Senator Joe McCarthy was bombastic, confrontational, controversial and irascible, but he was never boring, at least until now. William Buckley decided to write a fictional biography of the Wisconsin Senator and it becomes a big revisionist snore.

McCarthy was a political meteor - unheralded, he hit the US Senate in the late1940's and within his first term, he divided the nation with his hunt for Communist pinkos, liberals and eventaully the U.S. Army. Buckley has used McCarthy's rise and fall as an avenue of rewriting history, and manages to make the Wisconsin Senator a very dull figure, the one characteristic which the witch hunter would have loathed.

It's called THE REDHUNTER (Little Brown) and you might find it interesting to learn that WWII was a fight against Stalin's slave camps. The Nazis, in Buckley's world, hardly earned an asterisk. So even though the Soviet Union was our ally, anyone at home who joined a group that any Communist was part of, is justifiably a traitor in the world of McCarthy and Buckley. McCarthy's childhood also might be confused with Huck Finn's in this biography.

I'd love to tell Buckley about me in the 1950's, a member of the Young Democrats, who was elected editor of his undergraduate newspaper, only to be accused of being a Communist by the fraternity guys who were defeated. McCarthy was in style on campus and his rippling effects politicized and polarized me. That's the real part of the McCarthy legacy, a landscape of ruined lives and soiled reputations.