War Within the Party : THE CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP, <i> By R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. (Simon & Schuster: $22; 276 pp.)</i>

On May 5, 1989, certain members of the conservative movement began to notice that they hated each other. That day a man from the Rockford Institute turned up at the New York office of This World, a magazine Rockford published, accompanied by threateningly large men of uncertain institutional affiliation, and kicked everybody out onto the street. Reminiscent of the sectarianism that divided Trotskyites from Stalinists in this country during the 1930s, it was an early sign of a phenomenon to which the title of this book, “The Conservative Crack-Up,” can accurately be applied.

There are neoconservatives, and there are paleoconservatives. The neos are renegade liberals who emigrated to the Right during the 1970s. This World was a magazine of theirs. Having been in the camp somewhat longer, the paleos resented the newcomers, with whom they differed on such issues as immigration and foreign aid. The paleos clustered around Rockford.

More recently, the ardent paleo-conservative Patrick Buchanan used a run for the presidency as an occasion to insult neoconservatives. For a while, his candidacy threatened to upset the coalition Ronald Reagan had brought together in 1980. Though the disagreements that led to the abrupt shutdown of This World were never fully explained, the symbolic meaning of the event was clear: Conservatives could no longer live peaceably together.

This is all to introduce the subject R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. alludes to in his title--a subject which is not the subject of his new book. Tyrrell, who presides over another conservative magazine, the enjoyable American Spectator, sees a political movement that failed to capitalize on its decade-long hold on the presidency. As he puts it, “ . . . even at the end of the Reagan Revolution the only signs of Reaganism in the arts, the universities, and the media were grotesque caricatures, burning effigies, whoops of derision, and wails of alarm.” If conservatives continue to beat up on each other, they will leave America with its ruling liberal culture intact and all but unchallenged.

It’s true, and Tyrrell identifies a likely cause: the conservative’s homebody temperament, which is fundamentally unsuited to politics. He also has a solution. That solution seems to be R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who is the true subject of “The Conservative Crack-Up.” Now this subject fascinates Tyrrell, and he has a lot to say about it. He pays curiously little attention to the rancor among his compatriots.

About him, this much is beyond dispute: He doesn’t go by Emmett but by Bob (for Robert). His last name is pronounced TIH-RUL . In the late 1960s, as readers will learn, he competed on the Indiana University swim team, side by side with Olympic-quality athletes. He used to have a column in the Washington Post. Later in life he had a nasty divorce, about which he goes into uncomfortable detail. He enjoys fine food and wine, frequently praising a “superb claret,” a “superb Bordeaux” or a “superb French restaurant, La Brasserie, not far from the pols’ favored forums on Capitol Hill.” Though he lives in suburban McLean, Va., he keeps a “small pied-a-terre “ on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which you can guess is also superb.

All this about R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and his active, sensuous lifestyle may sound off the point, but I think Tyrrell is trying to do something other than merely talk excessively about himself. He wants to save conservatism by offering a model for future and present conservatives. This model is R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

Full of scorn for the “dimmer lights” among his allies, he presents a taxonomy of Country Club Republicans, Stupid Conservatives and others so contemptible they don’t even get a cute sobriquet. “By the mid-1980s,” he’ll say, “most (young conservatives) were college educated, which meant that they had acquired a set of manners that--a la the English gentleman --allowed them to pass for being intelligent. Yet many were not.”

What is needed are “serious minds” that “recognize the great game of politics as a facet of history, infused with ideas and values, and topped off with interludes of precious comedy,” “intellectuals of broad intellectual background” who “respect the genuine achievement of a real writer.” At one point he recalls proposing to William F. Buckley Jr. that conservatives “take an interest in each other’s work.” Is the “real writer” he has in mind R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., and does he believe it is his “genuine achievement” that other conservatives ought to “take an interest” in?

There is a definite poignancy here. In a cranky mood, Tyrrell writes like a neglected old man, resentful of those who receive more attention than he does. This is a highly personal book, in some ways painfully so. When he, for example, complains that liberal newspapers no longer publish conservatives, you get the feeling he is thinking of the Washington Post’s disinclination to publish him. Tyrrell wants readers to know he has not been left out in the cold. Like the head of a New York literary agency who once bragged to a stranger that he owned “15 works by famous painters,” Tyrrell has befriended many famous people--”three presidents have been my friends, two vice-presidents, scores of lesser politicians”--and wants to publicize the fact. Touched by his eagerness to impress, you end up liking the man, even as you feel a little puzzled.

After all, Tyrrell has done nothing shameful, which he needs to compensate for. At 48, he is not old. Nor is he untalented. He is an admirer of H. L. Mencken, and seeks to write like him, with some success. Read Tyrrell at book-length and the Menckenism does come to sound a little like a put-on, mixing overwritten ridicule (“The bovine intelligentsia (i.e. liberals) were moving in, and woe to intellect”) with mock fancy-pants diction (lots of “to wits” and “I think nots” and regular exhortations to “Think of it”).

But read him in snatches, or in the form of his column, now appearing in the Washington Times, and Tyrrell is sharper, funnier. Some passages from “The Conservative Crack-Up” get things just right, and in a way that does capture the “precious comedy” of political life. Of Michael Kinsley, schoolmarmish defender of liberalism on CNN’s “Crossfire,” Mr. Tyrrell says he “served as an Eleanor Roosevelt of the 1980s.” Exactly.

When he’s not talking about himself, Tyrrell writes observantly about the impasse conservatism has come to: He notes that, unlike liberal businessmen, conservative businessmen do less than their best to support sympathetic magazines. The current Republican President (with whom Tyrrell lunches on Page 266) has little patience for conservative intellectuals. Even Ronald Reagan never made full use of them.

The climax of “The Conservative Crack-Up” happens over dinner at Tyrrell’s home in Virginia. Reagan is there, and Tyrrell lets us know the two are on a first-name basis. Looking around his dining-room table, he realizes that everyone present is a former liberal. Other liberals ought to join the cause, he realizes, to vacuum away what he repeatedly calls the “Kultursmog” of liberal assumptions and prejudices that hovers over Washington and all of America.

A few months ago, the mayor of Mexico City offered an eccentric solution to the problem of the real smog that hovers over his hometown. The mayor proposed that 600 enormous fans be built, 20 feet high, to suck the smog down and jet it back up to be carried away by high winds. The citizens of Mexico smiled indulgently. Tyrrell’s solution to the problem of Kultursmog--”to wit,” as he would say, people should pay more attention to Bob Tyrrell--is about as endearing as the mayor’s, in its way, and about as likely to succeed.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “The Conservative Crack-Up,” see the Opinion section, Page 2.