THE POLITICS OF WILLIAM BUCKLEY
Epstein, Joseph
William F. Buckley, Jr.—author and editor, lecturer and columnist, one-time mayoral candidate for New York City, and leading publicist for the body of thought that goes by the name of...
...Murray Kempton, reviewing The Unmaking of a Mayor, Buckley's account of that same campaign, has this to say: He has never been better...
...Worsthorne concludes: "That conservatives should risk destroying something that has worked so well in the past is peculiar, to say the least...
...it is not John Birchism, as expounded in the writings of Robert Welch...
...McCarthy provided a subject that a budding polemicist could get his teeth, nails, and heels into...
...into respectability...
...His understanding that comedy must be serious provides us with many cranky but unexpectedly useful reflections on the New York ordeal...
...Buckley himself making Harry Truman a relatively happy na-has noted the main changes in an essay entional memory...
...All these, personalities, Buckley is more concerned he is saying, were acts of individual con-with what he construes to be economic efscience by men who believed their con-ficiency than with social justice...
...The Irish, Andrew Greeley has said, make the best fake WASPs...
...On December 18, 1970, Life, doubtless attempting to scratch up a Kennedy family substitute, did a cover story entitled, "The Buckleys, a Gifted American Family...
...Vidal has one of the best acts in the business—intellectual show business, that is...
...might have qualified, but certainly no longer...
...I see it THE POLITICS OF WILLIAM BUCKLEY as the historical role of the new conservatives not to abandon their traditional concerns," he writes, "but to accept the necessity of gut affirmations respecting America's way of doing things, some of which were traditionally espoused by the liberals and the progressives, whose contemporary uncertainty about them...
...Intact is his rigid faith in beneficence of the free enterprise system...
...Among such company as Charles Reich, Richard Harris, Senator Fulbright, angry anti-Pentagon and anti-Nixon "Talk" pieces, and exposes of Vietnam atrocities, the magazine found room to accommodate Buckley's prose...
...In defending Agnew, Buckley's stan stressing not the protection and preservation dard seems to be that if the man is so de of the American mainstream, but opposition spised on the Left, well, how bad can he be...
...Predictably, the book caused a small stir—less, one suspects, because of the cogency of its argument than because of the novel situation it presented: a young mind playing the tunes of old fogyism...
...all appeared in the same issue—April 14, 1972...
...Of what, precisely, does this libertarianism consist...
...They are not at all taken in by his content, or so they will tell you, but it is nonetheless clear that they are completely captivated by his style...
...How different things have been in America, which has never known a strong conservative tradition, nor even towering reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre, but instead (fortunately) only such bush-league figures as Father Coughlin and Joseph McCarthy, whose movements represented not conserva tism but, as Worsthorne puts it, "the ever latent intolerance of an overwhelmingly liberal society...
...has his own syndicated television show, "Firing Line," his own newspaper column, "On the Right," and there even exists a paperback entitled Quotations from Chairman Bill (1970...
...Along with his television show, his column, his work as editor of National Review, Buckley receives about 600 letters a week, has some 200-odd invitations to deliver speeches or take part in debates, attends board meetings of foundations and organizations of which he is a director, business meetings for enterprises in which he owns an interest, speaking engagements that he has accepted—and all the while he maintains a vigorous social round: THE POLITICS OF WILLIAM BUCKLEY concerts, suppers at the Russian Tea Room, visits to such once fashionable rock establishments as the now-defunct Fillmore East, and much more...
...While the celebrity intellectual is ostensibly celebrated for his intellectual accomplishments, the fact is that his celebrity has very little to do with his intellectuality—with the quality of his mind or the power of his ideas—but derives from his ability to perform well for the media, which after all are the only agency in America that confers celebrity...
...At a time when the abiding intellectual sin is to be boring, Buckley has risen to the rank of the paramount celebrity intellectual...
...Is it unreasonable to assume that the two evils, the threat of Communism abroad and the existence of large numbers of poor at home, are both worthy of jettisoning a theoretical position...
...but the belief appears to be widely held, especially among well-intentioned liberals...
...and Bayard Rustin as, among others, responsible for a white backlash against special pleading for the Negro...
...Its tone is— and has been throughout its life—an unsuccessful mixture of unwinning elements...
...Given the thinness, even at times the meanness, of his ideas, what, exactly, is the big attraction...
...for me, Bill, you lack all feeling for people...
...A relatively equating King's actions in the Montgomery happy national memory...
...Murray Kempton is talking about something else—not politics but the aesthetics of politics, for which he awards Buckley the highest marks...
...it is not simply antistatism, nor definable by any single political nostrum...
...Linking the two men together as Buckley did was an act quite without respect for distinction, and on the same level of political discourse as referring to "Robert Welch, Bill Buckley, and the Right...
...Every time someone from the Left called McCarthy a demagogue, whose tactics were not essentially different from those of Stalin or any other modern tyrant, Buckley stood ready to score polemical points...
...The spectacle was a grand one: night after night two Eustace Tilleys, each of somewhat dessicated patrician style and of implacably opposed points of view, each lookTHE POLITICS OF WILLIAM BUCKLEY 615 ing down his nose at the other, and letting the insults fly...
...Aesthetic judgment, this line of reasoning runs, is inextricably bound up with, if not indivisible from, moral judgment...
...For it is a mistake not to distinguish between capitalism and conservatism...
...Buckley countered by claiming that the lady, so ready to disdain the Senator from Wisconsin, showed no such contempt for the likes of Andrei Vishinsky, then head of the Soviet delegation to the UN, whose government was responsible for killing millions of its citizens...
...The closest analogy to Buckley's television persona is that of that stock movie character, also inherently fascinating, the highly cultivated gangster who keeps an art collection, has impeccable taste, remarks on how he "abhors violence," but can be ruthless nonetheless...
...Harnessed to energy, intellectual skills, and political ambition, as they are in Buckley, style can hurtle a man into a prominence out of all proportion to the significance of his ideas...
...If Buckley can be said to have any single message, that message is: let's continue to keep things as tilted as possible in favor of the privileged...
...Instead, Buckley came roaring out of the gates a full-blown man of the Right...
...On January 31, 1962, on one of his first major television appearances, he was illtreated on "The Tonight Show" by its thenhost, Jack Paar...
...Although there is a good deal of truth to Dick Schaap's remark apropos of Buckley's candidacy that "the reasoning behind his arguments make sense only to people who cannot understand a word he says," the tag of racist has been tossed around altogether too freely over the past ten years to place on a man unless the evidence against him is blatant...
...The conservatives take the position that an increase in the state's power involves a necessary decrease in the individual's freedom, while the liberals rejoin that such freedoms as the individual has lost are insubstantial—indeed, that no basic liberties are seriously infringed today...
...Part of the problem resides in simple journalistic ineptitude and personal tastelessness, but an even greater part in what is perhaps the unresolvable problem of conservatism in its application to American life...
...He can, for example, write: "We [American conservatives] must indeed continue to cherish our resentments against such institutionalized impositions upon our prerogatives as social security...
...The United States is a country associated in our minds with change, with overtaking the future rather than preserving the past...
...Norman Mailer, though his celebrity is considerable, is almost the very reverse of a celebrity intellectual...
...We considered a number of people and some did "auditions," sort of surreptitiously, that is, watching people on the air without them knowing we were watching them...
...Although there have since been some defections to death and some intellectual desertion from National Review's masthead—most notable is the absence of L. Brent-Bozell, whose notion of a sound foreign policy for America, as he exclaimed one night at Madison Square Garden in the early '60s, was, for starters, to tear down the Berlin Wall and to invade Cuba— over the years the magazine hasn't really changed much at all...
...Next to the madness of a Cleaver or to the buffoonery of an Abbie Hoffman, Buckley comes to seem sane...
...One can actually hear jokes about Buckley on prime-time television shows, which means, if nothing else, that recognition of his name is national...
...It was a question of who would best play off against him...
...Behind his resistance to social change, his hatred of the unions, his advocacy of the free market, his nearly complete absence of sympathy for minority-group aspirations is the desire to keep things in America pretty much as they are...
...His books are draped by blurbs from such liberals as THE POLITICS OF WILLIAM BUCKLEY 613 Murray Kempton and John Kenneth Galbraith...
...More often than not, however, find not the thought that other nations must his ideas are formed out of reaction to lib-work out their own systems even if we know eral-left opinion...
...Compact and emotionally intense, quick to take umbrage at anything that even smacks of a liberal idea, Mr...
...During his mayoral campaign in New York City, for example, Buckley rather sloppily linked Adam Clayton Powell, Jr...
...For one thing, as a television performer, Buckley is absolutely predictable—which means that his views will be predictably far to the right of whomever he is debating with...
...THE POLITICS OF WILLIAM BUCKLEY The one thing that has remained constant in National Review is its tone...
...The theory here is that a lower wage would make it possible to employ more, say, black teenagers...
...Not any longer, however...
...His original ploy was to deplore the erosion of state's rights while offering up such fudging declarations as that segregation "is a problem that should be solved not by the central government, but locally—in the states—and in the hearts of men...
...those, mainly of the white middle and lower-middle class, who, though unlikely to have intellectual access to his high style, sense that he gives eloquent expression to their extreme impatience with militant blacks, wild kids, and the pacifistwelfarepermissive strain of liberalism...
...At various times there have been large pools of conservative feeling, but feeling is not the same as thought...
...Rusher, Mr...
...Keith Mano," reads a note "In This Issue," "is 31 years old, and is, many think, not only among the best young American novelists, but now the best one, period...
...The conclusion is in-1972), after praising Buckley for his skill at escapable—both men in some rough sense debate, to remark: got what they deserved...
...There is To Contributors Like other periodicals, we have asked forstamped self-addressed envelopes with submitted articles but sometimes have returned them when such envelopes weren't included...
...repay attention: The very word "conservatism" has a peculiarly un-American ring about it...
...For a conservative bus boycott, at Selma, in Birmingham, in Buckley's own memory seems unusually Washington, and all across the South with short...
...To those who do not fear socialism so much as Peregrine Worsthorne, even to those the name of whose dream is socialism, the likely consequences of a strong conservative movement dominated by the National Review mentality still seem a dread nightmare...
...Dwight Macdonald, reviewing the first 11 issues, described it aptly as "the voice of the Lumpen-bourgeoisie...
...As a matter of fact, nearly the opposite has been true, and within recent years—certainly in the past two decades—it has been predominantly the Left, despite the disregard of the wilder segments of the New Left, and not the Right that was most concerned with libertarian issues...
...Gentlemen...
...Such has become his celebrity that Buckley, an intensely political man, is now in effect a figure of renown above mere politics...
...America, Worsthorne's argument runs, never having gone through a feudal phase, has from the beginning provided an infertile soil for conservatism...
...Though articulate and giving less the impression of mercilessness than Mr...
...Well, Stokely," I prize the memory of a Chicago talk show host named Iry Kupcinet once saying to Stokely Carmichael, "at this point we'll break for a commercial, and then get right back to just why it is you think America is doomed...
...Well, everyone knows what happened...
...What makes this worthy of note is that the New Yorker has never been in a more political phase than it is currently, and the direction of its politics is unmistakably leftward...
...A nice point, or so it once seemed...
...All polished malice, witty contempt, and devastating criticism, up to this point Vidal combines the unrelieved hauteur of a Henry Adams with the unrelenting barrage of insults of a Don Rickles...
...What seems to be involved is that in the first instance he feels unable to "afford" his antistatist purity, while in the second he is able to "afford" it...
...So much for the Right's libertarian virtue...
...In the sense Santayana intended, Buckley seems almost im 604 mediately to have developed an enlarged liver...
...In 1952, but two years out of Yale, he published God and Man at Yale, a book whose chief point was to show that that university's official pronouncements and its day-to-day academic practice were widely at variance, that Yale "derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists...
...Leaving Burke's prose...
...The fact that these would-be aristocrats model themselves so closely on Old World intellectual attitudes and social customs suggests that they find little to their taste at home in the United States...
...that Communism poses a more urgent threat than domestic poverty...
...This is of course the sheerest nonsense, some ideas and opinions being much worthier of serious consideration than others...
...If the Senator appeared as devil incarnate in the writings of the Left, in Buckley's own writing he resembled no one so much as a rather boorish Socrates, telling truth to power (granted, sometimes exaggeratedly), who was, alas, eventually brought down by the liberal elite, which in Buckley's prose often seemed to be taken as one and the same as the state...
...named W. H. von Dreele, which cannot merely generally be relied upon not to scan but is always profoundly unfunny as only truly failed humor can be...
...The NR's editorials," Macdonald noted, "are as elegant as a poke in the nose, as cultivated as a camp meeting, and as witty as a prat fall...
...Conceding that the defense of the democratic process was not formerly felt to be a principal responsibility of conservatives, Buckley remarks that it has now become so, largely through forfeiture on the part of a large segment on the Left who confuse democratic process with mob rule (e.g., students demanding the right to elect their own university president...
...He tells us what contemporary American conservatism is not...
...The answer is not easily got at in Buckley's writing...
...As it is, having inherited wealth would seem to have made it possible to deploy these same attributes elsewhere— into politics and the career of a celebrity intellectual...
...the viewers of his television program, "The Firing Line," are surely not homeowners worried about a Negro moving on the block but college graduates, numbers of whom read the New Republic, the Saturday Review, and the Nation...
...Also those students, whose numbers are not known, who find him attractive for a variety of reasons: his position on issues is never ambiguous, he has courage in debate, his conservatism offers the only radical-minority political orientation on campuses otherwise dominated by liberal-radical student bodies...
...For another, he has an instinct for an opponent's weakness—an instinct, that is, for the intellectual jugular—so that there is always a good chance that intellectual blood letting will result...
...James and Fitzgerald had the sensibility to back up these yearnings...
...Now comes the cruncher: "Dr...
...As with McCarthy, so with much else, Buckley would apparently rather be Right than right...
...As recently as 1969, for example, he proposed that the "government can be useful by repealing the minimum wage laws which have drastically adverse effects on the marginally employed...
...The Left has been more vigilant in libertarian matters not because it is the respository of virtue in America, but more likely for the more concrete reason that, apart from THE POLITICS OF WILLIAM BUCKLEY gangsters, it has been the civil liberties of people on the Left that have been more aggressively violated in recent years...
...After a brief stint as associate editor of the American Mercury, Buckley turned his attentions to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...
...As Whittaker Chambers, himself a journalist of high competence, once wrote in a letter to Buckley...
...Before going into that, perhaps it needs first to be said that of all the celebrity intellectuals, Buckley is the most celebrated...
...In America conservative feeling found its funnel mainly through organized religions, and addressed itself chiefly to social questions—for Prohibition, say, and against liberalizing divorce laws—that were only secondarily political...
...Speaking as a conservative, with wholly conservative ends in mind—the enemy for Mr...
...Intact, though now somewhat muted, is the desire, if not actually to dismantle, then certainly not to extend much of what the New Deal has bequeathed of an incomplete welfare state...
...Three main factors seem to me to have been involved: a certain inherent snobbery and aristocratic yearning in America at large, which finds its strongest expression in a hunger for style...
...It is the sheerest showmanship unencumbered in any way by substance...
...Worsthorne is socialism—his thoughts on American conservatism (originally uttered over the BBC under the title "What Is American Conservatism...
...In cultural tastes, in manner, in accent, Buckley comes on unrestrainedly upper class, with a slight admixture of jet-set swingingness provided by his interest in rock music and by the motor scooter on which he used to travel about Manhattan...
...The beginning section of his book Up From Liberalism (published in 1959 and reissued in 1968) is flush with it, and in 1962 he edited a book of essays entitled The Committee and Its Critics...
...a laissezfaire free enterprise domestic line not much above the level of sophistication to be heard every Wednesday afternoon at the Rotary...
...Yet is it not also fair to inquire why his hatred of the state is not greater than his hatred of poverty among the citizens of his own country, whose number is surely large...
...and, including the students, none of them is capable of conferring celebrity of the kind Buckley has acquired...
...mixing his actual proposals with much sneering talk about "incontinent mothers," people "who cannot be persuaded even to flush their own toilets," and "relocating chronic welfare cases outside the city limits...
...One can, and perhaps Buckley would, argue that the two evils are not equally urgent...
...Kilpatrick's problem is that he is an older man, has a Southern accent, and comes across rather too stodgily, and thus both sounds and looks too much like a conservative...
...In the main Buckley's chief constituency, at once his audience and the group most responsible for his current renown, is none other than American liberals...
...The point about upward mobility is more complicated, but it is true that conservatives do offer some solutions to the problem of eliminating poverty, however wrong-headed or incomplete one may think them (repealing the minimum wage, say, or destroying antiblack discrimination in certain labor unions), while the Left seems both confused and fatigued nearly to the point of impasse on the problem of poverty...
...Robespierre was a serious enemy to those who felt comfortable in an established place...
...Directly linked with Buckley's antistatism are the many claims, scattered throughout his journalism, that American conservatives are libertarian...
...Not necessarily those one might think...
...To anyone with even the foggiest notion of the civil rights movement, the differences between Powell and Rustin are staggeringly great...
...the metaphoric quality of his thinking, often involuted beyond the point of subtlety, does not come across well on either television or the lecture platform...
...With William F. Buckley, Jr...
...William A. Rusher, the publisher of National Review, used to appear on television a good deal, but, though his ideas and sentiments are in every essential way similar to Buckley's, Rusher commands none of Buckley's dashing verbal sword play...
...Buckley had earlier had some ugly television encounters with Vidal, and informed ABC he would rather not go on television with him again...
...1965...
...and faster than you can say egregious contradiction— he is Gore Vidal the fighting liberal, the enemy of censorship and pollution, the advocate of population control, one of the leaders of the People's party, a living tie with Eleanor Roosevelt, which is to say with the most humane strain of the New Deal...
...Peregrine JOSEPH EPSTEIN Worsthorne, an English political writer who is a self-avowed Tory...
...So often we find conservatives Agnew...
...James Jackson Kilpatrick, a Southern journalist who is another conservative of the Buckleyite persuasion, appears on television a goodly amount, but with nothing like the same effect as Buckley...
...William F. Buckley, Jr., Abbie Hoffman, and Eldridge Cleaver, all of whom rose to fame during this period, shared one quality: for a time at least, none of them was boring...
...The celebrity intellectual is a creation of fairly recent times—a creation, specifically, of the television talk shows, of the interview as a staple of magazine publishing, and above all of the national concern with stylishness as a value esteemed for itself...
...Rusher seems more of a garrotte man...
...But repealing the minimum wage seems every bit as likely to have the ultimate effect instead of reducing the wages of many of their parents...
...was in some not from vulgarity to vulgarity, oversimplifying altogether indirect way responsible for the issues, distorting history, questioning modeath of Robert F. Kennedy...
...No one, surely, can accuse National Review of not having a consistent tone...
...As long ago as 1959, Whittaker Chambers, who thought himself not a conservative but a straight-out counterrevolutionary, and toward whom Buckley felt a devotion almost filial in its intensity, remarked of the Senator: "You cannot defend a man who was, basically, not defensible...
...the aged died in neglect and loneliness while the idealistic young declared that the universities were totalitarian institutions...
...Given these standards, Buckley wonderfully fills the bill...
...At one point in Cruising Speed he concedes that he does not "spend much time on conscious introspection," and this can hardly come as astonishing news, for there is scarcely time for that in so strenuous a schedule...
...For the most part, the exercise comes to little more than a chasing of nuts back into the nut house...
...and in the things I read I find no feeling for humanity...
...The Senator, in my opinion, did the Right more mischief than he ever did the Left...
...Because such criteria ruled supreme over the past decade, the sixties, which started out leftward, ended up wayward...
...David Frye, a television performer who specializes in mimicking political figures, has in his repertoire, along with a Lyndon Johnson, a Richard Nixon, a Hubert Humphrey, a Nelson Rockefeller, and a George Wallace, an impeccable Bill Buckley impression...
...Not, of course, that Buckley is alone as a celebrity intellectual in America...
...g., me—is mortal to civil society...
...Something deeper than a regard for decent manners was violated that evening...
...They also regularly run the light verse of a man (a woman...
...His sense of comedy rode triumphantly through a process which turns most men into sodden lumps...
...What is his act...
...Does he wish to dismantle all the accomplishments of the New Deal, or does he instead merely oppose any further extension of them...
...The question arises whether, since the Federalist, and excepting only such occasional, isolated figures as Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, or Albert Jay Nock, there has ever really been a strong strain of conservative thought in America...
...As a Smithite, his program aside as Buckley conveniently does Dr...
...Never condescending to being a regular guy, nor one to poor-mouth in any way, he is, irretrievably, young (though now slightly aging) Lord Buckley, and the folks seem to eat it up...
...Which folks...
...As a public performer Mailer is quite wretched, a point about which he appears to suffer a large stretch of self-deception...
...Celebrated not in the sense of being honored or held up for public acclaim but in the balder sense of being the best known...
...No one, meanwhile, either on the Left or the Right, seems excessively concerned about protecting the civil liberties of alleged gangsters...
...That night the dialogue in America reached its splendid culmination...
...There have always been, and still are, plenty of Americans, particularly in New England and the South, who do have aristocratic yearnings, who deplore, on social and even intellectual grounds, the open society...
...Plimpton's celebrity has been acquired through his own tireless pursuit of other celebrities—in sports, show business, culture—and his career demonstrates that celebrity, like VD, is a communicable thing, to be had by certain kinds of touching...
...Buckley concludes these less than satisfactory notes by remarking of conservatism in America: "The freeway remains large, large enough to accommodate very different players with highly different prejudices and techniques...
...The cost of doing so has become prohibitive, and we have to announce that from now on we will not return any manuscript unless it comes with a stamped self-addressed envelope...
...Tun EDITORS 614 nothing like low company to bring out the high style...
...imposes special burdens on the conservatives...
...Why, for example, should we leave it to the Liberals to give tongue against the frightening developments in wire-tapping—though that is much too crude a term for the refinements which science is introducing in this practice which the Right has even more reason to fear than the Left...
...606 What purpose can National Review possibly fulfill...
...The price is that as long as he and his ideas are preeminently identified with American conservatism, a more serious conservatism—one that respects the traditions and values of the past and combines this respect with decency and a genuine regard for reform of a kind that amounts to more than merely setting back the clock—has little chance of gaining a hearing in America...
...Thus he writes: "There is a view, and I share it, that in Mr...
...He apparently never underwent a leftist phase, beginning in idealism and utopian hope, gradually adjusting his views of human nature and institutions, mellowing through experience, and growing more conservative with age...
...to dissatisfy an audience that asks the meaning of conservatism...
...As Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and their sons were once America's Favorite Family, as Lassie was once America's Favorite Dog, so Buckley has become America's Favorite Conservative...
...Buckley's constituency would seem to be comprised of the following elements: those who share his faith in free enterprise or in the need for a continued Cold War posture...
...At the end of his interview, Paar said to him: "I think you're sincere in what you believe...
...it seems entirely based on his name appearing atop the masthead of the Paris Review...
...the Kennedys and the Buckleys have had the energy and the cash to do the same...
...How, in other words, did Buckley come by his celebrity...
...Ideally, in the dialogue every shade of opinion short of madness has a right to a hearing, and, though cacaphony might for a time appear to rule, a symphonic blending of ideas and opinions JOSEPH EPSTEIN will emerge, providing sweet background music as we ascend the stairway to truth...
...it need not exclude people who are nonreligious, though its philosophical roots seem to be planted in a religious view of man...
...1959) Buckley wrote of Truman: "I sat in Rub your eyes and consider those two sen-the spring of 1958 before the television tences a moment longer...
...Eleanor Roosevelt once compared McCarthy to Hitler...
...what hat is American conservatism, as Buckley understands it...
...Let's not call names...
...He can be entertaining, no question about that, but at a price...
...Far from being accounted appalling for its pretentiousness, for most people the phenomenon is appealing and indeed even assuring...
...McCarthy, it must by now be obvious, was a tremendous selfpromoter, whose principal skill lay in manipulating the press, whose principal effect was to bring suffering to a much greater number of people than deserved it, and whose decline came principally because, like most hustlers, he had inevitably overreached himself...
...and a furiously reactionary antiliberalismall indelicately cooked and served up with very little garnish...
...King's discovery of the transcendent rights of the individual conscience is the kind of thing that killed Jim Crow all right...
...What the evidence does unmistakably show, however, is Buckley's unrelieved absence of sympathy with black aspirations, even in their most respectable form...
...The overall Buckley strategy, then, is to oppose any extension of government into such areas of national concern as welfare, housing, wage control, etc., while reserving the right to detest (to "cherish" resentments) those incursions government has already made without pressing unduly for the destruction of the most popular among them— social security, the enforcement of safe working conditions, pure food and drug standards, and so on...
...and finally Buckley's own very genuine, if somewhat special, talent...
...Yet so often those who claim the word conservative are not followers of Burke but of Adam Smith...
...Sane he is, but sanity is not quite the same as political wisdom, and, as Buckley would be the first to concede, his ideas on fundamental questions have undergone no serious alteration...
...The symbiosis may yet be a general consensus on the proper balance between freedom, order, and tradition...
...Truman, with the saying what he seems to be saying—that zest he had for that kind of thing, cavorting Martin Luther King, Jr...
...a particular conception, essentially liberal in its origins, of what constitutes political dialogue...
...So often you find not skeptiThroughout his writing Buckley sets him cism about rationalist reformers, but theself up as a man whose thought proceeds out prescription of laissez-faire not merely as aof a solid body of conservative principle, marvelously efficient economic device but aswith logic his constant companion, truth his a cure for the ills of society...
...E.g., "Robert F. Kennedy had a way of saying things loosely, and it may be that that is among the reasons why so many people invested so much idealism in him, it being in the idealistic [as distinguished from the analytic] mode to make large and good-sounding generalities, like the generality he spoke on April 5, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, two months exactly before his own assassination...
...He is essensciences transcended the laws of civil society...
...Buckley clearly prides himself on being a careful custodian of language and a man quick to point out the failure of the Left to make important distinctions, yet he can distort language and blur distinctions with the best of them, and especially has this been so in regard to civil rights...
...He would surely have recognized, unlike his American disciples, that the unifying liberal tradition in which the American system is rooted could all too easily be endangered by a conservative movement: that a conservative movement, in short, would be likely to have profoundly unconservative consequences...
...The evidence against Buckley is not blatant...
...So, too, the power of the labor unions, which he alwas Robert Kennedy, who not merely be-most invariably refers to as "the monopofriended King but refused to eschew his doc-listic labor unions...
...In the related area of civil rights, Buckley's record has been less than glorious...
...His intellectual work completely outshines his public performance...
...No, America has room for only one Favorite Conservative, and William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Exceedingly clubby, the magazine specializes in self-congratulation...
...The differences are now tonal, now substantive, but they do not appear to be choking each other off...
...Take, for example, Spiro ours are better, but an apocalyptic antiCommunism...
...With democracy, egalitarianism, and individualism the dominant traditions in the United States—"The American," as Tocqueville noted, "was born free without having to become so"—Worsthorne goes so far as to conclude that he believes that Edmund Burke, had he been born an American, would probably have been a liberal...
...It looked as though Buckley would play better with [Gore] Vidal than any of four or five other people...
...Kilpatrick's case, the casting has been all too predictable...
...Given a debate that chooses between Buckley and Eldridge Cleaver, some people might argue that there isn't much to 612 choose from, but as long as Cleaver offers up such guidelines for social reform as "take your guns and shoot judges and police," Buckley suddenly looks very good indeed...
...Cruising Speed offers an extended glimpse at the large joys and small sorrows of the quotidian concerns of America's Favorite Conservative...
...The tendency has been for the Right to remain silent about these violations, as perhaps the Left might, too, if it were people on the Right who had their homes bugged and their telephones tapped...
...Cruising Speed opens on the little domestic problem of entrapping the Buckley family dogs into the limousine for the trip from the Buckleys' home in Stamford, Connecticut, to their apartment in Manhattan...
...He is a celebrity intellectual...
...There is more than a modicum of truth to the notion...
...As an ABC executive put it: We knew we wanted Buckley because we were well familiar with him...
...If he is not going on about the "cancerousness" of our national architecture, he will accuse, as he has done on two different occasions, Buckley of being "a totalitarian of language" or Gore Vidal of being "a polluter of language"— nice points no doubt, but offered up as they were to talk-show audiences, points that had as much hope of hitting home as a reading of Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed over the public address system at half time of a Super Bowl game...
...The event may have been the making of Buckley's career as a celebrity intellectual...
...you get style aplenty, but it would be well to remember that in his case the style most emphatically ain't the message...
...Unlike the Kennedys, whose political roots were in the Democratic party, thus rendering the family in effect the People's aristocrats, the Buckley family, or at least William F., Jr., makes no concession to the bloody lower (or even the bloody middle) classes...
...president or senator in the family...
...Considering Buckley's mayoral campaign in New York, Michael Harrington wrote that Buckley emerged as "an urbane front man for the most primitive and vicious emotions in the land"—meaning, of course, that when all the rhetoric and delicate phrasing had been stripped away, Buckley's gut appeal in the campaign was directed tothose citizens of New York whose minds were dominated by fear, hatred, and an utter impatience with further attempts to improve the condition of the city's most poorly-off people...
...It isn't much, but there it trine of civil disobedience, killed by an act is, causing the Wall Street Journal (May 3, of civil disobedience...
...Why not...
...Agnew, Nixon found a high In recent years Buckley's conservatismdeposit of some of the best American ore has undergone some changes, the most use lying around: toughness, sincerity, decent-ful of which, from the conservative agitprop mindedness, decisiveness—much of what, point of view, have been partially ceded to after a fair amount of exposure, went into conservatism by the Left...
...When this caved in, the next strategy, again reflected in Buckley's journalism, has been apathy, where it hasn't been direct resistance to change, and in both cases accompanied by a quickness to point out rhetorical excesses on the part of black civil rights leaders...
...Intact is his utter inability to understand either the passion or the objective need for social justice...
...and what made it so unpleasant was not merely that one man had been supremely rude to another before an audience of millions of people--that, surely, was bad enough—but that he had been so because he didn't like his opinions...
...Rather like the Spanish Civil War for certain intellectuals of the Left, McCarthyism was evidently, if not a formative, then clearly a crucial experience for Buckley, and one he would return to again and again...
...Clearly, Buckley's is the case of a man keeping his ideological purity and his constituency, too...
...and he keeps right on doing it...
...Then suddenly—presto switcho...
...In other words, his hatred of Communism is greater than his hatred of the state...
...and concern about upward mobility...
...In his most ambitious effort at formulating a definition, "Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism," he remarks: "I have never failed...
...He has the essential attributes of the self-made millionaire: tremendous energy, considerable single-mindedness, and a near-total absence of self-doubt...
...But Vidal was ABC's choice, and Buckley, doubtless not wanting to lose an enormous audience, went along...
...The results were unmistakable: the mainstream of the civil rights movement all but crumbled and the Black Panthers became American mar tyrs...
...He is, however, a workaday journalist and a quondam politician, and these of his activities provide a much clearer sense of what his par 608 ticular brand of conservatism is about...
...But then American conservatives are very peculiar: they are in truth the real American radicals...
...In Up From Liberalism added...
...seems thin...
...The irony is that significant elements of the New Left, by acquiescing in the destruction of the highest values of democratic radicalism (belief in the central importance of the democratic process, hatred of violence, and ardent concern for bringing about an equality of material conditions), have practically driven William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Political and intellectual life took on the quality of a boutique, whose main design was the avoidance of boredom...
...Among people with his particular set of ideas, Buckley is apparently the only one fit for public (that is, television) consumption...
...Is he not tives, provoking base appetites...
...Excepting only the students, none of these groups comprises anything like an intellectual constituency...
...BUCKLEY: Now listen, you queer...
...But it is also the kind of JOSEPH EPSTEIN thing that killed Bobby Kennedy...
...or, in another issue, "C...
...But the problem was that Buckley really believed in McCarthy...
...Specifically, these burdens are three: defense of the democratic process...
...But the first represents social caution, the second vested interest, and neither, by any stretch of the political imagination, is worthy of the name of conservatism...
...Whatever function he may have served the collective psyche of Harlem, Powell was always something of an opportunist and toward the end of his 610 life a wholly irresponsible figure, while Rustin has been an insistent advocate of nonviolence, was the first to urge that the civil rights movement shift its priorities from protest to politics, and has gone on record as saying, "I reject the idea of working for the Negro as being impractical as well as immoral if one does that alone" (in Robert Penn Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro...
...Yet he also has been a hawk in Vietnam until quite late in the day, and remains a hard-liner in foreign policy, and so is willing to grant the state's need for manpower and large defense expenditures to maintain national security...
...And he would be perfectly correct— so long as one doesn't happen to be poor...
...There is, to begin with," Buckley wrote in 1966, "the preservation of liberty...
...Whether one agrees or disagrees with Harrington's appraisal—I, for one, agree with it —the fact is that Harrington is at least talking about the content of Buckley's campaign...
...We've discovered a way of getting blood out of a turnip...
...the redistribution of national income became a less absorbing subject than the effects of marijuana...
...Just having an experience has made him widely entertaining...
...Watching him on television, JOSEPH EPSTEIN one could scarcely avoid the uncomfortable feeling of sitting before the desk of a bank officer who had just foreclosed on your mortgage because you were one day late with your final payment...
...Buckley is, for example, antistatist, affirming that the state ought to stay out of people's lives as much as possible—"this side of anarchy," as he has put it...
...King...
...to it...
...Apart from the deliberate ignorance of historical evidence implicit in such an argument—the New Deal, after all, did not come about because of an abstract penchant for social experimentation, but precisely because Buckley's much-lauded free economy proved itself incapable of pulling the nation out of the dark hole of Depression in which, largely unregulated, it had plunged it in the first place —the consequences of Buckley's specific proposals for abolishing poverty seem calJOSEPH EPSTEIN culated at least as much to exacerbate poverty as to relieve it...
...But these frustrated yearnings are essentially those of a middle class attempting, somewhat guiltily and self-consciously, to escape from a dominating egalitarian background...
...The very word `conservatism' has a peculiarly un-American ring about it...
...William F. Buckley, Jr.—author and editor, lecturer and columnist, one-time mayoral candidate for New York City, and leading publicist for the body of thought that goes by the name of conservatism in America—is an intellectual of a very special kind...
...Paar supposedly received hundreds of telegrams protesting his rudeness to Buckley...
...He really comes across best on television, although he can also be a smooth performer in prose, when he is not straining for baroque effects...
...The style, it used to be said with some confidence—by, among others, Dwight Macdonald— is the message, meaning that the way something is said is every bit as important as what is being said...
...For a brief period during and after the Kennedy years, John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...
...But what of Buckley's celebrity...
...Such recent article titles as "Can We Do Without the Poor...
...True, the New World has a tradition to conserve— but it is an overwhelmingly liberal tradition...
...Apparently he does not understand it all that clearly, or if he does he is unable to bring to his understanding the same concision he brings to his notion of liberalism...
...Finally, there is something inherently fascinating about his very performance, his tics, his mannerisms, his diction, his high academic style—all placed in the service of views that are mainly difficult to distinguish from those of Spiro Agnew...
...Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Kennedys, the Buckleys, Irishmen all, all have been possessed by deep aristocratic yearnings...
...Buckley did not always receive such high marks...
...To Worsthorne, these "profoundly unconservative consequences" would mean a hardening of class lines, with a privileged business class on top and a coherent class of workers at the bottom rallied around a socialist party, which would destroy the partnership between capitalism, however mixed, and democracy, however imperfect, and eventually lead America to socialism...
...changing the titles on the masthead so that they read Absolute Editor, Ultimate Publisher, Penultimate Publisher, Presidium of Maximum Editors is considered a riotous joke...
...It was the belief in the dialogue, essentially, that Jack Paar trampled on so rudely, and it is the same belief that has given Buckley his place in American life...
...Be it breezy or drab, elegant or earnest, consistency of tone is what gives a magazine its character, and as such tone-consciousness in editorial ventures is a matter of no small importance...
...During his mayoral campaign in New York the charge was made time and again that Buckley was a racist, and in The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966), his account of that campaign, he argues time and again against the charge...
...Acquire enough cash, place your children in the right schools, and, who can say, you, too, may have a U.S...
...George Santayana, hardly a flaming radical, once said of William James: "He belonged to the left, which, as they say in Spain, is the side of the heart, as the right is that of the liver...
...There has also been much special pleading, "the business of America is business," that sort of thing...
...You only weaken your position when you do...
...tially an Adam Smith got up in Edmund But the implications extend further...
...Television has its own, even more vulgar notion of the dialogue...
...The same generally applies to due process, where the impatience of radicals has rendered both the campus representatives of Dow Chemical and the Jewish delicatessen owner in Harlem equally fair targets of vandalism and violence in the name of politics...
...In this connection, it is worth inquiring about how far Buckley would carry his antistatism...
...Dealing with the issues of the day and forged under the pressure of deadlines, they exhibit, so to say, his conservatism in action...
...Can Buckley be screen and beheld Mr...
...Buckley, however, having accrued a considerable stake in his opinion about McCarthy, never, as far as is known, altered his views...
...It is, by turns, crotchety (James Burnham), pompous (Russell Kirk), pretentious in its yearning to seem aristocratic (the prose of Buckley and various professors of classics at rural universities), and almost never unpredictable...
...Perhaps the most solid testimony to Buckley's arrival as a celebrity intellectual is that a large portion of his most recent book, Cruising Speed (1971), a journal covering a week in its author's hectic life, was run in the New Yorker...
...King, wrote Buckley, was a martyr and a hero in one respect...
...Its notion is to get two people together in the same room who couldn't agree on anything, turn on the cameras, and hope that some fur will fly...
...The intellectual diet of National Review's early years was comprised almost exclusively of right-wing anti-Communism...
...Here he is on poverty: "To give to the poor because the poor cannot otherwise make do is one thing...
...H. Simonds is at his wittiest this week, and deserves to be anthologized...
...you weaken your future power to defend others...
...I say "glimpse" because things speed by very fast in so crowded a life, and there really isn't much time to concentrate on any single aspect of it...
...The acid test is Martin Luther King, Jr., and Buckley fails it miserably...
...But then Buckley has always been most successful as a counterpuncher, being of an almost wholly polemical intelligence, and least impressive as a theoretician...
...If Mailer's complicated earnestness turns audiences off, Gore Vidal's blithe irreverence turns them on...
...It was a very unpleasant moment...
...How different the style is from the message, and, make no mistake about it, it has been Buckley's style much more than his message that is responsible for his celebrity...
...Its role is more on the order of the feeder at the zoo, throwing the same bedraggled red meat into the cages of the cats that are its regular constituency...
...HOWARD K. sMrrx: Now let's not call names...
...Perhaps in this regard National Review is not much different from the liberal weeklies, only more sealed off, less capable of surprises, more crudely aggressive, and less serious...
...As we are a nation that has prospered and (except for the Civil War) maintained its equilibrium through the political instrument of compromise, it is perhaps not surprising that there has long been a belief in America that no two views are finally irreconcilable...
...A case, surely, of one's own thought always being more complicated than the other fellow's...
...migrant workers, Appalachians, and the urban poor lived the same miserable lives they had for as long as anyone could remember, but suddenly it was announced that middle-class women and homosexuals were the truly insulted and injured of America...
...It would have been interesting to discover how many votes he might have won if the main feature of his New York mayoral campaign had been the abolition of social security...
...This is exhibited in high relief in a slight piece Buckley published on October 7, 1969, entitled "A Memorial for Dr...
...He would reform the tax system, King's unflagging allegiance to nonviolence, delegate larger and larger shares of ecowhich from the beginning was at the center nomic activity to the private sector, remove of his moral authority, King, he implies, was the minimum wage, and above all bust up killed by an act of civil disobedience...
...Spelling out OEO to read "the Orifice of Economic Opportunists" passes for subtlety in National Review's pages...
...One could extend the list further...
...The empirical definition toward which he struggles turns out to be mainly negative...
...Not yet 30 when the first issue appeared on November 19, 1955, and though he had put up only $10,000 of the $290,000 raised to launch the venture, Buckley retained majority control and took up the dual titles of publisher and editor in chief...
...Strenuous as Buckley's days are, they are played out under a large fluffy cloud of cash...
...defense of due process...
...Then in Chicago, in the middle of a garbled discussion on Vietnam, the poison came oozing out of both men: vmAL: As far as I am concerned, the only crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself, fail ing that, I would only say that we can't have...
...On one or another talk show, Vidal's act involves coming on all aristocratic and elitist, thumbing his nose grandly at the emptiness of American culture, making clear that America is no longer a fit place for anyone even mildly civilized to live in but enjoyable only—and at that, in small doses—for its circus quality...
...Buckley has long seen McCarthy and the phenomenon of McCarthyism as a touchstone for what he has called "the liberal mania," by which he meant—and presumJOSEPH EPSTEIN ably still means—the whole range of liberal attitudes, beliefs, and strategies that he has spent the better part of his career combating...
...But then their idea of a witty cartoon is a drawing of two scientists at the National Research Council, one saying to the other: "Eureka...
...Robert Hutchins lent this belief intellectual status when hetermed it, with characteristic grandiosity, "the dialogue...
...He never comes out and asks that welfare be done away with, but merely maintains that it can be drastically cut back, liberally (conservatively...
...a recent example was on "LaughIn," when, in a blackout skit, a man asked a librarian how to find a book by William F. Buckley and was instructed to go down the stacks and turn radically to the right...
...Stop call ing me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face and you'll stay plastered SMITH: Gentlemen...
...The money is, as perhaps everyone knows, inherited, deriving from his father's oil interests, and, if Life is to be believed, since nurtured and made to continue multiplying by Buckley's older brother John's business acumen...
...Style has its uses, but they are scarcely all salutary...
...Italics man is interesting...
...Whittaker Chambers recognized this, and suggested to Buckley that the time had come for the Right "to examine and define with a special scrupulousness the civil liberties field...
...Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Henry Ford, the great American capitalists —men who transformed a continent, revolutionized the habits of other men, and had no great reverence for the past—hardly qualify as conservatives...
...George Plimpton is perhaps the purest type of celebrity intellectual because his hold on the status of being an intellectual at all is so very tenuous...
...Papadopoulos All the Way"—"Is Berlin Our European Taiwan...
...Fair enough...
...Of course, Buckley might well rejoin that, far from not caring about abolishing poverty, he cares very much indeed, and that is why he advocates the free economy...
...By the fall of 1955, Buckley, now established as a young man of opinions so stringent as to be unwelcome anywhere but among cranks, had raised sufficient money to begin "a new conservative weekly of opinion," the National Review...
...So often you only concern...
...Without feudalism, there was no straitjacket of caste or class, no rigid heritage of long-standing privilege to conserve...
...So sure-fire is Buckley's television performance that, when it came time to decide on how to cover the 1968 Republican Convention in Miami and the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the American Broadcasting Company hired Buckley as a commentator on both conventions and to play him off against a liberal commentator...
...To determine why this should be so it is necessary to inquire briefly into the THE POLITICS OF WILLIAM BUCKLEY nature of conservative thought in America as represented by Buckley in the 1970s...
...There are others, among them Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton...
...in Mr...
...To give to the poor merely because they are poorer than you is, by conservative standards, something you should do on your own behalf, not on your own and also your neighbors...
...That McCarthy was neither the devil nor Socrates but something quite distant from both never seems to have occurred to Buckley— not when the Senator was alive and kicking up dirt, nor even now when the dust has finally begun to clear...
...Not that inherited wealth ought to be used against Buckley— although it does have to figure in any estimate of his particular brand of politics—for the likelihood is surely great that, without inherited wealth, he would doubtless have turned up a very rich man anyhow...
...If the last ten years can be said to have taught any lesson whatever, surely it is that few things are more dangerous than to apply aesthetic criteria to political and intellectual matters...
...a man was penalized by contemptible treatment because of the views he held, and that, given the liberal atmosphere of America, was deemed intolerable...
...your belief that NR is full of readable copy troubles me most...
...Pencil in air, head thrown back to emphasize aristocratic nose, tongue flicking in and out lizardlike, upper-class accent punctuated by great pregnant pauses, the recognition of Frye's impression is also immediate and inevitably gets howls of laughter...
...It offers living proof that in America there is little that money can't buy, including breeding...
...The comparison with Tru-titled "The New Conservatism...
...is his name...
...That sentence comes not from an American and not from a radical but from Mr...
...Somewhere along the line, the American train jumped the main rail, and across its engine was emblazoned the word "STYLE...
...Everywhere predictable, nowhere questioning its own assumptions, always addressing its readers as certified true believers, it can scarcely be calculated either to bring in fresh converts or discuss issues from a serious conservative point of view...
...The entire enterprise is streaked through with a blatant undergraduate humor that is, to put it gently, unseemly coming from the middle-aged men who are its editors...
...But Buckley does not waste much time cherishing them in public these days...
...Quick—notify the tax department...
...Instead, half ideologue, half practical politician, he pecks away at existing government programs, everywhere insisting that "private arrangements" are best...
...Sirhan Sirhan's action in the kitchen of the When dealing with issues, as opposed to Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel...
...Intact is his hard-lining foreign policy...
...In others—one thinks of his celebration of civil disobedience—he was the spokesmen for a point of view on citizenship which in the opinion of somee...
...Conservatism in Europe came into being as a reaction to forces that threatened to do away with almost all aspects of social organization as it was then known...
...Chauffeurs, hired help to walk the dogs, country houses, comfortable city apartments, two-month respites in Switzerland, much time dictating in the back of limousines or aloft in airplanes —in so many areas of Buckley's life cash clears the way, cushioning the jars of crowded days...
...The wilder the opinions, the greater the divergency of points of view, the better—or, which is much the same thing, the higher the ratings...
...American conservatism is not, as Buckley and the other editors of National Review understand it, Ayn Rand's Objectivism...
...In 1954, in collaboration with his brotherinlaw, L. Brent Bozell, he published McCarthy and His Enemies, a book Dwight Macdonald, an early Buckley-watcher, described as "written in an elegantly academic style, replete with nice discriminations and pedantic hair-splittings, giving the general effect of a brief by Cadwallader, Wickersham, & Taft on behalf of a pickpocket arrested in a subway men's room...
...The problem is that Mailer's mind is too complicated...
...The politics of kicks, as Irving Howe has described the phenomenon of political discourse when drained of content and judged solely as aesthetic excitement, have never been kickier...
Vol. 19 • September 1972 • No. 4
