Parting the waters.(From My Cold, Dead Hands: Charlton Heston and American Politics)(Book review)

From My Cold, Dead Hands: Charlton Heston and American Politics, by Emilie Raymond (Kentucky, 416 pp., $27.95)

BEFORE neocon became standard liberal code for Bush-lover or warmongering Jew, the usual insulting reference tossed at the rare uncloseted Hollywood conservative was Charlton Heston. As in: Charlton Heston, crazed gun nut. Or: Charlton Heston, aging, ultra-square star of corny hit movies like The Ten Commandments or Planet of the Apes. You can't be serious! Charlton Heston? Why would anyone be on the same political side as him?

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Other than being employed as terms of disapproval and having some overlap in political philosophy, Heston and the neo-cons wouldn't seem to have much in common. But in her long, strained slog of an argument, From My Cold, Dead Hands, Virginia Commonwealth University history professor Emilie Raymond has expanded an academic thesis into an entire book insisting that, well, they do. The end result is just like going to the movies, in that it depends on suspension of disbelief.

The book is only partly, and superficially, a biography; it is chiefly, as the jacket copy informs readers, "a chronicle of the resurgence of American conservative thought and, in particular, the birth of neoconservatism." But the connection between Heston and the neocons is artificial and depends almost entirely on passages such as the following, about Heston's distaste, when he was Screen Actors Guild president, for racial politics in casting:

 
  The actors Iron Eyes Cody and Kid Chissell complained that "everybody 
  is playing Indians" except Indians. Heston took the conservative side 
  of the debate, arguing that the Guild "cannot make actors totally 
  interchangeable and cannot deny the producer the right to cast the 
  actor he thinks is right for the role." Heston's was a judgment with 
  which the neocons would have agreed. 

That's pretty much what you're in for here, except when Raymond adds some variety by beginning with the neocons and ending, after some pretzel-like twisting, with Heston: "But it was not until McGovern's nomination that he left the party for good, concluding finally that it was 'not hospitable to any degree of conservatism.'"