Books: In Camera

UNITED NATIONS JOURNAL

by WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

280 pages. Putnam. $7.95.

Why did Ultraconservative William Buckley overcome his loathing for the United Nations and accept an assignment last year as U.S. representative on the U.N. Human Rights Committee? "Pure undiluted Walter Mittyism" seized him, Buckley confesses. Single-handed he would hold the world body spellbound as he read from Solzhenitsyn or pleaded the case for Ballet Dancer Valéry Panov. He would cajole, mesmerize, seduce, intimidate the delegates. The soaring Buckley vision of man's rights, in fact, might "repristinate" the jaded international bureaucracy.

The U.N.,...

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