CHAPTER 1
GROWING UP CONSERVATIVE
William Frank Buckley Jr. was born in New York City on November 24, 1925, the sixth of the ten children of William F. Buckley Sr., a strong-willed Texan and Irish Catholic, and Aloise Steiner Buckley, the devoutly Catholic daughter of a successful New Orleans business executive. After graduating from the University of Texas, the senior Buckley made and lost a fortune in the oil fields of Mexico and then regained it in Venezuela.
In search of financing for his business ventures, he moved his large family (and two Mexican nurses) to Paris and then to London in the late 1920s and early 1930s. All of which explains, at least in part, Bill Buckley’s unique accent. Until he was three, Billy Buckley was monolingual—in Spanish. His first formal schooling was in French. At five, he was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in England. In 1933, when he was seven, the Buckley family finally settled down in Sharon, Connecticut, where Will Buckley “went full-bore on implementing his pedagogical ideas.”1
“There was nothing complicated about Father’s theory of child-rearing,” wrote Aloise Buckley Heath, the oldest daughter. “He brought up his sons and daughters to be absolutely perfect.”2 The son who came closest to perfection was Billy Buckley, who strove from the earliest age to please his father.
Disdaining public education for his children, Will Buckley set up his own school at Great Elm—the family home—employing a small army of private tutors. There was professional instruction in apologetics, art, calligraphy, harmony, painting, piano, speech, and typing. There were tutors in French, Latin, Spanish, and English. There were two full-time teachers, tests, grades, class hours, and requirements for graduation. Several neighborhood children also attended the Buckley “school.”
What education did not occur in the classroom, writes Buckley biographer John B. Judis, took place at the dining table. The father made the children defend their intellectual and political positions. Will Buckley’s dinner-table examinations “encouraged a certain kind of performing intelligence among his children.” They succeeded or failed not simply by saying the right thing but by “saying it well—with wit and with style.”3 From a very early age, Billy Buckley did both. At six, according to his father, he wrote the king of England demanding that Britain pay her World War I debt.
The summers were near heaven for Billy and his siblings. They rode horses, swam in the pool, played golf or tennis, and sailed. This idyll was interrupted for forty-five minutes of piano practice every day except for the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas—and one’s birthday. There were five pianos and an organ in the house. “It was never absolutely clear,” Bill Buckley later wrote, “whether the sound was worse when all the pianos were being exercised jointly or when only one of them was being played.”4
In the mid-1930s, according to biographers Linda Bridges and John R. Coyne Jr., Will Buckley started taking his family to Camden, South Carolina, for part of the winter. He bought a house far out of town—so far that it was named Kamschatka, after the distant Siberian peninsula. “It was in Camden that the young Buckleys became acquainted with the Southern part of their heritage.”5 Most of that came from Aloise Buckley, who considered herself a “Daughter of the Confederacy.” Will Buckley was a Texan, not a southerner. His grandfather had emigrated from Ireland to Canada in the 1840s and then moved his family to San Diego, Texas, a small town only a hundred miles north of the Mexican border.
The dominant personality of the family was “Father”—Will Buckley, who loved America, trusted the free market, and hated Communism with equal passion. He detested Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. He did not try to mold his children into exact copies of himself, but saw to it that they were prepared, intellectually and morally, to make a difference in whatever profession they chose.
“He worshiped three earthly things,” Bill Buckley later wrote, “learning, beauty, and his family.” He was “the most admirable man I ever knew.”6 There was a special relationship between the father and his precocious son. Bill became “the apple of his father’s eye,” Jane Buckley Smith remarked. “Father loved us all,” Reid Buckley said, “he respected us for our various talents, but Bill combined the intellectual brilliance with the moral control.”7
The Buckleys were ardently Roman Catholic. While attending St. John’s Beaumont, a Catholic school in England run by Jesuits, young Bill went to mass every day, praying for the health of his mother, who was in the midst of a difficult pregnancy. He achieved a special reverence for “Our Lady” (Mary, the mother of God), who “became in my mind an indispensable character in the heavenly cloister.” He prayed the rosary daily for the rest of his life. It was at this time—he was thirteen—that Buckley developed what he called “a deep and permanent involvement in Catholic Christianity,” a statement critical to understanding his unfailing charity as an adult—except in the case of Gore Vidal and Lowell Weicker.8 When he was sixteen, he wrote his mother that probably the “greatest contribution you have given me is your faith. I can now rely on God in almost any matter.” Years later, in his one and only book about his faith, he wrote, “I was baptized a Catholic and reared as one by devoted parents whose emotional and intellectual energies never cloyed. My faith has not wavered.”9
At the same time, he did not hesitate to speak his mind to anyone. Within two days of his arrival at St. John’s, he called at the office of the school president, a distinguished scholar, and told him there were several things about the school he did not like. The president was so shocked by the young American’s boldness that he was “too paralyzed to speak,” affording Bill the opportunity to explain the deficiencies of the venerable school.10
IN THE ARMY AND AT YALE
At fourteen, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School, a small Protestant preparatory school in nearby New York where he boarded during the week. There Bill honed his writing and debating skills—often with the faculty. He once appeared uninvited at a faculty meeting to report that one of his teachers had deprived him of the right to express his political views in class. He proceeded to expound to the stunned faculty “on the virtues of isolationism, the dignity of the Catholic Church, and the political ignorance of the school staff.”11
In his last year at Millbrook, he began reading—at his father’s urging—the works of Albert Jay Nock, a radical libertarian who was a frequent luncheon guest at Great Elm. Born in 1870 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, author-editor Nock was a fiercely independent intellectual and severe critic of the state and of unbridled materialism. Ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1897, he served as pastor at several churches before leaving the clergy to take up a career in journalism. He was editor of American Magazine and then the Nation before becoming, in 1920, coeditor of the original Freeman, a magazine of politics and economics. When the Freeman stopped publishing for financial reasons, Nock became a freelance writer, writing pieces for a host of prominent publications and authoring several books. He penned biographies of his favorite thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson and Henry George, the leader of the “Single Tax” movement in the nineteenth century. Nock himself opposed progressive taxation.
Nock’s last and best-known book, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, was published in 1943, the year Buckley completed high school. In the years to come, Buckley would frequently quote from Nock’s Memoirs. In the book, Nock invents what he calls “Epstein’s Law” as an explanation of human activity: “Man tends always to satisfy his needs with the least possible exertion.” As a result, Nock holds out little hope for any effective political reform. Yet he expresses an almost mystical belief in a “Remnant” of elite writers and thinkers who will one day build a new and free society on the ruins of the modern welfare state (initiated by his least favorite president, Franklin Roosevelt). Memoirs resonates with the conviction that, like the ancient Hebrew prophet, modern-day Isaiahs will emerge to proclaim the truth about man, the state, and liberty.12
A number of leading figures of the postwar Right admired Nock, including Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, and Frank Chodorov. They were drawn by his cutting wit—he once wrote that dogs were “natural-born New Dealers,” content with whatever their masters gave them—and responded to his gospel of individual freedom.13 Bill Buckley also admired these traits, as well Nock’s passionate antistatism, his radical rhetoric, and his willingness to stick by his ideas regardless of whether they were out of step with the times. Buckley later admitted to publisher Henry Regnery that on several occasions he had made “a mental resolution” to do a book on Nock—”he has always fascinated me.”14
Albert Jay Nock—the ultimate individualist—was the first of four conservative writers who would have a profound influence on Bill Buckley. Notably, the man who became synonymous with the term conservative subtitled one collection of his articles and essays Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist.
When Buckley graduated from Millbrook in 1943 at the head of his class, he was only seventeen, and not eligible for the draft. Not wanting to start at Yale and then leave in the middle of the school year, he spent a few months at the University of Mexico improving his Spanish before he was inducted into the army in July 1944.
Will Buckley had adamantly opposed America’s entry into World War II, and his children shared his isolationist, America First views. But with Pearl Harbor, the patriotism of the Buckleys came to the fore, with John serving in the army in North Africa and France, and Jim in the navy in the Pacific.
Bill Buckley described his military service as “brief and bloodless,” but it was also a rite of passage for the outspoken young conservative.15 He did his basic training at Camp Wheeler, outside Macon, Georgia, and then in January 1945, at the age of nineteen, he entered the OCS (officers’ candidate school) at Fort Benning, Georgia. Although the physical regimen was very demanding, the brash young candidate found it more difficult to be properly deferential to his superiors—and to keep his political opinions to himself. “He was very vocal about his feelings about the Democrats in general and Roosevelt in particular,” recalled a friend.16 His outspokenness did not sit well with his commanders, trained as they were to keep politics and the military separate.
After graduating from OCS—following an extended debate by Buckley’s commanding officers, who at last decided to pass him—he spent the next months as an infantry training officer at Fort Gordon, Georgia. While there he was given a singular and ironic responsibility: he was assigned to the army honor guard that stood by when the body of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was carried to the train that would take him back to Washington, D.C. With the completion of his training, Buckley was sent to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio because of his Spanish proficiency to participate in counterintelligence activities, but he arrived the day the Japanese surrendered.
Although still not sufficiently deferential to his superiors—at least in their opinion—Bill Buckley did learn how to get along better with the men around him. In a mature letter of self-examination, he wrote to his father:
I don’t know whether you were aware of this while I was in Millbrook, but I was not very popular with boys…. I determined that the principal reasons for this revolved around my extreme dogmatism—particularly in matters concerning politics and the Catholic Church. I could not understand another point of view….
When I went into the Army, I learned the importance of tolerance, and the importance of a sense of proportion about all matters—even in regard to religion, morality etc…. I learned…that regardless of the individual’s dogmas, the most important thing as far as I was concerned was the personality: would his friendship broaden your horizon or provide you with intellectual entertainment? I found that there were actually very few prerequisites to the good friend: he had to have a good sense of humor, a pleasant personality and a certain number of common interests.17
Bill Buckley had learned, as biographer John Judis writes, to distinguish “the rules of personal friendship from those of political combat.”18 It was a critical lesson he would apply at Yale University and afterward.
At Yale, Buckley majored in economics, established himself as one of the best debaters in the university’s history, and was tapped by Skull and Bones, the prestigious secret society for seniors, making him one of the biggest men on campus. But his overriding ambition was to be chairman of the Yale Daily News. “I have never run across anything I wanted so much in all my life,” he wrote his father, “as the chairmanship of the News.”19 He would exhibit the same single-mindedness six years later when he determined that what America needed more than anything else was a conservative journal of opinion.
Following his unanimous election, Buckley began his year as chairman (editor-in-chief) of the newspaper on February 1, 1949. Pre-Buckley, the Yale Daily News had resembled most college papers, reporting the results of fraternity elections, the latest administration press releases, and the ups and downs of the football, basketball, and other athletic teams. But now the News sent reporters to New York and Washington to cover national stories while Chairman Bill editorialized about Yale’s educational flaws, the dangers of Communism, the virtues of capitalism, and the many mistakes of President Harry Truman. “There is no indication,” Buckley wrote, “that the majority of his backers have elevated Mr. Truman to the White House to lead the United States to socialism.”20 Elsewhere he encouraged the Young Republicans, who were holding a two-day convention nearby, to reassert “the principles of freedom of enterprise [and] anti-New Dealism.”21
Buckley editorialized often about the Soviet threat. He once asked, “Will Russia have too long to wait before she spurns [he surely meant ‘thumbs’] her nose at conference and diplomacy and invades Finland and Yugoslovia and maybe even Western Germany and France?”22 If the language seems overheated, note that in the preceding year there had been a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, Moscow had blockaded West Berlin, the Communist Party of France had become that nation’s largest political party, and Whittaker Chambers had named Alger Hiss as a Communist spy.
In another editorial, Buckley wondered why anybody would be shocked that spokesmen for the Communist Party of the United States had declared that in the event of war with Russia, American Communists would side with the Soviet Union. “We must here assert a well-known fact,” he wrote. “[T]he Communist Party of the United States is an agent of Soviet Russia.”23 And after defending pre-World War II isolationism as a “sane” policy, he noted that the “world division into two ideological camps” made such isolationism in 1949 “impossible.”24
When a reader challenged an editorial’s argument that Yale University had the right, as a private institution, to exclude any and all minorities, Buckley did not back down, anticipating conservative arguments of the 1960s about civil rights legislation. We believe, he wrote, that “discrimination of sorts [is] indispensable to the free society…. Human beings are equal only in the eyes of God.”25
In view of what was to come, it is significant that Bill Buckley’s collegiate editorials reflected the ideas of what would become the three major strains of American conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s—traditionalism, libertarianism, and anti-Communism.
He wrote pointed commentaries about “the godless materialism” whose advance threatened civilization, about liberal hypocrites who protested the appearance of musicians who had performed in Nazi Germany but overlooked the appearances of pro-Soviet musicians like Dmitri Shostakovich, and about the views of popular Yale sociologist Raymond Kennedy, who was fond of saying that religion was a “matter of ghosts, spirits, and emotions.”26
Anticipating a major theme of his first book, God and Man at Yale, Buckley wrote in the News that while Professor Kennedy was entitled to his own beliefs, he was not entitled to “undermin[e] religion through bawdy and slapstick humor, through circumspect allusions and emotive innuendos,” particularly among freshmen and sophomores.27 Buckley was quickly caught up in contention—in the 1940s, biographer Judis points out, students were expected to defer to their professors, not criticize them publicly. Among the irate letters to the editor was one from Professor Kennedy, who warned the twenty-three-year-old Buckley that his views would get him into trouble.28
Buckley shrugged off the warning from a liberal professor for whom he had little regard, but he was disturbed by the open discontent of several Daily News editors who called a meeting to discuss whether the chairman should submit his editorials to the whole board for approval. At the meeting, Buckley seized the offensive and called for a vote of confidence, discombobulating his colleagues, who decided not to force a vote. In a spirit of compromise, Buckley agreed to state that the editorials represented his personal views and to post for comment future editorials that might be considered controversial.29 He prevailed and learned a key lesson: editorial control of a newspaper, or a magazine, must rest with one person, not a board.
At the end of his term as News chairman, Buckley wrote a series of editorials titled “What to Do?” in which he called on Yale and other universities to defend free enterprise against the challenge of socialism—another theme of God and Man at Yale. He wrote:
The battle to retain free enterprise as the fundamental economic philosophy for America is being lost, and there are those of us who mind. The battle is even being lost at Yale…. We are losing the battle for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most influential is the spirit of restlessness, of iconoclasm, of pragmatism that is intellectually au courant and that is warmly embraced by so many evangelistic young intellectuals who find…their most enthusiastic disciples in the cloistered halls of a university, where everything goes in the name of the search for truth and freedom of inquiry.30
For Bill Buckley, the idea of “everything goes” was absurd and to be dismissed out of hand along with pragmatism and its sibling relativism, which were at the root of the restlessness that afflicted so many young intellectuals. The answer, philosophically, was a combination of conservatism, with its emphasis on order and custom, and libertarianism, with its belief in individual freedom. Buckley called on Yale and other colleges to establish “Adam Smith chairs of Political and Economic Philosophy” in which the adherents of free enterprise could present the arguments for the system that had made America the world’s most prosperous and freest nation.
In an editorial coda, Buckley pointed out that his views had been characterized as “reactionary, archaic, malicious and fascist” because, he said, he had “sallied against the stereotype liberalism which, paradoxically enough, has prescribed rigid limits to tolerable opinion in mid-twentieth-century America.” But then, in a quick shift in tone, he admitted that “some of what we got we deserved” because of “the compelling urge to jolt, to ridicule, to pound square on the nose.” “We deeply bemoan our inability,” he sighed, “to allure without antagonizing, to seduce without violating. Especially because we believe in what we preached and would have liked very much for our vision to have been contagious.”
Eschewing bathos—”it does not become us”—he concluded his chairman days with an impudent flourish: “Suffice to say that we enjoyed it all and that we hope for a Republican victory in November.”31
For all the protests Chairman Bill sparked, he did win admirers. Commented longtime professor Paul Weiss, “There was never a time during the years I was at Yale when the paper was read so eagerly.”32 Dean William C. DeVane agreed, congratulating Buckley for “making the News the most lively college newspaper in the country, past or present.”33
BMOC
Buckley found other fields to conquer in college. With his roommate and future brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., he formed one of the best debate teams in Yale history, according to debate coach Rollin Osterweis. The teammates were alike in political philosophy but dissimilar in personality and style. The rangy, red-haired Bozell offered eloquent prepared statements while Buckley engaged in “the cut-and-thrust that Firing Line viewers would come to know so well.”34 “They were extremely effective and dedicated,” commented Alan Finberg, president of the Political Union, “and [it] struck some of us as rather unusual that people of their relatively young years could be so fiercely ideological. Many of us wished that we could be as certain about anything as they were about everything.”35
A memorable debate occurred in the fall of 1949 when Oxford University sent over to the colonies a topflight team of Robin Day, a future celebrated journalist, and Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, who would become a leading Labour member of Parliament. Day and Wedgwood-Benn easily swept the American field until they arrived at Yale and encountered Buckley and Bozell. To the amazement of the visiting Brits, the Yale men followed an English style of debate, relying more on wit and eloquence than the usual recitation of facts and figures common to American debaters. Taking the negative side of the topic, “Resolved: the Americans should nationalize all their non-agricultural industries,” Buckley and Bozell routed the Oxford team.36 With his debating as with his writing, Bill Buckley was perfecting his ability to convince and at the same time entertain an audience.
Buckley also found time for classes. He encountered a professor, political scientist Willmoore Kendall, who would join Albert Jay Nock as an early critical influence on his political thinking.
Kendall was born in Konowa, Oklahoma, in 1909, the son of a blind Methodist minister. He was a child prodigy who read at the age of two, and graduated from high school at thirteen and the University of Oklahoma at eighteen. He became a Rhodes scholar in 1932, spending the next four years at Oxford and in Europe, where he became sympathetic to Trotskyism. But a stint as a reporter in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War—and his witness of the Communists’ deliberate murder of anyone, including newsboys, who opposed them—turned him against Communism. As historian George Nash writes, “Militant, uncompromising hostility to Communism became one of the dominant features of his thought.”37
Entering the University of Illinois, Kendall received his Ph.D. in political science. His dissertation established him as one of the most original thinkers of political thought in America. He challenged the conventional view that John Locke was the champion of “inalienable” natural rights, arguing rather that Locke was a “majority rule” democrat. In the last analysis, he said, Locke “would entrust to the majority the power of defining individual rights,” a position Kendall adopted.38
At Yale, where he began teaching in 1947, Kendall also roundly criticized the idea of the “open society” and the notion that all questions are open questions. To the contrary, he argued, all polities, including democracies, have an orthodoxy they have a right to defend against anyone who would fundamentally change it. As Nash puts it, “The nightmare of Spain…taught him the horror of a society without consensus…a society where all people were free to talk—and talked themselves into war.”39 In the late 1940s, Kendall supported legislation outlawing the Communist Party, whose goals violated the public orthodoxy necessary for America’s survival.
In later years, says Georgetown University’s George Carey, Kendall “refined his views considerably in light of the American political system.”40 According to Carey, Kendall argued that the founding fathers placed a premium on achieving consensus “rather than simply counting heads” and intended Congress to express the popular will through such consensus. However, liberals had succeeded in establishing the president as “the most authentic representative of the people’s values and aspirations.”41 As a result, there were “two majorities” in America—the congressional majority based on the values and interests of the thousands of communities across the country, and the presidential majority, which spoke for the people as a mass. Kendall asserted that Congress as an institution was inherently more conservative than the presidency.42
Enrolling in Kendall’s political science seminar, Buckley became a political disciple and personal friend of the “wild Yale don.” Kendall taught the young conservative to read political theory with the close attention to the text that the political philosopher Leo Strauss advocated. “Bill always had so much intellectual energy,” recalled Charles Lichen-stein, a graduate student of Kendall, “that he threatened to run off in too many directions simultaneously. Willmoore helped him enormously to focus that energy, target that energy, to encourage a higher degree of discipline.”43
Kendall also exerted an enormous influence on Buckley’s political thought. In fact, Buckley later said, “I attribute whatever political and philosophical insights I have to his tutelage and his friendship.”44
Buckley was genuinely struck by Kendall’s Nock-like metaphor—constantly used in class—that the conservative forces were strung out in isolated outposts over a wide front. As Carey summarizes Kendall’s “battlefield metaphor,” liberals could “easily overrun” those outposts “one at a time because they possessed a general staff to concentrate and coordinate their forces for attack. Only when these conservative outposts united in the recognition of their common enemy would conservatism prevail.”45 Buckley would promote and adhere to a strategy of unity as editor of National Review. Indeed, he would become the commander that conservatism had lacked.
Kendall, with his “militant, uncompromising” hostility to Communism, also reinforced Buckley’s already fervent anti-Communism. What’s more, with his rejection of laissez-faire politics, he provided Buckley with a key argument for the young man’s critique of what in God and Man at Yale would be called “laissez-faire” academic freedom.
Despite the extraordinary effect Kendall had on him, Buckley was of two minds about majority politics. He was an elitist, but also said he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory rather than the Harvard faculty. As we will see, and consistent with his evolving fusionism, he set aside his libertarianism and accepted a large role for the federal government because of the express need to resist Communism. At the same time, he did not hesitate to criticize the actions of whoever was in the White House, whether he was a Republican or a Democrat—from Harry Truman to George W. Bush.
While Kendall influenced Buckley, the student may have influenced his mentor—with his deeply grounded faith. In 1949 Kendall was, in Buckley’s words, “rather cynical about the great truths” that directed society. But by the mid-1950s Kendall had become “one of the few fine and intensely moral figures of our time.” In 1956 Kendall converted to Roman Catholicism, inspired in part, he said, by the church’s centuries of tradition.46
Like Nock, Kendall delighted in going against the grain. “He was a conservative all right,” Buckley remembered, “but invariably he gave the impression that he was being a conservative because he was surrounded by liberals; that he’d have been a revolutionist if that had been required in order to be socially disruptive.”47
Throughout his time at Yale, Buckley never hesitated to make his own conservative political views known, relishing the controversy they created among students and faculty. Henry Wallace’s third-party 1948 campaign for the presidency inspired him to take direct political action. Although Wallace had little chance of winning the election, he was pro-Soviet and anti-anti-Communist, sufficient reason for Buckley to lead a protest against Wallace’s appearance in the New Haven Arena. Buckley, his sisters Patricia and Jane, and several of his friends dressed up as ultraleftists—the girls wore dark suits and no makeup, the boys dark suits, loud ties, and greased hair—and carried signs saying, “Let’s Prove We Want Peace—Give Russia the Atom Bomb.”
In April, Buckley and Kendall debated two Wallace supporters on radio. When Nathaniel Colley, one of the Wallaceites, threatened to sue Kendall for an intemperate remark, Buckley challenged Colley to sue him instead and wrote in the Yale Daily News, “The undeniable facts are: [Professor] Nathaniel S. Colley, through his support of Henry Wallace, is—be it unwittingly—furthering the ends of the Soviet Union.”48
Colley did not take the bait, but Buckley was confirmed in his lifelong application of the French revolutionary Danton’s philosophy, “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace.”49
Buckley’s Yale years reached a climax in February 1950 when he was chosen by the faculty (who apparently had not been paying close attention to the Yale Daily News) to be the student speaker at Alumni Day. Rather than writing the expected “good old Yale” speech, he discussed the “policy of educational laissez-faire,” or academic freedom—borrowing from Kendall’s critique of laissez-faire politics. According to Buckley, it was against “academic freedom” to insist that freedom was better than tyranny, the free market better than socialism and central planning, and Christianity better than secular humanism. The problem, Buckley said, was not that all Yale professors were hard-core atheists or socialists but that the administration declined to say that one set of opinions was better than the other.50 For Buckley, it was obvious which was better.
When he submitted a copy of his speech, he was asked by a leading alumnus to alter his “indictment of the administration” because the alumni “simply wouldn’t understand it.” Buckley changed a couple of sentences. When pressed to do more rewriting, he declined and offered to withdraw as speaker. Despite more appeals to soften his criticism, Buckley remained adamant. Finally, Yale president Charles Seymour personally accepted his withdrawal.51
But this was not the final chapter of Bill Buckley’s career at Yale. As part of graduation exercises—he graduated with honors—he was elected by the Yale class council to deliver the class oration. An apprehensive administration hesitated but did not try to persuade the students to select another speaker. Although still vexed over the cancellation of his Alumni Day speech, Buckley did not single out the administration but called on the university to return to promoting Western civilization and praising America as “an oasis of freedom and prosperity.”52
Thank God that’s over, relieved administration officials undoubtedly said to themselves, not realizing they had provided William F. Buckley Jr. with the theme of his first book.
GOD AND MAN AND MARRIAGE
Through his sister Patricia, Bill Buckley met Patricia Taylor of Vancouver, Canada, who was beautiful, as sharp-witted as Bill, and even wealthier. “Pat looks like a queen, she acts like a queen, and is just the match for Billy,” remarked his sister.53 After a brief period of courting, Bill flew to Vancouver for a weekend and on the third day asked Pat if she would marry him. “She rushed upstairs to tell her mother,” Buckley recalled,
and I waited at the bottom of the huge staircase hoping to get the temper of her proud mother’s reaction (her father was out of town), and soon I heard peals of laughter. I waited apprehensively for Pat to advise me what that was all about. The laughter, she revealed, was generated by her mother’s taking the occasion to recall that eight times in the past, Pat had reported her betrothal.54
Bill and Pat—an Anglican—married in July 1950 at the Roman Catholic cathedral in Vancouver and then were blessed by the Anglican bishop at their wedding reception. They would love, honor, and challenge each other for more than five decades, until Pat Buckley’s death in April 2007.
The young couple settled in Hamden, Connecticut, a New Haven suburb, where Buckley taught Spanish part-time at Yale while working on a book dealing with the themes of his never-delivered Alumni Day talk—socialism versus capitalism and secularism versus Christianity at Yale. He was helped by his friend Frank Chodorov, a disciple of the archlibertarian Albert Jay Nock, and Willmoore Kendall, who read the manuscript and made numerous suggestions. Buckley would continue the practice of submitting his latest work-in-progress to selected friends and family members for their comments for the rest of his life.
While settling into his marriage and working on his first book, Buckley was also waiting to hear about a possible new job—a post with the Central Intelligence Agency. Even before his graduation, he had talked to the CIA at the suggestion of Kendall, who offered to introduce Buckley to James Burnham, then a consultant to the agency and someone whom Kendall idolized. When Kendall talked about Burnham in class, Buckley recalled, it was as if he were “describing Wotan.”55 Buckley would come to hold almost as high an opinion of Burnham during Burnham’s long tenure as National Review‘s most important senior editor. James Burnham became the third major influence on Bill Buckley’s political thinking.
Born in Chicago in 1905, Burnham graduated at the top of his class at Princeton and then—like Willmoore Kendall—entered Oxford, where he studied English literature and medieval philosophy. He joined the faculty of New York University and served as a professor of philosophy from 1929 to 1953. Drawn to politics during the Great Depression and fearful of the survival of Western civilization, he became a Trotskyite—also like Kendall. In fact, Burnham helped form the Socialist Workers Party and became a leading disciple of Leon Trotsky. Burnham broke with Trotsky when the old Bolshevik defended the Soviet Union even after Stalin’s invasion of Finland and takeover of the Baltic states. But it’s noteworthy that both Burnham and Kendall—and as we will see, the fourth major influence on Buckley—were former members of the Left who could provide personal testimony about (to paraphrase Arthur Koestler) the necessary lies, slanders, intimidations, and liquidations of Marxism-Leninism.56
In 1941 Burnham published The Managerial Revolution, which described the emergence of a new and unelected ruling elite, the managerial class, and its profound implications for Western society. In subsequent books, Burn-ham argued that the Soviet Union was the most advanced managerial regime and sought global power through subversion, aggression, and intimidation—an argument that Buckley fully endorsed.
Burnham was an apostle of realpolitik both in U.S. foreign policy and in politics. His pragmatism would profoundly shape Buckley, his magazine, and ultimately the conservative movement he led. Buckley would later write to Burnham: “It is inconceivable that NR could have lasted as a significant journal of opinion without your self-effacing contributions to it, and to my education, and morale.” He added, speaking objectively he insisted, that “your influence, as a great teacher and as a great analyst, has permanently affected the thought of those in America who will be making the substantial arguments in the days to come.”57
Buckley traveled to Washington in June 1950 to talk to Burnham about his prospective CIA employment. There he met Howard Hunt—later known for his role in the Watergate break-in. Hunt had already served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, and written a bestselling novel, and he was about to take over the agency’s operations in Mexico City. He was impressed by the young Yale graduate, who spoke fluent Spanish and had already lived in Mexico City. Burnham described Buckley as “a committed and articulate anti-Communist looking for the optimum way of working against the Stalinists.” “I needed somebody [outside the embassy],” Hunt later said, “who could make contacts and deal with the young people.”58
Back in Connecticut, Buckley applied the finishing touches to his manuscript about Yale and began looking for a publisher outside New York. He was certain that no mainline publishing house would touch his book. Frank Chodorov wrote to Henry Regnery, a conservative Chicago publisher, urging him to consider publishing the first work of a promising young writer named William F. Buckley Jr. Regnery liked the manuscript and scheduled publication for October 1951, with a first printing of five thousand copies, an impressive number for an unknown author. When God and Man at Yale quickly became a bestseller, Regnery ordered a second printing and sold twelve thousand copies in November alone. The book’s success can be attributed in part to Regnery’s extensive advertising campaign, which was largely underwritten by Will Buckley Sr.59 A condition of the Buckley investment was that the book would come out by the end of October, when Yale would celebrate its 250th anniversary.
The book—and Buckley himself—came under withering attack from Yale and from mainstream newspapers and journals. Some praised the work, including the onetime socialist Max Eastman, who lauded the author’s “arrant intellectual courage.” The New Republic’s Selden Rodman declared that Buckley wrote with “a clarity, a sobriety, and an intellectual honesty that would be noteworthy if it came from a college president.”60
The critical nadir was reached by Yale trustee Frank Ashburn, who wrote in Saturday Review: “The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.”61
What had Buckley written that so enraged his alma mater and its establishment friends? He charged that Yale’s values were agnostic as to religion, “interventionist” and Keynesian as to economics, and collectivist as regards the relation of the individual to society and government. While conceding the validity of academic freedom for a professor’s research, Buckley insisted that the professor did not have the right to inseminate into the minds of his students values that were counter to the values of the parents paying his salary. He urged parents, alumni, and trustees to resist this aberrant form of academic freedom.
Drawing upon his university experience, Buckley submitted that Yale had abandoned Christianity, free enterprise, and what he called “individualism.” (He described himself in these early days as an “individualist” rather than a conservative.) He said that the faculty members who fostered atheism and socialism ought to be fired, because the primary goal of education is to familiarize students with an existing body of truth, of which Christianity and free enterprise are the foundations. “Individualism is dying at Yale,” Buckley declared, “and without a fight.”62
As Buckley biographer Judis puts it, God and Man at Yale assumed the existence of a liberal establishment of administration and faculty that ruled without a mandate over students and alumni. The young author called “upon the conservative majority to rise up and overthrow the liberal elite.”63
In April 1951, as he was finishing God and Man at Yale, Buckley was told that he had been accepted by the CIA. After training in Washington, D.C., he would be assigned to Mexico City. While in Washington, he also worked at Human Events, the weekly newsletter edited by conservative Frank Hanighen and libertarian Frank Chodorov. It fell to Chodorov to publish Bill Buckley’s first professional article that spring, “Harvard Hogs the Headlines,” paying him the munificent sum of twenty-five dollars. Buckley wrote that although Harvard “gets most of the credit for nourishing the new, irresistible, mid-century liberalism—collectivism,” Yale deserved just as much credit.64 Buckley later wrote of Chodorov’s tutelage: “It is quite unlikely that I should have pursued a career as a writer but for the encouragement he gave me just after I graduated from Yale.”65 Typical of Chodorov’s pungent advice to the young writer: “The day you don’t sit at a typewriter for three hours is a day wasted.”66
In Mexico City, Buckley quickly developed contacts within the student movements, edited an anti-Communist book written by a former prominent Chilean Communist, and greatly impressed Howard Hunt, who had not realized in their first meetings “how well read and politically educated he was.” But the operational life of an agent—the tedium of making hundreds of telephone calls and contacts with the hope that a couple would prove useful—began to pale. There was too little romance and too much routine for the restless Buckley.67
Eager to get on with changing the intellectual climate of America, encouraged by the brisk sales of God and Man at Yale, and responsive to Pat’s wishes—she was pregnant and didn’t want to give birth to a child in Mexico City—Buckley informed Hunt in February 1952 that he was going to resign from the CIA and return home. He had been a secret agent for only nine months, but he used the experience to create a memorable fictional character, Blackford Oakes, the bold and brainy CIA hero of his popular novels about the Cold War.
Hunt was not surprised at Buckley’s decision. “I felt Bill had a great deal of drive to excel,” he recalled, “to become a figure with a capital F, and a spokesman, a man who wanted to present his ideas and his philosophy in very broad and significant forums. Obviously this wasn’t possible given the limitations of the CIA.”68
SEARCHING FOR A MAGAZINE
Will Buckley suggested that his son do graduate study at Oxford or Cambridge; Henry Regnery thought the young author could benefit by studying under the free-market economist F. A. Hayek at the University of Chicago. But Bill Buckley wanted to make a difference without delay. He entered the field in which he would play a leading role for the rest of his life—journalism. He accepted an offer from the American Mercury (turning down the Freeman) when its editor, William Bradford Huie, promised Buckley significant responsibility and freedom as associate editor. It also mattered that the Mercury, with 90,000 subscribers, had four times the circulation of the Freeman.
But within a few weeks of starting the job, Buckley fell out with the other associate editor, Martin Greenburg, when he refused to publish Buckley’s critical article about liberal dominance in the realm of ideas, ironically titled “The Plight of the Liberals.” Buckley quit the magazine. Declining an offer from the Freeman, he retired to his new home on Wallacks Point in Stamford, Connecticut, overlooking Long Island Sound, to write and to enjoy his new son, Christopher, born in September 1952. Buckley did not have to look very far to find an appropriate book topic.
Because of his militant anti-Communism, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had become the hero of millions of Main Street Americans and the bête noire of the liberal establishment. Both Buckley and Brent Bozell admired McCarthy for his willingness to take on the liberal elite and began writing a long article about the outspoken senator. When Henry Regnery suggested they expand it into a book, they readily agreed. The result was McCarthy and His Enemies, which examined the senator’s record and his opponents through 1952.
Occupied with the McCarthy book and carrying a heavy speaking schedule, the twenty-six-year-old Buckley nevertheless agreed, at the invitation of Frank Chodorov, to become president of a new national student organization—the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute). It was his first conscious act of building a conservative movement.
Buckley and ISI were a perfect match. ISI’s articles of incorporation stated that its objective was “to promote among college students, specifically, and the public, generally, an understanding of and appreciation for the Constitution of the United States of America, laissez-faire (free market) economics and the doctrine of individualism.” But in early 1953, less than a year later, Chodorov informed Buckley in a note: “Am removing you as president. Making myself pres. Easier to raise money if a Jew is president. You can be V-P. Love, Frank.” A busy Buckley was relieved to be relieved, but remained an enthusiastic supporter of ISI’s activities and publications—appearing on many campuses under its sponsorship—for the rest of his life.69
Meanwhile, Henry Regnery commissioned Willi Schlamm, a brilliant Time-tested editor, to shorten the 250,000-word manuscript submitted by Buckley and Bozell and to write an introduction. While they were working together, Schlamm shared with Buckley his long-held dream of starting a weekly conservative journal of opinion. He secured Buckley’s commitment to the undertaking with the understanding that the twenty-eight-year-old American wunderkind would serve as editor-in-chief and the forty-seven-year-old Austrian intellectual and former Communist as senior editor and éminence grise.70
The assent flowed from two factors. The first was that Buckley himself had been thinking about starting a magazine, mentioning it to Howard Hunt when he left the CIA in 1952 and to his Yale friend Evan Galbraith when he joined the American Mercury. He had sought the advice of Henry Regnery, who suggested that he edit a monthly magazine along with another Regnery author, Russell Kirk, but Buckley was not interested in a scholarly journal of limited circulation and influence.71
The second factor in Buckley’s decision was the intellectual vacuum that existed in the still amorphous conservative movement. The failing Freeman was bought by Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Freedom, who turned it into an economic monthly, “staid and academic,” in Buckley’s words. The American Mercury was taken over by millionaire Russell Maguire, a rabid anti-Semite, who immediately began filling the once-influential magazine with anti-Semitic diatribes.72
Impressed by Buckley’s ambition and resources, Schlamm argued that the youthful Buckley should be the undisputed editor of their magazine precisely because he was under thirty. “It was much easier for a 29-year-old to be editor-in-chief of a magazine with these giants than for a 39-year-old or a 49-year-old,” Buckley recalled Schlamm saying, “because people are willing to do favors and be condescending toward someone who was 25 years younger than they.”73 The “giants” referred to were authors such as James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Russell Kirk, whom the editors intended to recruit.
Schlamm’s other recommendation was that Buckley be the journal’s sole owner and stockholder so that factionalism would not wreck the new magazine as it had the Freeman. According to author and columnist John Chamberlain, who knew both men, Schlamm was confident he “could maintain his influence over a young man who was all of twenty-nine years old and was just feeling his way amid the complexities of a Stalin-dominated world.”74 Schlamm’s shrewd plan to make Buckley the formal and legal head of the new magazine—a proposition Buckley readily accepted—would enable the publication to survive the inevitable internal disputes, including the first serious quarrel, precipitated by none other than Willi Schlamm.75
Buckley acknowledged Schlamm’s essential role in an early NR memorandum to James Burnham when he said flatly, “It was Willi who dreamed of the magazine, and who persuaded me to make the effort to launch it. I am a fairly enterprising fellow, but I would not have thought of going out myself to found one.” It took Schlamm’s prodding and generosity, he told Burnham, as well as that “of yourself and of others, to convince me that…the idea of such a magazine was not grotesque; that the magazine was desprately [sic] needed; and, even, that the magazine might succeed.”76
But first came McCarthy and His Enemies.
As the historian George Nash points out, Buckley and Bozell strove for balance in their analysis, criticizing McCarthy for being guilty of blunders and “outrageous” conduct. But for all his faults, the authors concluded, the senator was correct: there were Communists in the U.S. government, which had been incredibly negligent in failing to oust the many security risks. As for McCarthy’s rhetorical excesses, they were no more objectionable than those of other partisan politicians of the day, including Harry Truman.77
In his 1948 election campaign, President Truman said at one rally that a vote for the Republican candidate, New York governor Thomas Dewey, was “a vote for fascism.” At another event, he suggested that the Communists were hoping for a Republican victory because they believed that would mean “a weak United States.”78
“On McCarthyism,” wrote Buckley and Bozell bluntly, “hang the hopes of America for effective resistance to Communist infiltration…. [A]s long as McCarthyism fixes its goal with its present precision, it is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”79
Once again, Bill Buckley was plunged into controversy. McCarthy and His Enemies was published in March 1954, one month before the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings. Buckley and Bozell were inundated with invitations to speak and debate and appear on radio. They trounced two Yale law professors in a debate at the university, with Buckley receiving “a long and loud burst of applause” at the end of his remarks, as the Yale Daily News reported. More than a thousand people filled the auditorium of the National Republican Club in New York City to hear Buckley denounce the Republicans who were turning away from McCarthy.80
Buckley tapped into a new constituency for American conservatism—middle-class Catholic Democrats, who would later form an important part of the Reagan coalition. Catholic groups in Queens, New York, and the suburbs of other eastern cities asked the young author to speak. They looked to Buckley as a Catholic “who understood McCarthy.”81 Judis, a liberal, argues that Buckley’s defense of McCarthy made him “a pariah” among the eastern intelligentsia, but he was a hero among anti-Communists and conservatives across the country—a reputation that would help when he launched National Review.
Then and always, Buckley honored the principle of standing by your friends and colleagues when they are under attack. Before and after the Senate censure of McCarthy in December 1954, the McCarthys, the Buckleys, and the Bozells remained personal friends. Bill Buckley never publicly disassociated himself from the man or the ism, convinced as he was of the necessity of combating Communism at home and abroad.
In a 1977 review of Tail Gunner Joe, a network television dramatization, Buckley scorned the anti-McCarthy bias of the program, writing, “There were some foolish things done and said by McCarthy and some of his supporters during the Fifties. But they cannot hold a candle up against the continuing excesses of McCarthy’s critics.”82
Four decades after McCarthy’s death, Buckley wrote The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy, in which he rejects the liberal view that McCarthy spawned a “reign of terror” that gripped professors, writers, actors, public officials, plumbers, and ordinary citizens from one coast to another. But he does offer a candid portrait of a man who will distort the truth to make a point and blacken the reputation of an opponent without apology, and who cannot slake his thirst for bourbon, vodka, or whatever brand of booze is readily available.
In the novel, Yale professor Willmoore Sherriff (closely modeled on Willmoore Kendall) criticizes McCarthy’s gutter style but nevertheless defends him because the senator understands that the function of a “vital democratic society” is to “reject unassimilable ideas” such as Communism. Biographer Sam Tanenhaus says that this defense “comes close to Buckley’s own view of McCarthyism, scarcely altered since 1954.”83
In an introduction to a 1961 edition of McCarthy and His Enemies, Buckley wrote, “The McCarthy business of course was deadly serious, and if it was not, there surely was no excuse either for his activities or his enemies.” The “deadly” business Buckley referred to was not McCarthyism but Communism.84
How unyielding an anti-Communist Buckley was can be seen in his January 1952 essay in Commonweal. Buckley wrote that given the “thus-far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union…we have got to accept Big Government for the duration.” The chances of “ultimate victory against an indigenous bureaucracy,” he said, “are far greater than they could ever be against one controlled from abroad, one that would be nourished and protected by a worldwide Communist monolith.”85 Buckley’s willingness, in the face of the Soviet threat, to accept “Big Government” was roundly criticized by libertarians. But he did not flinch, believing that in the present crisis a substantial defense establishment was required to preserve liberty.
As 1954 ended, the future of the American Right seemed uncertain. “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft was dead of cancer, Joe McCarthy had been censured by his peers, the Democrats had retaken Congress after a brief Republican interregnum, President Eisenhower had morphed into a modern Republican, and Barry Goldwater was an unknown junior senator from Arizona. When Russell Kirk published his intellectual history of Anglo-American conservatism in 1953, he at first intended to title it The Conservative Rout. At a moment when Lionel Trilling’s complaint that conservatism expressed itself only in “irritable mental gestures” seemed painfully apt, William F. Buckley Jr. began the most far-reaching adventure of his life—the creation of a conservative journal that would challenge the liberal zeitgeist and, more than any other institution, mold a national movement that would dominate American politics in the 1980s and beyond.