Barbed Bait

By Peter Stoler

WHO'S ON FIRST

by William F. Buckley Jr.

Doubleday; 275 pages; $9.95

When it comes to tweaking a nose --liberal, moderate Republican, even a lofty, aquiline proboscis like his own--no one is more skilled. Editor of National Review, host of Firing Line, syndicated columnist and author of half a dozen political treatises and collections of essays, William F. Buckley Jr. has long been one of the most delightful tweakers in America. But when it comes to writing of international intrigue, the author still has a lot to learn.

Buckley's latest adventure, Who's on First, is used to skewer such unarmed opponents as Dwight Eisenhower, the State Department, the Congress and the U.N. But it also weaves a story only slightly less convoluted than its prose style. The year is 1956, when the cold war was gelid. The U.S. and the Soviets are racing to get the first satellite into orbit. While CIA Chief Allen Dulles frets and a viciously urbane Dean Acheson argues that a Soviet space triumph may be necessary to shake American complacency, the agency plans to kidnap a top Soviet scientist. Enter Buckley's later ego, ex-Yalie Blackford Oakes, fresh from triumphs in two earlier works (Saving the Queen, Stained Glass) and eager for yet another chance to save the world.

Dodging a Hungarian double agent and a two-dimensional Soviet intelligence chief, pausing briefly to satisfy a lascivious lady, Oakes not only carries off the kidnaping, but wins the friendship of both the scientist and his wife. What he fails to do is prevent the Soviet space spectacular. He does, however, have a hell of a time trying.

And so does Buckley, who never offers bait without a barb. Oakes expresses "dismay over the mind-boggling incapacity of Frenchmen to govern themselves." Acheson recalls John Stuart Mill's observation that while Conservatives are not generally stupid, "stupid people are generally Conservative." The Soviet intelligence chief pays the author a compliment by quoting from a National Review article on an assassination attempt that "had all the earmarks of a CIA operation.

Everybody in the room was killed except Sukarno."

The gibes are better than the book, but no matter. Buckley, in life and art, always prefers to stay apart from the crowd.

Customarily, writers of thrillers take themselves seriously and their public lightly. In Who's on First the fables are turned. The author's vocabulary and wit show a high regard for his audience. It is William F. Buckley whom he takes humorously. And so, in the end, must the reader. --Peter Stoler

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