The Northern Agrarian

Tonight I read two fantastic pieces on TakiMag that are worth sharing.

First was a piece recently posted by Jeffrey Hart, who is somehow still affiliated with National Review, despite his having long since left the increasingly irrelevant magazine behind to publish for Taki and TAC. He discusses Solzhenitsyn’s works, and the entire piece is worth reading (although in my estimation he is wrong about Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address, an address I consider to be brilliant and brave). What struck me was his story about the Soviet Gulag visit by Vice President Henry Wallace and his encounter with a Russian doctor imprisoned there named Elinor Lipper. Here’s the story:

“During the war, a rumor swept Elinor’s camp that the president of the United States was coming. Everything was scrubbed, the watch towers were even taken down. Kolyma now became a vast Potemkin village. But it wasn’t the President who came. It was the vice president Henry A. Wallace. The inmates were gathered together to greet him. Wallace smiled and waved. He was told that this was a camp for incorrigible prisoners who were mentally ill.

“Suddenly, a woman ran from the ranks and threw herself at Wallace’s feet. She screamed in Russian how the prisoners were being treated, how they were dying, how they were innocent, as innocent as the snow at his feet. ‘Please,’ she sobbed, ‘please help us.’

“She was taken away, of course, while Wallace’s translator told him that she was mentally ill and he could not understand what she was saying… I subsequently discovered that Wallace’s translator that day had been Owen Lattimore…

“When we returned to New York in 1952 I arranged for Elinor, at her request, to meet Henry Wallace. I got his number through directory assistance, and he answered the phone himself. I was amazed that it was so easy to et hold of a former vice president of the United States. I told him about Elinor and said she wanted to meet with him. He invited us to his farm in South Salem, New York. She told him what had actually happened that day in Siberia. As she spoke his face paled. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know – please believe me – I didn’t know’.”

This story is shocking enough without the appearance of the despicable Lattimore, who was a target of the estimable and admirable Senator Joe McCarthy, but that led me to read a linked to piece by W. Wesley McDonald, a review of M. Stanton Evans’s book “Blacklisted by History.” I just started reading it myself, but the focus of McDonald’s piece is on the scathing review the book received in National Review, a magazine who’s founder penned a book himself attacking McCarthy’s enemies. McDonald writes:

For Evans, however, to find himself lambasted for his views in the pages of NR is a wholly different matter. “Having been around the block a time or two,” as the astonished Evans confessed in a letter to the editor (Dec. 31) in response to Radosh, “I guess nothing should surprise me, but I have to admit I was profoundly shocked by Ronald Radosh’s onslaught against my work—and honor—in what professed to be a review of my new book about Senator McCarthy.” If Radosh’s purpose was to do maximum damage to Evans’s reputation, he couldn’t have been given a better opportunity, given the publication’s history and standing as a premier journal of conservative opinion. In 1954 NR’s founding editor, William F. Buckley, co-authored with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, the first book that questioned the motives of McCarthy’s critics. Many NR contributors in the 1950s and 1960s vigorously took up McCarthy’s cause. Evans could not afford to ignore an assault emanating from a onetime implacably anti-Communist publication. “Had this Radosh invective been printed in The New Republic or the Washington Post—where it would have been more fitting—I probably wouldn’t have bothered to reply.” Evans explains, “As it appeared instead in the once-beloved pages of National Review, with which I have been connected since its inception, I can hardly let these poisonous charges against my writing, and my character, go unanswered.”

Evans is hardly an unknown figure on the Right. In addition to being a columnist, an author of many popular books, and a sought after lecturer, he has been for over 20 years the director of the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. Given his reputation as one of the most respected and prominent spokesmen for conservative principles, he deserved the courtesy of a fair review in what is reputedly a conservative publication. The way his book was treated in its pages strongly suggests what the fortnightly editors may really think about Evans.

In one swoop National Review attacked a man who it once bravely defended (McCarthy) and published a disgraceful review attacking a man who is still widely respected across the conservative spectrum (Evans). I was unaware at the time, but it only confirms what many already know; National Review, the magazine that was a bastion of right-wing intellectualism, is dead. In its place is the dull Lowry, the brain-dead Lopez, and the self-promoting, profoundly unfunny Goldberg.