The Heart and Head of the Matter

By R. Z. Sheppard

CONFESSIONS OF A CONSERVATIVE by Garry Wills; Doubleday; 231 pages; $10

Garry Wills calls himself a conservative, out of convenience. He would rather call himself a "convenientist," a citizen always willing to convene with his countrymen for the public good.

Wills, 44, is not an uncomplicated man. He is a Jesuit-trained classics scholar, historian, teacher and journalist with one of the most supple intellects now wrapped around the body politic.

The output of his books, articles and criticism is protean. It began 20 years ago when he was still a student at Xavier University in Cincinnati. William F. Buckley Jr., impressed by a Wills piece on TIME style, offered him reviewing assignments for National Review. He turned in so many that he had to use a pseudonym (William Roman) "to keep from clogging the pages."

Between 1959 and 1963, Wills wrote books on Chesterton, Catholicism and Roman culture, in addition to working on a doctoral dissertation on Aeschylus. During the '60s, his pieces in Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post established him as a journalist of the first rank. His Nixon Ag- onistes (1969) still has the longest shelf-life of any book on the former President. Last year Historian Wills published Inventing America, a fresh look at the roots of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. The work has already won several literary prizes. A few weeks ago, he was holed up in Williamsburg, Va., completing a sequel at the rate of one chapter a day. Wills has also found time to write a suspense novel, At Button's, conduct a weekly seminar for Johns Hopkins students at his home in Baltimore and meet three deadlines a week for his syndicated newspaper column "Outrider."

How far out can a conservative ride? In his Confessions, Wills ranges from Jack Ruby to Cardinal Newman, from Everett Dirksen's Washington to St. Augustine's City of God. The pace is brisk, the intellectual hurdles high, the glimpses of auto-biography charming but scattered.

From the seminary, which he leaves for reasons of "Eros generally, not Eros specifically," Wills slings himself into Bill Buckley's energetic orbit of lively conversation, sailboats and sports cars whose "constant whirrings down, fussy tuggings, and resumed flight seemed a nuisance rather than a luxury." In a holding pattern over New York, Wills falls into conversation with a stewardess. The talk continues during the ride from the airport, but later the young journalist cannot remember her name. A little subterfuge results in a new meeting and a marriage-now past its 20th year. By today's matrimonial standards Wills is practically a radical. His ideas on love and the governing of men are also a departure from the customary lines. Wills' starting point is St. Augustine: "A people is a gathering of many rational individuals united by accord on loved things held in common." What rational individuals love best is peace. It is, says Wills, "the very soul of society" and "the gift of the politicians."

What kind of talk is that from a man who wrote brilliant, troubling pieces about the assassinations and civil strife of the '60s? Did not three Presidents and most of the Congress give us the Viet Nam War? Wills' long-range views of democratic politics tend to overlook such immediate questions. He focuses instead on a system that works for most of the people, most of the time. He applauds a process that elects less than the best because he believes political leaders of ordinary ability and accommodating character lessen the chances for disruptive extremes. "The turmoil of the '60s occurred," Wills writes, "because the anti-Communist crusade had revived in our system, whose whole genius is bar gaining and compromise, an absolutism not in accord with our normal politics. We could not administer final justice around the world through a political apparatus not meant to administer final justice even to ourselves."

For Wills, final justice is the busi ness of God, not of man. It is a conviction at the theological heart of his book. The secular Wills realizes that men cannot wait for ultimate judgment and that social action does not always end where theology begins. He readily ad mits that even while writing about racial demonstrations in the '60s, he did not approve of civil disobedience. The death of Martin Luther King changed his mind: "I saw in his career some thing I would find repeated in our his tory, now that I looked back at it with out my blinders: change is initiated by the principled few, not the compromising many." Politicians tend to tell us what we want to hear; prophets tell us what is right. Says Wills: "They set impossibly high standards for the rest of us. They make us appreciate the purely political virtues of compromise, easily pleased vanity and mediocre expectation."

The author himself possesses no such virtues. He refuses to accept the free mar ket of ideas where one opinion is worth as much as another. He is a demanding rationalist but understands, with Chester ton, that "reason is itself a matter of faith." His vanity insists on rigorous and adventurous exploration of paradox and contradiction, and his expectations are any thing but mediocre. Neither prophet nor politician, Wills is a passionate and tire less grounds keeper of the arena where, as Augustine said, the wheat and the weeds grow together.

--R. Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox: They are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good. Hilaire Belloc, after spending a term in the House of Commons, wrote: 'The standard of intellect in politics is so low that men of moderate mental capacity have to stoop in order to reach it.' He meant this as a criticism; but it is good that some men are willing to stoop. How else would our politics get done? Eugene McCarthy spent a good deal of his time trying to prove he was too good for politics. What use was that?

... Any fair person must recognize the positive uses of mediocrity. There is no mystery in the matter. We have admitted that a politician must be representative -and that means he must be predictable. He must be chosen because his general circle of thought is known. He is not likely to depart too markedly from that agreed-on area of thinking. If he were startlingly novel in his approach, liable to strike off on his own, capable of bold invention, unafraid of its consequences, only an idiot would ask him to represent the mass of common man."

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