(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Red Hunter By William F. Buckley Jr. Little Brown 432 pages

As a young man, William F. Buckley very early got himself ejected from polite society when he co-wrote McCarthy and His Enemies. That 1954 polemic was a dossier-rattling defense of Joseph R. McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose pursuit of (presumed) subversives came to symbolize early Cold War hysteria. Revisiting the topic in calmer times, Buckley, now 73, has produced The Red Hunter, an arresting hybrid of fact and invention.

Faced with the problem of imputing dignity to Joe's clamorous crusade, Buckley filters his story though the fictional eyes of Harry Bontecou, a well-born New Yorker who discovers the evils of communism while stationed as an officer at a West German camp for Russian refugees. This haunting experience, plus later run-ins at Columbia University with junior communists, persuades Harry that "the highest calling of our time is to contribute to the anti-Soviet cause." He gets a staff job with McCarthy.

Buckley has mined existing biographies of McCarthy for snapshots of Joe's formative years: his boyhood on a Wisconsin chicken farm, his days as an amateur boxer, his poker-playing nights as a Marine. The picture is of a heartland go-getter, "attractive, earnest, yet never boring or fanatical, courteous and thoughtful, a life lover." But we also catch glints of an unscrupulous pol with a fondness for smearing opponents and a "quite extraordinary capacity to polarize."

Propelled to the Senate in 1946, McCarthy fumbled through years of obscurity in Washington. In 1950 he found his calling: Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, had been convicted of lying about his secret career as a Soviet spy. Boldly upping the ante, McCarthy charged in a Lincoln's Birthday oration that as many as 205 communists remained on the State Department payroll. Over the next four years he kept up the attack with what amounted to little more than slanders. He tapped into the fear, partially confirmed by recently declassified documents, that, as Buckley writes, "the terrible troubles America was having all over the world were in part because enemies of America were influencing decisions."

Buckley rejects the conventional view that McCarthy ushered in a reign of terror and minimizes the trauma he left in his wake. But The Red Hunter does give a penetrating account of McCarthy's intellectual laziness and lack of discipline, which were heightened by his dependence on both the vodka bottle and the advice of Roy Cohn, his sinister young aide.

Growing disillusioned, Harry escapes to New York for informal tutorials with the donnish Willmoore Sherrill (modeled on Buckley's own mentor at Yale). Sherrill deplores McCarthy's gutter methods yet defends him as an Everyman who grasps, however inchoately, that the function of a "vital democratic society" is to "reject unassimilable ideas" such as communism. This comes close to Buckley's own view of McCarthyism, scarcely altered since 1954.

What has changed since then is Buckley's willingness to assess some of the consequences of McCarthy's thuggery, such as the cost of branding Secretary of State George C. Marshall a Soviet dupe. He also notes that, thanks to McCarthy, "it became almost impossible in future years to say that anyone was a communist, because you'd be hauled up for committing McCarthyism."

Like his protagonist, Buckley is not a detail man, and errors litter the narrative. But this does not detract from his achievement, which is to entertain even as he proposes a daring premise: that McCarthy was human after all.

--Sam Tanenhaus