SOURCE: Edwards, Thomas R. “Boom at the Top.” New York Review of Books (8 May 1986): 12-15.

In the following excerpt, Edwards offers a negative assessment of The White House Mess, contending that Buckley's satire is bland and imbecilic.

It may seem some distance from a ludlum to a political burlesque like Christopher Buckley's The White House Mess, which declines to find much darkness just where we expected a lot, in the corridors of national power. Though the book carries dust-jacket testimonials from such as George F. Will, David A. Stockman, and John Kenneth Galbraith, who ecumenically agree that it's somewhere between funny and hilarious, its comedy seems rather feeble. Like Ludlum, Buckley wants to offend no one's politics, and he mixes jokes about Reagan and George Bush (for whom he once wrote speeches) with ones about Carter and Geraldine Ferraro, none of them nasty enough to be truly stimulating...