Books: Intellectuals: It Takes One to Know One

THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL ELITE by CHARLES KADUSHIN 389 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

Between the time Spiro Agnew became a household word and the moment he passed into the garage sale of history, many of America's intellectuals feared a recurrence of McCarthy fever. But with the notable exception of Daniel Ellsberg, the Administration was not out to get those who, in the early cold war, were derisively called eggheads. The Vice President's bark was reserved for TV, newspaper and magazine journalists, a motley lot whom intellectuals sometimes refer to as middlebrows.

But what precisely...