Death by irrelevance.

• Author: Coyne, John R., Jr.
• Position: 'Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party' - Book review

Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 504 pp., $29.95.

First, a few of the players: On one side of the great divide within the Republican Party of the 1960s and 1970s, as author Geoffrey Kabaservice tells it, were the "moderates," many of them cut from the same expensive cloth, WASPishly good-looking and well-mannered. There was William Scranton, "slim and handsome, and projecting a Kennedyesque image of charm, cool, urbanity, and elegance." Add men such as Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney. And there was John Lindsay, "one of the best-looking politicians ever to mount the hustings: six feet three inches tall, with chiseled features, blue eyes, and wavy blond hair." Leave aside one critic's observation that there seemed to be nothing at all behind those China-blue eyes. These were the good guys.

On the other side were the conservatives, among them Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr. (although the author does frequently attempt to enlist Buckley on the good-guy side), William Rusher, Clif White and George Gilder, who left the good guys for the bad. And, of course, there's Richard Nixon, whose occasional forays into liberal territory, says Kabaservice (in a chapter called "Darkness Drops"), "reflected pragmatism, opportunism, or even cynicism." These were the bad guys.

The good guys lost; the bad guys won. That's the story Kabaservice sets out to tell in Rule and Ruin. He tells it in strong and engaging prose, often with a literary flair. And it's that flair, combined with an exceptional mastery of detail and an unlikely exuberance for one recounting a defeat he laments, that saves the book from becoming a great lost-cause slog. Indeed, in describing the largely ineffectual politics of his moderate heroes over nearly half a century, he compares their progress to that of Napoleon's armies in the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812.

In the 1960s, as Kabaservice's intense ideological and intraparty battles were being fought out, many of us who were in no way political or ideological found ourselves forced to take sides. And, like most of the men with whom I had served in the Marine Corps, I joined the bad guys.

From Alaska, where I'd lived for five years after discharge and earned degrees at the University of Alaska, to California, where I did graduate work and supported my small family, my political awareness grew. As the day-to-day demonstrations, disruptions, and frequent campus violence at Berkeley and other campuses increased, I decided to describe what was happening there and sent a series of articles to National Review, the only thoughtful publication in the country likely to be interested in articles on campus unrest written by a bad guy.

The articles were accepted. Bill Buckley came to San Francisco and hired me as an editor and writer at National Review. While there, I wrote a book called The Kumquat Statement, for which Buckley provided a flattering introduction. Vice President Spiro Agnew read the book, asked me to visit him in Washington and offered me a job. I was his chief speechwriter when he resigned, then joined the Nixon writing staff and stayed until he resigned. Then I repeated the process with Gerald Ford. It was, as they say, a hell of a ride, through some of the stormiest periods in recent American history.

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