Heads Should Roll at National Review -- Jack Cashill

Heads Should Roll at National Review -- Jack Cashill

Jack Cashill writes about NR's lust for respectability, as demonstrated by the pains they took to distance themselves from his investigative work on TWA Flight 800 and Bill Ayers' role in the authorship of Dreams from My Father, and most recently demonstrated in their knee-jerk response to the Covington Catholic video:

"In truth, National Review editors have been dancing to the left's tune since its founding in 1955. To justify its condemnation of the John Birch Society in the early 1960s, one of its editors gave away the game, writing, 'We can't afford to jeopardize the grudging status we've earned in the Liberal community.'

"For all of founder William Buckley's virtues, he overly worried about the 'status' the liberal community begrudged him. As Lowry once noted, 'Mr. Buckley's first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks.'

"Over dinner with Lowry [in 2001] and just one other person, I talked about the documentary I was working on at the time. The subject was TWA Flight 800. He gave me the look I would come to recognize from my conservative betters. It was the "kook" look. He showed zero interest in the subject.

"In September 2008, I introduced the theory, for which the evidence was overwhelming, that Bill Ayers had a major role in the writing of Obama's memoir 'Dreams from My Father.'

"At 'The Corner,' on National Review Online, Andy McCarthy called my analysis 'thorough, thoughtful, and alarming--particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama's memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers' memoir....'

"...I am told that McCarthy caught a lot of heat internally for jeopardizing National Review's 'grudging status' among liberals. What I know for sure is that the link from Coates' article to McCarthy's goes nowhere.

"I suspect McCarthy's review was scrubbed almost as quickly as Frankovich's. I was unaware of it until I read Remnick's attack on it two years later."