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Reviewed by Michael McDonald
Outside Looking In:
Adventures of an Observer
by Garry Wills
Do the words “The Wills Watch” mean anything
to you? If you’re a conservative of a certain
age whose political views were shaped by reading
William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review in the 1970s, I’m sure they will. The “Wills” in
question is Garry Wills, the prolific journalist,
critic, and historian who, apart from scientific
matters, seems to specialize in just about everything
under the sun—while devoting particular
attention to American politics and history, Roman
Catholicism, and Classical antiquity.
Wills began his writing career at National
Review in 1957, thanks to Buckley. “But,” as
Wills writes in his new memoir, Outside Looking
In, “the convulsions of the 1960s and their
aftermath tore many people apart, and they
did that with us.”1 That is to say, in a twelve year
period Wills grew increasingly estranged
from the kind of conservatism espoused in
the pages of National Review and moved from
right to left on the contentious issues then
roiling American society: principally civil
rights and the Vietnam War. By the end of the
1960s, estrangement had led to irreconcilable
differences; Wills and Buckley parted ways.
Sadly, the separation was not amicable. Enter
“The Wills Watch,” a recurring feature of
the magazine, which was usually written by
the late Joseph Sobran. (Ironically, Sobran
would himself be forced out of National Review many years later, in the wake of columns
of his that Buckley deemed to be “contextually anti-Semitic.”) “The Wills Watch” existed
to chronicle Wills’s post–National Review activities
in service to American liberalism.
Wills had long since departed from National
Review when I (to indulge in a bit of memoir writing
of my own) began subscribing in the
malaise- and stagflation-ridden Age of Carter.
It was, however, through “The Wills Watch”
that I not only became aware of Wills’s previous
association with the magazine, but also became
curious about the reasons for his apostasy. The
first book by Wills that I read was Confessions of
a Conservative, when it came out in 1979. I disagreed
with much of the political philosophy
that it espoused, but was captivated by its first
third, in which Wills vividly recounted what it
was like to work at National Review with Buckley,
Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, William
Rusher, and other important figures from the
magazine’s early years.
From Confessions of a Conservative, I went
on to several of Wills’s earlier books: Chesterton (1961), Nixon Agonistes (1970), Bare Ruined
Choirs (1972) and Inventing America (1978). My
reaction, in each instance, was quite similar:
great admiration for individual passages of bravura
writing that were overshadowed by serious
reservations as to the larger political, historical,
or religious arguments being made, especially
on such matters as the meaning of “true conservatism.”
And yet when all was said and done,
there could be no doubt: a habit had taken hold.
I had become a “Wills watcher” for life.
In the pages of National Review, “Wills
watching” was generally conducted with a light touch: a regretful skewering of a formidably gifted former colleague who had inexplicably
changed sides. Indeed, properly viewed, these
barbed rebukes were nothing if not backhanded
tributes to the intellectual contributions that
Wills had made to the conservative movement
before taking leave of his senses to embrace radical
chic. Yet, at times, it morphed into Wills
bashing. For example, one issue of the magazine
dedicated an entire cover to a doctored
photo, in which Wills’s head was superimposed
upon a shotgun- and spear-wielding image of
Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton.
It behooves me, then, to be clear about what
I mean by “Wills watching”—especially because
Wills himself is a self-described “wordaholic.”
Thus, for example, in his new book,
Wills castigates Buckley for having “poisoned
the general currency” of the word “oxymoron.”
Buckley, per Wills, thought it was a fancier
word for “contradiction” and, as a result,
legions of conservatives are now wont to say,
as Buckley first did, that an “intelligent liberal
is an oxymoron.” But Wills observes that the
Greek word means something quite different:
something that is surprisingly true, a paradox,
a “shrewd dumbness.” Point taken: definitional
precision matters.
There are two aspects to being a Wills watcher:
the first is to be an avid Wills reader, no mean
feat given the man’s Stakhanovite output. Wills
regularly writes and reviews for many newspapers
and magazines, foremost among them
The New York Times and The New York Review
of Books. In addition, he wrote, by my count,
no fewer than forty-two books between 1960
and 2010. The second and less passive aspect of
Wills watching consists of an alertness to the
various ways—some less subtle than others—
in which Wills himself takes his own peculiar
liberties with words, as he chronicles his activities,
his political allegiances, and, of course, the
underlying “conservative” philosophy exemplified
by those activities and allegiances.
Outside Looking In seems principally intended
to provide an overview of the main political
incidents in Wills’s life, as well as a distillation of
many of the people and issues upon whom and
which he has trained his gimlet eye throughout
his career. There is an “executive summary” or
“greatest hits” feel to the book. Veteran Wills
watchers will recognize many of the anecdotes
he recounts—anecdotes that he previously described
with greater feeling in earlier books and
essays. But if you’re new to Wills watching,
Outside Looking In is a good place to begin. All
the more so since the book also offers numerous
opportunities to move from the passive
to the active part of Wills watching—which is
where the real pleasure is to be had.
The opening chapter of Outside Looking In sets
the tone for the whole. Titled “Reading Greek
in Jail,” it juxtaposes Wills the scholar with
Wills the activist. The time is 1968. The place
is the Democratic convention in Chicago—“a
swirl of action,” of protesting, tear gas, and arrests.
Wills is hesitant to take sides just then.
But four years later, in 1972, “events catch up”
with him, and he’s involved in protests that lead
to his arrest. Wills reads the Greek New Testament
while incarcerated and tells his surprised
cellmates that “learning Greek is the most economical
intellectual investment one can make”:
it opens the door to the entire Western philosophical
tradition. In short order he describes
helping others (including Karl Hess, a former
Goldwater speechwriter turned reclusive anarchist,
and the radical journalist I. F. Stone) in
their attempts to master its complexities.
In the following chapter, “They’ve Killed Dr.
King,” Wills relives what it was like to report
on the aftermath of the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr., and his impressions of civil
rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Andrew
Young. In the next, he unexpectedly finds himself
in a strip club in Dallas, as a reporter for
Esquire magazine, trying to uncover what may
have motivated Jack Ruby to murder Lee Harvey
Oswald.
The chapters move swiftly. We follow Wills
interviewing both the inventor of Mace and
Pentagon brass on how the National Guard
intended to control inner-city rioting. A subsequent
chapter recounts his years in Baltimore,
when he served on an educational board with
Thomas D’Alesandro III, the city’s mayor and
Nancy Pelosi’s brother, and got to know local
luminaries such as the “underground” filmmaker
John Waters. He delves into his love of movies and opera and the celebrities in both
worlds whom he came to befriend (such as Paul
Schrader and Beverly Sills). He describes his impressions
of various presidents: Nixon “was not
the cartoon figure of liberal myth” but rather
“an intellectually serious and prepared candidate”;
George H. W. Bush, however, seemed
“devoid of personal reading memories.” Wills
seems most impressed with Jimmy Carter, in
large part because of Why Not the Best?, a campaign
book that Carter had written that “had a
precision that comes from clear thinking.”
He makes some fairly prosaic observations
along the way: for example, “Books can open
doors,” and “Discussions with conspiracy theorists
[here in reference to Oliver Stone] are a
waste of time.” But a few aren’t so bland. One
of my favorites concerns how ex-politicians
make for bad academics. Why? Because they
don’t know what to do when their stock of anecdotes
runs out: “Politicians live for contact
with people. They lose the gift for contemplation,
or research, or simple reading. Being alone
with a book is a way to die for many of them.”
Wills devotes the four final chapters of the
book to more detailed renderings of the four
figures in his life who seem to have been most
important to him: his father, Jack; his great
friend Studs Terkel; Bill Buckley; and his wife
Natalie. Wills did not have a particularly close
relationship with his father, who is described
as a boxer, gambler, failed businessman, adulterer,
and racist who never read a book in his
life. Yet Jack had “an infectious sense of fun.”
For that reason, while Wills the younger believes
that though there isn’t much of his father
in him, he wouldn’t want to remove what
little there is. Wills’s admiration for Terkel
stems from Terkel’s sympathy for the common
man. Wills describes “the Terkel talent for instant
connection with people,” and says that
he would have been ideally suited to conduct
peace talks in the Middle East.
Buckley, in Wills’s charming portrait, is “one
of Wodehouse’s blithe young men—Psmith,
say, or Piccadilly Jim—who act forever on
impulse.” A born risk-taker, he was “hour by
hour, day by day . . . just an exciting person to
be around.” Wills extols Buckley’s generosity
to family and friends and, along the way, punctures
the myths that grew up about him, which
depicted him as a social, intellectual, and/or ideological
snob. And he wonderfully reveals a secret
side of Buckley, “his least plausible identity,
that of a working stiff”: in fact, Buckley never
had nearly as much money as was commonly
supposed, and he had to work hard and tirelessly
to adopt his chosen lifestyle. Though it
took over three decades, Wills and Buckley reconciled
and resumed their friendship in 2005,
thanks to Buckley’s sister Priscilla.
Most of the good things that happened in
Wills’s life resulted from books. In the memoir’s
last chapter, Wills recounts how books—
and in part the ruse of a lost book—led him to
meet his wife, Natalie, and then to their subsequent
intellectual partnership in fifty years of
married life.
The best biographers are able to move beyond
the masks their subjects present to find what
Leon Edel has called the “figure under the carpet”
or “life myth,” the “inner myth we all create
in order to live.” A good biographer considers
not simply the facts of a life but also how his
subject wanted to be perceived. The concluding
chapters of Outside Looking In demonstrate
Wills’s surefooted talent as a biographer.
Unfortunately, he is less successful as an autobiographer
or memoir writer. Perhaps this is because—
as La Rochefoucauld says—it’s easy to
see through other people, but we have a harder
time seeing through ourselves. Coming to grips
with his own “life myth” seems beyond him.
Wills’s title is revealing: Wills wants to be perceived
as an “outsider” and a mere “observer.”
Why does Wills think of himself as an outsider?
First, because of his family: “Neither of my parents
went to college or read books”; they also
felt that his reading was “abnormal.” He adds
that his penchant for reading further cements his
position as an outsider: “Reading has made me
not so much a participant in life around me as
an observer. I have stood to the side of events.”
Finally, Wills portrays himself as an outsider because
he thinks that he is not easily categorized.
He maintains that he stands between the liberal
and conservative poles, as shown by his presence
on two very different enemies lists: Nixon’s
and Alger Hiss’s. Furthermore, whereas liberals are secularists, he is a Catholic. Similarly, he is
viewed as a journalist in the academy and as an
academic by journalists.
But isn’t an “outsider”—to be definitionally
precise again—a person who is isolated from
and does not fit into conventional society?
Such a definition more than applies to a writer
and intellectual such as George Orwell, but not
Garry Wills, who is the very model of an insider,
and specifically an honored member of the
liberal establishment. Consider the evidence.
Even during his National Review years he sailed
not only with Buckley, but also, as he takes care
to point out, with John Kenneth Galbraith and
Walter Cronkite. Buckley also helped Wills in
the search for a scholarship which took him to
Yale, where he studied under the eminent classical
scholar Bernard Knox.
The evidence of his insider status following
his break with Buckley is still more impressive.
Important civil rights leaders, such as Jesse Jackson,
asked him to ghostwrite their memoirs. He
offers a celebrity list of protesters with whom he
has marched: Gloria Steinem, Marlo Thomas,
Bella Abzug, John Conyers, Judy Collins,
Richard Avedon, and the Berrigan brothers, to
name but a few. He casually mentions writing
a speech on Jefferson for Sargent Shriver to deliver
in France. He has received many honorary
degrees. He writes for the leading liberal establishment
journals. A party celebrating the publication
of one of his books was held at Sardi’s in
New York. He received a National Humanities
Medal from President Clinton.
In the 1970s, along with Lillian Hellman,
Hannah Arendt, and Robert Silvers, Wills was
invited to attend a private conference exploring
the possibility of impeaching Nixon. In 2009,
President Obama invited him and a few other
select historians to dinner at the White House,
at which Wills advised him to pull out of Afghanistan.
Like Byron’s Childe Harold, Wills
would have us believe that he “stood among
them, but not of them; in a shroud of thoughts
which were not their thoughts.” This is, frankly,
incredible. Wills stood among “them”—the
“them” being the legion of liberal activists,
politicians, intellectuals, and academics he has
associated himself with since leaving National
Review—precisely because the shroud of their
thoughts, on most divisive political issues, so
neatly enfolds his own.
As Wills himself notes, he was associated with
the New Journalism, a style of writing marked
by advocacy and activism. Esquire claimed
credit for inventing the style, in which journalists
apply the subjective techniques of fiction to
reporting on current events. As befits a New
Journalist, Wills was not an unblinking observer
who merely allowed stories to tell themselves.
Instead, like his hero Terkel (whose oral
histories shape their narrative to conform to
Marxist ideology), Wills is a man of the political
left. He can hardly be compared to Christopher
Isherwood, who, in Goodbye to Berlin, purported
to be “a camera with its shutter open, quite
passive, not thinking.” The shutter of Wills’s
reportorial camera is always open, but is never
passive, particularly when it comes to devising
ways to advance political liberalism.
Wills’s embrace of liberalism is further revealed
in his enthusiasms; “The country is
full of people who stood a little taller in their
youth because of Jesse Jackson [and his chant
‘I am—somebody!’].” One doubts that Jackson
has read many books, but Wills’s disdain for
those who read little is nowhere evident here.
Wills also praises Terkel for his ability to “size
up phonies or ideologues, the greedy and selfish
politicians.” Perhaps Terkel had such a talent,
though he was only too happy to provide
a blurb for the memoirs of the former Weatherman
William “I don’t regret setting bombs”
Ayers. (“As sensitive and gifted a chronicler,”
Terkel piously proclaimed, “as he is a teacher.”)
In any case, Wills doesn’t possess it. That is evident
from his admiration for Hillary Clinton:
“I came to know her fairly well and to like her a
lot. She has a wonderful sense of humor. . . . She
is a sincere practitioner of religion. And she was
also humble.” Someone good at sizing up phonies
might note that Hillary could speak self-righteously
of “the politics of meaning,” while
also making a quick $100,000 in cattle futures.
She also didn’t hesitate to back Dick Morris’s
(sleazily unprincipled, if ultimately successful)
triangulation strategy, with the goal of securing
a second term for her husband. But Wills
is oblivious to the questions justifiably raised about Hillary’s character. She tells him one day
that her favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov (“it opened ranges of spirituality I never
dreamed of”), and Wills all but swoons.
Another theme that Wills stresses in the
book concerns his bona fides as “an average
guy.” Thus he was a fan of Johnny Unitas and
the Baltimore Colts when he lived in Baltimore
in the 1960s and 1970s. He boasts that he leads
a traditionalist life, never having tried marijuana
or even tobacco. “I have mainly been a conventional
person, a churchgoer . . . saying the
rosary every day.” “I have also been incurably
square, middle-class, never bohemian. I remain
old-fashioned.” In a concession to the reigning
tell-it-all climate prevailing in book publishing,
Wills further volunteers that his wife is “the
only person with whom I have ever had sex.”
I was surprised to read Wills’s avowal of being
a churchgoer who’d believe in the Catholic
Church even if God didn’t exist. In this respect
he reminds me of a character from Brian
Moore’s 1972 novel Catholics, the abbot of an
Irish monastery who stalwartly defends the passionate
traditionalism of his monks and holds
the mass in Latin. The abbot vigorously prefers
his monks to the post–Vatican II Church that,
in his view, has capitulated to secularism—even
though he himself doesn’t believe in God.
Wills has translated the Latin satirist Martial
and is surely familiar with this famous line of
his: “lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba” (“my
writing may be naughty, but my life is pure”).
Wills seems to be saying something similar:
“My writing may be liberal, but my life is traditional,”
implying that in some sense he’s really
a conservative. Unfortunately, what one thinks
matters in addition to how one lives: Lenin
lived a bourgeois life as an exile in Paris and
Zurich, but remained ever the radical at heart.
As we have seen, Wills wants to be understood
as a conservative. Indeed, he writes,
“One of the reasons I am a conservative is that I
do not believe that ‘cannot’ should be removed
from the dictionary. Recognition of limits is
important to human life, and especially to human
politics.” But he calls the importance of
that recognition into question, immediately
adding: “On the other hand, a defiance of human
limits is an exhilarating prospect.” For
Wills, the 1960s were a “fizzy time of youth and
change.” Others, however, who really are conservative,
would say that the country suffered
a collective nervous breakdown. Wills not only
found the 1960s exhilarating—it was also when
he turned decisively to the left.
Pace his protestations, Wills is a liberal—albeit
a liberal who is highly intelligent and at
least something of a traditionalist when partisan
politics aren’t at stake. I was reminded of
this recently when he unleashed a witheringly
sarcastic and completely justified attack, in the
New York Review of Books, on two academics,
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly (the
chairman of the Harvard philosophy department)
for their new book, All Things Shining:
Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in
a Secular Age. To Wills’s dismay, the authors,
far from defending the Western intellectual
tradition, end up celebrating superficiality and
attacking Western culture (particularly as embodied
by Wills’s personal hero Augustine of
Hippo) for its invention of “inwardness,” its
search for deeper meanings in life. It was yet
another bravura performance on his part.
Gary Wills is a living, breathing oxymoron
in the Willsian sense of the word: a paradox
who displays “a shrewd dumbness” in his writing.
That is what makes Wills watching such
an endlessly fascinating hobby. Read this book
and you’re likely to take it up, too.
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