Those of us who have helped to found conservative campus journals envy The American Spectator. Born in 1967 into modest circumstances—as upstart samizdat published out of a farmhouse by four Indiana University students—it has gone on to achieve nationwide distribution, a distinguished list of subscribers, and a 500-page anniversary collection of its work from a major publisher (Harper & Row). The success is well-deserved—although it has long since graduated from college, the Spectator has for 20 years remained one of the liveliest journals around.

In the introduction to this book, editor R. Emmett Tyrrell says that his magazine’s purpose is to defend American Orthodoxy. But the Spectator is not primarily a defensive player; it shines most when on offense. And it can be very offensive to those of progressive sensibilities. Harper & Row is living dangerously in reprinting essays like Taki’s “Ugly Women”:

Take Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine. That harshness, those granite glares, the shrillness of their rhetoric—it makes one want to shriek at their ugliness.

The Spectator‘s charm lies in its audacity. As Joseph Sobran has pointed out, people celebrated for their “irreverence”—Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, cast members on Norman Lear sitcoms—actually adhere to the code of liberal orthodoxy, mocking things for which the prescribed liberal attitude is mockery while respectfully laying off the icons of the left. The pleasure in picking up an American Spectator is the knowledge that, for the duration of the issue, such rules go out the window. No New Ager is safe.

This volume contains a number of amusing profiles: P.J. O’Rourke on Lee Iacocca (“a hero for our time—a conceited big-mouth, glad-handing huckster who talked the government into loaning his company piles of money”), Phillip Terzian on Washington Post gossipmonger Sally Quinn (evidence that “inside every metropolitan newspaper is a National Enquirer champing at the bit”), Lewis Lapham on Jimmy Carter and his 5,000-page White House diary (“He was writing about himself, and the subject so captivated him, so consumed him with the fires of love, that he abandoned himself to it in the way that lesser men abandon themselves to their enthusiasms for stamps or butterflies or Civil War cannon”). The funniest piece of the lot, though, is J.D. Lofton’s satirical review of Brezhnev’s authorized biography, a work “full of never-before-told tales of Brezhnev’s personal courage [in World War II] which, quite frankly, makes one wonder why the rest of the Red Army was really necessary.”

For all its rambunctiousness, the magazine does more than its share of the heavy work. In Orthodoxy, Peter Rodman demolishes the lies of Sideshow, William Shawcross’ sleazy attempt to shift the blame for the Cambodian genocide from the Khmer Rouge to the United States. Nicholas Rothwell exposes Soviet/Vietnamese chemical warfare in Laos, in an early story subsequently picked up, and doggedly pursued, by the Wall Street Journal. Arnold Beichman and Kenneth Lynn thwart the efforts of such literary fellow travelers as Irving Howe and Malcolm Cowley. Vladimir Bukovsky and Malcolm Muggeridge offer their diagnoses of the West’s deteriorating condition.

There are over 70 articles here, most of them examples of good writing. Two of them, however, are interesting precisely because they are not particularly well-done: the interviews with William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol. Conducted during the Spectator‘s campus days, they are clearly the work of amateurs—transcribed (apparently) verbatim, filled with awkward sentence constructions and repetition. They are the sort of thing found today in several dozen conservative campus papers. And for that reason they are, to the staffers of those papers, inspirational as reminders that everyone has to start somewhere.

 

[Orthodoxy: The American Spectator Anniversary Anthology, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. (New York: Harper & Row) $24.95]