A TIME FOR CHOOSING: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism.

• Author: Foer, Franklin
• Position: Review

A TIME FOR CHOOSING: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism by Jonathan Schoenwald Oxford University Press, $35.00

IN THE EARLY SIXTIES, THIS country's leading rightist was a candy manufacturer from Cambridge, Mass., named Robert Welch. He followed his wildly successful promotion of the Sugar Daddy with his wildly successful promotion of the John Birch Society. Both a crank and salesman of the highest order, Welch managed to simultaneously place the popular ex-president Dwight Eisenhower at the center of a communist conspiracy and to build an army of suburban supporters. His movement grew large enough to warrant the cover of Time and a denunciation from President Kennedy.

Welch's heyday, however, was fleeting. By the `70s he'd been shoved to the fringe of the political scene, causing him to grow even crankier. In 1979, he published a pamphlet called, "False Leadership: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the New World Order." The National Review editor, he surmised, craved "a place in the Establishment which he professes to oppose, in the expectation of sharing influence with such as [sic] Henry Kissinger and the House of Rockefeller in a New World Order."

There's a lesson to be gleaned. While liberals consider Buckley to be a wing-nut, he's far from the real deal. Yet the conservative confectioner wasn't entirely nutty. He had some rational reasons for despising Buckley. More than anyone, Buckley had discredited the John Birch Society. In the pages of National Review, Buckley denounced Welch for "distorting reality." And in conservative circles, he demanded that the movement marginalize the Birchers.

In a nutshell, the Buckley-Welch feud is the story of conservatism--and the story told in Jonathan Schoenwald's admirable narrative. According to Schoenwald's thesis, American conservatism only succeeded after it banished the conspiratorial extremists like Welch from its ranks. This wasn't such a painless task. For Buckley, disavowing the Birchites meant disavowing thousands of the subscribers to his own magazine. (A month after National Review's first anti-Welch editorial appeared, William Rusher, the magazine's publisher, counted twenty donors who had revoked donations to NR and dozens of canceled subscriptions.) For conservative politicians, dissing the extremists was even more unpleasant. It potentially meant alienating rank-and-file voters and activists with a ferocious appetite for campaign drudgery.

But it was a necessary task. Without...