Bill Buckley Without a Cause

...When someone suggested that he take a course in metaphysics, Bill rejected the idea...

...The media took aliking to Buckley, and he to them...

...Buckley did not even vote for Dwight D. Eisenhower, claiming he was insufficiently conservative...

...He did not see college as a place to broaden his horizons...

...In fact, as the '60s progressed, Buckley moved closer to the political center in almost every way...

...The conservative movement was gaining strength in America, with Buckley as its new philosopher-king...

...It was based, Buchanan continued, on "a militant but intelligent anti-Communism—the recognition that in Lenin's party...

...The campus erupted...

...He became a proficient pianist...

...Buchanan recalled the exact moment he picked up his first copy at a newsstand in 1960...

...By the 1980s, his commentary seemed shallow and stale...

...Aside from the ever-present Communist threat, his days of monolithic thinking were over...

...By the end of this fine biography, Bill Buckley appears as a celebrity without a cause...

...Like the old Republican Right, the editors opposed the "containment" of Communism in favor of "liberation," and strongly supported breaking diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union after its suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956...

...Another time, the children did some late-night damage to the minister's office at the local Episcopal church...

...Then he lapsed back into unconsciousness...

...Bundy's piece was savage, describing Buckley as a "twisted and ignorant young man" who wished to impose his Catholicism on the university...

...He learned to speak in public...

...In addition, "the principal Right-wing organizations were anti-Semitic and neoisolationist throwbacks to the thirties and forties like Gerald L. K. Smith's Nationalist Christian Crusade...

...William F. Buckley Jr.'s father, Will Buckley, had already made a fortune in the oil business by the time his sixth child, and namesake, was born in 1925...

...Like his father, Buckley appeared to identify blacks with backwardness and disorder...

...Near the end of his life, Will suffered a stroke that left him in a coma...

...Since then, it's been Cruising Speed for Buckley, to borrow the title ofabookhe wrote in the 1970s justifying a celebrity lifestyle that seemed fuller to him than to those who remembered his early promise...

...At no time," he writes, "did the fortunes of the American Right appear as dim as they did in 1954...

...John Judis' biography of William F. Buckley Jr...

...And he quickly became the most outspoken proponent of his father's conservative views...

...The better approach he suggested, was to disenfranchise all uneducated voters, black as well as white, "thus living up to the spirit of the Constitution, and the letter of the Fifteenth Amendment...

...Griswold was so pleased with the essay that he distributed thousands of reprints to interested alumni...

...The sobering answer is Yes—the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...

...Buckley wanted to replace academic freedom with academic certainty, as determmed by the alumni of Yale...

...students chose sides...

...Buckley had always hoped to write the "great book" about conservative thought in America...

...According to Judis, the youngsters adored their father and sometimes aped his uglier traits...

...As a result, he accepted the segregationist argument that universal suffrage would have disastrous consequences for the "superior" white culture of the South...

...He had taken time out for the project on numerous occasions, but the words never came, and he wound up writing mystery novels instead...

...Soon he was hosting a weekly television show (Firing Line), writing a nationally syndicated column, working the big-time speaking circuit, and running, unsuccessfully, for Mayor of New York...

...Privately, writes Judis, "he had a low opinion of Goldwater's intelligence and his ability as a Presidential candidate...

...Subscriptions topped 50,000, with readers treated to articles by James Burnham, John Chamberlain, Whittaker Chambers, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Willi Schlamm, and Buckley himself...

...Before long, the National Review became a bible for budding conservatives like George Will, Pat Buchanan and Garry Wills...

...The Buckleys lived on a fine estate in western Connecticut known as Great Elm...

...Will's politics could charitably be described as reactionary—a crude mix of social Darwinism, devout Catholicism and fervent anti-Communism...

...In 1955, heembarked on "the boldest political and intellectual venture of his life...

...With a gift of $100,000 from his father, he began the National Review, amagazine of conservative opinion...

...The circulation of the National Review reached 90,000 by 1964, an increase of almost 100 per cent...

...Boy," said Will, "could those Jews write...

...But...

...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" Writing the biography of a living person is a risky business, at best...

...is a welcome exception...

...Here was stated, with style and grace, but especially with fire and wit, the political philosophy in which I, too, believed...

...On one occasion, when Bill Buckley was nine, his older brothers and sisters burned a cross on the lawn of a nearby Jewish resort...

...Although Buckley was primarily interested in the Cold War between East and West, his most controversial writings in the National Review concerned the growing struggle for civil rights at home...

...He starred on the debating team, joined Skull and Bones, the most prestigious secret society, and became chairman of the Yale Daily News...

...As a rule, books of this sort are done with a specific purpose in mind: to puff up a political candidate, for example, or to capitalize quickly on someone's 15 minutes in the sun...

...What made Bill different was his militant Catholicism...

...they belonged to the Establishment that Buckley hoped someday to subvert...

...had repudiated the Republican Right...

...Most Yalies were Protestants...

...Buckley hoped to change that perception...

...I unquestionably would have gone along if I had been permitted," Buckley recalled...

...is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically...

...It was Buckley versus JohnLindsay, Buckley versus SDS, Buckley versus Gore Vidal...

...Under his stewardship, the newspaper veered sharply to the Right...

...Instead, it had become an open market, where professors taught many different "truths" and students were trained to accept or reject them as they learned to think for themselves...

...you [will] have to learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views and try to express them in a way that [will] give as little offense as possible to your friends...

...He could still create an occasional stir—as when he advocated the mandatory tattooing of AIDS victims— but his writings lacked the insight and immediacy of competitors like George Will or Evans and Novak...

...Yale had been chosen for him by his father, who liked its conservatism and its proximity to Great Elm...

...There was never a time during the years I was at Yale when the paper was read so eagerly," a classmate recalled...

...So intense was young Buckley at prep school that Will sent him this letter to calm him down: "My dear Billy: ...Your mother and I like very much your attitude of having strong convictions and of not being too bashful to express them...

...He opened his eyes briefly, we are told, as his wife, Aloise, was reading aloud to him from the Old Testament...

...Enough was enough...

...Goldwater and Buckley agreed on virtually everything, from defense policy to anti-Communism to civil rights...

...To his thinking, Left-wing professors—he included Marxists, Keynesians, even Fair Dealers—should be fired...

...The "boycott" ended in 1964, with the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, a trueman of the Right whose recent best-seller, Conscience of a Conservative, had been ghosted by Brent Bozell...

...among them—Buckley was quite fond of the liberals he routinely insulted, including Max Lerner, John Kenneth Galbraith and Norman Mailer...

...The central question," he wrote, "is whether the white community...

...When asked, point blank, why he had not followed Will's example, young Buckley replied, "In my own experience, anti-Semitism is not a communicable disease...

...McCarthy had been discredited...

...His behavior in school and elsewhere was impeccable on that score...

...Four years later, the magazine—and Buckley—refused to endorse Richard M. Nixon on much the same grounds...

...To his credit, however, Billy Buckley did not become a Jew-hater...

...In an " editorial clarification," he admitted that disenfranchising uneducated blacks alone was a bad idea...

...People today identify him as a sharptongued, high-living controversialist...

...It did not sell very well—Joe McCarthy was nearly a lost cause by 1954—but it did serve to reinforce Buckley's image as the nation's leading young conservative intellectual...

...When a friend asked him what would happen if Goldwater were actually elected, Buckley replied, "That might beaserious problem...

...The passion was gone...

...That's all I need...

...The magazine's editors—or a majority of them—believed that Stalin's terror was the essence of Communism, not the aberrant behavior of one deranged man...

...Goldwater's debacle became the springboard for Buckley's success...

...This time Buckley retreated, but his "new" position was hardly better than the old...

...Furthermore, one gets the sense that this biography will stand up for a while, if only because its subject shows no signs of producing any more surprises in an already illustrious career...

...Eisenhower...

...I have God and my father," he replied...

...on November 4, not at the ashes of defeat, but at the well-planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future...

...Buckley's graduation did not end the dispute...

...The problem, wrote Buckley, was that the modern university no longer offered its students received truths to be cherished and defended...

...There was nothing within the pages of Bill Buckley's blue-bordered magazine with which I disagreed...

...Buckley's next book, McCarthy and His Enemies, was a "factual" defense of Wisconsin's Red-hunting junior Senator, coauthored with Brent Bozell, a Right-wing classmate from Yale...

...With an "enemies list" longer than Richard Nixon's, Will fretted about Reds, New Dealers, the Protestant establishment, and especially the Jews...

...In 1956, the National Review refused to endorse a candidate for President of the United States...

...That is unfortunate, says Judis, for Bill Buckley was once someone special—the leader "of an embattled minority, standing athwart history and yelling stop...

...God and Man became a minor best seller, in part because Buckley gave the publisher, Henry Regnery, $10,000 to advertise it nationwide...

...What Buckley ignored, naturally, was the spirit of democracy— a spirit that rejected the elitist tone of his remarks...

...Yale President Whitney Griswold was horrified by the book...

...His obsession with the last group was remarkable, to say the least...

...The story has not ended, after all, and the subject can still dramatically alter the course of his life...

...In one ugly episode, it attacked liberal faculty members by name for their perceived opposition to free enterprise and to militant anti-Communism...

...But he knew it wouldn't happen...

...For another, Buckley began to rethink and modify his position on a number of vital issues...

...the United States faced an implacable and mortal enemy who could In Coming Issues Barry Gewen on Barbara W. Tuchman's "The First Salute" Robert Lekachman on Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus' "Landslide: The Unmaking of a President" and Mark Hertsgaard's "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency Robert Gorham Davis on Philip Roth's "The Facts' Betty Falkenberg on Harold Brodkey's "Stories in on Almost Classical Mode" not be appeased...

...Bill was a good student at Yale, though hardly an inquisitive one...

...Conservative journalists and intellectuals were thrilled by the prospect of contributing to a "respectable" publication far removed from the paranoid, antiSemitic rags of the extreme Right...

...The results were impressive...

...the project took off...

...As Judis notes, Buckley's intense, polemical style was perfect for theconfrontationalmoodofthe'60s...

...Buckley's position was too much for Bozell and other editors, who quite correctly viewed it as a blatant violation of constitutional law...

...The National Review supported the Arizona Republican with great public enthusiasm, though Buckley had some doubts...

...They had no business undermining the values of the conservative student majority...

...Still, Buckley thrived in New Haven...

...When that failed, Griswold worked closely with McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard professor and Yale graduate, who was writing an essay about God and Man for the Saturday Review...

...His face is recognizable to millions, yet his influence, even in Ronald Reagan's America, is dimly perceived...

...Although all the Buckley children "followed the course of study their father set out for them," reports Judis, " Bill alone succeeded at mastering each part of the curriculum...

...the Democrats had recaptured Congress...

...Of course, as Judis reminds us, the competition for that honor was not very keen...

...Bill Buckley's "sainthood" was legitimately earned in the 1950s and '60s, when his accomplishments were legion, his influence unique...

...He had privately implored Buckley to withdraw it from publication...

...In the 1970s, Buckley supported both the Panama Canal Treaty and the movement to create a national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr...

...Judis, a well-known liberal journalist, has written a witty, detailed and, yes, objective account of America's "patron saint of the conservatives...

...Senator Robert ?.] Taft was dead...

...In 1968, National Review endorsed Nixon for President as the lesser of two evils, amovealmost unthinkable a decade before...

...Everyone agreed with Buchanan's first adjective—the philosophy was militant, to put it mildly...

...The children traveled widely, spoke several languages and studied music, literature and horsemanship from tutors on the grounds...

...Worst of all, perhaps, was Buckley's increasing isolation from the younger generation of conservatives, who seemed more interested in social issues like divorce, crime and abortion, than in the great geopolitical issues that had dominated his own formative years...

...Thus, they saw little difference between the brutal dictator and those who succeeded him in the Kremlin...

...Two years later, he finished God and Man at Yale, a withering critique of his college education—indeed, of college education in general...

...Unlike many others on the Right, Buckley refused to fool himself with the notion that Goldwater might actually win...

...My reaction," he said, "was not unlike that of John Keats On First Looking into Chapman's Homer...

...The whole point of the election, he told fellow conservatives, was to recruit new blood, " to infuse the conservative spirit in enough people to entitle us to look...

...Bill entered Yale in 1946, after a hitch in the Army at the end of World War II...

...To claim to be a Right-wing intellectual was to court ridicule...

...With few exceptions—Vidal and Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...In 1948, a poll of Yale students showed 88 per cent of them for Thomas Dewey, 4 per cent for Harry Truman, and the rest for thirdparty candidates like Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace...

...After pleading guilty in court, they were each fined $100...

...Much of this was theatrics...

...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers...

...few recall his role in reviving, shaping, and nurturing the conservative cause...

...These years brought disappointment as well...

...He was there, in fact, for the opposite purpose: to reinforce his firmly held beliefs...

...For one thing, the National Review strongly condemned the John Birch-type fringe groups that had plagued the American Right for years...

...Bill was his father's favorite...

...No holds barred...