THE ALTERNATIVE INTERVIEWS AN AMERICAN GOTHIC:
JR., WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY
The Alternative Interviews An American Gothic: William F. Buckley, Jr. William F. Buckley, Jr. is a columnist, editor, politician, yachtsman, and most alluring he is an American Gothic....
...Measured by consumer goods yardsticks, less than 5% of U.S...
...It became almost a religion with him...
...j ( Not only did Mr...
...Mainly that we know about the quality of reverence and feel it strongly and feel that the holy things should be treated venerably, whereas, of course there was practically no area at all that was immune to the raillery of Mencken specifically religion, which should be an excellent example...
...TYRRELL AND TESICH: (indignantly) We care quite a lot about those things...
...Thus recognized, she directed me to Buckley's upstairs office...
...But we were alone, the greeting was meant for us, and had not Tesich, as we entered Buckley's office, mistaken a drawing of Buckley's wife for Jacqueline Kennedy, I would have remained uncomfortably bereft of aplomb all afternoon...
...All statistics are for 1965...
...The Editors of National Review always have their own laws of which one of mine is don't try to write like Murray Kempton unless you can...
...Our deficits range from $125,000 to $250,000 a year, and are made up by three or four thousand people sending in checks...
...Aside from Bobby Kennedy's procreant powers, what is the greatest crisis in America...
...But Socrates himself was highly venerable toward the venerable things, and that I think is an important distinction...
...Too many right wing college papers, I think, tend to fill their magazines with articles on price controls by a remote professor of economics somewhere, without any journalistic flair...
...It's other things too, but those are what it's famous for...
...These problems will either be solved or the nation will descend into chaos...
...There had been several intervening editors Henry Hazlitt, Eugene Lyons, and Lawrence Spivac...
...88% have telephones in their homes...
...And finally launched it...
...Other than, that is, as a great, rollicking, wonderful polemicist...
...So I am very much happy with the progress that has been made...
...If we could charge $18 a year we'd be a prosperous journal of opinion...
...And what we do is make up that deficit by an annual fund appeal which so far has kept us afloat...
...As Buckley's desk was a Himalayan range of books, manuscripts, magazines, and memos, we held our interview at a long table across from it...
...What is the New Right, and are you happy with the development of the New Right...
...Though NATIONAL REVIEW'S offices are confusedly shelved on three cramped stories of a building somewhat more prehistoric than Maxwell Hall, the receptionist looked impatiently at Tesich, attired in leather jacket, paisley tie and huaraches...
...Lesser toward the end, but for a while one had the feeling that he debunked for the sake of debunking, but the only things he really cared about were Beethoven and beer...
...And it's extraordinary to say this in light of the fact that there didn't then exist a really conservative journal of opinion, at least one that was in any sense journalistically inclined...
...j J For thirty-nine years Mr...
...I think he is terribly gullible...
...I don't think anybody reads Mencken to find out what he said so much as to enjoy how he said it...
...I flew to New York on 31 March and interviewed Buckley in his offices at NATIONAL REVIEW on 2 April accompanied by our characteristically shaggy literary editor, Stojan Tesich...
...He taught his- j f tory man's record of cruelty and kindness, of j ! hate and love, of cowardice and courage, and of j | faith...
...The trouble with a lot of conservatives Continued on Page 6 5 BUCKLEY Continued from Page 5 is that they're booring, and it is important, I think, that when one edits, let's say a college paper, to edit the college paper so that it will be read with interest by at least that part of the college community that reads that kind of thing...
...I tend to feel that most of the people on the New Left who oppose the draft, oppose the draft simply as a useful way of opposing the Vietnam War...
...In the early 'fifties you worked with it...
...TYRRELL: How do you estimate Mencken...
...TYRRELL: Had the character of Mencken lingered at all...
...So that it isn't simply a matter of whiplashing people into trying to write in a particular style as it is selecting people who can write naturally in a real style...
...There are a lot of people who don't like me by the way...
...It J j was this continuing hospitality that nurtured, J j from the most precarious seed, The Alternative...
...Surrounded by pictures of sailing sloops and dwarfed by a huge bulletin board adorned with insults he could not quite throw away, Buckley comfortably intwined himself around and over three chairs and graciously replied to the following questions: TYRRELL: Mr...
...America just could not have that many crises...
...The crime rate is soaring up a third from only 1960 to 1964...
...You say what is the New Right...
...Here I see an analogy with NATIONAL REVIEW...
...BUCKLEY: Complicated...
...Are the goals similar and should young conservatives work with the New Left...
...It's sort of Platonic activations of one's own maturity...
...But I think that what Lenin used to call the sin of opportunism is something one needs to watch out for...
...How did you go about founding NATIONAL REVIEW...
...BUCKLEY: I think that was so a few years ago, but it is definitely not so in the last couple of years, because the New Left unless you talk now about the kook left, the total separatists and so on haven't really known what to say about the Negro question...
...BUCKLEY: Oh, I agree with you...
...Sectarianism is when you don't want to work with anybody because he isn't exactly (sibilantly) like you...
...Buckley, how can the New Right effectively improve proselytzing its philosophy on campuses...
...With utmost caution I mounted the stairs, for only one year before I had, in reply to a fund-raising letter, sent him a personal check for $250,000...
...And if you keep your eyes trained to the ridiculuous dimension of politics, you can, I think, be instructive in discussing politics...
...This," he considers, "hogwash...
...He asserts that the report rests on three fallacies...
...So although Mencken was alive when I worked on the Mercury, it was after he had had his near-fatal strokes...
...Those are the only ones I can think of who have said "no...
...We figured we needed about $400,000 to $450,000...
...Yes I am...
...He is the kind of person who, although he can be very hardboiled in dealing with, let's say Mayor Daley, can be swept off his feet by Sukarno...
...BUCKLEY: I think that it is largely a matter of tone...
...He was sort of an obsessed anti-Semite and so on and so forth but he I quit when Huey sold it...
...I worked with the American Mercury for about three months, three very hectic months under William Bradford Huey...
...BUCKLEY: I think that people should write in the way that comes naturally to them...
...Buley's wit, beneficence J ! and charm transfused refulgence, into jaded stu- J j dents anesthetized by the impersonality and cyni- ! | cism of our educational factories...
...It's become quite a pile of junk since you left it, is this so...
...If today we have a widespread problem of poverty, it is the poverty William Faulkner spoke of the poverty that induces writers to write not from the heart but from the glands...
...The AMERICAN MERCURY was a leading journal under H.L...
...One exception to this I suppose is what seems to be a genuine fear on the part of members of the New Left of big government, something which is rather new and very refreshing...
...BUCKLEY: Yeah, quite a while ago...
...We've always had deficits large deficits which I think is true of every journal of opinion in America, even those subsidized by the CIA...
...TYRRELL: The New Left often giddily attests to having similar goals with the New Right, and suggests the New Right work concomitantly with the New Left...
...You'd need more than that now, by the way quite a lot and it turned out to be extremely difficult to raise, extremely difficult to raise...
...BUCKLEY: What I worry about and what I assume you worry about is the spirit of accomodation...
...Second, poor people actually pay much less for their goods than do the rich, because many durable items automobiles and appliances for examples can be bought used at a fraction of their original price...
...Parrish disagrees...
...7 BUCKLEY Continued from Page 7 ken was that he tended to theologize skepticism...
...Mencken...
...I j Newspapers have already written of the abound- j | ing achievements of this Pulitzer prize-winning j j historian...
...THE ALTERNATIVE ignores most of these crises, much as we ignore Modern Republicanism...
...He notes that "poverty intellectuals" now claim that there are from 30 to 80 million poor people in the United States...
...TYRRELL: Are you still having difficulty getting people to debate you on FIRING LINE...
...We hope he imparted to us his zest for j ! challenge, his sentience and his devotion...
...Fearing she was about to inform us that "deliveries are made at the rear" I hastened to tell her I was from Monroe County, Indiana, and Tesich serves merely as my guide and bearer...
...BUCKLEY: Well, within a certain framework, and we do publish different views of lots of thing McNamara, marijuana and so on, and so forth...
...In a j ! stainless steel civilization obsessed with flabby j ! youth he taught us how to be vital and how to be I | old...
...By 1970, ten per cent of all births will be illegitimate...
...First he says, married college students, older people with most material necessities already bought and paid 6 competative paradigm against which you can't survive for psychological reasons unless you keep your price as low as their price level...
...BUCKLEY: Well, yes...
...99% have electric refrigerators...
...He went broke, and sold it to a mad man called, what was his name...
...John B. Parrish, Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois...
...But what we did was set up a stock company and go out and sell stock and debentures and eventually sold about $350,000 worth...
...And then it went into straight anti - Semitism and it became completely junkey...
...But the reason it doesn't sell for more than eight dollars is because Life magazine and Look, and so on, are available for eight dollars and they set up a THE ALTER NATIVE by Sir Arthur Wellesley Poverty: Hungry People or Bloated Rhetoric...
...I think that the Church is most attractive and most alluring when it resists the times...
...How do you establish a style...
...But what you have is an enormous discrepancy between the cost of publication and the cost of subscription...
...BUCKLEY: Oh, sure, I couldn't agree with you more and incidentally it's definitely in the American tradition the tall tale...
...And that under the circumstances I find myself, and some of my colleagues disagree with me, declining to join some of those abolish the draft committees, even though I do believe in abolishing the draft...
...Now it's owned by some fundamentalist out in Texas...
...j R. Carlyle Buley, RIP ! On 25 April The Alternative lost its dearest j ! friend its mentor, Professor R. Carlyle Buley...
...A lot of people feel that if you see anything amusing in politics, it's like laughing in church...
...I think that what one has to avoid is purely abjurgative polemics mere recapitulations of received conservative truths...
...BUCKLEY: Well, it was an incredibly hard thing to launch...
...And there's nothing worse than people who can't be funny trying to be funny, or people who can't be serious, trying to be serious...
...let us write of our friend...
...He claims that his journal of opinion, NATIONAL REVIEW, ". . . is committed to stand athwart history yelling 'Stop!'" Yet New York's voguish liberals endure him, for as his roomate from Yale, Thomas Guinzburg, of Viking Press says "he feels pain...
...I think that Kennedy is terribly gullible...
...The Economist is a very prosperous journal, so is the New Statesman, and Nation, with considerably less circulation...
...BUCKLEY: The only people who could discontinue it are its supporters, but our circulation is higher now than it ever has been...
...As you probably know, the principal difficulty of the journals of opinion is not so much that they don't have a substantial circulation...
...And it is the poverty William Buckley speaks of in this issue of The Alternative the poverty of confidence...
...Parrish offers statistics to the contrary: 95% of all families enjoy a minimum adequate diet, or better...
...Do you think there is a place for his type of thought today...
...Do these things concern you...
...So I think that accidental congruities between the positions of the New Left and the New Right tend to be more accidental than genuine philosophical congruities...
...But he agreed to stay on as editor, it being understood that he would have plenary editorial powers which he continued to exercise up until a point where he was fired and somebody else was brought in who also continued to have plenary powers, but then he was fired about 1955...
...TYRRELL: Mr...
...It is the feeling that there is nothing worth defending...
...Parrish notes that the number of people reached by government food-subsidy programs in 1966 equaled the number of people classified as poor in 1964...
...When you say effectively, you've got to say, "Compared to what...
...TYRRELL: Well, at least Mencken needled people into thinking and reviewing their opinions...
...BUCKLEY: I think that they are programatically similar in some respects...
...It is a recognition of the necessity to protect the individual in a highly centrifugalized and technological society...
...TYRRELL: Do you think it manifests itself most efficiently in Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), and certain Young Republican organizations...
...Don't you try to get people to reflect by needling them...
...At the poststudent level it's manifested by the work of critics academic and journalistic of the Liberal Establishment...
...Oh, whatchamacallit said "no" Kenneth Tynan, but most others have said "yes...
...BUCKLEY: No...
...Striving for a very private ideal ever since age six, when he wrote George V exhorting him to retire British war debts, Buckley has gracefully raged through America beneath a banner of conservatism derided by the left, disdained by the right and confused by the modern muddled middle...
...But that's why I think that Mencken other than his dictionary, the American Language, which was a formidable academic and scholarly achievement really ends up not speaking to this generation at all...
...It was all filed in his mind and amplified j j by his intensely human spirit...
...I think that it's been effective in the sense of defending defensible positions and not being associated with the kook right...
...BUCKLEY: It was there sort of as a memory...
...In a life of travail he evinced resolution, ! j defiance, magnanimity, and good will __ and J j we are grateful...
...But skepticism as an epistemological instrument is something that of course was preached by Socrates...
...Whereas the sin of the error of opportunism is that, let's say, if everyone else is in favor of socialized medicine be he Stalinist or Marxist or whatever and you're in favor of public medicine, then you make common cause with him...
...households are below the poverty line, and the percentage continues to decrease," writes Dr...
...Yes, sure...
...I think that the New Right is consolidating a criticism of Liberalism a consolidation that progresses in part because of the intellectual penetration of the New Right, but in part also because history is catching up with orthodox Liberalism...
...Todays low-income 'new poverty' buyer has a purchasing power 25 times greater than that of the rich buyer of 1923...
...TESICH: Wouldn't you feel that exaggeration has to be one technique, and that by exaggeration you can point to things you can't point to in any other way...
...We don't have trouble getting people on Firing Line...
...And National Review therefore does attempt to look at politics as something which has a ridiculous dimension...
...However, it seems to me that there is this stylistic difference at least between what National Review hopes it is and what we understood Mencken to be...
...Third, most medical and other social services can be obtained free or inexpensively...
...When people think of YAF or ISI they don't think of the John Birch Society, for instance, and that much is healthy...
...BUCKLEY: Ahh...
...TYRRELL: What of your style...
...99% of all families have electric or gas stoves...
...BUCKLEY: Well, I think that the trouble with Menc Continued on Page 8 for, and those families simply having a bad year, are not hopelessly mired in poverty, even though they may have earned less than $3000...
...Now take for instance the New Left's opposition to the draft, which coincides also to the opposition to the draft on the New Right...
...This is a curious criticism which is not often made of him...
...In truth he is an eminently cultivated gentleman prancing about a culturally immature nation but, one suspects, he has fun...
...I don't think he's qualified to be President, not only because of what he thinks, but because of himself...
...The estimate that there are at least 30 million poverty - stricken Americans originated with a 1964 report from the President's Council of Economic Advisors...
...This report defined as "poor" those families with an income of less than $3000 per year...
...And for that reason theatrically the New Left has been much more in evidence than the New Right...
...BUCKLEY: At the student level, yes...
...Did you establish one specific style...
...Well, it seems to me it is a lot of things...
...92% have televisions...
...So it can be done...
...TYRRELL: What is your estimate of Kennedy...
...TYRRELL: On the campuses is the right wing advancing effectively...
...TYRRELL: America supposedly trembles with the seismographic rumblings of all sorts of crises...
...TYRRELL: As the founders of emetic journalism, THE ALTERNATIVE would like to know how you founded conservative journalism in America...
...As I approached his office Buckley burst from a door, chest forward, eyes twinkling, teeth glinting, and hand outstretched, all I could imagine was that a resurrected Robert Taft stood behind me...
...He distinguished between opportunism and sectarianism...
...They haven't been as effective dramatically as the New Left has, in part because the New Left was able to operate with the leverage of the Vietnam War which was not available to the New Right...
...There are x number of readers we don't have because they can't stand what they consider to be our insouciance...
...It's part of the American way of saying things...
...He had experienced these elements of j | history, he understood them and he taught them j I well...
...I care about them too...
...Though he J | retired from the IU history department in 1964 J I his door always remained open to students...
...TYRRELL: Is it true that originally you intended NATIONAL REVIEW to be a journal of conflicting and diverse ideas...
...Somebody, reviewing a book on Goethe, wrote in National Review: "Sometimes upon reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny...
...we have trouble getting some people on Firing Line Wayne Morse, the Kennedys, Fulbright...
...It is a recognition of the limitations of the public sector...
...Our real problems, Parrish affirms, are reflected in statistics on crime, illegitimacy and delinquency...
...Buckley, you are considered the father of the New Right...
...Do you feel Mencken's old MERCURY has a similarity with NATIONAL REVIEW...
...Buley relentlessly pursue j I truth, but as an exemplary teacher, he eagerly | I and eloquently communicated it...
...Finally, 98% of all children are born in hospitals...
...The New Republic in 1932 was available to its readers for six bucks, now a 300% increase in the cost of living since then and it's available for eight bucks...
...I think that journalistic flair ought to focus on the events of a particular college rather than to try always to speak sub specie communalis...
...R.E.T Jr I 8...
...We did everything they told us to do and paradise wasn't ushered in" so that they've been, or haven't you noticed, rather constipated in discussing the Negro question since, roughly speaking, Watts...
...He never used j j a note...
...We are apprehensive of the flabby lack of restraint on the part of young clergy and the growing influence of situational morality...
...TESICH: Wouldn't the Negro question be also kind of a theatrical element that the New Left could use...
...TYRRELL: What of the AMERICAN MERCURY...
...TYRRELL: The increasing liberalism of the Church disturbs the editors of THE ALTERNATIVE especially George Nathan who resides in Gethsemene, Kentucky...
...The big common unions of the 'thirties, the common fronts of the 'thirties, were distinctively errors in opportunism...
...It is anti-utopian, for instance...
...As to the plight of youthful clergy, the blame is not with the young clergy, it is with the older clergy their teachers...
...We feel your magazine is written elegantly and with wit...
...100,000 is a substantial circulation and with any such circulation in England, for instance, you can make money...
...BUCKLEY: Self-doubt, and it is a world problem...
...TYRRELL: What of the future of NATIONAL REVIEW...
...But it was always projected as a conservatively oriented periodical...
...That, I think, is undesirable...
...BUCKLEY: Ahhhh...
...What, I think, one has to do is to be interesting...
...I suppose, here and there, such associations have continued or have taken place, but by and large, they haven't...
...But we can't do that and keep the marginal subscribers, and it's the marginal subscribers that are of course the ones you want...
Vol. 1 • May 1968 • No. 6
