As I have noted before, I am a big fan of WFB (as Mr. Buckley is affectionately know). I own practically every book he has ever written (the only ones I don't have are the ones he has co-authored or edited) and have read most of them cover to cover (I haven't read all of his collected columns). As you probable know by now, I am a conservative and a student of the movement. Given this, it is hard for me to be objective about WFB's books - especially ones that deal with the conservative movement as this one does. I find them interesting because of my interest in the author and the subject. That said, however, I think Getting It Right is a fascinating and entertaining tale that captures a unique part of American history. It also carries a message about American Conservatism.

The first thing to note about Getting It Right is that it is, in essence, historical fiction. It is a look at the history of Modern American Conservatism in the form of a novel. Here is how Buckley describes it:

This book is a novel in which public figures are intimately portrayed. Liberties are taken in chronology, and of course, as is to be expected in novels, thoughts and sentences are given to individuals, which, however true they are to character, were not actually recorded.
But there is no misrepresentation in this novel, certainly none intended, and to the best of my knowledge, none crept in . . . Not one word is attributed to any public declaration by Robert Welch or other representatives of the John Birch Society that wasn't actually spoken or written by them. This is so also of Ayn Rand, respecting her thought and writing.

So Buckley is using his front row seat in the development of the modern American Right to weave a novel. The building blocks are the actual events, conversations, and lives of those involved. The fiction is what Buckley calls the "joiner work" that knits the story together.

The focus of this fascinating story is the turbulent decade from 1956 to 1966. The plot centers on the lives of two young people, Woodroe Raynor and Lenora Goldstein, whose paths first cross in 1960 at the founding conference of the Young Americans For Freedom in Sharon, Connecticut. But as noted above, two unique sections of the American Right are highlighted through the lives of these two individuals: the John Birch Society and the objectivists centered around Ayn Rand. As the story develops, you see how the burgeoning conservative movement attempted to define itself and how its members tried to deal with the events and ideas of their times.