SAINT OF THE RADICAL RIGHT
Nossiter, Bernard D.
Books Saint of the Radical Right WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives by John B. Judis Simon & Schuster. 528 pp. $22.95. by Bernard D. Nossiter Arguing for George Bush in...
...by Bernard D. Nossiter Arguing for George Bush in The AtlanticJust before the election, William F. Buckley Jr...
...This is probably a pity...
...Other undergraduates who had read Burke could have told Buckley that destruction of academic inquiry and persecution for heresy undermine private property as well as democracy...
...The Securities and Exchange Commission caught him trying to bail out one of his bankrupt enterprises with the funds from another, publicly held...
...Next, Buckley and his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, prqduced an admiring account of Joseph R. McCarthy and his works, a book distinguished chiefly by its willingness to go beyond McCarthy...
...As it happens, Cavaco Silva is a member of the Social Democrats, a right-of-center party in Lisbon, and is himself so conservative that he is known as "Mr...
...A particularly ripe specimen, the Dartmouth Review, owes its ancestry to Buckley and his crony Jeffrey Hart, a Dartmouth teacher...
...The trouble is that this synthesis was achieved by much of corporate America after World War I, before Buckley was born...
...We knew where the radical Right stood and what it wanted...
...It regularly taunts blacks, homosexuals, and feminists, and has become a natural launching pad for Wall Street Journal editorial writers and aides in the Reagan White House...
...Buckley first came to public notice with his God and Man at Yale, a cry inspired by the successful loyalty-security inquisition of the day...
...An unconfined state need not respect property rights...
...His most ambitious claim asserts, "During the 1950s, Buckley and National Review had generated the conservative movement out of a synthesis of apocalyptical anti-communism and free-market capitalism...
...Yale's few Keynesians were described as atheist, relativist, collectivist, socialist—and the University's responsibility was to fire them at once...
...That was in 1965, a good twenty-three years before still another Yale man and fellow member of Skull and Bones, George Bush, effectively revived the technique...
...In time, Buckley may be recognized as the father of still another great idea...
...He said he had committed no fraud...
...This may be the case...
...Those who know Buckley say he is charming and kind to his friends of all perBernard D. Nossiter, a former correspondent of The Washington Post and The New York Times, is working on a study of the postwar U.S...
...suasions...
...The Wisconsin Senator, after all, simply sought to drive "communists" from government...
...Making a single target of godless communists, union leaders, immigrants, reformers, and teachers is an old game of the Chamber of Commerce, among others...
...made much of an interview he claimed he had with, of all people, the Portuguese Prime Minister...
...Early on, Buckley contended that liberals lacked patriotism, worried about the rights of criminals, and held to an exaggerated concern for black rights against cultured Southern whites...
...In his magisterial fashion, Buckley lumped the premier, Anibal Cavaco Silva, with "[John Kenneth] Galbraith and the leftist intelligentsia" who won't applaud Ronald Reagan's tax cuts for the rich, of whom Buckley is one...
...These things became New Yorker articles, even books...
...John B. Judis, Buckley's excellent biographer, understands this well despite a misleading subtitle that suggests Buckley has been a conservative...
...It is not easy to measure Buckley's contribution to American politics...
...Buckley and Bozell urged the liquidation of all who favored policies not in the national interest as defined by Buckley and Bozell...
...When he was true to himself, there was no civilized veneer...
...This banal incident illustrates Buckley's breathtakingly casual use of truth...
...By "truth," Buckley meant his own brand of theology and libertarian economics...
...I am inclined to believe that Buckley*s lasting achievement is the successful campaign theme of 1988—one that deserves a place alongside the "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" of 1840...
...In Buckley's one unsuccessful campaign for office—an attempt to destroy John Lindsay, another stylish Yale man—Buckley put the three elements together: Lindsay, he charged, was soft on reds, crooks, and blacks...
...As the sixth of nine children, William had to shout a little louder, offer even longer words to compel attention, play the feisty show-off to dazzle father Will at the dinner table...
...Truth is a commodity to promote Buckley, free-booting enterprise, and his deity...
...Buckley might deserve credit for spreading little National Reviews to Ivy campuses...
...At least William did not join in some of his siblings' more notorious pranks, burning a cross on the lawn of a Jewish resort or wrecking the church of an Episcopal minister who opposed isolationism...
...In fact, Buckley turned conservative only as he approached middle age, became a celebrity, and discovered his act was bound to have a limited run as long as it was confined to the hard Right...
...The paper has ridiculed the accent of former Dartmouth President Kemeny, a Hungarian Jew, and has compared another Jewish intellectual president, James Freedman, to Hitler...
...Buckley had to give back $1.4 million to the stockholders selected for shearing...
...Judis suggests that the key to Buckley lies in his large and self-regarding family, particularly his demanding father...
...Judis, a thoughtful left-of-center journalist-^he is a senior editor of In These Times and a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board—is scrupulously fair as a biographer, rarely venturing a judgment...
...Almost forgotten is his skillful linkage of taxes, welfare, and crime...
...Since his days as a student debater at Yale, Buckley has treated fact as malleable, something to be accommodated to his needs...
...In that 1965 campaign, Buckley proposed sending welfare recipients—"social derelicts"—to "rehabilitation centers," or concentration camps...
...He is not always so nice to his stockholders...
...Thatcher" in the Portuguese press...
...But these escapades may explain how a grown-up William could regard Hitler as no worse than the Stalinist rulers of East Germany, and so defend Reagan's visit to the Nazi cemetery at Bitburg...
...He runs a television program that displays his agreeable smile and a remarkable, synthetic pseudo-British accent...
...Will Buckley was an entrepreneurial swashbuckler who seems to have done well in Mexican oil until his properties were expropriated...
...His last book, "The Global Struggle for More," has just been published in paperback by Harper & Row...
...Buckley is now too much part of the respectable order to repeat the excesses of his middle and earlier years...
...He is quick at coining multisyllabic pe-joratives—perhaps the greatest master of this particular art form since Westbrook Pegler...
...How he recovered and enhanced the family fortune is one of the few points that Judis's thorough work leaves unexplored...
...In time, Buckley was celebrated for the usual thing, being celebrated...
...The book was a bright undergraduate's attack on academic freedom, urging that professors at Yale must teach truth as defined by the richer alumni and abandon belief in open inquiry...
...From then on, Buckley eased into self-generated gossip columns about himself, his boats, his wine, his Bach, his indoor swimming pool, his stretch limousine...
...That was more or less the philosophical high point...
...economy...
...God and Man at Yale assured Buckley of national celebrity...
...The enterprise system rests on contract, which depends on a lawful and orderly state...
...This, of course, is the stance not of a conservative but of a radical, someone who willingly tears up the roots of an orderly society for private gain...
...With his rich and fashionable wife, his wide acquaintanceship in politics, show business, and the media, his money and his estate, Buckley has been a hero to thousands of ambitious young men in the provinces who have discovered that embracing the Right is a far better route to advancement these days than Balzac's Madame de Bargeton or a nonexistent Left...
...It was a piece of authentic radical authoritarianism...
...He launched a magazine, National Review, that is frequently less turgid and sometimes wittier than much of the matter on the Right...
Vol. 53 • January 1989 • No. 1
