Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From.

• Author: Buckley, Christopher

In college, I was a member of a secret society. I worked at the White House for Vice President George Bush, who, in addition to being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, is also a member of that same secret society. My father, another member of the secret society, founded National Review magazine. The lawyer who drew up the documents incorporating NR was William Casey, who would go on to become director of the CIA under Ronald Reagan. Before he became a magazine editor, my father worked for the CIA. His immediate boss was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to Watergate fame, along with his colleague, G. Gordon Liddy. I later hired Liddy to write a column on security for the magazine that I edit. The magazine is owned by Steve Forbes, past and future presidential candidate. Forbes Inc.'s chairman is Caspar Weinberger, who worked for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. At the White House, I worked closely with Donald P. Gregg, Bush's national security adviser. Don had had a very distinguished career at the CIA for over 30 years. In Vietnam, his comrade-in-arms was Felix Rodriguez, the CIA officer who helped track down Che Guevara in Bolivia. You remember Felix. Iran-Contra? The Senate and The Washington Post, egged on by the Christic Institute and assorted people with the last name of Cockburn, tried very hard to nail Don for, among other things, helping to orchestrate the famous 1980 October Surprise--traveling in secret to Paris with George Bush to persuade the Iranians not to release the American hostages until after Reagan had been elected. Call up Christopher Hitchens at The Nation; he'll fill you in on all the details, though he's rather busy these days establishing Mother Teresa's villainy. Anyway, Don survived and became ambassador to South Korea, where previously he had been CIA station chief. I married his daughter. She worked for the CIA, too. She--well, I don't have time to get into all that. I have to review this book for you called Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From. It's a fine, important, even invaluable book. The author is Daniel Pipes. Come to think of it, I knew his father, Richard Pipes, the eminent Russian scholar. We sort of worked together at the White House. He was Reagan's top Soviet adviser. I also worked at the White House with C. Boyden Gray. Mention the name of his father, Gordon Gray, to any serious UFOlogist and they will coo and stroke their chins and tell you that Gordon Gray was a member of the shadowy, ultra-secret group called Majestic-12 that ran the first flying-saucer cover up. Are you getting the picture? Don't you think I know the fix is in? Quick, close those...