Bush 41, Edwards, Dowd and Me

In her New York Times column today about John Edwards, Maureen Dowd takes a detour when the candidate tells her that, after praising a book about Socrates, he was “jumped on” because the author, I. F. Stone, was allegedly a Soviet agent.

In response, Dowd writes: “I tell the Democrat that Poppy Bush drolly told the story about his ’64 Texas Senate race, when a John Birch Society pamphlet suggested that Barbara Bush’s father, the president of McCall Publishing, put out a Communist manifesto called Redbook.”

That comes as news to me, and I was editor of Redbook at the time, working for Mrs. Bush’s father, who was as Republican as you can get but had Democrats like me editing his magazines because, as Henry Luce succinctly put it, “Those Republican bastards can’t write.”

Now, almost half a century later, here I am blogging away at the Bushes’ son for subverting American democracy. Maybe those John Birch Society nuts were onto something.