Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square
by randy boyagoda
image, 459 pages, $30
The Richard Neuhaus I knew first appears on page 179 of Randy Boyagoda’s biography of the founder and perpetual genius loci of First Things. It is then, anno Domini 1975, that RJN embarks on that process of political maturation that would bring him from a youthful radicalism to the (neo-)conservatism that became his hallmark.
I always knew that Richard was one of those men who had been (in Irving Kristol’s famous phrase) “mugged by reality”—who had begun on the left and, appalled by what he saw there, moved rightward. Or perhaps it was the left that did the moving. “He had,” Boyagoda writes, “become a leading clergyman of the American Left, only now to discover that the American Left was moving away from his clergyman concerns.” In any event, I had not realized the fervor of those concerns. That he campaigned for the civil rights movement and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I knew. That he was “against the war” in Vietnam, ditto. But I was surprised to find him declaring that the Vietnamese people were “God’s instrument for bringing the American empire to its knees” and announcing that
“We” are for revolution. A revolution of consciousness, no doubt. A cultural revolution, certainly. A non-violent revolution, perhaps. An armed overthrow of the existing order, it may be necessary. Revolution for the hell of it or revolution for a new world, but revolution, Yes.
