Word: buckley
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MARCO POLO, IF YOU CAN by William F. Buckley Jr. Doubleday; 233 pages...
Veterans of Cold War I who are rushing to re-enlist for Cold War II should get a lift from this jaunty medley of 1950s history and spy fiction. Through diplomatic freeze and thaw, William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review, has always kept his ideological thermostat set at a conservative 32° F. In his fourth novel-entertainment, he again slips into the adventurous alter id, Blackford Oakes, the dashing Yalie spook who first appeared in Saving the Queen...
...Buckley embroiders this story with subplots and uneven characterizations of such personages as Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, Dean Acheson, Nikita Khrushchev and Charles de Gaulle. The results are mixed. The author's portrait of Hoover, for example, seems a weak parody of old newsweeklies: "Jut-jawed, beefy, all business...
...Buckley's Eisenhower is a refreshing bit of revisionism. From behind the famous grin and fractured press-conference syntax, the Great Golfer emerges as crisp, shrewd and decisive: "Herter, go back and study the minutes of all National Security Council meetings going back three months at least. Then assume everything we said is known to the Kremlin. Report back to me, and advise me how this will affect a) our policy; b) our negotiations; c) our public statements . . . Twining? Do the same thing . . . Get back to me by the fifth of October, or by the time their missiles land...
...assignment proves difficult, dangerous and, at times, confusing to the reader. Buckley's narrative line has some loops and kinks. From a scene in which Oakes awaits sentence for espionage in Moscow, the book flashes back to Fascist Italy and fashionable Washington with a romantic side trip to Bermuda. Buckley the novelist, unlike Buckley the columnist and lecturer, is not out to score debating points. But there are some targets of opportunity that are too juicy to overlook. An American Communist lawyer, representing a captured Soviet spy, aggressively defends his client's civil rights in a manner that...