WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
Judis, John
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. The Consummate Conservative BY JOHN JUDIS 'Au great Biblical stories begin with Genesis,' Washington Post columnist George Will Jr. said at National Review's twenty-fifth...
...The ACC was therefore set up as a branch of what Liebman described in his memos as a "front" Organization, the Consejo Chileno Nor-teamericano (CCNA), run by Nena Ossa and based in Santiago...
...Last year, with the victory of Joint Conservative-Republican Party candidate AI D'Amato over incumbent Jacob Javits in the Senato-rial primary and D'Amato's subsequent victory over Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman, the conservatives had effectively captured the New York Republican Party for themselves...
...The small farmer and entrepreneur became a lesser v?ssal of the corporate lord...
...But he was also concerned, in social historian Stephen Birmingham's words, that they not grow up to be "effete Easterners...
...Formerly a class of thinkers and artists could flourish in the midst of general ignorance," Kirk wrote in 1954, "but now the mass-mind juke-box culture penetrates to every corner of the Western world, and the man of superior talents is ashamed of being different...
...was brought up in southwest Texas, the son of a small-town sheriff who had immigrated to the United States by way of Canadaand Ireland...
...In the same vein, Buckley simply dis-missed as "subterfuges" Mexico's and India's attempts at democratic government...
...representative on the Human Rights Committee...
...Buckley also pitched the magazine to a general intellectual audience rather than simply to the Right...
...Buckley's attitude toward the New Right illustrates what is most admirable and also what is most disconcerting about Buckley and the "Old Right...
...Let us bar him from teaching," Buckley proposed, "because he is inculcating values that the governing board at Yale considers to be against the public welfare...
...But the rise of corporate capitalism in the Twen-tieth Century threatened the Jeffersonian dream...
...Other National Review authors who em-barked on a regul?r round of visits to Chile in 1975 included F. Reid Buckley, William's younger brother...
...In the next year, the Pinochet regime was to murder, impi ison, or ex-ile about 100,000 Chileans—one out of every 100 Citizens...
...Before Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater, there was National Review, and before there was National Review, there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration' In a country that lacks a feudal tradition, William F. Buckley Jr...
...Lynch (1977): The Letelier killing may have been done by a "left-wing Chilean group intent on disrupting Chile's relations with the United States...
...Although Buckley Jr...
...Buckley also met James Burnham, a New York University philosophy professor and sometime CIA agent—one of a group of former Communists, Trotskyites, and fellow travelers who were moving into the conservative ranks...
...Richard Viguerie, a young Texan who came to New York in the early 1960s to learn fund-raising from Marvin Liebman, was deeply influenced later by his experience with the George Wallace campaigns...
...The focus on McCarthyism scared off some traditionalists, but overall it united the vying strains of conservatism...
...The question, as far as the white Community is concerned, is whether the Claims of civili-zation supersede those of universal suffrage...
...But unlike his National Review col-league William Rusher, Buckley has remained adamantly opposed to the New Right's political approach...
...When The American Mercury began pushing an openly anti-Semitic line, he resigned from its editorial board and refused to publish in National Review any authors who were still Willing to write for it...
...was growing up in Sharon, a frequent visitor to the Buckley home was the right-wing anarchist Albert Jay Nock, an elitist who be-lieved that a "remnant" set off from the "masses" was the only hope of keeping the flame of civilization afire...
...His goal was to defeat Lindsay^ even if that meant putting Beame in office...
...From all accounts, William Buckley Sr...
...There are echoes here of Oxford's John Henry Newman leading a band of British conservatives to Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century...
...The 1965 mayoral campaign also made Buckley a national celebrity, and ended whatever pretensions he had had of beconv ing a major conservative theorist like Kirk or Kendall...
...The department later paid him a lump sum to renounce his tenure and leave Yale...
...And Buckley made a similar point in ex-plaining his Conservative Party platform in 1965: "Conservatives know you can't do away with Skid Row," he said...
...And of course that results in a dance along a precipice...
...Even in his personality—at once haughty and friendly, arrogant and open—the American Southwest merges with Yale...
...His associate in these efforts has usually been Marvin Liebman, a former Communist who left the party in 1944 when Earl Browder was expelled...
...The discussions led to the formation of the American-Chilean Council (ACC), with Liebman as its head and Ossa, still National Review's Chilean correspondent, as its Santiago representative...
...Thus was born the politics of the New Right...
...After graduat-ing, Buckley recorded his convictions in the best-selling God and Man at Yale, taking up at one point the hypothetical case of John Smith, a socialist economist...
...Buckley vigorously opposed anti-Semitism, beginning in his College days when he refused an invitation to join Skull and Bones until his Jewish roommate, Thomas Guinzburg, was also invited...
...interest, as a Symbol ?f liberal betrayal...
...Offstage he is, says Harrington, "one of the most liberal persons I've met—not at all pompous or self-centered, and enjoyable to be with...
...One important group was the pre-World War I Socialists, led by Eugene V. Debs...
...In 1970, James Buckley realized the conservative dream by defeating incumbent Charles Goodell and taking his place in the U.S...
...He is not above patriotic appeals, but he was unwilling to exploit the Panama Canal treaty, which he believed to be in the U.S...
...through brother James, formerly U.S...
...The two of them then brought together former Freeman editors Kendall, Burnham, Meyer, Eastman, Russell Kirk, and Frank Chodorov...
...But while Buckley's conservative syn-thesis united much of the Right, it did alien-ate two significant groups...
...The notion that John Cham-berlain is bribable is a joke...
...Review's survival has been the ability of its wealthy owners—William Buckley and his sister Priscill?, who took over from Suzanne LaFollette as managing editor in 1959 after also serving briefly in the CIA—to attract wealthy contributors...
...He was a dogged nonconformist who cared little for political fashion or high society...
...Buckley applied Chambers's advice in the 1956 election, when he advocated the slogan, "I prefer Ike," rather than "I like Ike...
...I asked Buckley whether he didn't think this resembled a communist writer going off to write about East Germany at East German expense...
...In 1968, convinced that Ronald Reagan could not get the Republican nomination, Buckley mobilized the Right on behalf of Richard Nixon, who later appointed Buckley to the Advisory Commission of the United States Information Agency...
...It is instructive to compare Amnesty International's reports with National Review's: 1977 Report: "In short, during the pe-riod covered by this report (May 1976-June 1977), serious and systematic violations of human rights continued in Chile...
...Buckley (1980): "No American can say, with any sense of historical authority, what liberty he would now be enjoying if he had had a bout with Salvador Allende...
...When one New York publicist volunteered for a price to get his name regularly into the society pages, Buckley told him he would pay him to keep his name out of the papers...
...A sample of their views should suffice: Moss (1975): "Even if you could, it would probably be impossible to produce a democratic government in Chile at this stage with the guts, and the popul?r back-ing, to sustain the current program of economic reconstruction which is at last be-ginning to bring inflation under control...
...Buckley has remained faithful to a political philosophy...
...But some conservatives have tried to re-solve the dilemma by developing a new politics capable of attracting a majority...
...was an aggressive businessman who was at home in the gun-toting Southwest and in the speculative byways of Wall Street...
...But since the mid-1960s, he has de-voted more and more time to other journal-istic efforts—and to active involvement in politics...
...I find him a fascinating person," says socialist Michael Harrington, a Buckley sparring partner...
...Senate, a total unknown, won 120,000 votes in New York City alone...
...Theirs was the conservative European Catholicism of the Nineteenth Century theolo-gian Joseph DeMaistre and of Pope Pius IX, who in 1846 declared his utter contempt for the idea that "the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcilehimself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civi-lization...
...And on Franco's Spain, one correspon-dent wrote in a 1956 report, "General Franco's regime is inc?ntestably stable, and his prestige great...
...The second group that National Review alienated—and in this case, went out of its way to alienate—was the paranoid Old Right fringe, made up in the 1940s of rac-ists, quasi-fascists, and such anti-Semites as Father Coughlin, H.L...
...Buckley is fond of quoting a letter from Chambers: "Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms...
...For Meyer, Buckley, and the other National Review editors, demoeraey was merely a means to a higher social ideal—virtue, perhaps, or civilization...
...INSERVICE OF TERROR The Pinochet government paidfor National Review writers to visit and write about Chile At fifty-five, Buckley retains a certain boy-ish charm...
...Buckley also has had a knack for Spotting and encouraging new writers and editors...
...But it adhered none-theless to what Buckley regarded as a "fanatical" belief that anyone who in its eyes contributed to the growth of world communism was himself a communist, in-cluding President Eisenhower...
...Kendall...
...There is no way somebody who is not ideologically docile will get to East Germany...
...And demoeraey was reduced to the abstract exercise of the franchise, detached from the economic circumstances that would make votes count...
...A succession of political leaders—from Jackson to Lincoln to the two Roosevelts to Kennedy and Johnson—has updated and repack'aged the dream...
...But other editors, including Bozell, Kendali, Meyer, and Kirk, converted to Catholi-cism...
...As a celebrity and wit—impeccably dressed in dark blazer and lo?fers, head typically arched backwards like that of an aging preppy sardonically surveying the incoming freshmen—Buckley has bestowed on the Right a much needed panache, a dashing legitimacy...
...In the CIA, Buckley met E. Howard Hunt, who was his case officer during the year Buckley spent as a "covert agent" in Mexico...
...Its thesis was that "liberty and equality are in essence contradictory...
...The late Max Eastman, whose life spanned a transition from editing The Masses to being an editor of National Review and Reader's Digest, approached the same question from a different direction: "We have to make up our minds," he wrote in 1955, "if we are going to defend this free world against an bncreeping totalitarian State control, whether, in fact, our primary interest is in freedom from State control, or in an attempt at economic equality enforced by a Controlling State...
...From 1920 to 1929 and from 1939 to 1970, Americans of all classes en-joyed a constantly rising Standard of living...
...It has also fos-tered a certain pessimism...
...Under certain circumstances, dictator-ship is best," Buckley once admitted...
...Chile is the only country in postwar history about which it almost became possi-ble to say that they voted themselves into communism, and for that reason it was hugely important," said Buckley...
...He reads all the major arti-cles and meets with his sister Priscilla and articles editor Kevin Lynch to plan future issues...
...When he was at Yale, Buckley became the protege and friend of Willmoore Kendali, a professor who was then on his way to becoming the black sheep of Yale's political science department...
...Buckley himself (he says he paid for his own trips), and editor Jeffrey Hart...
...Buckley's articles cost the Birchers their respectability with conservatives," Richard Nixon later commented...
...They were tutored in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, mathematics, and grammar, and then sent off to exclusive boarding schools and to Yale, Vassar, and Smith...
...National Review'* editors had consistently opposed the Kennedy Administration's attempt in South America to encourage "third forces"—democratic reformers who could pose an alternative to the military dictators on the Right and the communists on the Left...
...Majority politics has remained firmly ensconced within this liberal tradition...
...This conservative stance is philosophi-cally consistent and fits the reality of modern corporate capitalism much better than competing liberal philosophies...
...According to one of the memos released in the subsequent Justice Department suit, Liebman believed that "it would not be de-sirable for the government of Chile to be represented in the United States by a regis-tered American lobbyist...
...Buckley received only 13.4 per cent of the vote—not enough to defeat Lindsay— but his campaign did put the Conservative Party on the political map...
...Meanwhile, after his graduation from Yale, Buckley began creating a public image for himself as a free-lance airthor who was also widely in demand for speaking engagements...
...Democracy is not workable in some na-tions at their present stage of development," he wrote in his influential bpok, Up from Liberalism...
...Liebman and Buckley met in 1953, when Liebman was working with the International Rescue Committee...
...Rothbard remains, to this day, suspi-cious of National Review's Cold War stance: "I'm convinced that the whole National Review is a CIA Operation," he says...
...Rusher says that the Reagan presidency has already pushed it up to 110,000...
...God-father to Hunt's children, Buckley would later come to Hunt's defense during the Watergate scandal...
...When Buckley was sent to boarding school at age ten...
...They lent lais-sez-faire capitalism a new legitimaey by framing it in the context of a world threat-ened by fascism and communism...
...He has allowed this theory to temper his own pessimism about conservatism's political fu-ture...
...Buckley's politics would deny the aspirations not only of most Americans, but of most people of the world, who during the Twentieth Century have demonstrated a growing impatience with the old inequalities of class...
...Richard Nixon's Quaker parentage sheds little light on his conduct of the war in Vietnam, and the New Deal commitments of Ronald Reagan's parents do little to ex-plain his budget cuts...
...Kendali, like Buckley's father, was a great admirer of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he defended against his campus detractors...
...it assumed that the upper classes would reproduce themselves (in Buckley's unsuccessful campaign in 1967 for the Yale Board of Trustees he made preferential admission of the sons of alumni one of his main campaign planks...
...And in a Statement ad-dressed to what was then the Belgian Congo's Colonel Mobutu, Buckley said, "Your people, sir, are not ready to rule themselves...
...caste, and colonial Status...
...But when Nixon faced Senator George McGovem in the fall, Buckley was back with his minimal preferences...
...In the 1950s, Burnham and Schlamm squared off on whether to support Eisenhower for President...
...he only waited two days before presentin'g the headmaster with a list of the school's short-comings...
...from the beginning of National Review, Buckley defined the point of unity between them as the defense of Mc-Carthyism and Opposition to communism...
...When William Jr...
...Hunt, and the post-H.L...
...Buckley also reiterated his past support for reimposing the Monroe Doctrine in the Caribbean—in other words, trying to top-ple Cuban President Fidel Castro—and proceeding toward equal rights in South Africa only as fast as "they could be achieved...
...His campaign characteristically avoided any emotional appeals to race or national origin, but his program nevertheless spoke to certain white ethnic resentments...
...The truth is that it does not matter what a great majority of the Mexican people think," Buckley told a Senate committee in 1919...
...Garry Wills was hired out of an Ohio seminary on the basis of one article—his first published one...
...Buckley still plays an important role in the magazine...
...It was an awful stench that came out of Chicago," Buckley wrote of the American Independent Party's Convention there in September 1976...
...Chambers was rephrasing, in more poetic language, the old Marxist distinc-tiori, first enunciated in The Communist Manifesto and later refined in Rosa Luxembourg's Reform and Revolution, between a minimal and maximal program...
...Kirk and the other traditionalists championed what British philosopher-politician Edmund Burke had called the "natural aristoeraey"—a capitalist rather than a feudal aristoeraey, an aristoeraey of ability, but an aristoeraey nonetheless...
...Buckley (1976): "My guess is that there is torture in Chile, and certainly suppres-sion of human rights...
...He has not tried to flavor it with appeals to whatever current issue inflames the most reactionary popul?r imagination...
...This Opposition was rein-forced by Watergate and by revelations that the United States had itself tried to under-mine the Allende government through CIA covert action...
...Certainly those Americans who wrote the laws governing licit political activity in Germany after Hitler understand what some people consider to be the imperatives of political re-education...
...Sooner than most, Burnham grasped the potential contradic-tion between America's global war against communism and America's espousal of democratic values...
...There is little doubt that Buckley became the most influential voice in this country legitimating the Chilean regime," says Larry Bims, the director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs...
...One editor, Max Eastman, refused eventually to stomach Buckley's equation of the struggle against communism with the struggle for God...
...for opinion soon finds its expression in action, and the fanatics whom we tolerated will not tolerate us when they have power...
...When Mexican revolutionaries nationalized Mexico's oil, Buckley organized the American Association of Mexico to lobby against recognition of the government of Alvaro Obregon...
...he also kept its fractious editors from destroying it...
...The magazine's leadership split over Mc-Carthyism, and board members Suzanne LaFollette and John Chamberlain aban-d?ned The Freeman to the libertarians who opposed the Senator and the Cold War...
...In October 1974, the Chilean ambassador called Buckley at the Suggestion of Nena Ossa, who had been National Review'* correspondent in Santiago and was close to the Pinochet regime...
...Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Buckley saw himself as an exception in American politics—a "radical conservative...
...But Buckley acknowledged afterwards that it had been a "vile campaign...
...They had argued that encouraging such politicians as Chile's Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei would eventually lead to communist takeovers, and they saw in Allende's election victory in 1970 a confirmation of their fears...
...The American Right of the 1950s was pulled in three different directions, aecord-ing to George Nash in his authoritative The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: In addition to the anti-Communist converts from the Left such as Burnham, traditionalists and free-market libertarians vied for center stage...
...In the mid-1970s, other conservatives, some of them former Democrats who had turned right in the late 1960s, began to de-velop a new economic theory—supply-side economics—that was designed to win popul?r support for conservative economics...
...The use of tcrture was widespread...
...Buckley and the conservatives that clus-tered around National Review in the 1950s understood that the expansion of private industry at home and of American capitalism abroad would prove incompatible with equality at home and demoeraey abroad...
...Moss's article was reprinted by the ACC...
...In the 1970s, the editors and contributors argued about publisher William Rusher's third-party proposals and about gay rights, the Panama Canal treaty, and the legalization of marijuana and Prostitution...
...In the pages of the Review, Buckley merged the competing and often discordant strains of the American Right into a powerful political force that led to the 1964 Presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater and to Reagan's rise from the General Electric Theater to the White House...
...Whenever Buckley was called upon to define conservatism in those years, he reached first for the McCarthy issue...
...The senior Buckley combined this conservative Catholicism and an Opposition to revolution with a fierce devotion—born of his own business experience—to laissez-faire individualism...
...My guess is that it has been less than systematic, that the Situation is getting better than worse...
...As editor of the Yale Daily News, he saw his job as trying to expose and combat professors who were teaching atheism and socialism in their classrooms...
...Mencken American Mercury, and showing up later as the Minutemen, John Birch Society, and White Citizens Councils...
...The problem lies not in the logic ?f Buckley conservatism but in its political fu-ture...
...Walter Cronkite and Henry Kissinger came to the celebration of National Review'% twenty-fifth anniversary, and Ronald Reagan (who planned to attend but lost track of the date) and John Kenneth Galbraith sent telegrams...
...But Buckley's attempt to legitimize the Chilean regime took his associate Marvin Liebman outside the law, and it involved National Review in serious questions of journalistic integrity...
...I told Buckley, 'If you hear of anybody who needs a young lawyer, let me know.' He said, 'How would you like to come to National Review?' and I asked him, 'As what?' since I couldn't imagine they needed a full-time lawyer, and he said, 'As the publisher.' He was offering to split up his own job with me...
...It jumped to 90,000 during the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, dropped slightly afterwards, in-creased during the Nixon Administration, dropped during Watergate, and was about 90,000 last fall...
...But during those years he played a leading role in shaping the American conservative movement and bringing it to political power...
...In September 1977 in Chile, about forty-five people, members of the banned Socialist Party, were arrested, electrically tortured, and hung from their prison bars...
...and the former Aloise Steiner, and those of their four sons and six daughters...
...Buckley backed Reagan in his 1976 primary campaign against President Gerald Ford...
...By 1960, it had risen to 30,000...
...The reality is that the only alternative to the Communist world empire is an American empire which will be, if not literally world-wide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control," he asserted...
...DANCE ALONG A PRECIPICE Realpolitik called and Buckley became a national celebrity Buckley learned his politics from Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, who learned theirs in their years on the Left...
...The certainty of their failure to win control of a demoeraey reinforced conservatives' disdain for demoeraey...
...But as befitting the non-WASP son of a self-made millionaire, his conservative ideal was not governed by caste, religion, or national origin...
...intelli-gence agent to draw on his former connec-tions in gathering damaging inform?tion on Letelier...
...One of his admirers—one who particularly liked McCarthy and His Enemies—was Willi Schlamm, an Austrian who had been Henry Luce's assistant at Time...
...The circumstances surrounding Liebman's exposure are still clouded, but one report links it to his attempt to monitor the case of Orlando Letelier, the former Allende official who became the head of the Transnational Institute of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C...
...In the United States, there was broad Opposition to the Pinochet regime, which had ended forty-one years of democratic rule in Chile...
...Buckley's objective was to take conservatism away from that group of bad guys and know-nothings and make it re-spectable...
...Senator from New York and now a high official in the State Department...
...But there is remark-able continuity between the beliefs of Buckley's parents, William Buckley Sr...
...When the coup occurred in 1973, National Review applauded it and subse-quently helped build support in the United States for Pinochet...
...I couldn't have accomplished that...
...He had them learn to ride and at one point imported several broncos from the West on which they could test their skills...
...Robert Moss, whose ear-Iier book, Chile's Marxist Experiment, was reported by The New York Times to have been financed by the CIA...
...While it has lost much of its plausibility, it retains its emotional hold...
...Buckley, in 1957, called on Franco to ensure the perpetuation of his regime by adopting some Symbols of legitimacy that "would almost surely not be democratic...
...through huridreds of Buckley proteges scattered among the upper reaches of the Government and the media, and through the Buckley family's wealth—estimated at $110 million when William Buckley Sr...
...They were terrible people...
...Burnham, along with Buckley's former Yale mentor Kendall and others on the "left" end of conservatism—Frank Meyer, Max Eastman—had been editors together at The Freeman, the latest incarnation of the Journal begun by the anarchist Nock in 1920...
...Schlamm originally thought of Buckley as a rieh, intelligent lightweight who would defer to his eiders' editorial judgment...
...After Reagan failed to win the Republican nomination, Buckley refused to abandon Ford (whom National Review termed a "Chamber of commerce conservative") in favor of third-party efforts...
...Even with Ronald Reagan's election, Buckley still retains vestiges of that pessimism: "At a popul?r level in 1980," he says, "something happened, the implications of which are still uncertain...
...National Review published its first issue on November 19,1955...
...became a lawyer, moved to Mexico, and made an early fortune in oil...
...The majority of Americans became wage earners without any hope of economic inde-pendence...
...We have to accept such inequalities as are presumed by, and result from, economic competition...
...Liebman was an expert fund raiser and by his own description a specialist in "agitprop...
...He can spot talent a mile away...
...Not everyone at The Freeman shared Burnham's enthusiasm for the Cold War...
...And he supports such rights as freedom of speech and assembly only so far as their exercise does not threaten the kind of government he deems best: a government that stays out of the free market at home and protects it abroad...
...Hart (1978): "It is very clear this is no to-talitarian Situation...
...Buckley was able to maintain the alle-giance of a diverse and internally divided group of writers and intellectuals, partly because his self-confidence and good humor allowed him to appreciate the different factions without being swept up in their rivalries, partly because he insisted that National Review promote rather than discourage public debate within the Right and among its editors...
...He presided over the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom, helped launch New York's Conservative Party, and put his imprint on a string of foreign policy lobbies, from the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Com-munist China to the United Nations, to the pro-Pinochet American-Chilean Council...
...Its promise—first enunicated in Thomas Jefferson's vision of a land of small independent producers—has been to achieve both liberty and equality...
...What are the assumptions that guide the use of that power...
...There were certain important consola-tions, though...
...The Pinochet government became the central human rights issue for Democratic liberals...
...through a syndicated column and the weekly television program Firing Line...
...The Society's founder, Robert Welch, had tried to dissociate the group from any anti*-Semitic Statements...
...I wanted to know if the Buckley of 1981 was substantially different in any way from the Buckley of the 1950s, so I read to him a 1954 Statement by Russell Kirk that I thought particularly brazen in its rejection of equality as a social goal: "That some men are richer than others, and that some are more educated than others," Kirk wrote in 1954, "is no more unjust in the great scheme of things than that some undeniably are handsomer or stronger or quicker or healthier than others...
...Buckley's son, Chris, organized "Youth Against McGovern...
...With Buckley, the vindication of the Pinochet regime seemed to have the same im-portance as the Spanish Civil War had with the Left...
...That is what conservatives must decide: how much to give in in order to survive at all...
...Buckley would often hire young writers sight unseen, simply on the basis of one arti-cle or even a letter...
...As a free-market libertarian...
...I feil in love with him," Liebman said...
...He believes economic and political inequality are natural and de-sirable...
...The sounds of radio and television were to them the death knell of Western culture...
...In the 1950s, Buckley and Liebman worked together on the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations, one of the most successful lobbies ever, the Committee for the Monroe Doctrine (conceived in Buckley's living room), and the American Committee for Aid to the Katanga Freedom Fighters (set up at a luncheon meeting of Liebman, Burnham, and Buckley...
...In 1964, Buckley threw his f?ll support behind Barry Goldwater...
...His inimitable speech pattern blends arch anglicisms with sudden infu-sions of slang...
...What Buckley dislikes most about the New Right he also dislikes about liberals, progressives, populists, and socialists: the appeal to demoeraey as both a means and an end of political life...
...I think it is a travesty of democracy to assume that a vote is a congenital birth-right...
...In 1980, Buckley became a reluctant convert to supply-side economics...
...Buckley's personal and political ties with Reagan go back to the early 1960s...
...In 1965, Buckley ran for mayor against incumbent John Lindsay and Democrat Abraham Beame...
...The Justice Department documents show that one National Review editor, Kevin Lynch, received money from the ACC, but they don't reveal the precise relationship between the Organization and the magazine...
...was born in 1925 after his parents had left the Southwest, he retains traces of mixed cowboy-patrician origins...
...And he encouraged Representative John Ashbrook's 1971 primary challenge to Nixon...
...Buckley transferred much of his oil business to Venezuela, where in 1936 a Standard Oil subsidiary would strike oil on land leased from Buckley's Pantepec Oil Corporation...
...Ronald Reagan's own political successes from 1966 through 1980 have stemmed from a combination of conservative pro-grams and a "liberal" politics that stressed social issues, populist appeals, and supply-side economics...
...In a series of articles from 1961 to 1965, National Review read the society out of the conservative movement...
...Beginning with the Spanish-American War, Americans could also pride themselves on exporting their dream to many countries that had even less freedom or prosperity than the United States...
...In his life and ideas, the senior Buckley anticipated the political and geographical polarities of later conservatism: Catholic traditionalism and laissez-faire capitalism, Sunbelt indivi-dualism and Yankee elitism—an ideologi-cal world held together by a fierce Opposition to anything smacking of socialism or communism...
...All the while National Review's corre-spondents and editors were vaunting Chile's progress under the Pinochet regime, Amnesty International was issuing yearly reports on human rights in Chile...
...The sobering answer is Yes—the white Community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...
...When LaFollette and Chamberlain talked with Schlamm about starting a new Journal, Schlamm, in turn, talked to Buckley...
...He moved with his wife to Bronxville, New York, and then to Sharon, Connecticut, where they raised their children...
...And some readers who rejected the magazine's political assumptions nevertheless read the political articles because they were brash, witty, and sardonic, like Buckley himself...
...But more important, before Buckley was thirty he created National Review, President Reagan's favorite magazine...
...His largest achievement has been the identification and development of young talent," said Neal Freeman, himself one of Buckley's instant discoveries...
...In a 1964 essay, which Buckley reprinted in his anthology of American Conservative Thought and which current National Review editors describe as their political mani-festo, Frank Meyer referred to demoeraey derisively as a "means of government which implies that what is morally right is what 50 per cent plus one think is right...
...The Party, modeled after New York's Liberal Party, intended to wrest the conservative vote from such Republican moderates as Nelson Rockefeiler, Charles Goodell, John Lindsay, and Jacob Javits...
...LIBERTY FOR SOME Buckley despises the populism of the New Right, the glorification ofmajority rule America has always been the ultimate liberal nation...
...Such conservatives as Lee Edwards or L. Frances Bouchey have even made careers of repre-senting such countries in the United States...
...RALLY 'ROUND He cheered McCarthy, jeereddemocracy, and gave thefractious Right a common cause At Yale, Buckley became a campus celeb-rity and the center of constant controversy...
...Buckley said he re-mained in f?ll agfeement with Kirk's Statement...
...But he infuriated some hard-line conservatives by approving Reagan's choice of Senator Richard Schweiker, who was then known as a "liberal," as his Vice Presiden-tial running mate...
...The traditionalists, led by the academic Russell Kirk, were appalled not only by the New Deal but by what Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset called "the revolt of the masses...
...Supply-side economics claimed to resolve the contradic-tion between liberty and equality...
...He knows that conservatives will continue to pay a political price for opposing the minimum wage or universal suffrage, but he refuses to re-pudiate his past Stands...
...who had been in government intelligence, joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1950 and convinced Buckley, who was graduating, to do so as well...
...Buckley's subsequent b?oks have consisted of collections of his columns, two Journals of his day-to-day activity, two books on sail-ing, and some fairly good spy novels...
...National Review became highbrow without being heavy...
...Neither Wills nor Bridges applied for a job...
...Democracy, to be successful, must be practiced by politically mature people among whom there is a consensus on the meaning of life within their society...
...The mass of people have not the ability to think clearly, and have not the knowledge on which to base convictions, or the public spirit to act on them...
...Liebman, acting in his capacity as Chile's representative, reportedly hired a former U.S...
...That is not correct," he re-plied...
...In the 1960s, the Rothbard-Buckley split would recur within Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom, this time over the issue of the Vietnam war...
...died in 1958 and now substantially greater—Bill Buckley exerts considerable power in America...
...Buckley (1978): "There are highly rea-sonable, indeed compelling grounds for doubting that Pinochet had anything to do with the assassination...
...race...
...Linda Bridges, currently the assistarit managing editor, was hired in 1969, while she was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, on the basis of a letter she wrote to Buckley's "Notes and Asides" column...
...I think roughly speaking that there are 30 to 40 per cent more voters than there ought to be," he re-plied...
...The distrust of what the National Review editors called the "open society" led to an attack on the ideal of demoeraey itself...
...By drumming such outfits as the Birch Society and The American Mercury out to the lunatic fringe, Buckley and the conservative movement were able to move into the American mainstream without having to face the usual charges of political ex-tremism...
...Buckley himself has been an energetic defender of foreign dictatorships since the early 1950s...
...And the political repression came to include not merely socialists and communists, but also Christian Democrats who were initially sympathetic to the coup...
...Buckley abandoned his study of Ortega y Gassett, to have been entitled Revolt Against the Masses, which he had been working on for years, and he signed a contract to do Firing Line on public televi-sion and to write a syndicated column...
...According to von Kuehnelt-Leddhin, classes, hierarchy, and inequality are necessary aecompaniments of free enterprise...
...Marvin Liebman, a Manhattan publicist and fund raiser who has worked closely with Buckley since 1953, summed up the achievement: "When Buckley started," Liebman said, "a lot of people on the Right had the reputation of being anti-Semites and fascists...
...They were accused of distribut-ing political pamphlets...
...Libertarian econo-mist Murray Rothbard, for one, broke openly with Buckley and National Review (to which he had frequently contributed ar-ticles) over the magazine's Opposition in 1959 to the invitation of Soviet Premier Ni-kita Khrushchev to the United States...
...1978Report: "During 1977-78, Amnesty International has received numerous torture testimonies...
...Buckley Sr...
...He concluded that it was necessary to create politics that combined "traditional conservatism" on economic issues with the Wallace campaign's Stands on such social issues as busing and its disdain for "pointy-headed bureaucrats" and the "Eastern establishment...
...Much of the ACC's activity from 1974 to 1979, when the Justice Department suit forced it to suspend Operations, consisted of planting favorable stories about Chile in the American press...
...Buckley's wife, Patricia, was a classmate of Nancy Davis Reagan at Smith College, and the Buckleys and Reagans have socialized frequently over the years...
...In our interview Buckley ad-mitted, however, that the Chilean government paid for National Review writers to visit and write about Chile...
...In one typical essay on "Catholic Liberais, Catho-lic Conservatives, and the Requirements of Unity," he differentiated liberals from conservatives entirely on the basis of how far they would go in rooting out communists in government...
...Many of the pundits, critics, and analysts of the Right—and the Left—got their Start at National Review— among them Garry Wills, George Will, novelists Joan Didion and Renata Adler, critics John Simon, Arlene Croce, and John Leonard, and economist and Treasury Department official Alan Reynolds...
...Its cultural coverage attracted readers who were re-pelled by its political analysis...
...Buckley took his stand against the John Birch Society on different grounds...
...His return came right after the demo-cratically elected Chilean government of socialist Salvador Allende was overthrown in a 1973 coup...
...William Buckley Sr...
...But one must also recognize what Buckley's philosophy and politics are all about: the rejection of social, economic, and political equality...
...He succeeded more than any person I've known in meeting his objec-tives...
...Offering little hope to the majority, whom Nock termed "the masses," in the 1950s and 1960s Buckley's beliefs could find support only among the more self-centered nouveaux riches and among alienated intel-lectuals who fancied themselves part of Nock's "remnant...
...But he resisted the arguments of some of his editors that it adopt a weighty tone and print long essays...
...For Buckley and National Review, Chile was also central...
...He even spied on some teachers for the FBI...
...Buckley proposed, for instance, that welfare not be granted unless someone had lived in New York City for a year—a proposal clearly aimed at stemming the Puerto Rican influx—and he opposed the creation of a ci-vilian police review board...
...Liebman therefore did not register as an agent of a foreign government, as required by U.S...
...Liberty meant the freedom of giant corporations to set prices and transfer Operations, while equality meant equal op-portunity within the American working class...
...Buckley recom-mended Liebman, and on October 29, Liebman, Ossa, and several Chilean officials met to discuss the possibility of Liebman lobbying on behalf of the Chilean government...
...Even William Rusher, who became National Review's publisher in 1957 and has become its second best known representa-tive, was hired by Buckley after the briefest acquaintance...
...Through National Review, which em-ploys three other Buckleys besides William...
...Nock advocated the Virtual dis-solution of the State...
...they saw any attempt to introduce State planning as a step toward totalitarianism...
...They resolved this dilemma on the side of the giant corporations and the struggle against communism...
...and that we only discredit the purity of the concern we ought to feel about torture by ideologizing it...
...In 1964, the Party's candidate for the U.S...
...how much to give up in order not to give up the basic principles...
...In traditional liberal thought as repre-sented, for instance, by John Stuart Mill, demoeraey was seen as both a means and an end: It was the way to achieve Optimum in-dividual development and it was the highest social expression of such development...
...John Judis is political editor of In These Times and a contributing editor of The ProgreSS?Ve...
...His defense was to form the basis for the book that Buckley and his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, wrote in 1954, McCarthy and His Enemies...
...Indeed, Buckley readily granted my re-quest for an interview, which took place in a walnut-paneled meeting room of the National Review Offices on East 35th Street, Manhattan...
...Buckley conceived the magazine as one directed to "opinion-makers" rather than the "masses...
...said at National Review's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration last December atNew York City' s Plaza Hotel...
...Rusher, a lawyer who had been the associate counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee for a year and a half, had lunch with Buckley to dis-cuss a possible job as a lawyer with the Buckley family oil business...
...The free-market libertarians were led by the Austrian economists Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Von Hayek, who found an eager disciple in University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman...
...the other has been the post-World War II conservatives, led by William F. Buckley Jr...
...In 1961, Buckley and Marvin Lieb-man met with two Manhattan lawyers, J. Daniel Mahoney and Kieran O'Doherty, to form the New York Conservative Party...
...I asked Buckley whether he still believed in limiting the franchise...
...His brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, who was still working closely with Buckley, ghosted Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative...
...He has to his credit im-portant achievements in many fields—for the most part achievements which, given the marked individualism, not to say anarchy, of the Spanish character, given also the ravages of the Civil War, would in my opinion have been impossible in the ab-sence of dictatorial power...
...comes as close as any American can to being a genuine conservative...
...It would allow conservatives to argue that an economic program designed to widen class and income divisions would, in the end, benefit all classes equally...
...Viguerie says that he had come out of a "traditional conservative viewpoint," but that he learned that "people weren't as con-cerned with these issues as we were...
...What Liebman was doing got back to the Justice Department, which began investigating ACC and discovered that it was, indeed, an official Chilean lobby...
...According to Buckley, the liberal would agree to "some kind of internal security machinery," but only the conservative would consent to hearings being held in which the accused communist or fellow traveler was not even informed of "the sources of accusation against him if there is any risk of exposing a counterintelligence Operation...
...He also remained opposed to a progressive income and inheritance tax, as well as to the minimum wage...
...Buckley was on Amnesty International's Advisory Board until he resigned in the fall of 1977 over the organization's Opposition to capital punishment...
...In 1952, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddhin, who would become National Review's European correspondent, published a book entitled Liberty or Equality...
...During Buckley's 1965 mayoral campaign, liberal columnist Murray Kempton wrote of him, "There are occasions when' Buckley tempts you to re-member Macauley's grudging compliment to Burke, which was that he generally chose his side like a fanatic and defended it like a philosopher...
...His efforts won him an appointment as a U.S...
...In a 1956 National Review essay on John Stuart Mill, Russell Kirk voiced their point of unity: "It is consummate folly," he asserted, "to tol-erate every variety of opinion on every top-ic out of devotion to an abstract liberty...
...Addressing itself to the demand for black voting rights in the South, National Review declared in a 1957 editorial, "The central question that emerges is whether the white Community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numeri-cally...
...After World War II, Buckley expanded his holdings internationally through the inge-nious use of his Consulting firm, which he called the Catawba Corporation...
...Liberais couldn't have either...
...But in this respect, probably the most interesting part of our discussion con-cerned Chile—a country whose fate has oc-cupied the same importance in Buckley's mind as the fate of Franco's Spain did in the 1950s...
...Letelier and an associate were murdered in 1976 in Washington by assassins who were even-tually linked by the Justice Department to Chile's secret police, the DINA...
...He raised his children to be members of the American ruling class...
...The first con-sisted of those Taft conservatives and free-market libertarians who opposed the national security State...
...It also fits the imperatives of Cold War foreign policy much better than do Wilsonian homilies about "making the world safe for demoeraey...
...Buckley simply called them up and offered them one...
...I think I would have had more freedom under Franco that I would have had under the Spanish Republic...
...National Review'?, renewal rate— the key figure for small magazines—is a high 70 to 75 per cent...
...It was a short step from this coneeption of demoeraey to the notion that in certain circumstances demoeraey was not necessar-ily the best form of government...
...Some members of the American Right have always enjoyed relations to anti-Communist dictatorships in such countries as Spain, Guatemala, Taiwan, and Argentina similar to the relations that American Communists have enjoyed to the Soviet Union, East Germany, or Cuba...
...But Buckley not only quickly established his hold over the magazine...
...Buckley's own stand on social issues is mixed: On abortion, his Catholicism dictates strong Opposition, but on marijuana, Prostitution, and gay rights his cosmopolitanism has won out...
...And Buckley clearly despises the New Right's populism—its appeal to anti-elitist sentiment, its demagoguery, and its glorification of direct majority rule through the initiative process...
...As an ideologue, young Buckley did not inherit his father's "America First" attitude or his reputed anti-Semitism, but when he entered Yale in 1946 as a twenty-one-year-old World War II veteran, he was a conservative Catholic, a Nockian elitist, an ardent defender of laissez-faire capitalism, and a fierce foe of revolution and communism...
...Hostility simmered between these schools of thought...
...If the worst-case sce-nario of the New Right is the fascist dema-gogue, the worst-case scenario of Buckley's politics remains Franco and Pinochet— military dictators in the service of virtue, civilization, and above all anti-communism...
...Somebody once asked me who should not vote, and I said the 30 per cent who don't know the existence of the United Nations...
...Both William and Aloise Buckley were Catholics, but their Catholicism was not of the immigrant populist strain that charac-terized much of the American church...
...They nominated Les-ter Maddox, the former governor of Georgia, whose distinction lies in his expressed preference for hitting a Negro over the head with an axe, rather than serve him a plate of fried chicken...
...In the first years of National Review, its editors and contributors made this argument not only in defense of McCarthyism, but also in defense of se'gregation and anti-communist dictatorships...
...In 1921, the Obregon government expelled Buckley...
...In 1954, Russell Kirk made the same point: "It is very easy to run with the pack and howl for the attainment of absolute equality," he said, "but that equality would be the death of human liveliness, and prob-ably the death of our economy...
...No small reason for National...
...COME WORK WITH ME He hired young writers sight unseen and watched his magazine flourish Political magazines, whether on the Left, Right, or Center, rarely live much longer than fireflies...
...There have been few dis-senters...
...delegate to the General Assembly of the United Nations— the U.S...
...Buckley resigned the post in 1971 to protest Nixon's "Keynesianism" and his opening to China...
...Senate...
...Without preaching, he opened myeyes...
...Young Bill Buckley inherited much of his father's character—his brash aggressive-ness and self-confidence, his willingness to sail against the winds...
...In 1957, when Rusher joined National Review, its circulation was 16,000...
...During its first years, National Review kept up a running battle with liberal theolo-gians and the new Pope, John XXIII, whose 1961 encyclical on behalf of the poor and unemployed, Mater et Magistra, elicited from Buckley an editorial entitled "Mater, si, Magistra, no...
...But Buckley's skill as chief editor is the most important reason for the magazine's survival and success...
...Liebman was also the fund raiser for Young Americans for Freedom, which was founded in 1960 at Buckley's Sharon estate, for the Conservative Party of New York, and for Buckley's 1965 mayoral campaign...
...The amb-bassador asked Buckley to recommend a public relations firm...
...In addition to numerous 'disappearances,' torture is still a systematic practice...
...1980 Report: "Between 1,500 and 2,000 people were arrested for political reasons during 1979 and at the beginning of 1980, mostly for participating in public and peace-ful demonstrations, still systematically for-bidden by the government...
...Several hun-dreds were arrested in their homes, at their places of work, or in public places, by members of the security forces who commionly took them to secret detention centers where they were interrogated and tortured or suf-fered other forms of ill-treatment and then released a few days later...
...In 1969, Liebman left for London to be-come a theatrical producer, but after several box office fiops, he returned to the United States to resume his public relations work...
...Buckley's own career was most affected, however, by his experiences in New York politics...
...CONNECTICUT COWBOY Grandson ofa sheriff, son ofan oil magnate, he was raised to take his place in the ruling class With some politicians and political thinkers, the last place to find the source of their current views is their family back-ground...
...Buckley's conservatism was, like theirs, hierarchical and authoritarian...
...He opposes majority rule and universal suffrage...
Vol. 45 • September 1981 • No. 9
