Buckley started National Review the year I was born, and by 1968, when I started following politics seriously, he was a big deal- one of the leading newspaper columnists of the day. He'd also run an upstart campaign for the New York City mayoralty in 1965, and a year later launched a television show called Firing Line, that would run for 33 years. You never knew who'd be on his show- Allen Ginsburg?:
Buckley was an odd character, chock-full-o-mannerisms and a unique accent that meandered between British public school hauteur and Southern mush-drawling. He seemed incapable, on television, of sitting upright. He seemed supremely indifferent to what anyone else in his presence- sometimes, anywhere on the planet, thought besides himself (when he announced for mayor, columnist Murray Kempton reported, Buckley "read his statement of principles in a tone for all the world that of an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript assemblage of Zulus.").
He came from what might as well have been another planet, the one of New York intellectuals: people who argued over fancy dinner tables, then wrote about it the next day in their columns. His book Cruising Speed (1971) portrayed the odd- at least to me, in a small North Carolina town- world of a man who seemed to employ legions of minions and limos to maximize his output of words and self-amusement (he was found, dead at his desk, by his cook).
Still, he was charming and witty and smart, with a talent for skewering the pretensions of others. The young love a bit of bear-baiting in their politics in all seasons, and this was when The Sixties were upon us.
By 1980 Buckley's place in the intellectual mandarinate of conservatism was that of an elder. Ronald Reagan had taken the baton and run the winning lap. Still he pressed on, cranking out dozens of speeches and debates a year (on the road, his debates looked and sounded a lot like Hannity and Colmes do today. I can recall all the times I saw Buckley in person in the 1980s, but none of his sparring partners). As he wound down his activities at century's end, he began to look a bit like Congressman Ron Paul does today: a man of solid principles who let himself, and his magazine, be surrounded and traded upon by lesser lights with more disreputable ideas.
Sam Tanenhaus, who has been writing a biography of Buckley for some time, makes me wonder if the ideological pixie Buckley seemed was really just an act. In a masterful 2000 New York Times Magazine article on the mayor's race 35 years before, Tanenhaus found there were really two sides to Buckley:
'He possessed a talent, perhaps even a genius, for modulating effortlessly between his two personas, the ideological firebrand who made direct appeals to the mob alternating with the comic patrician who charmed sophisticated audiences. "He is the first candidate for a major local office in years who is working at the top of an acute intelligence and who possesses real and not press-agented style," Pete Hamill of The Post observed. "Yet he remains the leader of people who seem to understand only the emotion of contempt."'
His candidacy announcement was one of his best charm offensives:
'But the highlight was the question-and-answer period. It verged on shtick, with the reporters tossing softballs to the novice candidate.
'Did he have any chance of winning?
"No," Buckley said, reaching into his pocket to extract a cigar.
'Did he really want to be mayor?
'Buckley pondered, flashed his dazzling teeth and replied, "I've never considered it."
'Well, then, "conservatively speaking," how many votes did he expect to get?
'"One," Buckley said cheerfully.
'And who would cast that vote?
'"My secretary."
'Wooing voters was more than he was ready for at this point, especially if it involved courting "blocs," a practiced he abhorred on principle, since it elevated the group and devalued the individual. "I will not go to Irish centers and go dancing," he declared. "I will not go to Jewish centers and eat blintzes, nor will I go to Italian centers and pretend to speak Italian." Besides, stumping for votes was too time-consuming. He had already warned Conservative Party officials he would not disrupt his already crowded schedule. He had a magazine to edit, three columns a week to write, lectures to give - and there was, in just a week, a sailing race to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He promised to release position papers in due time - in the fall, once the Democratic primary had been settled - and to deliver a speech in each of the five boroughs. He would also be available for interviews. But that would be the extent of it. '
'Buckley's comic turns served another purpose. They softened the harsher aspect of his message once he closed in on the theme that was winning him support. That theme was race.
'Moynihan, Glazer and Malcolm X all shared a powerful feeling of identification with the downtrodden and an acute awareness of racial injustice and its troubling legacy; Buckley, even as he appropriated their arguments, expressed no equivalent sympathy. He acknowledged the fact of racism but did not seem particularly vexed by it. He exhibited much greater zeal in his attacks on black leaders. A result was that although he did not sound like a bigot - and indeed he was not - he seemed to give comfort to those who were.'
Buckley's charm and intellectual facility seemed to insulate him from his own record. Rick Perlstine, a friend, writes, "I cannot deny that Buckley, the founder of National Review and leader of the conservative movement, said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting."
Examples: his editorials and columns opposing civil rights legislation on grounds that whites were, in fact, the superior race. His defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthy's ilk. When Buckley thought marijuana might be interesting to try, he sailed his yacht beyond the twelve-mile limit of US waters and tried it on the high seas, a law and order type who simply went where there was no applicable law. The authoritarian on vexing social issues- Tanenhaus writes that in his campaign Buckley "recommended quarantining drug addicts and proposed a 'pilot program' that would 'explore the feasibility of relocating chronic welfare cases outside the City limits.'"
'Following a Vietnam protest in Manhattan in October, he distributed comments to the press saying, "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?" This brought him the fiercest rebuke yet, a Times editorial that accused him of "pandering to some of the more brutish instincts in the community, though his appeals to racism and bigotry have been artfully masked." In a letter, Buckley pointed out that the demonstrators had given Hanoi a free pass and that he had not said "a single thing about the Negro problem in Harlem that hasn't been said by others whom you have not, so far as I am aware, done one of your hippopotamus-walks over. Mr. Daniel Moynihan, for instance, whose credentials are by your standards in very good order."'
Buckley's use of "mincing" to describe antiwar protesters is no accident (surely no one in American letters, save Henry James, every used his words more precisely). In the overheated atmosphere of 1968, Buckley outed writer Gore Vidal on national television:
Eighteen years later, in a New York Times op-ed, Buckley noted, "A generation ago, homosexuals lived mostly in the closet. Nowadays they take over cities and parade on Halloween and demand equal rights for themselves qua homosexuals, not merely as apparently disinterested civil libertarians." Considering the debate between privacy advocates and public health protection, Buckley found a middle ground. "Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals...Our society is generally threatened, and in order to fight AIDS, we need the civil equivalent of universal military training."
Twenty years further on, in a December 28, 2007 appearance on Charlie Rose's show, Buckley still talked like it was 1965 and socialism must be held at bay in America. There's not too much religion in American politics, he said; there's too little. Medicare was a mistake.
And so he's gone. The hauteur of the eyebrow, the tongue that could outflick an anteater's, the ratty neckties- all gone with him. His Anglo-Catholic, authoritarian politics of privilege remains to haunt us as more heirs will now spring out to claim his inheritance than James Brown had children, united only by their common desire to quarantine,to ostracize, to deport those not like them.
In Alan Bennett's novella, The Uncommon Reader, Queen Elizabeth II of Britain is imagined to develop a passion for reading late in life. Urged to take up Jane Austen, the Queen found "she had handicaps as a reader of Jane Austen that were peculiarly her own. The essence of Jane Austen lies in minute social distinctions, distinctions which the Queen's unique position made it difficult for her to grasp. There was such a chasm between the monarch and even her grandest subject that the social difference beyond that were somewhat telescoped. So the social differences of which Jane Austen made so much seemed of even less consequence to the Queen than they did to the ordinary reader, thus making the novels much harder going. To begin with, at any rate, Jane Austen was practically a work of entomology, the characters not quite ants but seeming to the royal reader so much alike as to require a microscope." William F. Buckley's understanding of most of America was just another, different, microscope slide.
Another insular intellectual, film critic Pauline Kael, told a Modern Language Association seminar in 1972, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."
Kael and Buckley were two sides of a coin. "Buckley," Sam Tanenhaus says of the 1965 campaign, "was confident that there were conservatives in New York. And he would be proved right. He was also confident he knew who they were."
For all his faults, Buckley lived a good life, had a happy marriage and the pleasure of seeing a son succeed in politics, journalism and fiction, and gave good entertainment value to the ants of America for decades. It's worth remembering him at his best, here summing up why the Panama Canal Treaty should be ratified in a 1978 debate against Ronald Reagan:
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