Showdown With Evil: Our Struggle against Tyranny and Terror by Jamie Glazov

Author:Jamie Glazov [Glazov, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mantua Books
Published: 2010-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

18. Banquo’s Ghosts - Rich Lowry

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, a nationally syndicated columnist, and a Fox News political analyst. His book, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years, was a New York Times bestseller. He is the co-author (with Keith Korman) of the new thriller, Banquo's Ghosts.

FP: Rich Lowry, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Tell us what inspired you to write this thriller.

Lowry: I originally got the idea at one of NR's editorial dinners hosted by Bill Buckley a few years ago. We were talking about Iran's nuclear program and the idea of sending an amateur assassin to Iran popped into my head and I mused “that would make a good spy novel.” Keith is my literary agent (and a novelist), so we're always bouncing book ideas off one another and I lobbied him to write this one with me. We got started almost immediately and had a blast doing it.

FP: Enlighten our readers what this novel is about exactly.

Lowry: Here's the basic plot: Peter Johnson is a left-wing journalist who writes for a New York-based publication called The Crusader. He's a lush, a cynic, and a little corrupt. But watching the 9/11 attacks from his Brooklyn Heights apartment changes something in him. He begins to have doubts about the "hate America" pieces his editrix, Josephine von Hildebrand, constantly assigns him. Meanwhile, an old forgotten CIA spymaster, Stewart Bancroft (he works under cover of the name Banquo), has an eye on him. Banquo is old school. He's been marginalized in the new overly bureaucratic, politically correct CIA, as an anachronism who believes in aggressively and imaginatively taking the fight to the enemy. He concludes that the best possible man to send to kill Iran's top nuclear scientist is the one no one would suspect--the unreliable, famously America-hating Peter Johnson. And then, as they say, mayhem ensues.

FP: The novel is clearly a critique of the media. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lowry: Yes, if there's a villain in the book--besides the ones coming out of Iran--it's the media. And why not? The media in this country is shallow, self-obsessed, and defeatist. If it had had its way in Iraq, we would have lost the war there, and now that the situation has stabilized, it has moved onto declaring Afghanistan--previously the "good war"--the latest Vietnam. In the struggle with radical Islam, maintaining our will and civilizational self-confidence is absolutely essential and the media undermines both.

FP: Why do you think our media is saturated with such defeatist elements? What is the best way we can counter this defeatism in our media?

Lowry: A couple of things. As James Burnham said "liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to its dissolution." Also, there's a generational thing going on. For Baby-Boomer media types, whatever it is--it's always another Vietnam and always another Watergate. Ultimately, though, the truth will come out; the press, for instance, was reluctant to report on the progress forged by the surge in

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