ON FORREST McDONALD

I've been very impressed by his books on American history and what's a little surprising to me is that he is a conservative.   The first hint was an address McDonald gave to the Heritage Foundation in 2006, "A New Order for the Ages: The Making of the United States Constitution."  I then read parts of McDonald's autobiography, Recovering the past : a historian's memoir (2004) and discovered that he voted for Barry Goldwater and thinks the civil rights and social welfare legislation of the 1960s has done great harm to America.  None of this means that he isn't a terrific historian; the point is that we rarely get well-informed arguments from conservatives.  Off the top of my head, I can only think of David Frum, David Weigel and Daniel Larison.