative of many administrations --make the book an interesting read. His
contrarian interpretation of Grant's presidency is particularly welcome, as is his defense of Reagan.
Nevertheless, the work suffers from several deficiencies. Felzenberg is to be credited with wanting to apply
rigorous criteria as an alternative to polling (typically liberal) scholars; unfortunately, his methodology is
not up to the task.
There are three salient problems.
First, the criteria themselves are problematic. Felzenberg posits these six standards and assumes that we will
agree that they are self--evident. Upon first glance, they appear to be, but on closer inspection maybe they
aren't.
As I mentioned above, three of the criteria hinge on personal qualities and three on policy outputs. Higher
scores for the personal qualities should make a president more successful; thus, higher personal scores
should yield higher policy scores. This appears to be the case with vision and competence: An analysis of
each president's scores indicates that these personal scores are closely related to output scores. So, for
instance, a president with a high vision score is more likely to receive a high score on preserving and
extending liberty.
However, the scores on "character" have only a weak relationship with the output scores. The correlation
between character and economics is only 25 percent, between character and preserving and extending
liberty 48 percent, and between character and foreign policy a measly 10 percent. In other words, character
seems not to matter much when it comes to performance. Felzenberg says that character "can be a
precursor" to presidential greatness, but the results leave one wondering if this is really the case.
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While the other personal qualities show a stronger relationship with policy outputs, even here there are
some peculiar exceptions. For instance, only three presidents receive a perfect score for preserving and
extending liberty: Lincoln, Grant, and Lyndon Johnson. Lincoln and Grant both receive a perfect vision
score--but Johnson receives a three out of five. This is strange, as Felzenberg defines preserving and
extending liberty in terms similar to those of his definition of vision: Preserving and extending liberty is the
"principal mission of the country," and vision has to do with the "purpose of America." This definitional
closeness makes one wonder how LBJ can do so well on one and so poorly on the other.
There are other oddities of this sort. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, receives
a four out of five on vision (the same score as Zachary Taylor). This points to the second major problem
with the methodology: It requires judgment calls that stretch far beyond the reach of the data. Granted, we
can detect differences between Herbert Hoover and Abraham Lincoln; but Felzenberg claims to find much
smaller differences. For instance, he gives James Monroe a vision score of four, while George H. W. Bush
rates merely a two. It is difficult to believe that the data allow for this kind of fine--grained distinction. Yet
it is these seemingly minute differentiations that produce much of the final results.
The third problem with the system is that no criterion captures the effect a president can have on the
institution itself. Presidents make and remake the office, and in this way can influence the country beyond
their policy achievements. But Felzenberg has no category to account for this--and this, too, occasionally
produces strange results. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, a paradigm--shifting president who helped
transform the office, receives the same final score as James Monroe, who was working within the
Jeffersonian framework.
This problem is most pronounced with Jackson. We can, of course, criticize Jackson when it comes to the
wisdom of his bank policy, or the morality of his Indian policy, but there is no doubt that Old Hickory
helped make the presidency what it is today. Indeed, Lincoln drew upon Jackson's stand against
Nullification to defend the Union. Felzenberg faults previous historians for overestimating Jackson. He may
be correct--but, by excluding a category to account for the institutional changes that leaders like Jackson
helped create, Felzenberg has ended up underestimating him.
More broadly, Felzenberg's omission of any institutional variable means that his ratings retain the strange
"apples to oranges" quality that prior ratings have had. How, for instance, can Bill Clinton be judged in
relation to Chester Arthur? The presidency in 1881 was a very different institution than it was in 1993. How
can we profitably compare its occupants across time? Felzenberg, like previous raters before him, does not
give a satisfactory answer to this important question.
Given that one of Felzenberg's professed purposes is to cleanse the presidentialratings game of past liberal
biases, the following must be mentioned. Being a Republican is positively associated with a higher score
along all six criteria. Being a Democrat is negatively associated along all six criteria. That is, in the
aggregate, Felzenberg's analysis slightly but consistently tilts toward the GOP. This analysis jibes with
several noteworthy results: There is no Democratic president in the top five. FDR, the highestrated
Democrat, sits in the seventh position, sandwiched between Eisenhower and Taylor. The Jacksonian
Democrats--for whom Felzenberg has barely a kind word--never break the bottom half; all but one (Polk)
are in the bottom third. If conservatives have been rightly unhappy with the results of surveys like
Schlesinger's, liberals might have reason to be unhappy with Felzenberg's conclusions. Nevertheless,
Felzenberg is to be credited with bringing to the presidential--ratings game a quality that had been sorely
lacking: an opportunity to debate. Though I disagree with Felzenberg's methodology and many of his
conclusions, it must be noted that he--unlike others--has offered a thorough explanation of his reasoning.
Previous ratings typically relied upon a poll of "the experts." This made them seem less like the initiation of
a public discussion and more like the final word from the Ivory Tower. Felzenberg has offered a correction
to that condescending attitude by giving us clear reasons for his ratings. He offers us an opportunity to
deliberate, discuss, and ultimately sharpen our views of the presidents. In this regard, he has done us a
service. The book can be recommended to those with an interest in this subject--not as the final word, but as
the opening argument in a long--overdue debate.
3/25/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Mr. Cost writes the HorseRaceBlog for RealClearPolitics.com.
Cost, Jay
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cost, Jay. "Ratings sweeps." National Review, 20 Oct. 2008, p. 70. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A188644057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fbf9990e.
Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A188644057
3/25/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1522021611540 8/8
Felzenberg, Alvin Stephen. The Leaders
We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't):
Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game
Bryan Craig
Library Journal.
133.9 (May 15, 2008): p111+.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Felzenberg, Alvin Stephen. The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential
Rating Game. Basic Bks: Perseus. Jun. 2008. c.480p. ISBN 978-0-465-00291-7. $29.95. MIST
Felzenberg (political science, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Governor Tom Kean) attacks the historians' rankings
of U.S. Presidents conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. (1948, 1962) and by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
(1996). The author argues that these rankings used no precise criteria, were never entirely explained, and
relied on experts who tended to be politically liberal. Felzenberg's approach is sound. He attempts to rectify
the situation by newly systematizing such rankings into six different categories, e.g., character, vision,
competence, economic soundness, the protection and expansion of liberties, and handling of defense and
foreign policy. These categories and his in-depth discussions of their meaning, together with his selected
top-, middle-, and bottom-ranked Presidents for each category, are the book's strength. Unfortunately,
Craig's execution is flawed; like his predecessors, he gives no explanation of how he used these categories
to obtain his own rankings of selected Presidents, and some Presidents are neither ranked nor discussed. But
his criteria remain sound and carefully considered, and their consistent application would add depth to the
ever-popular practice of ranking our Presidents. For public and academic libraries.--Bryan Craig, MLS,
Nellysford, VA
Craig, Bryan
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Craig, Bryan. "Felzenberg, Alvin Stephen. The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking
the Presidential Rating Game." Library Journal, 15 May 2008, p. 111+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A179534283/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f26bcd41.
Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A179534283

Flutter, George William. "All Buckley's presidents." New Criterion, Sept. 2017, p. 75+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505839912/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018. "Felzenberg, Alvin S.: A MAN AND HIS PRESIDENTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668636/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018. Cost, Jay. "Ratings sweeps." National Review, 20 Oct. 2008, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A188644057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018. Craig, Bryan. "Felzenberg, Alvin Stephen. The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game." Library Journal, 15 May 2008, p. 111+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A179534283/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 25 Mar. 2018.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/books/review/a-man-and-his-presidents-william-f-buckley-jr-alvin-s-felzenberg-.html
  Word count: 1677

  BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTON
  William F. Buckley and the Odyssey of Conservatism
  By DAMON LINKERMAY 8, 2017

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  President Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. in 1983. Credit United Press International
  A MAN AND HIS PRESIDENTS
  The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
  By Alvin S. Felzenberg
  Illustrated. 417 pp. Yale University Press. $35.

  You know what they say: Never judge a book by its title.

  Alvin S. Felzenberg’s “A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.” is a gracefully written and richly informative book, but it’s not a narrowly focused study of the relationships between one of the 20th century’s leading political commentators and a series of American presidents, which were not very significant. (The exception was Buckley’s singularly important friendship with Ronald Reagan, which Felzenberg explores in a pair of illuminating chapters.)

  Neither does the book tell the story of its subject’s “political odyssey.” Rather than taking the form of a journey from one place to another, or a voyage of discovery that ends where it began, Buckley’s life is noteworthy for its constancy. He was born (in 1925) into a conservative Catholic family, he devoted his life to forging and popularizing the ideology that galvanized the conservative movement, and he died (in 2008) a conservative and a Catholic.

  Yes, there were important incremental adjustments along the way, as, like any thoughtful person, Buckley learned from intelligent interlocutors and responded to changes in the world around him. But his core political convictions remained remarkably consistent: opposition (in the name of individualism and free enterprise) to the size and growth of the federal government; insistence on defending traditional Judeo-Christian morality against all forms of “moral equivalency”; and a belief that American foreign policy should be oriented toward the defense of freedom against the threat of totalitarianism, especially Soviet Communism. (Buckley joined the America First Committee as an adolescent, but he permanently abandoned his youthful isolationism as soon as the United States entered World War II.)

  If there’s an odyssey recounted in the book, it’s that of conservatism itself — the ideology and electoral coalition that started to coalesce with Barry Goldwater’s insurgent presidential campaign in 1964, took control of the Republican Party when Reagan won the White House in 1980, and held the G.O.P. firmly in its grip through the presidency of George W. Bush. That’s where Felzenberg’s story ends, but it’s where conservatism’s travails begin — or rather, it’s where they resurface.

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  Reading the book in light of events since Buckley’s death — including the Sarah Palin sensation of 2008, the Anybody but Romney procession during the Republican primaries of 2012, but most of all Donald Trump’s shockingly successful populist insurrection in 2016 — one realizes the passages that provide the most illumination are those in which Felzenberg highlights what Buckley himself described as his greatest achievement: purging the conservative movement of “extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites and racists.”

  The first such act of ideological excommunication came in the pages of National Review in 1957, two years after Buckley founded the magazine. (National Review would always play a crucial role in Buckley’s efforts at boundary definition and policing, but so would his syndicated column and erudite public affairs program, “Firing Line,” which premiered in 1966 and stayed on the air for an astonishing 33 years.)

  When Buckley assigned a review of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” to Whittaker Chambers, a Communist turned fervent anti-Communist and devout Christian, he must have known the sparks would fly. To call the review an evisceration is to understate its severity. For Chambers, Rand’s novel was morally obscene, a shrill and dogmatic exercise in political propaganda that promoted a form of inverted Marxism in which a coterie of capitalist supermen do battle with and justly triumph over throngs of resentful, parasitic “looters.” Buckley himself would criticize Rand in similar terms on many occasions over the years, including in a decidedly mixed appreciation written on the occasion of her death in 1982.

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  Four years after Chambers’s review, Buckley took aim at the John Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch. The two men met in 1952 and at first saw themselves as allies and ideological compatriots. These were years when Buckley and National Review were flamboyantly right-wing — denouncing President Eisenhower for an absence of ideological fortitude, treating Senator Joseph McCarthy as an American hero, defending Southern segregation and opposing the early civil rights movement in blatantly racist terms, and advocating the military “rollback” of the Soviet Union from Central and Eastern Europe. On all these matters, Buckley and Welch found common cause.

  But by the early 1960s, Buckley’s most intellectually formidable colleagues (Chambers and the political theorist James Burnham) had prevailed on him to make the magazine more politically responsible. At the same time, Welch was moving in the opposite direction, founding the John Birch Society in 1958 to promote the view that Soviet spies had penetrated the highest levels of the United States government. Over the coming years, Welch and his organization would accuse a long list of public figures of acting as Communist agents, including Eisenhower himself, Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles, and the young Henry Kissinger. The Birch Society also launched a campaign to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren for using the Supreme Court to prepare the way for a Communist takeover of the country.

  In April 1961, Buckley wrote the first of several editorials blasting Welch for spreading conspiracy theories that were both implausible on their face and likely to do considerable political harm to the conservative cause they both professed to believe in. Hundreds of angry letters streamed into the offices of the magazine, subscriptions were canceled, prominent donors withdrew their support, and the magazine’s staff split into polarized factions. To his considerable credit, Buckley kept up the assault on Welch and the Birchers, ultimately establishing that the conservative movement would not tolerate conspiratorial forms of argument.

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  Buckley responded similarly to George Wallace during his third-party presidential run in 1968. Making a play for many of the voters who had cast ballots for Goldwater four years earlier, Wallace portrayed himself as more conservative than the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. Buckley disagreed, calling Wallace a “dangerous man” and a “welfare populist” who stoked anger and resentment among blue-collar voters and favored increased federal spending, provided it went only to whites and did nothing to further civil rights for African-Americans.

  In his final act of excommunication, Buckley took a stand against the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan in 1991 for expressing opposition to the Persian Gulf war in terms that were both incendiary and undeniably anti-Semitic. (Buchanan had claimed that the only two groups clamoring for war were “the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States” and described Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory.”) Later that year, Buckley sought to expose and root out remaining vestiges of anti-Semitism on the right in a lengthy essay that filled an entire issue of National Review.

  Those were the factions of the right that Buckley aimed to exclude from the conservative movement: proudly plutocratic libertarians; conspiracy theorists; angry, race-baiting populists; and paleocons dabbling in ethnic demonization.

  Sound familiar?

  If it was once possible for members of the conservative movement to tell themselves that these factions had been driven into the political wilderness for good, recent events tell a more disconcerting story. Even when one side of a political argument appears to prevail decisively, it rarely succeeds in vanquishing the losers, who often live on to fight another day, sometimes years or decades later, more powerful and politically formidable than ever before.

  Felzenberg, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, has produced an accomplished and admiring biography that paints a portrait of a man toiling joyfully to define and elevate a political movement. But the book also, perhaps unintentionally, vindicates a cluster of enduring truths taught by the wisest conservatives down through the ages — that elevated things are fragile, and that nothing lasts forever, or even as long as we may wish.

  The rise of Donald Trump and overturning of so much that Buckley stood for doesn’t quite cast a shadow of tragedy over his life’s work. But it does evoke a mood that can only be described as wistful.

  Correction: May 21, 2017
  A review last Sunday about “A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckely Jr.,” by Alvin S. Felzenberg, misstated the religious affiliation of Whittaker Chambers, who reviewed Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” for Buckley’s National Review in 1957. He was Quaker, not Catholic. The review also misstated the year of Rand’s death. It was 1982, not 1981.

  Damon Linker, a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com, is the author of “The Theocons” and “The Religious Test.”

  A version of this review appears in print on May 14, 2017, on Page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Constant Conservative. Today's Paper|Subscribe

• Wall Street Journal
  https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-man-with-the-presidents-ear-1494542202
  Word count: 1082

  BOOKS BOOKSHELF
  The Man With the President’s Ear
  Buckley was strident in his criticism of Dwight Eisenhower, considering him an obstacle to the conservative cause. Lee Edwards reviews “A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.” by Alvin S. Felzenberg.
  William F. Buckley Jr. left, talks with former California Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1978.
  William F. Buckley Jr. left, talks with former California Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1978. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
  By Lee Edwards
  May 11, 2017 6:36 p.m. ET
  22 COMMENTS
  At the dinner marking National Review’s 30th anniversary, President Ronald Reagan summed up the debt that he and the nation owed the magazine: “You didn’t just part the Red Sea—you rolled it back, dried it up, and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism.” He went on to call the magazine’s founder “perhaps the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era.” Rarely has a sitting president been so lavish in his public praise—at least of someone outside his own administration. In fact, William F. Buckley had been Reagan’s intellectual mentor, political counselor and friend for nearly a quarter-century.

  Most of us are familiar with Buckley’s multiple lives—novelist, TV host, columnist, Bach lover, enfant terrible turned éminence grise. But not until Alvin Felzenberg plumbed the Buckley Papers at Yale, as well as other sources, was another Buckley revealed: a political strategist determined to change the political direction of America.

  Writing to prospective investors for National Review in 1955, Buckley explained that conservatives needed a journal that would supply its readers with “live ammunition for every round of the battle.” Over time, he predicted, an alternative network of commentators, academicians and journalists would emerge. All would take their inspiration from National Review, which would function as the “keeper of the tablets” for an emerging movement. One of the journal’s first subscribers was Ronald Reagan.

  “A Man and His Presidents,” deeply researched and smoothly written, is a superb political biography. At its core is the friendship between Buckley and Reagan, who corresponded and telephoned constantly about matters of state and sometimes their children’s future. The two did disagree—as on the Panama Canal treaties (which Reagan opposed) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty (which Buckley opposed)—but never allowed their policy differences to weaken their ties.

  Of all the presidents during his lifetime, Mr. Felzenberg writes, Buckley was “most strident” in his criticism of Dwight Eisenhower, considering him the “principal obstacle to the conservative cause.” At home, Buckley believed, Ike was too willing to continue New Deal and Fair Deal programs; abroad, he too often played a weak hand. The feeble U.S. response to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 produced National Review’s “most bitter condemnation” of the administration.

  The Man With the President’s Ear
  PHOTO: WSJ
  A MAN AND HIS PRESIDENTS
  By Alvin S. Felzenberg
  Yale, 417 pages, $35

  John F. Kennedy was treated differently. Sometimes Buckley agreed with him, as with Kennedy’s call for across-the-board tax cuts; and sometimes he did not, dissenting from the widespread praise of Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which included a U.S. pledge never to invade Cuba. What Khrushchev cared about most, Buckley argued, was the survival of the Castro regime, “not the lousy missiles.” As for Lyndon Johnson, Buckley demanded that if he was not prepared to win the Vietnam War, he should withdraw U.S. forces “and quickly.” He noted that, in spite of the vaunted aspirations of the Great Society, LBJ left office “lonely, unloved, and discredited.”

  The most entertaining chapter of “A Man and His Presidents” is “Demand a Recount,” the story of Buckley’s quixotic campaign for mayor of New York. The campaign invigorated conservatives, still devastated by Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat months earlier, and led to the birth of “Firing Line,” Buckley’s long-lived TV show. Buckley received an impressive 13.4% of the vote by appealing primarily to white working-class Democrats in the outer boroughs, the same constituency that re-emerged in later years as Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” and “Reagan Democrats.”

  Buckley supported Nixon in 1968 as “the most right, viable candidate who could win.” He spent the next five years skewering him for appeasing the Soviets and Chinese Communists and embracing Keynesian economics. Buckley’s final verdict on Nixon: He was both the “weakest of men and the strongest, a master of self-abuse and of self-recovery.”

  The presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush was a disappointment to Buckley, who called him a “reluctant statist.” Buckley had fewer dealings with George W. Bush and his administration than any Republican president since Nixon. The lack of engagement was partly intentional—by 2001, Buckley was winding down his affairs. But he applauded Mr. Bush’s action against Saddam Hussein because of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then reversed himself when no WMDs were found. He roundly criticized Mr. Bush for his utopian policy of “nation-building.”

  Over the years, writes Mr. Felzenberg, Buckley and the conservative movement changed. In the 1950s, Buckley and his nascent movement sought to reverse the New Deal, “roll back” Soviet expansion and even wage preventive war on the U.S.S.R., all at the same time. But gradually, influenced by realists like Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, Buckley learned to prioritize and trim his sails here and there. He thus managed to bring conservatism into the mainstream and, Mr. Felzenberg says, “helped change the world.”

  To what end? Much like the historian Russell Kirk, Buckley saw his role not as a discoverer of new truths but as a retriever of ancient ones. He believed those truths to be the best means to “preserve human freedom, enhance civilization, create wealth, enable people to attain their full capabilities, and glorify God, in whose image humankind was created.” In his 82 years, concludes Mr. Felzenberg in this fresh account of a much-chronicled figure, Buckley achieved a great deal of what he set out to do, leaving behind a movement that continues to make a profound difference in our politics.

  Mr. Edwards, a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is the author of a biography of William F. Buckley. His memoir, “Just Right,” will appear in the fall.

• Curled Up With a Good Book
  http://www.curledup.com/leadserv.htm
  Word count: 362

  The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game
  Alvin S. Felzenberg
  Basic Books
  Hardcover
  480 pages
  June 2008
  rated 4 1/2 of 5 possible stars

  buy this book now or browse millions of other great products at amazon.com
  previous reviewnext review
  The Leaders We Deserved rates American presidents based on specific traits: character, vision, competence, economic performance, foreign policy achievements, and their effect on human rights.

  There is little surprise at the number-one ranking, for this president consistently ranks first by almost everyone’s yardstick. I was, however, shocked by two of the top five and thought that one ranked 34th should have been lower. Those of you who have read some of my reviews know very well who I believe should be ranked dead last. Enough said.

  The greatest part of Felzberg’s ranking system is that he considers categories that have previously not been applied and therefore did not encompass the accomplishments or devastations of past Presidents.

  Everyone knows of the advances Lincoln made on human rights, but few know much if anything about his foreign policies. Grant, formerly relegated to the “boozer” category, actually also worked very hard to stamp out the Ku Klux Klan. Kennedy is best known for his philandering first and the Bay of Pigs debacle second; this means he rarely gets credit for averting nuclear war. We all know Nixon was a crook, but he does deserve recognition and thanks for his work with China. Ouch; that last part was painful to write.

  Seriously, folks, The Leaders We Deserved should be required reading for all political science students. Actually, that should probably be extended to all history students, so that everyone is exposed to an unbiased assessment of our Presidents.

  Felzenberg has created an indispensable rating system for further Presidents and a book destined to be a valuable addition to school curriculums. If you read it - and you should - you will learn.

  Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Camden Alexander, 2008

• The American Spectator
  https://spectator.org/william-f-buckley-jr-still-strictly-right/
  Word count: 1413

  Buy the Book
  William F. Buckley Jr.: Still Strictly Right
  JOHN R. COYNE JR.Print Friendly and PDF
  May 8, 2017, 12:04 am

  A graceful treatment of the one conservative we forever miss.
  A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
  By Alvin S. Felzenberg
  (Yale University Press, 456 pages, $35)

  From the earliest days, writes Dr. Alvin S Felzenberg, a noted presidential historian and principal spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, “William F. Buckley Jr. presumed to tell heads of state what to do.”

  Depending on whether you accept his mother’s or father’s version, when Bill Buckley was either six or seven, he wrote King George V of England, demanding the United Kingdom immediately repay the debt owed to the United States after World War I.

  As an adolescent, he joined the America First Committee, protesting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plans to provide assistance to England and involve us in what would become World War II. Later, in 1945, as Second Lieutenant Buckley, USA, he antagonized his commanding officer by writing a letter outlining “how the War Department, with the war over, could speed up the demobilization process.”

  Upon discharge, he enrolled at Yale, where, as Chairman of the Yale Daily News, “he hectored Harry Truman on economics, labor unions, and corruption,” instructed the faculty and administration on morality and values, and upon graduation wrote his first book, God and Man at Yale, published in Chicago by Henry Regnery (one of the great men of the conservative movement), which “took as its mission nothing less than revising the curricula and restructuring the governance of the university from which he had recently graduated.”

  The next task was to command history to pause for long enough to build a genuine conservative movement able to appeal to intelligent Americans. For this he founded National Review, with the ultimate goal, Dr. Felzenberg writes, of transforming “the GOP into a party that presented a genuine alternative to the liberalism that was dominant within both major parties.”

  One of Buckley’s first orders of business was to attempt to read Dwight D. Eisenhower out of the conservative movement. But there was no coherent movement for Ike to be read out of. And the General of the Armies who had won the war in Europe was unlikely to pay much attention to a shavetail second lieutenant talking political mumbo-jumbo with an accent vaguely reminiscent of Field Marshall Montgomery’s, a man he detested.

  Nor were the anti-Eisenhower allies available at that time all that savory — or even sane, for that matter, as witness Robert Welch, head of the John Birch Society, a rapidly growing anti-communist group, who insisted that Eisenhower was “a conscious agent of the international Communist conspiracy.” (Buckley may have failed with Eisenhower; but he would later succeed in reading Welch out of the movement.)

  Conservative Taft Republicans, who had long made up the heart of the party, had steadily lost influence since WWII, while more liberal eastern Rockefeller Republicans like John Lindsay, the New York City mayor with leading-man looks, through whose ears the wind reportedly whistled, became media favorites.

  (Buckley would later run as a conservative against Lindsay for mayor, losing the election, as he intended — asked what he’d do if he won, he said “Demand a recount.” But he left Lindsay exposed as vacant and vapid, insuring that he’d rise no farther in the GOP, and wrote a book about it, The Unmaking of the Mayor, now a campaign classic.)

  In 1964, to end liberal national political dominance, he and a new breed of articulate conservatives had settled on Barry Goldwater as conservatism’s public face. With Goldwater as candidate, “Buckley’s National Review functioned as the candidate’s unofficial headquarters and policy shop.”

  But with the assassination of John Kennedy, it imploded. Although national polls showed Goldwater running a tight race against JFK, LBJ opened a wide lead by successfully painting Goldwater as an extremist.

  “In your heart, you know he’s right,” was one of the best Goldwater slogans. LBJ countered with, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”

  In the end, Goldwater ran against a ghost and lost in a landslide.

  But in Republican politics, Bill Buckley had made himself a force, and people like Richard Nixon realized it.

  I first met Bill Buckley in 1968 in San Francisco, when he took me to dinner at Trader Vic’s (one of Nixon’s favorite restaurants) and asked me to come to work for him at NR. We drank Navy Grog’s and talked for four hours. Much of the conversation was about Richard Nixon, not as a conservative, but as a man who had earned the respect of conservatives for his courageous and principled defense of Whittaker Chambers against the Soviet spy Alger Hiss, and by so doing also earning the undying enmity of the liberal establishment.

  In general, as Dr. Felzenberg writes, he’d supported Richard Nixon as the most conservative of the electable candidates, rallying right-wing doubters. But while Buckley backed Nixon in 1968, he had longer thoughts about the governor of California, who’d made the journey from Liberal to Conservative, and among other virtues had become a regular reader of National Review. (Later he’d also become an enthusiastic reader of The American Spectator, whose editor he held in high personal and professional esteem, , as did Bill Buckley, who viewed Bob Tyrrell as one of the country’s most able and eloquent conservative spokesmen.)

  As Dr. Felzenberg points out, the Nixon-Buckley relationship was never smooth, although there were many of us in the Nixon White House with ties to National Review, where I’d worked as an editor and feature writer. Nixon referred to us as Buckleyites, and was never quite comfortable with Bill Buckley himself. The feeling was mutual, and with Watergate it all exploded.

  It was, for Richard Nixon and his family, a personal tragedy of great proportions, and there are many of us who still believe he was treated unjustly — my comrade Ben Stein, for instance, who should be asked to write the real story of the Nixon administration. But injustice and the politics of personal destruction aside, his fall cleared the way for the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s.

  After the Gerald Ford/Jimmy Carter interludes, Ronald Reagan captured the White House with an all-out assist from Bill Buckley. And with Reagan’s election, “Buckley’s role changed from that of political commentator, go-between, and even political broker to that of unofficial participant in the administration’s inner sanctum.”

  Dr. Feltzenberg notes: “He also proved a constant source of emotional support to Ronald and Nancy Reagan. On the few occasions when Buckley and Reagan disagreed on policy, sometimes strongly, their friendship never frayed.”

  With later presidents, the relationships were not especially significant. Buckley admired the older Bush for his sterling personal qualities, but would fall out with Bush the younger over Iraq. And Bill Clinton’s problems with morality precluded any relationship.

  But no matter. “For Buckley, Reagan’s presidency represented the culmination of what he had hoped the conservative movement would attain and achieve.” And for himself, not quite “telling heads of state what to do.” But close enough.

  Dr. Felzenberg writes with grace and good humor, and with genuine affection and respect for his subjects. True, there are several noticeable omissions, among them any discussion of the central role played by this journal and its editor in the growth of the conservative movement, often working with Bill Buckley to find and develop now-prominent conservative writers. George Will and David Brooks, for instance, both took their basic training at TAS, as for that matter did Andy Ferguson, Christopher Caldwell, and Bill Kristol, to name a few.

  But sins of omissions aside, of the good Buckley books available treating the Reagan/Buckley relationship, this is one of the best, running just south of Strictly Right: the book I helped the late Linda Bridges write.

  Linda, a National Review colleague from the Burnham-Rusher-Meyer-Priscilla Buckley days and a friend since, left us on March 26. During our collaborating days, her title was Comrade Managing Editor. RIP, CME.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/william-f-buckley-jr-and-the-collapse-of-the-conservative-movement/2017/07/05/116202d4-55b8-11e7-b38e-35fd8e0c288f_story.html?utm_term=.89121f728dc5
  Word count: 1351

  Opinions
  William F. Buckley Jr. and the collapse of the conservative movement

  Over the course of his career, William F. Buckley Jr. moderated some of his more radical conservative views. (Cynthia Johnson/For The Washington Post)
  By Julius Krein July 6, 2017
  Julius Krein is the editor of American Affairs.

  Alvin S. Felzenberg’s biography of William F. Buckley Jr. arrives just after the political and intellectual collapse of Buckley’s conservative project. Although Felzenberg does not specifically address the 2016 campaign, it is impossible to read his book without looking for clues that might explain Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Indeed, “A Man and His Presidents” is a rather poor biography of Buckley, consistently preoccupied with the trivial at the expense of the significant. Yet the book offers some important and perhaps unintended insights into the unraveling of the conservative movement.

  The principal weakness of Felzenberg’s biography is that it contains little in the way of serious intellectual history. A reader otherwise unacquainted with Buckley’s work would come away with the impression that he never wrote anything beyond acerbic one-liners and forgettable novels. And if Felzenberg’s Buckley wrote little, he read almost nothing. Important debates between traditionalists and libertarians — and Buckley’s role in securing their temporary resolution under the banner of “fusionist” conservatism — receive shockingly scant attention. The influence of neoconservatism is totally ignored. And aside from brief accounts of interactions with fellow National Review editors, there is little meaningful discussion of Buckley’s relationships with other leading conservative intellectuals.

  Without any coherent treatment of the deeper intellectual currents shaping Buckley’s positions, there is nothing to hold the narrative together. The book is less a biography than a breezy history of the major political events that occurred during Buckley’s lifetime. And since Buckley’s career spanned a period from before World War II to the Iraq War, no single episode can be examined in any depth.

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  This problem is compounded by the fact that — the book’s grandiose title notwithstanding — Buckley exerted a significant degree of influence on only one president, Ronald Reagan. He loathed Dwight Eisenhower; was considered a nuisance by Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and both George Bushes; and was shut out of Barry Goldwater’s campaign. Even in his discussion of the Reagan administration, however, Felzenberg inexplicably focuses on the least important material. He spends more time discussing Buckley’s bizarrely flirtatious correspondence with Nancy Reagan than on the administration’s trade policy or Iran-contra. He devotes pages to Buckley’s momentary contretemps with Reagan over whether the president would attend a National Review anniversary dinner — as if it mattered then, much less now. Likewise, the decades-long friendship between Buckley and Henry Kissinger is mentioned frequently, but if the two ever had a substantive conversation about detente, or anything else, Felzenberg is apparently unaware of it.

  Those genuinely interested in Buckley’s life and his influence on conservative intellectual debates would probably prefer John B. Judis’s “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives.” Nevertheless, “A Man and His Presidents” offers some insight into the collapse of Buckley’s conservative movement precisely because its weaknesses as a biography coincide with the weaknesses of movement conservatism.

  It is unlikely that Felzenberg sought to diminish the reputation of his subject, but that is the effect of his work. The “political odyssey” of the subtitle is a fairly simple one: In Felzenberg’s account, Buckley inherited a constellation of attitudes from his father, including total opposition to the New Deal, strident anti-communism and staunch Roman Catholicism. The young Buckley also shared his father’s racism, anti-Semitism and isolationism (Buckley joined the America First Committee before World War II, though Felzenberg is quick to point out that John F. Kennedy was a member, too). Over time, Buckley either shed or moderated all of these views. He began his career at National Review by ranting against Eisenhower and defending segregation. By the end, he had become a respected elder statesman willing to criticize McCarthyism and accept the New Deal. Felzenberg describes this process as one of intellectual and political maturation, by which the prudent counsels of figures such as Whittaker Chambers slowly impressed themselves upon the brash radical.

  But there is another interpretation Felzenberg does not consider: that 20th-century American conservatism simply never made any sense. Far from a coherent program of high principle, it was always a largely accidental combination of inherited reflexes and political opportunism. There is certainly much more to conservative thought than what is treated in Felzenberg’s biography. None of it, however, changes the fact that conservatism’s political trajectory parallels Buckley’s rather embarrassing intellectual journey: One by one, its tenets are admitted to be little more than “irritable mental gestures,” to use Lionel Trilling’s famous phrase, until it is reduced to the most simplistic form of Reaganomics. The one exception is anti-communism, which disappeared with the Soviet Union. It is telling that Buckley’s writing career begins with “God and Man at Yale,” a rousing and idealistic — if not particularly thoughtful or effective — defense of tradition, and ends with grumbling about deficits.

  The history preferred by conservatives, including Buckley, is a version of Felzenberg’s maturation thesis, a purging of crackpots and fringe prejudices to allow the light of “true conservatism” to shine more brightly. Yet that is true only if there is something illuminating at the core. Buckley’s conservatism, as portrayed by Felzenberg, however, rather resembles Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: Cranks of diverse kinds pass in and out of it, but there’s no there there. And while the purging of crackpots ought to be celebrated, what if all that remains are talk show hosts, sycophants and second-rate economists?

  Some movement grognards who still hope for a restoration of Buckley’s conservatism have appealed to his example to reproach President Trump. But such comparisons are unlikely to impress anyone who reads Felzenberg’s book. Whatever one might think of the current administration, Buckley was, at times, all the immoral things that Trump is accused of being. Felzenberg even undercuts the legend of Buckley’s greatest purge, noting that he went to considerable lengths in private to repair relations with the John Birch Society’s leader, Robert Welch, even after denouncing him in public.

  “A Man and His Presidents” is most successful as a reminder that American politics has not changed as much as it sometimes seems — political discourse in the 1950s was rather ridiculous, too, with Welch accusing the president of secret collaboration with Russia, for example. In certain ways, Buckley even prefigured some of the worst tendencies of today’s politics. He was one of the first campus provocateurs, for instance, and his frequent use of biting personal insults would fit well in an obnoxious Twitter feed. One noticeable difference, however, is that Buckley repeatedly sued people who called him a Nazi, and occasionally he won.

  Buckley was also able to maintain meaningful friendships and discussions with ideological opponents, something that occurs rarely today. He criticized every president of his own party and even broke with many National Review editors on the Iraq War.

  Perhaps Buckley succeeded because his personality was always larger than his ideology. At a certain level, he seems to have understood that politics was more than ideology, too. Felzenberg does an admirable job capturing these aspects of Buckley’s career, which deserve to be recalled more often today.

  A MAN AND HIS PRESIDENTS
  The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
  By Alvin S. Felzenberg

  Yale. 448 pp. $35

  We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-objectionist-the-life-and-times-of-william-f-buckley-jr/#!
  Word count: 1754

  The Objectionist: The Life and Times of William F. Buckley Jr.
  By Andrew Burt

  6 0 0

  JUNE 20, 2017

  IN LATE MARCH, veteran news anchor Ted Koppel hosted Sean Hannity for what would prove to be a defining moment in recent American political journalism. Hannity declared the American people “know the difference between an opinion show and a news show.”

  Koppel asserted that Hannity and his supporters placed ideology over facts, eliciting this hurt response from Hannity: “You think I’m bad for America?”

  “Yeah,” said Koppel, without hesitating.

  Reading A Man and His Presidents, the recent biography of William F. Buckley Jr. by Alvin S. Felzenberg, a lecturer at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, it’s hard not to question if Koppel might have made the same condemnation of Buckley at various times throughout his career.

  Buckley was, after all, the intellectual firebrand who famously defined conservatism as a movement that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop” — regardless, it often seemed, of the issue at hand. Indeed, the act of objecting — in print, on television, through political campaigns — was an art form that Buckley perfected. He was a singular character, whose gravitas and intellect helped define a political movement that climaxed in the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

  But Buckley’s life story, as told by Felzenberg, is also characterized by the tensions of a man coming to terms with his own convictions — quite frequently only after he’d set them forth in public view.

  ¤

  Buckley was born into a large, wealthy Catholic family that would have him living, at turns, in Connecticut, South Carolina, Mexico, France, and in the United Kingdom. Despite Buckley’s wealth and precociousness, he was beset early on with the self-consciousness of a minority living in the upper crust. Felzenberg describes the young Buckley as, alternatively, “a Yankee in South Carolina, a southerner and a Catholic in Yankee Protestant Connecticut, a conservative at Yale, and an activist in the buttoned-down CIA,” where Buckley spent a few years at the outset of his career.

  Rather than temper Buckley’s views or his demeanor, his outsider status seemed to exaggerate them. At one point, for example, the young Buckley stormed into a faculty meeting to, as his father would put it, lecture his teachers on “the virtues of isolationism, the dignity of the Catholic Church, and the political ignorance of the school staff.”

  The list of events to which Buckley objected throughout his long career was seemingly endless. Throughout the lead up to World War II, for example, Buckley was an ardent “America Firster,” supporting Charles Lindbergh’s entreaties to let the war (and the atrocities) on the European continent take its course. Buckley was also an early and consistent defender of the southern states’ rights to discriminate against African Americans. Upon graduating from Yale, Buckley formalized his hostility to the liberal elite in his book, God and Man at Yale, which, among other assertions, placed the contest between Christianity and atheism as the central struggle of his era. A struggle, of course, that Yale and its faculty were both ignoring and losing.

  God and Man at Yale might have made Buckley well known within intellectual circles, but it failed to temper his rejectionist inclinations. Buckley would, for example, label the state itself a “domestic enemy,” and become one of Joseph McCarthy’s staunchest defenders, even after the Wisconsin senator had fallen from national grace. As Felzenberg describes it, even after McCarthy’s downfall, Buckley continued to assist his “wounded champion,” never speaking ill of McCarthy or his allies.

  A decade later, Buckley engaged in what now appears to be an act of extreme intellectual provocation when, in 1965, he publicly debated James Baldwin on whether the American Dream had been created at the expense of African Americans. The New York Times published a transcript of the debate the very day of the assaults on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Before an audience of 700, Buckley argued that Baldwin’s literary success itself proved that African Americans were not disadvantaged in the United States.

  While Buckley might not have been fully transparent about all his views during that debate, Buckley was never one to hide his beliefs. Elsewhere, Buckley would publicly describe whites as an advanced race that was, quite simply, “entitled to rule.” Decades later, Buckley would admit to regretting not supporting civil rights sooner.

  ¤

  Among the markers of Buckley’s rise to fame were his founding of the National Review (in 1955), which Ronald Reagan would describe as playing “a part in my becoming a Republican”; the national syndication of his column “On the Right” (in 1962), allowing Buckley to appear in print in 150 newspapers nationwide three times a week; his run for New York City mayor in a publicity-seeking third-party bid (in 1965); and his public affairs show Firing Line, which would air on television for over three decades, becoming a marquee public venue for both conservative thinking and the exhibition of Buckley’s personal charm.

  Throughout it all, Buckley relished his role as a member of the opposition — deriding everyone from fellow Republicans Eisenhower and Nixon, to communists and welfare proponents, to the ultra-liberal Gore Vidal or the extremist John Birch Society, against which Buckley waged a decades-long fight, successfully preventing the group from becoming mainstream in conservative circles. Felzenberg consistently describes Buckley’s various crusades with skill and detail. As a result, A Man and His Presidents thoroughly captures Buckley’s life and decades-long career, a comprehensive portrait of one of the towering figures of 20th-century conservatism.

  But the character Felzenberg depicts is also largely from a distance. When it comes to the lived experience of Buckley’s career choices or much of Buckley’s private life, A Man and His Presidents falls short. Perhaps this is indicative of Buckley himself, who used his wit and intellect as a both a bludgeon and as a personal shield; perhaps Buckley was most animated in the National Review columns that Felzenberg meticulously cites, though this seems unlikely. Even his letters to Nancy Reagan, with whom Buckley was a frequent correspondent, are described as lively and flirtatious. But something less than the man himself fully materializes from the pages of A Man and His Presidents, which is a shame, given the clear admiration and interest Felzenberg holds for his subject.

  We are, however, afforded what feels like the most extensive view into Buckley during Reagan’s presidency, where Buckley appears both more measured and more principled than at any other time throughout his career. Having placed his bets on Reagan since the 1960s, and subsequently lent him the full weight of his credibility and assistance, Buckley saw in Reagan an ability to transform his own objectionist impulses. As Felzenberg describes it: “What distinguished Reagan in Buckley’s eyes was his capacity to project his conservative ideas as a positive agenda, stating what he was for rather than delivering a litany of what he opposed.” Yelling “stop” at history, in other words, formed an incomplete basis for a political agenda. In Reagan, Buckley saw someone who could — and, indeed, did — redefine what it meant to object to the four decades of politics brought forth by the New Deal.

  The dependence was mutual. Reagan leaned on Buckley heavily throughout his political career, both before and after his ascendance to the presidency. As the United States sent troops into Lebanon, for example, Reagan would write Buckley to temper his objections to foreign intervention. “Bill, I know Lebanon looks like a lost cause but there are things going on that don’t make the front page,” Reagan would write. In response, Buckley would caution his friend against falling victim to “misplaced pride.”

  Despite the book’s title, no relationship rivaled that which Buckley shared with Reagan. Throughout the 1950s, Buckley attacked Eisenhower for his unquestioning acceptance of the active role of government in American life, determining that Eisenhower “did nothing whatever for the Republican Party” nor to “catalyze a meaty American conservatism.”

  Buckley would enjoy a closer relationship with the next Republican president, thanks in no small part to his deep relationship with Henry Kissinger, who would, in addition to Buckley’s son, serve as the only speaker at Buckley’s funeral. But the association with Richard Nixon was by all means an uneasy one, marked by both men’s suspicions of the other, especially after Nixon declared himself a “Keynsian” on economic matters — a deep, if not fatal, blow to his conservative credibility. Buckley would become one of the first conservatives to call for Nixon’s resignation after his culpability in the Watergate scandal became clear.

  When George H. W. Bush followed Reagan, Buckley found fault in Bush’s inability to sell a positive vision of conservatism, deeming his pledges against raising taxes as both an uninspired and insufficient embodiment of conservatism from Reagan’s successor. And if Buckley’s relationship with H. W. was marked by its distance, it was even colder with W., whose two terms were characterized by foreign interventionism and increased government spending. Buckley would pronounce the 43rd president “conservative” but “not a conservative.”

  Indeed, what marked Buckley’s connection to the Republican presidents throughout his lifetime was not the consistency of meaningful relationships, as the book’s title implies. Instead, such presidents often sought simply to understand, if not to channel, the power Buckley wielded throughout the conservative intelligentsia, at times from a distance. When Democrats occupied the White House, Buckley was largely shut out. For that reason Buckley’s thoughts about such presidents, from Kennedy to Carter to Clinton, play a lesser role in Felzenberg’s narrative.

  Ultimately, what emerges from A Man and His Presidents is less the biography of one political commentator, and more the rise and fall of a movement bookended by the New Deal on the one hand and the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush on the other. Between these two periods, Buckley emerged as, in Felzenberg’s words, “a single voice speaking for the conservative movement.” One can’t help but wonder who holds that mantle today.

  ¤

  Andrew Burt is the author of American Hysteria: The Untold Story of Mass Political Extremism in the United States.

• New York Journal of Books
  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/man-and-his
  Word count: 1290

  A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
  Image of A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
  Author(s):
  Alvin S. Felzenberg
  Release Date:
  June 3, 2017
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Yale University Press
  Pages:
  448
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Francis P. Sempa
  ". . . a fascinating examination of Buckley’s approach to practical politics . . ."

  William F. Buckley Jr. may have been the most politically influential intellectual of the 20th century. In the mid-1950s, he set about to make conservatism a respectable alternative to liberalism by founding National Review.

  In the 1960s, he married conservative ideas to practical politics, first in the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and later in his own run for mayor of New York one year after.

  He achieved the ultimate political success when his friend and philosophical pupil Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 and resoundingly reelected in 1984.

  Alvin Felzenberg’s A Man and His Presidents is a fascinating examination of Buckley’s approach to practical politics in the context of his strong but evolving philosophical views.

  Felzenberg does not hide his admiration for Buckley. As a 16-year-old sophomore at Irvington High School in New Jersey, Felzenberg closely followed the 1965 New York mayoral campaign in which Buckley ran on the Conservative Party ticket. Buckley, he recalled, was “articulate, knowledgeable, witty and urbane.”

  Felzenberg was soon regularly reading Buckley’s syndicated column. He also read some of Buckley’s books, including The Unmaking of a Mayor, Up From Liberalism, Rumbles Left and Right, and later God and Man at Yale, and got “hooked” on Buckley’s new television show Firing Line.

  Buckley grew-up in what Felzenberg calls a “secure, serene, and privileged environment,” thanks to his father, William F. Buckley Sr., a politically connected entrepreneur who “believed that societies should be governed in accordance with eternal, time-tested, universal truths, all enshrined within the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church.”

  Buckley worshipped his father and hewed to those “eternal, time-tested, universal truths” in life, journalism, and politics, but not, Felzenberg shows, inflexibly.

  Throughout his career as intellectual conservatism’s leading public figure, Buckley repeatedly shaded his philosophical views when necessary to facilitate practical political goals.

  Felzenberg rightly attributes Buckley’s political flexibility to the influence of James Burnham, the brilliant Cold War strategist and analyst who Buckley called the dominant intellectual influence at National Review, and Whittaker Chambers, the tormented ex-Soviet espionage courier who Buckley befriended in the 1950s.

  Burnham and Chambers impressed upon their younger colleague “the importance of prioritizing goals, the need to cultivate public opinion for what one was proposing,” and in electoral politics the necessity of supporting the most right-leaning electable candidate.

  One way Buckley achieved this was by reading out of the conservative movement extremist elements such as the John Birch Society. Another way he accomplished this was to find areas of agreement among the different strands of conservatism—cultural conservatives, libertarians, and anti-communists. Finally, his own views changed, especially in the area of Civil Rights.

  The book’s main focus is Buckley’s relationships with GOP presidents, especially Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.

  Buckley was not close to Nixon, but supported him in 1968 and 1972, despite what Buckley believed was Nixon’s unnecessary abandonment of Taiwan as part of the opening to China, his pursuit of détente and arms control with the Soviet Union, and his liberal domestic policies.

  Nixon, for his part, was never a “movement” conservative, but he understood the political necessity of courting conservatives to maintain and expand his winning political coalition. Buckley accompanied Nixon to China, served briefly in his administration as a delegate to the UN General Assembly, and formed a close friendship with Henry Kissinger.

  This did not immunize the Nixon administration from strong criticism when Buckley believed its policies went against those “eternal, time-tested, universal truths” he held so dear.

  As the Watergate scandal intensified, Buckley refused to call for Nixon’s impeachment, but publicly “voiced increasing skepticism about whether Nixon could survive.”

  After Nixon died, Buckley wrote that it was remarkable that most conservatives rallied to Nixon’s defense during Watergate given that Nixon had done very little to advance conservative policies. Felzenberg quotes Buckley’s final verdict on Nixon: he was the “weakest of men and the strongest: a master of self-abuse and of self-recovery.”

  Buckley befriended Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Felzenberg notes, soon after Reagan gave his famous televised speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater shortly before the 1964 election. “Buckley,” writes Felzenberg, “became Reagan’s most trusted adviser outside his official family and, after Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s primary enabler and protector.”

  Reagan was an avid reader of National Review. Like Buckley, he was a principled conservative but appreciated the need for flexibility in practical politics. Buckley saw in Reagan, Felzenberg notes, a “capacity to project . . . conservative ideas as a positive agenda, stating what he was for rather than delivering a litany of what he opposed.”

  Ultimately, Buckley saw Reagan as a political leader who could win high office and implement the conservative agenda and conservative ideas that Buckley had been writing and talking about for decades.

  During Reagan’s presidency, Buckley acted as an “informal policy adviser and confidant,” frequently meeting and communicating with the president and Nancy Reagan. Reagan later called Buckley “the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era” and conservatism’s champion.

  Felzenberg notes that Buckley’s correspondence with Reagan continued into his post-presidency until Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease made that impossible. “He stayed in close contact with Nancy Reagan,” the author writes, “for the rest of his days.”

  Buckley had been friends with George H. W. Bush from their Yale days, but unlike with Reagan, the friendship with Bush was personal not philosophical. Much to Bush’s chagrin, Buckley and National Review failed to endorse Bush over the other GOP candidates in the 1988 primaries.

  Four years later, Buckley made it clear that he was philosophically closer to Jack Kemp and Pat Buchanan than to Bush, but in the general election he tepidly endorsed Bush over Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. Nevertheless, before he left office, George H. W. Bush awarded Buckley the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

  Buckley, of course, supported George W. Bush for president in 2000 and 2004, but Bush’s Wilsonian rhetoric and policies with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan struck Buckley as unwise, imprudent, and wasteful of American lives. “Nation-building,” often promoted by neoconservatives, was not to his liking. He often invoked the words of John Quincy Adams about not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. It is a debate within conservatism that continues to this day.

  The brash, young conservative who originally proclaimed his mission as standing athwart history yelling “Stop,” had, Felzenberg concludes, “learned to prioritize, . . . trimmed his sails, and, along the way, . . . helped change the world.”

  Francis P. Sempa's most recent book is Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier's Journey through the Second World War. He he has also contributed to other books as well as written numerous articles and book reviews on foreign policy and historical topics for leading publications. Mr. Sempa is Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. The views reported in this review are those of the reviewer and not those of the U.S. government.

• National Review
  https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/06/26/alvin-s-felzenberg-a-man-and-his-presidents/
  Word count: 1297

  In the Arena
  By RACHEL CURRIE
  About Rachel Currie
  June 26, 2017 12:50 AM

  A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr., by Alvin S. Felzenberg (Yale, 456 pp., $35)
  William F. Buckley Jr. made enormous contributions to America’s publishing industry during his life, and he has continued to do so, albeit indirectly, in the nine years since his death. He has been the subject of two beautifully written memoirs — one by his son, Christopher, the other by NR’s Richard Brookhiser — along with biographies by Heritage Foundation scholar Lee Edwards and Roger Williams University law professor Carl Bogus. In 2015, the Devault-Graves Agency published the complete transcripts of Buckley’s famous 1968 debates with Gore Vidal, and University of Illinois at Chicago historian Kevin Schultz published a study of Buckley’s turbulent friendship with Norman Mailer. A year later, James Rosen of Fox News published an edited collection of Buckley’s best eulogies, while MIT film and media professor Heather Hendershot published a history of Firing Line, Buckley’s long-running weekly debate show.

  The sheer number of WFB-related titles confirms his enduring impact on American intellectual life. Yet at this point, even the biggest Buckley fans might be excused for wondering, “Do we really need another book about the Great Man’s influence?” Alvin Felzenberg believes the answer is yes, and his new book proves him right. Part biography and part political history, A Man and His Presidents offers a veritable Thanksgiving feast for Buckleyologists.

  Felzenberg approaches WFB from a sympathetic perspective, both personally and ideologically. Like so many others, he forged a relationship with Buckley by sending him a letter while in college. The letter yielded a visit to NR’s offices, which led to what Felzenberg calls an “active acquaintanceship” stretching out over four decades. During that time, Felzenberg compiled a lengthy CV in Republican politics, including a stint as New Jersey’s assistant secretary of state under Governor Tom Kean, positions in the Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations, and a job as principal spokesman for the 9/11 Commission (which Kean co-chaired).

  A distinguished author and regular NR contributor, he clearly believes that Buckley’s conservative revolution was good for America and good for the world. Yet A Man and His Presidents is no hagiography. While Felzenberg documents the indispensable role that WFB played in building a movement and fueling Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the White House, he does not shy away from those issues on which Buckley made mistakes or showed poor judgment. The result is a well-balanced, richly detailed account of a most remarkable political journey.

  WFB began that journey as a youthful “America Firster” who opposed U.S. aid to Britain prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, he called for rolling back Soviet control of Eastern Europe, before embracing a more pragmatic (though still aggressive) approach to the superpower conflict. Toward the end of his life, he supported George W. Bush’s Iraq War but quickly grew disillusioned with it, telling the New York Times in June 2004: “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”

  Meanwhile, Buckley went from defending Jim Crow to celebrating how the civil-rights revolution had transformed the American South. He also went from seeking a reversal of the New Deal to championing a former FDR Democrat turned conservative Republican — Ronald Reagan — whose presidency kept the New Deal mostly intact.

  In short, while Buckley was deeply philosophical and deeply conservative, his views evolved over time. He launched an ideological movement, but he was never a rigid ideologue. “Buckley’s fealty to principle,” writes Felzenberg, “did not blind him to his own imperfections and inconsistencies. And by no means did his devotion to truths that had been passed down to him through the generations make him a prisoner of dogma. He had also learned to free himself of views that had come to him by the circumstances of his background that he concluded ran counter to values he cherished.”

  For example, when Buckley created this magazine, he opposed using federal power to dismantle southern segregation. In 1957, he even penned an editorial arguing that whites were “entitled to rule” in the South because they were “the more advanced race.” That same year, NR opposed the civil-rights bill signed by President Eisenhower — a bill that earned the support of every Republican senator, including conservative stalwarts Barry Goldwater, Everett Dirksen, and William F. Knowland.

  Yet by the mid 1960s, notes Felzenberg, “Buckley showed increased sympathy for the goals of the civil-rights movement and for the rights of citizens to demonstrate. While he continued to oppose an increased federal role in guaranteeing voting rights, he shifted his emphasis, criticizing more frequently those who resisted change in the South than he did those seeking federal assistance in bringing it about.” Indeed, he considered George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, to be a “welfare populist” who tried to camouflage his racist appeals behind the rhetoric of “states’ rights.” In 1968, Buckley debated the governor on Firing Line, and afterward he told Nancy Reagan that Wallace was a “dangerous man.”

  During the years that followed, WFB applauded the ways in which civil-rights policies and local leaders had changed southern society for the better. Decades later, in 2004, he said unequivocally that his earlier opposition to the civil-rights movement had been a mistake, telling Time magazine: “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: Federal intervention was necessary.”

  Of course, as Felzenberg properly emphasizes, Buckley’s “core beliefs” remained constant throughout his career: He was a devout Catholic, a devout anti-Communist, and a devout believer in the virtues of economic and personal freedom.

  On some issues, Buckley adopted positions that did not become conservative orthodoxy until many years down the line. In 1962, for example, he endorsed the concept of across-the-board reductions in marginal income-tax rates, at a moment when President Kennedy was promoting such a plan. Opponents of the JFK tax cut included Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and the Chamber of Commerce. Even Goldwater eventually voted against it. “In taking the stand he did,” says Felzenberg, “Buckley showed himself to be a ‘supply-sider’ on economics a generation before the term was coined and years before either Jack Kemp or Ronald Reagan, both advocates of these kinds of tax cuts, entered electoral politics.”

  Speaking of Reagan, Felzenberg does a masterly job documenting Buckley’s world-changing relationship with the 40th president, stressing that WFB was “Reagan’s most trusted adviser outside his official family and, after Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s primary enabler and protector.” Buckley provided the Gipper with everything from policy and personnel recommendations to “back-channel assistance” to robust support in his columns and articles. “The role Buckley played in advancing Reagan’s career,” writes Felzenberg, “cannot be overstated.” Their only two major policy disagreements came in the late 1970s, over the Panama Canal treaties (which Buckley supported and Reagan opposed), and in the late 1980s, over the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (which Reagan supported and Buckley opposed). At NR’s 30th-anniversary dinner, in December 1985, Reagan hailed Buckley as “perhaps the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era.”

  COMMENTS
  A Man and His Presidents reminds us how he achieved that influence, and how it helped change the course of history. Felzenberg’s book surely won’t be the final word on WFB’s political odyssey; but for now, it is probably the best.

  – Rachel Currie is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

• Renew America
  http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/vernon/170707
  Word count: 2214

  Book review: 'A Man and his Presidents,' by Alvin S. Felzenberg
  The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
  FacebookTwitterGoogle+
  By Wes Vernon
  July 7, 2017

  News and entertainment media, to say nothing of the history books, have inundated Americans with their own political versions of our nation's founding and of the political officials and other alert Americans who followed, including our 45 presidents (for whatever the proficiency of their efforts as "keepers of the flame" may have been). By no means, however, are those who made great strides in their contributions to the nation's direction confined to our elected or officially appointed public servants. In fact, some of those "outside the Washington bubble" had an impact that was much more than simply "noteworthy."

  Seemingly no end to accomplishments

  Such a power broker was the late William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008). Unlike some others who quietly dispensed eagerly-received advice to "the power" in the White House Oval Office, Buckley's advice to Barry Goldwater and to Presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II was not only by frequent personal contact to the actual "seat of power"; some of it was very public, as in knowing that the political intellectual heavyweights Mr. Buckley was attempting to influence were subscribers to his conservative "must-read" magazine National Review. Actual influence? President George W. Bush summed it up: "Buckley brought conservative thought into the mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America's victory in the Cold War."

  The tribute was fitting, though it arguably left much to be added. That gap is filled admirably by Alvin S. Felzenberg in his new volume A Man and his Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. The author, aside from serving two administrations, is a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania and a historian in his own right, as shown, for example, in his 2008 Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't) – an outstanding and brutally honest rating of our first 42 presidents, excepting William Henry Harrison, whose presidency lasted all of one month.

  Mr. Felzenberg also authored Governor Tom Kean: From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 9/11 Commission (2006). The author also served as the primary communications director for that panel. (You may recall having seen Al Felzenberg delivering a briefing to and taking questions from the media during the 9/11 hearings which Governor Kean chaired.)

  A longtime attack aimed at America?

  The "third party" presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 Truman-Dewey contest was a candidacy that a very concerned Bill Buckley took very seriously at the time. Though Wallace ultimately received only 2.4 million popular votes and zero electoral votes, the former vice president (for Roosevelt) did attract a decent-sized intellectual contingent. His Progressive Party had been publicized for its backing and suspected funding by the Communist Party, which was able to gin up demonstrations in New York City. Buckley – a conservative young student, campus politician, and editor – pointed to history to support the point that "ideas advanced during elections could outlast losing campaigns, capture the imagination of intellectuals and under the right circumstances gain acceptance over time."

  That might be cited as an example of Buckley's prescience, given the generations-long crawl from the meager vote for Henry Wallace, as the Democrat Party in the following generations seemed to veer increasingly leftward in small increments until, in 2008, Americans could pull the lever for Barack Obama, who had been mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, an acknowledged Communist. Wallace later sorrowfully recanted his communist leanings. Obama in his later time bore down on Marxist policies while never acknowledging the arguable origins of the ideas behind them. A more positive and much shorter example of Buckley's point came when, in 1980, Ronald Reagan told Barry Goldwater that the latter had won his own presidential run in 1964, but "it just took us 16 years to count the votes."

  True to its principles?

  Beyond his very visible years at Yale, Buckley later emerged on the public scene as if he'd been shot out of a cannon. His first of what would be scores of books during the rest of his life was God and Man at Yale. Yale University was a secular institution whose students (in the majority) were nominally Protestant. The school was "conservative," though far more moderate than Buckley, who as a very devout Latin Mass-attending Catholic saw the teaching and the drift of Yale as having gradually taken on a rejection of Christianity and its vital teachings. He viewed Yale as ignoring Christianity, or in some instances, rejecting it. According to the author of A Man and his Presidents, Buckley wanted the university to teach that Christianity was superior to other faiths.

  God and Man at Yale was the product of Buckley's own tussles – political and cultural – on the campus of the prestigious Ivy League institution (founded in 1701). This young man, during his student days there, notably was the editor and unabashedly opinionated (but also well-informed) editorial writer for the Yale Daily News. His time as "Chairman" at the paper reflected his stormy political activism as a student and portended what was to be his multiple-controversy-packed career in the decades to come.

  What he really thought

  Before he walked out the door at Yale, Buckley was selected to deliver the class day oration upon graduation. When those in charge of the event saw Buckley's prepared remarks, they advised him to tone them down before delivery.

  Mr. Felzenberg quotes some prepared parts of the text, most of which Buckley insisted on delivering absent "references to specific individuals."

  His comments included: "Here we find men who will tell us Jesus Christ was the greatest fraud that history has known." He said, in some classrooms conventional morality was presented as an anachronism "by human thought." He also urged Yale to proclaim that "collectivism [socialism] was inimical to individual dignity and to the nation's strength and prosperity." (One might add that collectivism, since Buckley's student days, has proven difficult to remove before or after it has done much of its damage (witness decades later the 2017 effort to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. – WV)

  What says this senior guru of conservatism?

  Both at Yale and later out in the real world, Buckley stirred controversy, and in the give and take of political battle found throughout the many years of his repertoire, Buckley was usually disciplined enough to know where to draw the line without losing the sharp edge he displayed as a masterful debater, at Yale and later on the worldwide political stage. His opponents respected him, and many of them befriended him without either they or he shedding their political convictions. His grip of an issue rarely if ever betrayed him when he was confronted with a debate opponent who was also well briefed of the arguments on both sides... Those were qualities that enabled Bill Buckley to come back week after week for years and face down the next comer on his popular Firing Line TV show. How else would his Firing Line last for 1429 TV episodes until it finally ended? He said he did not wish to "die on the set." (Obviously, he had the intellect and the concentration to multi-task. How else can one whose love of music enabled him the versatility to sit at the piano to play Bach with one hand and "Toot-Toot-Tootsie Good-bye" with the other?)

  Then there were the columns in newspapers around the country – usually three per week – and scores of books, as well, while also meeting frequent speech-making demands Of course, the crown jewel of all of William F. Buckley's literary/media efforts is the magazine that started it all – his beloved National Review – "Buckley's magazine" as it was known. That fabled history about "standing athwart" the post-war political New Deal-accepting nation and shouting "Stop" was the turning point for America's post-war days. The magazine remains today on the web.

  But there is more

  "The Buckley era," best defined as 1945-1982 (starting at Yale) brought conservatism into the mainstream, as President Bush (see above) has said. At that time in history, much of Europe (the half not occupied by Soviet troops), and post-war media and other venues in America, were pushing or going along with a settling down with a collectivism-is-here-to stay attitude. William Buckley was not the only "voice in the wilderness" saying in so many words, hey what is this? Are we still America? Or are we willing to slowly (at first) drift away from the nation of our founders who fought so valiantly to make us an exceptional nation with a Constitution that is the backbone that has made us great?

  The limits

  Other conservatives arose, and Buckley welcomed or did not discourage them. But since much of America looked on him as an original steady hand and not a fly-by-night, he took on the job of noting publicly those who in his judgment were doing the cause more harm than good.

  Dissenters voiced the Who-do-you-think-you-are retort. Some may have been put off by his transatlantic accent. (Note: Though the Buckleys were thoroughly American, they had some meaningful experiences elsewhere, as for example Bill's two years attending a prep school in England; that may be where he picked up the accent. It was no put-on. That's the way he talked. The woman who would later become his wife Pat, his "best friend," was the daughter of one of the most prominent citizens of Canada.)

  Family fights?

  Since William Buckley was generally recognized as a foremost post-war leader of conservatives, and was constantly besieged by media inquiring what he thought of this or that other conservative who had made some controversial remark, he felt (rightly or wrongly) that he had to try to draw what he considered the boundaries of what American conservatism was and what it was not.

  Buckley publicly drew the lines on basically three or four sources of beyond-the-pale, as he viewed them. These included the "objectivist" group of the late libertarian author Ayn Rand. Their first meeting quickly deteriorated when Rand said to Buckley she could not understand how someone as intelligent as he could possibly believe in God. Her book Atlas Shrugged was roundly slammed in National Review by Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Communist who played a major role is exposing Alger Hiss as a traitor. Secondly, there was the John Birch Society, manly its leadership, which Buckley denounced. Bill Rusher, then a publisher for National Review, told me in the late nineties he had been in on the Buckley discussions of the Birch Society. At the time, he said he objected because well-meaning members of the Society were also fans of National Review. However, Rusher added in retrospect that he believes Buckley was right. And thirdly, the George Wallace segregationists. (Note: Governor Wallace once said to columnist Robert Novak, "You have never heard me call myself a "conservative.") Finally, Buckley ruled out anti-Semites as not deserving any seat at the conservative table.

  The McCarthy book

  Bill Buckley's second book, co-written with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, Sr., was McCarthy and his Enemies, a defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his battle against Communism. Buckley and Bozell hailed the Wisconsin senator's fight to keep Communists out of government, while acknowledging the senator's lack of required political skills. Basically, they agreed with former leftist – and later National Review writer Max Eastman – who said McCarthy was doing, however imperfectly, "a job that had to be done."

  When the book was released, Buckley honored Senator McCarthy at a news conference where he presented the senator with a copy and declared that McCarthy was "the most smeared man in America."

  Later, in 2007, M. Stanton Evans (a friend and acolyte of Buckley's) released a voluminous book that brought forth much more information on McCarthy that had not been available to Buckley and Bozell in 1953. That book formed the basis for a ten-part series in this column – Parts 1-9 in late 2007 and Part 10 in May of 2008. The book by Evans was titled Blacklisted by History. Also shortly before our 2007 pieces, we did an examination of the late Edward R. Murrow's attack on McCarthy in two separate pieces shortly before the 1-9 installment in RenewAmerica

  Alvin Felzenberg has given us a marvelous and comprehensive account of a man whose impact on American history in the late 20th and very early 21st centuries was tremendous, far greater than much of the public has realized – and all to the good of our nation. Some of us believe we may have barely missed a serious takeover in the "surprise" outcome of the 2016 election. We are now in danger of another civil war or total chaos in this country. Hopefully, we will have another William Buckley around before a real downfall is upon us.

  © Wes Vernon

  The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
  (See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)

• The American Spectator
  https://spectator.org/38830_schlesinger-syndrome-updated/
  Word count: 2024

  The Schlesinger Syndrome, Updated
  JOHN R. COYNE JR.Print Friendly and PDF
  October 20, 2010, 10:07 am

  The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game
  By Alvin S. Felzenberg
  (Basic Books, 486 pages, $19.95)

  In this updated and revised version of the original edition, first published before the presidential election of 2008 and therefore not including an analysis of George W. Bush as a leader we did or didn’t deserve, Alvin Felzenberg gives us some 50 additional pages containing “an early assessment” of the Bush presidency.

  The inspiration for taking a fresh look at the way we arrive at approved presidential ratings first hit Felzenberg, appropriately enough, on “a cold, dreary December day in 1996. As I sat down to breakfast with The New York Times Magazine, its cover story caught my attention. The article, ‘The Ultimate Approval Rating,’ by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., contained the results of a survey he conducted, in which he asked leading historians to evaluate U.S. presidents.”

  For most of us, no doubt a depressing scene, something out of Sartre — a dreary winter morning, the New York Times, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. — enough to drive ordinary men to the liquor cabinet or back to bed, to await the first football game of the day.

  But Mr. Felzenberg is no ordinary man. Among other things, he has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins; earned a doctorate in politics from Princeton; was a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School; and served as principal spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, a job that required strength of character and the ability to think clearly and objectively.

  Felzenberg has spent significant time in the academy, but isn’t an academician. He has also served as a congressional staffer and government official and is known as a Republican, but not identified with any one wing or faction. Clarity of thought, independence, a strong measure of objectivity — in short, just the qualities needed in someone sufficiently irreverent to question the premises and methodology underlying the Schlesinger syndrome.

  In that New York Times Magazine article, Felzenberg notes, “Schlesinger Jr.’s survey replicated and updated those that his father, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., conducted in 1948 and 1962.” In those surveys, both Schlesingers asked a selected group of historians — they did the selecting — “to place presidents into one of five categories: great, near great, average, below average, and failure.” No criteria for ratings within these categories were suggested, and the result was — and is — a “presidential rating game” in which winners and losers are determined by bias or unthinking acceptance of the approved conventional wisdom. And since the raters are Schlesinger-approved academics, no conservatives need apply.

  Then there’s the matter of a general historical dumbing-down. “The popularization of Schlesinger-style surveys,” writes Felzenberg, “freed journalists, political commentators [he might have mentioned bartenders], museum curators, and students of all ages from having to offer evidence in support of their opinions.” All that was necessary was “to cite the collective assessments of the ‘experts.’” Thus is conventional wisdom transmitted.

  Toward the end of that New York Times article, Felzenberg writes, “Schlesinger dropped any and all pretense to objectivity when he presumed to advise the recently re-elected Bill Clinton on how he might raise his grade in subsequent surveys,” by dropping that “New Democrat” persona he’d adopted and returning to that old-time liberal religion. “‘Only boldness and creativity, even at times foiled and frustrated,’ Schlesinger mused, ‘would earn Clinton a place among the immortals.’ ”

  If so, Felzenberg notes, whatever else may be said about Clinton’s successor, “George W. Bush’s willingness to wage preventive war, his undertakings to spread democracy in the Middle East, and his readiness to act unilaterally on the international stage were certainly ‘bold and creative,’ even if they were at times ‘foiled and frustrated.’”

  Does that qualify Bush for “immortal” status somewhere down the road? Of course not. The jury’s been fixed. As Felzenberg points out, one of Schlesinger’s jurors “wrote a cover story for a popular magazine, declaring Bush the worst president in history. Others seconded this opinion in other forums. Again, it would seem that presidential greatness lies in the ideological eyes of their evaluators.”

  TO COMPENSATE FOR SUCH FAILINGS, and perhaps to restore some measure of balance, “to distinguish policy from process” and to see presidents whole rather than in part or caricature, Felzenberg has designed his own rating system, ranking presidents on three criteria — character, vision, and competence; and their handling of three policy areas — economic policy, the protection and expansion of liberty, national defense and foreign policy. “Taken together,” writes Felzenberg, “these six components provide readers with a thorough and consistent standard against which to measure presidential performance.”

  They also result in “some surprise verdicts.” Andrew Jackson for instance, a special favorite of the Schlesingers, was a president of great consequence. But his economic policies plunged the country into a major depression, and his treatment of American Indians was unconscionable. Felzenberg drops Jackson to 27th place, two slots above George W. Bush’s preliminary resting place, and just behind Warren G. Harding.

  Ulysses Grant, however, who has long received an undeserved bad press among academic historians moves up to 7th place, tied with John F. Kennedy. “Mistakes and all,” writes Felzenberg, “the old soldier had done his duty. He deserves better in the pages of history.” Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose great sin among the Schlesingerites was to have drubbed Adlai Stevenson, the favorite of the liberal establishment, moves to 5th place, one ahead of FDR. And Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan tie for 3rd place, behind Lincoln and Washington, in that order.

  Conservatives and Republicans will find many of these revisions overdue and welcome. But there are those (Ben Stein and this reviewer, to name two) who believe Richard Nixon deserves better than 35th place, especially in the category of vision. Although Felzenberg seems not overly impressed with the results of Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, it in fact threw the Soviets so badly off balance they were never able to recover. As a direct result of Nixon’s visit and the new relationship with China, there was a distinct and lasting shift in the global balance of power — as Margaret MacMillan has pointed out, a rare example of a statesmanlike vision successfully shaping reality.

  But no matter. Feltzenberg’s rankings, which made the first edition of this book both predictably controversial and surprisingly popular, are a welcome release from the group-think evaluations imposed by several generations of Schlesingerite academics. This new and revised edition should also prompt strong reactions for its early assessment of the Bush years and its preliminary observations on the early days of the Obama administration.

  “Forecasting how history will ultimately regard George W. Bush’s presidency so soon after he left office is a fool’s errand,” writes Felzenberg. “As Bush noted, what future historians will write about him rests to a large degree on his successor.”

  An astute observation, borne out by the historic record. Had Eisenhower not found a way to bring the Korean War to a minimally successful end, for instance, history would probably have judged Truman, who committed us to participating in that war, much more harshly. Similarly, if Obama is able to hold the Bush-led victory in Iraq and succeed in Afghanistan, he will not only strengthen his own standing but validate the Bush approach, to which his escalation of the war has committed him.

  As Felzenberg points out, much the same situation pertains in other aspects of Obama administration policy. Despite the campaign promises, Guantanamo remains open for business. Education programs are little changed, as are “faith-based initiatives.” On the economy, “Obama continued Bush’s policy of purchasing stocks with tax payers funds” and “expanded upon Bush’s initiative to pump billions of taxpayer dollars into Chrysler and General Motors.” Obama continues to draw on the economic advice of golden boys from institutions like Goldman also favored by the Bush economists. In other areas — immigration, executive prerogatives, “signing statements” — there seems little difference.

  In short, at least for the first term, Obama, much to the dismay and anguish of his neo-romantic young supporters and most of academe, seems intent on bringing the programs and policies initiated during the Bush administration to successful conclusions. One school of thought has it that he doesn’t know what else to do. But whatever the motivations, an evaluation of Bush as president depends to a somewhat surprising extent on the successes or failures of the Obama presidency.

  IN HIS PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS of Bush as president, Felzenberg enumerates those idiosyncrasies that so infuriated his enemies. At Andover, where he was known as “the Lip,” Bush “began a lifetime practice of addressing peers by nicknames, often derisive…He also acquired what appeared to be an omnipresent smirk.” As president, Felzenberg continues, mercilessly, “Bush occasionally reverted to the quirky behavior he had displayed as an adolescent.”

  There was the wink at Queen Elizabeth and the “unwelcome back rub” administered to Angela Merkel. And in accepting his party’s nomination for the second time, “Bush drew attention to the strut some detected in his gait. ‘In Texas, they call this walking,’ he said.” (And good for him, some murmured, perhaps remembering Richard Nixon in Latin America, confronting rock-throwing demonstrators, climbing up on the hood of his car, grinning, flashing the victory sign, and telling an aide: “This’ll drive them up the wall!”)

  But Bush was also a man who grew, writes Felzenberg, who developed considerable strength of character — an “attitudinal conservative” who despite a privileged upbringing instinctively and emotionally sided with “ordinary Americans”; an executive who “valued brevity and consensus”; a model husband and father who stopped drinking and sincerely embraced religion. “Religion…brought out Bush’s sense of empathy. Stories about his demonstrations of kindness and generosity toward wounded soldiers, surviving relatives of victims of terrorist attacks, and others abound.”

  Felzenberg gives Bush a 3 out of a possible 5 for “Character” on his ratings chart, tying FDR and, of course, beating Clinton. He also earns a 3 for “Preserving and Expanding Liberty,” tying, among others, Jefferson, both Adamses, and his father. Under “Defense, National Security, and Foreign Policy,” he beats out Carter and ties with Nixon, Jackson, and others. His worst rating is a 1 for “Competence,” owing in large part to the Katrina fiasco.

  In all, in his early assessment of the Bush presidency, Felzenberg leaves us with this: “However history may fault Bush for his decision-making process and his handling of the war in Iraq for much of his time in office, it may also credit him for the courage he showed in pressing for Petraeus’s surge in the face of almost unanimous opposition. Future president Barack Obama predicted in 2006 that the surge would fail and denied in 2007 that it was working.”

  But it did work. And now, three years later, President Obama is pressing for his own surge in Afghanistan. And he has chosen General Petraeus to lead it.

  “Finally,” writes Felzenberg, “while historians will for decades debate the soundness of Bush’s actions…they will note that Bush’s defenders were correct in at least one respect: after September 11, 2001, for the rest of Bush’s presidency, no further attack upon Americans took place within the United States. That too will remain an important part of Bush’s legacy.”

  It most certainly will, especially now that it’s difficult if not impossible for academics to play the ratings game by simply echoing approved ideological judgments. Of course, as long as there are liberals and academics, the Schlesinger syndrome will be with us. But it will never again be as potent as it once seemed on that dreary December morning, when Alvin Felzenberg decided to take it on. 

• Insider NJ
  https://www.insidernj.com/buckley-literary-political-triumph-new-jerseys-al-felzenberg/
  Word count: 1068

  Buckley: A Literary and Political Triumph for New Jersey’s Al Felzenberg
  By Alan Steinberg | April 21, 2017, 10:57 am | in Edward Edwards

  The administration of former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean had the most impressive talent pool of any New Jersey gubernatorial administration during the past century. Former members of the Kean administration achieved remarkable success in a wide variety of fields of endeavor. Some were elected to higher political office. In the business arena, former Kean officials joined the highest ranks of New Jersey captains of industry. Others achieved major success in the fields of lobbying and law.

  Yet few Kean administration members, if any, have made the lasting impact on society of former Kean Assistant Secretary of State Alvin S. Felzenberg. His success has been in the field of academia, specifically in writing books that became the definitive works on subjects of major historical import. His biography, Governor Tom Kean: From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 9-11 Commission will stand for generations as the most authoritative work on New Jersey’s foremost governor of the 20th century. His book, The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Ratings Game is considered by leading American history and political science academics to be the gold standard of comparative presidential rating systems and assessments.

  Al Felzenberg’s latest biography, A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley, Jr., published this past month, is likely to be his most significant work, both in terms of literary critical acclaim and political impact. The book is more than a comprehensive biography of Bill Buckley; it is also a masterly analysis of the evolution and development of political conservatism since the end of the Second World War.

  It is not surprising that the book has received lavish praise from such esteemed sources as George Shultz, George Will, Cokie Roberts, and Chris Matthews. This book has all the hallmarks of the scholarship that distinguishes Al Felzenberg works: Comprehensive coverage of events and issues, trenchant analysis, and above all, the avoidance of hagiography.

  It is remarkable how diligent Felzenberg always is in pursuit of this objective of producing a credible historical biography rather than a slavish, sycophantic hagiography. This was even true of his Kean biography. Tom Kean and Al Felzenberg have been intimate friends for nearly five decades. Al also served as principle spokesman of the 9-11 Commission, chaired by Kean. Yet while his biography of Kean was appropriately laudatory, Felzenberg did not hesitate to criticize Kean administration actions when he deemed it appropriate. As he said at the time of publication of the Kean biography, “I’m a biographer, not a press secretary.”

  Similarly, in spite of his admiration for Buckley, Felzenberg critically describes in detail Buckley’s original opposition to federal efforts to desegregate Southern schools, end discrimination in public accommodations, and guarantee voting rights.

  Once Buckley changed his positions on these issues in the late 1960s, he became the intellectual lodestar for a generation of young conservatives, myself included. Buckley’s periodical, the National Review, became our secular political bible. The apogee of Buckley’s presidential influence transpired during the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, a continuation of their previous years of friendship, communication, and advice.

  With his new Buckley tome, Felzenberg has achieved a political triumph as well. He has solidified his status as perhaps the leading Republican intellectual in America. His previous literary accomplishments and his academic experiences as a professor at various leading national universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, have laid the groundwork for his attaining this status. This Felzenberg breakthrough comes at a time when the Republican Party is badly in need of such intellectual mentorship.

  The Trump administration in Washington and the Christie administration in Trenton are vast intellectual wastelands. This stands in dramatic contrast to the administrations in the 1980s of Tom Kean in New Jersey and Ronald Reagan in Washington, both of which were magnets for intellectuals.

  Tom Kean himself was an authentic intellectual who went on to become president of Drew University. Chris Christie, in an effort to establish a populist style for his then forthcoming 2016 presidential campaign, spoke derisively of “college professors” in a 2013 speech that established himself as an avatar of anti-intellectual philistinism. The message of the intellectual Kean was “the politics of inclusion.” The message of the philistine Christie was the politics of vindictiveness, culminating in Bridgegate.

  Ronald Reagan was not an intellectual, but he possessed enormous intellectual curiosity. He studied in depth American history and the economic works and treatises of intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. This contrasts starkly with Trump, who claims he has no time to read, but plenty of time to play golf.

  Reagan’s message of “a shining city on a hill” was a product of his intellectual curiosity, specifically his study of early American history and colonial Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop. Trump’s contrasting message of “American carnage” is directly attributable to his lack of intellectualism and reliance on his nihilist-in-chief, Steve Bannon.

  In fact, the four factions struggling for dominance in the Trump White House are all distinguished by a lack of any intellectual agenda. The Bannonist faction is distinguished by anti-intellectual nihilism and xenophobia. The “family members” faction is motivated by a superficial desire to make Trumpism acceptable to the tony societal sets of Manhattan and Washington. The Wall Street faction pursues a crony-capitalist agenda. The mainstream Republican faction is focused on establishing commonality between Trump administration proposals and the shopworn ideas of GOP Capitol Hill.

  In such an atmosphere of chaos, Trump is badly in need of outside political intellectual guidance, and Al Felzenberg would felicitously meet this exigency. It is too late for Chis Christie, who leaves office in nine months, to benefit from the creation of a dialogue between himself and Al Felzenberg. It is not too late for Donald Trump. The sooner a Trump-Felzenberg dialogue is established, the better both America and Trump will be.

  Alan J. Steinberg served as Regional Administrator of Region 2 EPA during the administration of former President George W. Bush and as Executive Director of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission under former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman.

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
  http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/book-reviews/2008/08/24/The-Leaders-We-Deserved-by-Alvin-Stephen-Felzenberg/stories/200808240250
  Word count: 538

  'The Leaders We Deserved' by Alvin Stephen Felzenberg
  Ike better than FDR? New scorecard shuffles presidential deck

  LEN BARCOUSKYPITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
  AUG 23, 2008 9:00 PM
  No other job, with the possible exception of the pope's, is as complex as that of the president of the United States.

  Alvin Stephen Felzenberg asked himself how, then, could historians rank and rate presidents on any single quality?

  He offers an alternative that examines how presidents performed based on three personal attributes and in three policy areas.

  Using a five-point scale, he then ranked each president based on all six measures.

  "THE LEADERS WE DESERVED"
  By Alvin Stephen Felzenberg
  Basic Books ($29.95)

  The resulting book provides a nuanced look at where the nation's chief executives stood out and where they stumbled.

  First, there's some bad news for Pennsylvanians. James Buchanan, the state's only native-born president, holds his familiar place at the bottom of presidential rankings.

  Despite having served in more state and federal offices than any other president, Buchanan appeared to have learned little from his lifetime of experience, Felzenberg writes.

  Lacking character, vision and competence, Buchanan also sought to reduce national liberty. He blocked emancipation measures and supported erosion of civil rights for free blacks in an unsuccessful attempt to placate Southern slaveholders.

  Buchanan is in the lowest spot in Felzenberg's list, with Andrew Johnson and Franklin Pierce, often called America's most handsome president, tied for the second-to-last position.

  Occupying the top of the list is Abraham Lincoln, an overachiever who earned top grades of five on all six of Felzenberg's scales. He is followed by George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt.

  One surprise is how well Ulysses S. Grant did under Felzenberg's analysis.

  The Civil War general turned politician ranks higher than Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, John Adams, John Quincy Adams and George H.W. Bush.

  Jefferson and Wilson suffered from Felzenberg's judgment of their mediocre character and half-hearted defenses of liberty.

  Grant got high marks from Felzenberg for his efforts to extend voting rights to newly freed slaves and for his efforts to integrate blacks into national life despite administrations fraught with scandal.

  Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor, Virginia-born and a slaveholder, died in office.

  His death in 1850 let Felzenberg speculate about what might have been had Taylor served out his term.

  Like Andrew Jackson before him, Taylor was a Southerner who was ready to send federal troops and hang traitors to protect the union.

  If a civil war had started in 1850, he might have held more states in the union, weakening the Confederacy and shortening the war.

  An academic who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University and a sometime bureaucrat, Felzenberg has written a book likely to start many more arguments than it settles.

  I, for one, can't see how he can rank Dwight Eisenhower above Franklin Roosevelt.

  I think I'll have to assign my own values to character and economic policy and see what happens.

• The Weekly Standard
  http://www.weeklystandard.com/garden-state-warrior/article/14502
  Word count: 1266

  THE MAGAZINE: From the March 19 Issue
  Garden State Warrior
  The politics of noblesse oblige, New Jersey style.
  12:00 AM, MAR 19, 2007 | By DUNCAN CURRIE

  Governor Tom Kean
  From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 9/11 Commission
  by Alvin S. Felzenberg
  Rutgers, 558 pp., $29.95

  Rarely does a politician who never held national office find his biography blurbed by such an eclectic mix of luminaries. Bill Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Jack Kemp, Ed Koch, William F. Buckley Jr., and George Stephanopoulos all seem to agree that former New Jersey governor Tom Kean has been a model public servant. Clinton calls him "a wonderful man and a genuine patriot." Kemp: "Ahead of his time in many ways." Koch: "An extraordinarily gifted and likable human being." Buckley: "An exemplar of Republican independence."

  That last point is a theme of Alvin Felzenberg's study, which documents how Kean became the most popular governor in recent New Jersey history and went on to chair the 9/11 Commission, thus burnishing his elder statesman credentials. In Felzenberg's narrative, Kean stood on principle, cut a centrist figure, showed compassion for the downtrodden, reached out to African Americans, and bucked the Republican base when he saw fit--all the while maintaining a chummy friendship with Ronald Reagan. Felzenberg has not quite written a hagiography, but he does paint Kean as almost too good to be true.

  The author makes no secret of his bias. He served as New Jersey's assistant secretary of state during the Kean years (1982-90) and later became chief spokesman for the 9/11 Commission. Plus, he "worked on most of Tom Kean's campaigns." As Felzenberg admits, he does not approach his material from a standpoint of "complete disinterest." He played a firsthand role in many of the episodes recounted in this book and, thus, adds the disclaimer.

  The book itself makes for a rich--though some times dense and slow-paced--piece of history. Felzenberg brims with charming anecdotes, such as where Kean picked up his famous accent and how he personally urged President Reagan to sign a formal apology for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Kean was born into New Jersey's political aristocracy: Among the many legislators in his family tree were his father Robert W. Kean, a congressman, and his grandfather Hamilton Fish Kean, a U.S. senator. Kean went from St. Mark's in Massachusetts--where, says Felzenberg, he acquired his New England Brahmin inflection--to Princeton; after graduation, he served in the 50th Armored Division of the New Jersey National Guard.

  But he was inevitably drawn into politics, and worked his first campaign in 1958, the year Robert Kean ran for the Senate seat vacated by H. Alexander Smith. Despite his wealth and 20-year tenure in the House, the elder Kean lost to the Democrat Harrison A. Williams--who went on to win reelection three times before being exposed in the Abscam scandal, and going to prison. Young Tom Kean considered his father's defeat "one of the world's great injustices."

  He went on to earn a master's degree in social studies from Columbia's Teacher's College before putting his academic career on hiatus to join the eleventh-hour 1964 presidential campaign of Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, designed to stop Barry Goldwater. (Scranton had earlier balked at running for president but, says Felzenberg, changed his mind after Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act.) Kean won election to the New Jersey assembly in 1967 in a season of racial strife, marked principally by the bloody Newark riots. It was in the assembly that he pioneered his centrist, consensus-driven approach, which would one day boost his appeal as governor. On the heels of the Newark meltdown he took the lead in promoting a hefty urban aid program, and in 1972 he ascended to speaker at age 36, the youngest in New Jersey history.

  But the unusual circumstances of his ascension--it hinged on a deal Kean made with a few renegade Democrats--left many Democrats fuming. To succeed as speaker, writes Felzenberg, Kean once again applied his third-way style, "but with a different twist. This time . . . he would cut a path not between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans but between competing factions of Democrats."

  His "crowning achievement as speaker," writes Felzenberg, was decidedly liberal: "steering to passage the Coastal Area Facility Review Act, to prevent industries considered most likely to increase pollution from locating along the state's coastline." Environmentalism would remain a Kean passion throughout his career, which suffered its first major setback in 1977, when he ran for governor and lost the Republican nomination to the state senate minority leader. Four years later Kean won--but not on Election Night. His margin of victory over Democratic congressman Jim Florio was so close (less than 2,000 votes) that Florio demanded a recount, and the whole process dragged on for several weeks. The recount affirmed Kean's narrow triumph over a Democrat who had relentlessly tied Kean to Ronald Reagan and cast him as too conservative for New Jersey.

  In fact, despite splitting with the president on social issues such as school prayer and abortion--and despite having backed Gerald Ford in the 1976 GOP primary--Kean became warm friends with Reagan, whose large stable of Democratic supporters helped him carry New Jersey twice. "Ronald Reagan genuinely liked Tom Kean," Ken Duberstein, Reagan's last chief of staff, told Felzenberg. "He would love going to New Jersey just so he could discuss policy with Tom Kean."

  Of course, compared with Reagan, Kean was no conservative. But in New Jersey, writes Felzenberg, "Kean was the most conservative governor the state had seen since the 1950s." Conservatives inside and outside the Reagan White House lauded his efforts on education and welfare reform, and though Kean criticized Reagan over various proposed budget cuts, he was a stalwart supporter of the administration's foreign policy in such hot spots as Nicaragua (aid to the contras) and Libya (the 1986 bombing raid). Closer to home, Kean leaned rightward on taxes, regulation, and the death penalty.

  His approval rating soared to 80 percent by November 1985, when he won reelection with 68 percent of the vote, including a remarkable 62 percent of the black vote. In early 1986 Newsweek named him one of the five best governors in America, along with Bill Clinton of Arkansas. In 1988 Kean delivered the keynote address to George H.W. Bush's "kinder, gentler" GOP convention in New Orleans, with Newt Gingrich calling Kean a "brilliant, creative governor who has applied conservative values and created a compassionate, fundamentally Republican record."

  In the 1990s Kean served as president of Drew University, and Bill Clinton tapped him for a pair of bipartisan commissions: one on entitlement and tax reform in 1994, the other on race relations in 1997. But his true return to national--and now international--prominence came after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Kean faced a daunting task: establishing what caused the intelligence breakdown before 9/11, and proposing ways to avert future terrorism. Dismissing him as "a former governor little schooled in defense and foreign affairs," the Wall Street Journal complained that Kean was "apparently oblivious to the political hardball being played around him." The Bush White House found itself playing defense over testimony, document requests, and the commission's deadline.

  For readers outside of New Jersey, Felzenberg's chapter on the 9/11 Commission may seem considerably more relevant than the previous 400 pages. Still, those pages offer unprecedented access to one of the most popular Republicans of his time--an unusually successful governor whose story deserves telling.

  Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

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