Ivy League Bond

By R.Z. Sheppard

MARCO POLO, IF YOU CAN by William F. Buckley Jr. Doubleday; 233 pages; $13.95

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 32DEG 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.

Oakes, like the author, is a remarkably versatile fellow. In Marco Polo, If You Can, he quotes Yeats, works for the CIA and pilots a U2. But he is not a routine spy in the sky. Because a mole in the National Security Council has been passing policy secrets to the Soviets, Oakes is asked to fake a forced landing in the U.S.S.R. and allow a packet of forged documents to fall into enemy hands. The aim of this counterespionage is to neutralize a Soviet agent and drive a wedge into Chinese-Soviet relations. Can Blackie pull off this caper and get home in time for such bourgeois sentimentality as marrying his sweetheart and celebrating Christmas? Not to worry; the East and West love to swap important captured agents at any time of the year.

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," etc.

But 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 on us, whichever comes first . . . Dulles? Find the mole."

The 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 bespeaks contempt for America and its democratic institutions. Fiction, as the busy Buckley illustrates once again, allows a more leisurely and richer development of irony. -- By R.Z. Sheppard

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.