Conrad Black accuses Andy McCarthy of creating schisms on the right in endorsing Diana West’s American Betrayal. This is his article from National Review:

This is not a return to Diana West’s book. However, Andy McCarthy, a man for whom I have very great respect and whom I like very much, has written a review of it in The New Criterion that, because of its revisionist presentation of a number of historical events, is among the most discouraging political documents I have read in many years. Mr. McCarthy, a former prosecutor and distinguished and perceptive writer of the sensible Right, has frequently inspired me by his writing, and when I met him, at a difficult time in my own former travails, by his conversation also. I confidently turned to his review of Ms. West’s America Betrayed, which readers of this column will find it hard to forget after the robust knockabout the book received here and in her reply to me. The rigor of the review and its application to the book are matters I will address in a letter to The New Criterion, which the editor of that publication graciously invited, as I am mentioned, quite unexceptionably, in the review.

What seriously depresses me are three positions taken in the review. First is Andy McCarthy’s view that the scandalous, cowardly refusal of the mainstream elite of American culture and politics to recognize that America’s Islamist enemies are enemies can be traced to Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government in World War II. It is a fact that alarms and disgusts all of us in this debate, including Ms. West and her more vocal (than I am) critics, but I do not agree about the source of the problem. Second is Andy’s qualified accommodation, as worthy of reasonable consideration, of the claims by Ms. West that Lend-Lease was at least in significant part a mistaken reinforcement of Stalinist totalitarianism to the ultimate detriment of the West; that the Normandy invasion served Stalin’s purposes and enhanced his penetration of Western Europe; that Franklin D. Roosevelt was more or less ambivalent about the comparative virtues of Stalinist Communism and Western democracy (though he acknowledges that FDR disapproved of the barbarism of Stalin’s rule); that the Yalta agreement “gave” Stalin half of Europe; and that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were so significantly influenced in a pro-Soviet direction by Soviet agents and such arch-sympathizers that the distinction between an agent and a sympathizer was academic in the United States. And third, I am distressed by Andy McCarthy’s partial defense of Joseph R. McCarthy and his conclusion that the smear of McCarthy enabled Communism and anti-American reflexes to flourish in the United States through all the intervening years and are responsible for the inadequate general response to the Islamist threat that, I repeat, all the participants in this very heated and prolonged exchange revile in almost equally emphatic strictures.

The unanimity on this last point underlines the source of my concern. A relatively united Right, which included Diana West and other participants in this discussion, exercised a great influence in assisting President Reagan and his followers and collaborators in mobilizing opinion to support his arms buildup, his development of anti-missile defenses, his stiffening of the backbone of the Western alliance, and the consensus he helped create for a rollback of the Soviet intrusions in Central America, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the imposition of martial law in Poland. That unity of the influential Right was vitally important to the course corrections that lifted the United States and the West out of the inanities and shabby compromises of the Carter era, and led the world to the collapse of the Soviet Union and of international Communism, and to the triumph of democracy and market economics in most of the world. The New Criterion itself played an important and distinguished role in the intellectual phase of that struggle. Diana West, Andy McCarthy, and most of those who have supported and opposed Ms. West in this controversy all played their parts, and there is credit for all of them in the result: the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the nation-state.

A schism as profound as this controversy has now become will splinter the Right and render it incapable of united action, and perpetuate the precise condition that Andy decries and mistakenly lays at the door of Soviet wartime infiltration, both directly and through sympathizers. The process of fragmenting the Right, in this now notorious instance, began with Ms. West’s frequently, though not entirely, outrageous book, but for a writer of the stature of Andy McCarthy to take the positions mentioned above, and for The New Criterion to lend the exposition of those opinions the mantle of its earned prestige, is, and to say the least, very worrisome.

OK, I give up. Where’s the schism? Who is more in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, Conrad Black or Diana West? Reagan was demonised on the left as much as McCarthy ever was. For a variety of reasons it was not made to stick, but it wasn’t for want of trying. If I am not prepared to sell out one of the most relentless fighters on behalf of freedom I do not think of myself as anything other than acting in step with the values of a free world. No one in politics gets it right every time. No one can see the future perfectly. No one has absolutely pure and unblemished motives in everything they do. But if we are to walk away from McCarthy and his aims who then should be the person in the 1950s we should look to as the example of how these issues could be fought out? No one’s name comes to mind because no one else seemed willing to take these issues on and was capable of highlighting them in the same way.

If some of us over here prefer to honour McCarthy rather than revile him, so what? I can work perfectly well with people of a similar persuasion to myself who hold different views about McCarthy’s approach to dealing with our deadliest enemies. If it’s tactics and strategy you are worried about, then say so and this can be discussed. But it looks like a different agenda in play, one that is hard to fathom but seems to suggest that McCarthy was actually wrong in what he said, not in what he did. Since every single person he named in the 1950s has since that time been demonstrated to be an actual communist, communist sympathiser and useful idiot, nothing of what he did strikes me as wrongheaded and against my interests.

McCarthy’s only piece of bad luck was to have arrived on the scene at the same time as television. He seems strange to us today in those grainy black and white takes, but these are the takes made by his enemies in the media. We have our own battles today against a different kind of tyranny. I only wish we had a McCarthy right now who could show the same kind of leadership today that he did then.