CRUISING SPEED
In the 1960s, American conservatism experienced spectacular political growth, nominating one of its own—Senator Barry Goldwater—for president, and electing an equally unapologetic conservative—Ronald Reagan—as governor of the second-most-populous state in the union. Central to these political successes was the omnipresence of Bill Buckley as hands-on editor, bestselling author, incisive columnist, rapier-witted television host, unparalleled debater, and not-so-quixotic candidate for mayor of the most liberal city in America—New York City. In his spare time, he skied in Switzerland, sailed from Newport to Bermuda and eventually across the Atlantic, and partied with friends on the Right and the Left such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Kissinger, Clare Boothe Luce, Tom Wolfe, and Alistair Cooke.
He even took up painting, although with less than laudable results. At Gstaad, Switzerland, Buckley’s friend David Niven brought the famous French artist Marc Chagall to visit the chateau the Buckleys rented every winter. Over Niven’s objections, Buckley immediately took Chagall to his studio. Chagall looked at Buckley’s paintings, picked up a tube of paint, and said in French, “The poor paint!”1
His cruising speed violated all normal limits. Once asked why he worked so hard and didn’t take life easier, he replied, “I am easily bored.”2 But in reality he was honoring the injunctions of his father and of Edward Pulling, founder of the Millbrook School, to repay his country for the bountiful patrimony it had bequeathed him.
One thing he did not do during this period was to write a “big book” providing his understanding of the conservative philosophy—something he had talked of doing for several years, following the publication of Up from Liberalism in 1959. The book was tentatively called The Revolt Against the Masses, a play on the title of the Spanish conservative Ortega y Gasset’s classic work, The Revolt of the Masses. Buckley would show that a conservative revolt against the masses—that is, against Marxism—was in the making.
He had developed a routine of going to Gstaad for six or eight weeks every winter to write the first draft of a book. But when he set out to write The Revolt Against the Masses in Switzerland in the first part of 1964, he struggled. After a month of thought and work, he had produced only ten thousand not particularly riveting words.
Buckley later diagnosed his problem with Revolt: his thesis no longer seemed to apply. He had expected America “to realize that it has to go back to serious thought, and away from these distracting frivolities with which we had been preoccupied. Exactly the opposite happened. Instead of going against the masses, we went right into a situation where the masses tyrannized—the Berkeley campus blowup.”3 (In late 1964 thousands of student protestors seized control of the Berkeley administration building.)
More to the point, all his biographers agree, is that Bill Buckley admitted to himself that he was not a political philosopher but a popularizer of ideas. His responsibility to himself and to the movement he was shaping was to apply the scholars’ findings to prevailing problems and to disseminate their ideas as widely as possible through “the force of his personality as well as the written word,” as Linda Bridges and John Coyne write.4 His friend Hugh Kenner, who urged him to write Revolt, thought that Buckley “was already moving too fast to do anything but the topical.” Buckley accepted the assessment of his colleague William Rickenbacker: “He knows he’s quick, but doubts he’s deep.”5 Author-editor M. Stanton Evans, a longtime NR contributor, thought that Buckley could be a philosopher if he put his mind to it, but instead he concentrated on acting “as a broker and analyst of ideas, rather than as an originator of them.”6
There was no question that Buckley could be a deeply moving writer. Typical was the unsigned editorial he wrote following John Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. As Americans of all parties and pursuits mourned the violent death of the young president, Buckley wrote: “The grief was spontaneous and, in most cases, wholly sincere. Not because Mr. Kennedy’s policies were so universally beloved, but because he was a man so intensely charming, whose personal vigor and robust enjoyment of life so invigorated almost all who beheld him.”7
Much the same could be said of Bill Buckley—and was, following his death.
THE GOLDWATER CAMPAIGN
The political climax of conservatism in the 1960s was Goldwater’s historic presidential campaign. Among the reasons for Goldwater’s ascendancy were his bestselling manifesto The Conscience of a Conservative (ghostwritten by L. Brent Bozell); Richard Nixon’s deliberately moderate and losing presidential campaign in 1960; Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s abrupt fall from Republican grace after divorcing his wife of thirty-some years and marrying his former secretary; President John F. Kennedy’s mounting problems with southern Democrats and other factions within the Democratic Party; and a growing unease among the general public that America was not doing all it could do to defeat Communism. Goldwater offered sharp-edged conservative solutions, such as seeking victory rather than accommodation in the Cold War and rolling back government rather than managing it more efficiently, as modern Republicans sought to do.
In the 1964 Goldwater campaign, George Nash points out, politics and ideas were related as they “had not been for a long time.” National Review happily promoted Goldwater’s candidacy. Russell Kirk helped draft several of his speeches, including a major address at Notre Dame, and frequently praised him in his syndicated newspaper column. Professor Harry Jaffa of Ohio State University wrote Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Milton Friedman, among other conservative academics, served as an economic adviser. “It is likely,” Nash writes, “that without the patient spadework of the intellectual Right, the conservative political movement of the 1960s would have remained disorganized and defeated.”8
Not everyone at National Review, however, welcomed the Goldwater candidacy. James Burnham had doubts about the senator’s intellectual capacity and regarded his “why not victory?” policy to end the Cold War as simplistic. Burnham suggested Rockefeller at editorial meetings as a possible alternative. The suggestion precipitated cries of horror from Frank Meyer and William Rusher, who pointed to Governor Rockefeller’s bloated New York state budgets and his exclusion of conservatives from his administration and among his top advisers. If Goldwater won the nomination, they argued, the Republican Party would advance significantly toward becoming the conservative party. If Goldwater did not win the presidency, they said, conservatives would still be able to point to his nomination as proof that American conservatism had become a political force to be reckoned with. Rusher was not a disinterested observer; along with political tactician F. Clifton White and Representative John Ashbrook of Ohio, he was a prime mover in the draft-Goldwater movement.
Buckley, affected by Burnham’s realpolitik arguments, was more cautious about Goldwater, but he was attracted to Goldwater’s libertarian views on government (“I did not come to Washington to pass laws but to repeal them,” the senator declared in The Conscience of a Conservative) and his uncompromising anti-Communism. Biographer John Judis links Buckley and Burnham in a deep skepticism about Goldwater, but Buckley participated in two private high-level meetings—one in Palm Beach, the other in Washington, D.C.—at which he sought an advisory position in the Goldwater campaign. Both meetings were coordinated by Jay Gordon Hall, a Washington lobbyist with a Ph.D., who had befriended Goldwater shortly after his first senatorial victory in 1952 and had done research and some speechwriting for the senator ever since.
In the end, Buckley’s proposal at the September 1963 meeting to form a group of leading academics who would counsel Goldwater on public policy was blocked by the man who already had the senator’s ear and was determined to share it with no one else—William Baroody, the president (on leave) of the American Enterprise Institute. Although Goldwater later claimed that he would have welcomed them, Buckley, Brent Bozell, and Bill Rusher were all prevented from making any significant contribution to the 1964 campaign. The Goldwater team even barred Buckley from speaking at a Young Americans for Freedom rally at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, although he had been listed as a main speaker and the organization had been founded at his family’s home.
Throughout 1964, Buckley weighed Goldwater’s candidacy in terms of how its success or failure would affect the future of the conservative movement. In late May, he said at a National Review editorial meeting that if Goldwater lost the upcoming California primary, the magazine should urge him to withdraw from the race to prevent a humiliating defeat at the national convention. His analysis was based on a shaky premise. If asked, F. Clifton White would have told Buckley that Goldwater had enough delegates locked up to win on the first ballot, regardless of how he fared in California.9
After Goldwater narrowly won the Republican primary in California, Buckley attempted to prepare fellow conservatives for the inevitable outcome in the general election, writing, “This is probably Lyndon Johnson’s year, and the Archangel Gabriel running on the Republican ticket probably couldn’t win.”10 He was correct: every poll, public and private, had been saying all year that the American people wanted President Johnson to carry out the martyred Kennedy’s program. They were not interested in having a third president in one year, whether it was Goldwater, Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Scranton, Nixon, or any other Republican.
But sometimes you win by losing. Goldwater’s presidential bid enabled him to raise issues and propose conservative solutions to those issues; to forge a national political organization that would be used by future conservative candidates; to establish for conservatives a broad financial base stemming from direct mail and television appeals; and to demonstrate that a political force called conservatism could nominate a conservative and capture millions of votes. All of this went far beyond the original Buckley cry of trying to stop history and entered a new realm of attempting to shape history.
Buckley persisted in his public warnings that Goldwa-ter’s chances were hopeless, telling the delegates to YAF’s annual convention in September—two months before election day—to prepare themselves for “the impending defeat of Barry Goldwater.” Young conservatives looking for a rallying cry received instead the bleak advice that all they could do was to prepare for future Novembers—”if there is a future.”11 Fearing a chilling effect on political activity, YAF national chairman Robert Bauman forbade distribution of Buckley’s remarks to the news media.
A month later, at the anniversary dinner of the Conservative Party of New York, Buckley took a different tack, mentioning Goldwater only once and focusing on what conservatives might accomplish in the next decades. He spoke of the possible and the ideal in politics. “How this movement, considering the contrary tug of history,” he said, “has got as far as it has got, is something that surpasses the understanding of natural pessimists like myself.”12
Buckley argued that if conservatives in politics wanted to be successful they had to steer a middle course between the ideal and the prudential. This golden mean, inspired by Burnham and Chambers (who had died in 1961), became Bill Buckley’s guiding principle and would, in Judis’s words, “influence a great many conservative politicians.”13
But the golden mean is not a precise midway point between two extremes; rather, it is a shifting point that sometimes winds up closer to the ideal, sometimes closer to the prudential. Buckley would veer between the two, depending upon the issue and the state of the conservative movement, in the years ahead.
In spite of the overwhelming Goldwater defeat—he received only 38.5 percent of the popular vote and carried just six states—Buckley was not demoralized. Along with T. S. Eliot, he believed that there are no permanent defeats because there are no permanent victories. Buckley immediately sent a telegram to Goldwater, stating: “I wish to express my gratitude as an American for the gallant work you did for all your countrymen. I have no doubt at all that history will one day reward you.”14
He also took concrete action to strengthen the conservative movement. He agreed in December 1964 to serve on the board of directors of a new political organization for “senior” conservatives—the American Conservative Union, best known in later years for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that attracts thousands of participants. The same month he helped form, along with Milton Friedman, the Philadelphia Society, an association of conservative intellectuals modeled after the free-market Mont Pelerin Society. He put up the first $ 100 for the society’s bank account, and over the next decade contributed an estimated $ 50,000 to the society through his share of a trust fund.15
He was always responsive when young people came calling. David Jones, the energetic executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, saw the need for an educational counterpart to YAF. Former New Jersey governor Charles Edison agreed to lend his name to the new organization, which became the Charles Edison Youth Fund (later the Fund for American Studies). When Jones asked Buckley to serve as the founding chairman, he declined, citing his commitments to National Review, but he joined the board of trustees and was a frequent speaker at the fund’s events. In September 1998, he gave the keynote address at the fund’s dinner honoring Jones, who had recently died. Buckley confessed his open admiration for Jones and the fund’s efforts through its institutes at Georgetown University and overseas to teach rising young leaders about economic and political freedom.
Shortly after the Goldwater defeat, Buckley invited the gifted political operative F. Clifton White to dine with him in his Manhattan apartment to discuss the campaign. White was amazed that he did 90 percent of the talking. “He wanted to know exactly what I had done to get the Goldwater nomination and how I had done it…. He decided it must be something significant and worthwhile.”16
Buckley may have been considering his next political act, which would complete his transformation into one of the most celebrated public figures, left or right, in America. Whatever his course or his trajectory, he never abandoned the magazine he had founded or the movement he had fashioned, but took them along on an increasingly breathtaking ride.
BUCKLEY FOR MAYOR?
In early 1965, Ronald Reagan was considering whether he should seek the Republican nomination for governor of California. When approached to run, he responded, “I’m an actor, not a politician.” But he admitted that the public reaction to his October 1964 telecast for Barry Goldwater had exceeded anything in his movie or television career. The title of his 1963 autobiography (borrowed from his dramatic hospital bed scene in the film King’s Row) was Where’s the Rest of Me? Was it possible, the fifty-four-year-old actor asked himself, that he would find the answer in politics?
Three thousand miles away, the forty-year-old Bill Buckley was mulling over whether to run for mayor of—what else?—New York City.
There were several reasons why he was eyeing the New York City mayoralty. First, he wanted to help block the rapid rise of Congressman John Lindsay, the golden boy of liberal Republicans. Lindsay’s backers planned to move their man up the political ladder from congressman to mayor to governor to president of the United States. Such a succession was a prospect devoutly rejected by all right-thinking citizens.
Second, the conservative movement could use a political boost after the Goldwater defeat, and a good showing by a conservative candidate in the center of liberalism would do just that.
Third, Buckley had some ideas about the conduct of a large city’s affairs (borrowed heavily from Harvard professors Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan) that merited serious public discussion. Where better to have that discussion than in New York City, headquarters of the nation’s news media?
Finally, running for mayor of New York would be fun and anything but boring, the one thing on God’s earth that Buckley could not abide. Besides, he knew he would get a book out of the experience.
Although he insisted at the time—and later in The Unmaking of a Mayor, his witty account of his campaign—that the conservative movement was not a factor in his decision to run, Buckley was being either disingenuous or naïve. In the year 1965, you could no more separate Buckley and American conservatism than you could uncouple the pope and Roman Catholicism.
Looking back on this critical event in the history of the conservative movement, John O’Sullivan, who would in time succeed Buckley as editor of National Review, wrote, “Bill knew that if conservatism had any future, it had to be a hard political movement as well as a soft intellectual movement. It also had to have appeal to people other than NR subscribers. And it had to succeed—or at least be protected from failure. So WFB launched a serious bid for the New York mayoralty disguised as a lark.”17
In early June, and not yet a candidate, Buckley wrote a column titled “Mayor, Anyone?” that set forth a ten-point platform on which a candidate might run. What strikes the reader is how libertarian it is. He recommended that “anti-narcotic laws for adults” be repealed, gambling be legalized, anyone without a police record be allowed to operate a car as a taxi, and communities be encouraged to finance their own “watchmen,” relieving the municipal police force of what he called “an almost impossible job.”18 In these proposals we see the invisible hand of Albert Jay Nock, a continuing intellectual influence on Buckley.
The would-be mayoral candidate also displayed formidable prescience. He anticipated Representative Jack Kemp’s enterprise-zone proposal of a decade later by suggesting that state and federal authorities suspend property and income taxes for all “Negro or Puerto Rican entrepreneurs” who established businesses in depressed areas in the inner city. And he proposed, several years before Governor Reagan offered his hard-nosed welfare-reform program in California, that all welfare recipients be required to do “street cleaning and general prettification work” for the city. Here was the first conservative enunciation of the workfare principle, or as Buckley put it rather crudely, “No workee, no dolee.”19
The New York Times dismissed Buckley’s formal announcement as an “exercise in futility,” and predicted that New York voters would reject Buckley’s “kind of Republicanism” as decisively as the nation had repudiated “Goldwaterism.” Buckley quickly responded with a letter to the editor listing the reforms the Times had not mentioned in its news story: an increase in the police force; lower taxes; workfare; a disavowal of those who “encourage racism, lawlessness, and despair” among blacks; decentralization of city schools; and a reduction of the urban renewal and city planning that were “dehumanizing” New York City.20
Although serious about his proposals, Buckley, the candidate of the Conservative Party of New York, harbored no illusions about his chances. Asked at a news conference what he would do if he were elected, Buckley delivered the most quoted line of the campaign, and perhaps his life: “Demand a recount.”
The widely viewed television debates between Conservative Buckley, Republican John Lindsay, and Democrat Abe Beame were devastating for Lindsay, revealing his superficiality, short temper, and just plain dullness. In contrast, Buckley was always ready with a bon mot. In one debate, the moderator advised the conservative candidate that he had “another moment if you care to comment.” Buckley replied with a smile, “No, I think I’ll just contemplate the great eloquence of my previous remarks.”21
On election day, an impressive 13.4 percent (341,226) of the New York electorate voted for Bill Buckley. John Lindsay eked out a narrow win, receiving 45.3 percent to Abe Beame’s 41.3 percent. Conservatives had denied the New York Times the opportunity to proclaim, “Lindsay’s decisive victory today catapulted him into a position of national leadership in the Republican Party and established him as a leading presidential possibility in 1968.”
The Buckley campaign so energized the Conservative Party of New York that five years later it elected Bill’s brother Jim to the U.S. Senate. (Bill Buckley was first approached to make the race but declined.) Buckley’s mayoral effort also sketched the outlines of a winning coalition of ethnic, Catholic Democrats and middle-class Republicans. In his landmark study The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips cited Buckley’s vote as a “harbinger” of the new majority. Buckley’s 1965 coalition, writes John Judis, “perfectly anticipated” the northern urban coalition that Ronald Reagan forged in 1980 and 1984, which enabled the California conservative to carry New York City in both elections.22
But Buckley offered a more pessimistic appraisal of the future, writing in The Unmaking of a Mayor that the conservative doctrine lacked “mass appeal.” Conservatism in America, he wrote, was a “force” rather than “a political movement.” He went so far as to declare that the Republican Party would not survive as “a major party,” a probability he deeply regretted, for the alternative was likely to be “a congeries of third parties, adamantly doctrinaire, inadequately led, insufficiently thoughtful, improvidently angry, self-defeatingly sectarian.”23
Buckley’s lamentation was ill-timed. Even as he tore at his garments, a new political star was rising in the West, the Conservative Party of New York was girding for battle, and a new mode of political fundraising (direct mail) was being crafted by Richard Viguerie and others that would enable conservatives to challenge Big Government in Washington, D.C., and various state capitals.
Another outcome of the Buckley campaign was the award-winning Firing Line. Buckley and the multitalented Neal Freeman (who had managed the mayoral campaign) had been talking for a year about a television program featuring Buckley versus any and all champions of the Left. Little serious interest was expressed by media executives until the Buckley-Lindsay-Beame debates, and then they came calling. Firing Line debuted in April 1966, and would stay on the air for more than thirty-three years.
Television had never seen anything like it: Buckley verbally slicing and dicing liberal opponents like perennial Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, anti-Vietnam War activist Staughton Lynd, TV moderator David Susskind (whom Buckley introduced by saying, “If there were a contest for the title of Mr. Eleanor Roosevelt, he would unquestionably win it”), LSD apostle Timothy Leary, and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, playing his little harmonium and offering his Hare Krishna chant.24
Not everyone was interested in matching wits and words with Buckley. Eager to have Senator Robert F. Kennedy as a guest, the Firing Line host offered the late president’s brother an honorarium of $ 500 and a role in determining the format. Kennedy declined. Asked why he thought the New York senator had turned him down, Buckley replied, “Why does baloney reject the grinder?”25
Out of the 1,500 programs and the several thousand guests during the three decades of Firing Line, three central themes emerged: Communism, capitalism, and faith—the themes that mattered most to Buckley throughout his life.
The reality of Communism came up again and again. British historian Paul Johnson insisted that the nature of twentieth-century totalitarianism, particularly the Soviet variety, was unique and that conventional historical analysis did not tell you how to deal with Soviet aggression. Buckley heartily agreed. Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, “treated” in Soviet mental hospitals for a decade, described how potential opposition in the Soviet Union was suppressed. Buckley was appalled. Henry Kissinger, the master of realpolitik, discussed the inherent dangers in any unequal strategic strength between the Soviets and the United States. Jeane Kirkpatrick, recently returned from Nicaragua, acknowledged that for the first time she saw the possible “disestablishment” of the Marxist state there—which turned out to be the case in the democratic elections of 1990 made possible by the Reagan Doctrine.26
Likewise, Buckley debated economics on Firing Line. Liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith—a frequent guest who held his own with his host and friend—stated that he loved taxation because he believed in leveling, regardless of the consequences (or more precisely, because of the consequences). Free marketer George Gilder argued that the risk element of capitalism was what made it a philanthropic social arrangement. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan endorsed tax cuts across the board and the Laffer curve, to Buckley’s delight.27
For all his pessimism—and even on a good day, Buckley could be quite pessimistic—he retained his belief that God knew what he was doing and in any case we should be more concerned about where we end up in the City of God than in the City of Man. He liked to quote the Russian poet Ilya Ehrenburg, who, although a Soviet apologist much of his life, rose to the defense of another Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, with these memorable lines: “If the whole world were to be covered with asphalt, one day a crack would appear in the asphalt; and in that crack grass would grow.”28
With Firing Line guests such as Clare Boothe Luce, former British prime minister Harold Macmillan, philosopher Mortimer Adler, and especially Malcolm Muggeridge, Buckley delved deeply into religion and its place in the modern world. Asked why Whittaker Chambers had written that the Christian church represented the only truly conservative force in the world, Luce replied that the church had preserved for two thousand years a “true view of the nature of man: a creature who is capable of being a saint and who is most of the time a sinner.”29
When Macmillan, at age eighty-six, was asked about the prospects for the survival of the West, the elder statesman replied that he couldn’t understand why so many people who believed so firmly in the brotherhood of man had so much difficulty believing in the fatherhood of God. Paul Johnson spoke to the political consequences of idealism and atheism, saying that in his book Modern Times he pointed out that “when you drive toward a utopian state, there is no point of balance; there is no stasis there…. You have to drive onwards or else you go backward—and relapse into capitalism. You have to drive onward…until you create boat people, and put men like Vladimir Bukovsky in psychiatric asylums.”30
In their conversation, broadcast at Christmastime, Muggeridge and Buckley agreed that Christendom was probably coming to an end. But there was good news, Muggeridge insisted, quoting St. Augustine on the sacking of Carthage by the barbarians: “This is grievous news, but let us remember if it’s happened, then God has willed it; and that men build cities and men destroy cities; that there’s also the City of God, and that’s where we belong.”
“To me,” Muggeridge said, “that’s the perfect expression.” He added, “It’s only insofar as we’re citizens of the City of God that we can be Christians in the City of Man.”
“That we can bear it,” responded Buckley.
“That we can bear it,” Muggeridge agreed.31
This is not an axiom certain to find favor among liberals, but it resonates among conservatives like Bill Buckley, who as a schoolboy in England began all his essays with the initials A.M.D.G.—Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (for the greater glory of God).
Expanding Buckley’s popular appeal at this time was The Unmaking of a Mayor, which, in the words of liberal biographer Judis, displayed “a stylistic brilliance and a skill in narrative” that far exceeded his early writing. The Buckley of God and Man at Yale had “charmed older conservatives and inspired younger ones.” The Buckley of The Unmaking of a Mayor attracted a far broader range of readers and made Bill Buckley a popular bestselling writer.32 And the novels were yet to come.
A VERY BAD YEAR
The year 1968 may have been “the most turbulent in American history,” writes Jeffrey Hart. Americans were shaken by events ranging from the unexpected Communist offensive of Tet to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy to the near anarchy of the Democratic National Convention. Like China, America was experiencing a Great Cultural Revolution with the attempted elimination of the Four Olds—old customs, old habits, old culture, old thinking. Nothing seemed safe or sacred.33 While the center wavered, conservatives challenged the Left and helped give voice to a Silent Majority. One voice above all others could be heard on the Right—that of William F. Buckley Jr.
Following Tet, Buckley called for the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam as a way to bring the war to a swift end, a radical course of action that even Barry Goldwater, the alleged wild-eyed bomb-thrower, had never suggested. He described New York City antiwar marchers as “young slobs strutting their epicene resentment.” He opposed Pope John XXIII’s and Pope Paul VI’s support of détente, and he denounced American Catholics, like the Berrigan brothers, who opposed the Vietnam War.34 He firmly condemned the murders of America’s leaders, writing: “[Nothing] in the whole exclamatory spring—not the war, not a Presidential race—shocks the sensibilities so stunningly as Martin Luther King’s death in Tennessee…. A breathtaking ugliness, coiled like a clock spring, gathered itself and struck.”35
No one was immune to the ugly mood of the nation, including the usually unflappable Bill Buckley, who lost his temper at the Democratic convention in full view of a national television audience. He and the serpentine Gore Vidal had debated nightly at the Republican National Convention and now at the Democratic meeting, their language becoming more personal and vitriolic at each encounter. On one occasion, the calculatedly provocative Vidal remarked that Buckley would win a contest for “Mr. Myra Breckinridge”—a reference to the transgender “hero” of Vidal’s not-so-soft-pornographic novel Myra Breckinridge.
In Chicago, Vidal began their conversation by saying, “As far as I am concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi that I can think of is yourself.” Which prompted Buckley to angrily respond, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”36
As Bridges and Coyne point out, Buckley was so upset by the explosive exchange that he wrote a 15,000-word article about it in Esquire including a semi-apology for calling Vidal a “queer.” The magazine published a response by Vidal, who implied, among other things, that Buckley was a homosexual and an anti-Semite. Although urged by friends not to take action, Buckley sued Esquire and Vidal for libel. Vidal countersued. Some four years later, Esquire settled out of court but publicly apologized to Buckley and reimbursed him for legal expenses.37
For Buckley, the 1968 presidential campaign came down to a practical question: who was the most viable conservative candidate? An inviting choice was Barry Goldwater, whose prediction that Vietnam would become an unwinnable war under Johnson’s leadership had been vindicated. But Goldwater had already endorsed Richard Nixon. Another possibility was Ronald Reagan, but he had been governor of California for little more than a year when the campaign began.
That left Nixon. Buckley admired Nixon as the man who had defended Whittaker Chambers against Alger Hiss, but recognized that the former vice president tilted to the left on most domestic issues. And so National Review, with James Burnham as author, endorsed Nixon as a “competent, intelligent, experienced, professional politician” known for his “election-machine style of politics.” Jeffrey Hart calls the editorial “a fine exposition” of “skeptical conservatism going back to the Constitution and the Federalist Papers.”38 It was also a case of hoping for the best and expecting less.
As John Judis points out, Buckley had come a long way from 1955 and his search for the ideal conservative candidate.39 He was now willing to support an anti-Communist nonconservative who was open to conservative ideas and influence. NR’s endorsement was a sharp break even from 1960, when the magazine, stating that it did not engage in practical politics, had declined to state its presidential preference. Here again can be seen the influence of the prudential politics advocated by Burnham and Chambers.
The Nixon endorsement had not just happened: Nixon had wooed Buckley and his colleagues for years, instructing aide Patrick J. Buchanan to talk insider politics with publisher Bill Rusher and personally discussing realpolitik in all its ramifications with Buckley and Burnham. Nixon denied emphatically that he had ever said (as reported by columnist Robert Novak) that “the Buckleyites are a greater menace to the Republican Party than the Birchers.”40
When Nixon narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey in November 1968, Buckley and his colleagues took satisfaction, knowing that in the absence of their endorsement the outcome might well have been different.
The result also might have been different had Buckley not gone out of his way to discredit the third-party candidate, the alleged conservative Alabama governor George Wallace. On Firing Line he attacked Wallace from the right on economic policy and from the left on race. Buckley later recalled that his design was to show that Wallace’s “hold on conservatism really had to do with his racism.” He wrote Nancy Reagan that Wallace was “a dangerous man” and his son, Christopher, that Wallace was “Mr. Evil.”41
NOT THE ONE
In the first six months of the Nixon administration, National Review was cautiously complimentary, applauding the appointment of Warren Burger to succeed Earl Warren as chief justice and the announcement of welfare reform and revenue-sharing with the states.
Buckley continued his ascendancy. In 1967 he won a Best Columnist of the Year award. In 1969 Firing Line won an Emmy. In September 1970 Buckley achieved iconic cultural status when he was the celebrity guest on the top-ranked TV comedy program, Laugh-In.
But President Nixon’s lurch to the left, especially in foreign policy, was no laughing matter for Buckley and other conservatives. Henry Kissinger’s secret trips to Communist China were revealed, and Nixon announced that he would attend summits in Peking and Moscow. In the summer of 1971, the president unveiled what he called his New Economic Plan (Lenin would have applauded the variation on his New Economic Policy), featuring wage and price controls and a new “flexible” tariff policy. “I am now a Keynesian in economics,” Nixon declared, an assertion that could not be ignored by conservatives.
Twelve leaders of the Right, with William F. Buckley Jr. at the top of the list, met in New York City and issued a declaration as “The Manhattan Twelve.” Citing the dereliction in military preparedness and the turns toward the Soviet Union and Red China, these conservative leaders announced that they were suspending their “support of the Administration.”42 Buckley’s unyielding anti-Communism had again led him to take a strong public stand against an American president. He and NR went so far as to back Representative John Ashbrook’s principled but impractical run against Nixon in the 1972 New Hampshire Republican primary. Only 10 percent of Republican voters cast their ballots for Ashbrook in the three states in which he ran, but fundamental conservative principles had been articulated—principles like limited government and a firm stand against Communism, which the Nixon administration had abandoned.
To his surprise, Buckley was assigned a seat on the Nixon plane going to China, affording him a rhetorical opportunity of which he took full advantage. Repulsed by the spectacle of an American president greeting and toasting the top Chinese Communist officials at a formal Peking dinner, he wrote these memorable lines: “The effect was as if Sir Hartley Shawcross had suddenly risen from the prosecutor’s stand at Nuremberg and descended to embrace Goering and Goebbels and Doenitz and Hess, begging them to join him in the making of a better world.”43
Buckley was even more startled in the summer of 1973 when the White House invited him to serve as an American delegate to the United Nations, an organization he had used as a piñata from his earliest days. He at first demurred but then accepted, having been promised a place on the UN’s Third Committee, which deals with human rights, and because in a spasm of “pure undiluted Walter Mittyism” he imagined that any delegate armed with a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could make the Third Committee his personal forum.44 He saw himself holding the other delegates spellbound as he read from Solzhenitsyn, described the concentration camps in Communist China, and pleaded the case for this or that incarcerated dissident.
In the end, his every attempt to discuss human rights candidly in the Third Committee was squelched as not being in accord with detente, the official U.S.-Nixon-Kissinger policy. While conceding that one could refer to certain nonideological achievements in areas such as science and health and the usefulness perhaps of the General Assembly as a place where “the little countries can speak their minds,” Buckley summed up his UN experience in one sentence: “The United Nations is the most concentrated assault on moral reality in the history of free institutions.”45
Meanwhile, cracks were appearing in the seemingly smooth Nixon façade. On January 11, 1973, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) announced that Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) would head an inquiry into Watergate. Almost from the beginning, NR took a strong stand, saying editorially, “This Watergate affair…has acquired a sour, rotting quality that can only be cleaned up by the truth…. The Administration should purge itself of any person of whatever level whose relation to the Watergate affair was legally or morally culpable.”46 Burnham was the author of the editorial, Buckley having recused himself from commenting in the magazine because of his longtime friendship with Howard Hunt, organizer of the break-in.
In the ensuing nineteen months, Nixon dodged and ducked, insisting to conservatives like Senator Barry Gold-water that he had no knowledge of Watergate, reluctantly accepting the resignations of his top aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, firing various attorneys general (Richard Kleindienst and Elliot Richardson), and clinging stubbornly to the mast of the White House. At long last, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned as president rather than face certain impeachment by the House of Representatives and probable conviction by the Senate for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.
Buckley believed that Nixon had brought his troubles down on himself. He wrote in his column that the president “had teased the Puritan conscience of America and loosed the hounds that finally arrived at his door.” As with the Goldwater candidacy a decade earlier, Buckley was concerned about the deleterious impact of Nixon’s exit on the conservative movement.47
As early as October 1973, he had written to Reagan, then in his next to last year as governor of California, that “Our Leader [their code name for Nixon] is in deep trouble, and that it is altogether possible that he will not succeed, finally, in extricating himself.” The following July, shortly before it was revealed that Nixon had been aware of the Watergate cover-up—the so-called smoking gun—Buckley warned Reagan, “Don’t make the mistake of hanging in there too long.”48 Reagan did not heed Buckley’s advice, being one of the very last Republicans to call for Nixon’s resignation. “I have just a sneaking instinct,” he wrote Buckley, “that there may have been, with regard to our leader, overkill.”49
Buckley had already been obliged to put into perspective the ignominious departure of Vice President Spiro Agnew—a national conservative hero—who had resigned his office after pleading nolo contendere to a charge of income tax evasion. Agnew privately admitted to Goldwater, among others, that as governor of Maryland he had accepted political contributions totaling tens of thousands of dollars from people who did business with the state. He continued to receive money from them as vice president, pocketing envelopes thick with cash during meetings in his White House office.50
At the annual dinner of the Conservative Party of New York, Buckley stressed that conservatives should not make the mistake of defending Agnew as liberals had defended Alger Hiss in the 1950s. Rather, they should separate the “valid ideas” Agnew had espoused from the misconduct of the man. Human Events was less diplomatic, saying the vice president had “traded away” his many attributes—including giving voice to the Silent Majority—”for a mess of pottage.”51
First Agnew’s resignation in disgrace, then Nixon’s forced departure to avoid impeachment. What next? President Gerald Ford provided the answer: the nomination of ultraliberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president.
Many conservatives favored the man they still thought of as “Mr. Conservative,” Senator Barry Goldwater, although others preferred Ronald Reagan. Instead, Ford named the man whose malicious misrepresentations of Goldwater during the 1964 Republican primaries had been used by Democrats to bury the senator in the general election.
Some tough-minded young conservatives were mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore. Led by direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie, they formed an informal group of political activists and Capitol Hill aides that became the New Right. They were, in the words of author and columnist Kevin Phillips, “anti-establishment, middle-class political rebels more interested in issues like abortion, gun control, busing, ERA, quotas, bureaucracy, and the grassroots tax revolt than in capital gains taxation or natural gas deregulation.”52 They were also firmly anti-Communist, providing a link to the conservatives grouped around National Review and Bill Buckley.
But there were disconnects between New Right leaders and Buckley, starting with Viguerie’s enthusiasm for George Wallace. The Texas-born Viguerie insisted that he and Alabama’s Democratic governor agreed on about “80 percent of the important issues, social issues like busing and law and order, and the need for a strong national defense.”53 In his eagerness to forge an alliance between Republican economic conservatives and Democratic social conservatives, Viguerie was willing to downplay and even overlook Wallace’s earlier and adamant stand against civil rights for African Americans, as well as his fondness for government solutions to public problems.
Buckley was skeptical about the New Right’s attempt to fuse populism and conservatism in the person of Wallace. Taking up the issue of higher energy costs, for example, Buckley argued that a conservative would pass along higher costs to the consumer in order to encourage more exploration, but a populist would seek a villain like the big oil companies. “That’s the kind of thing that rolls off George Wallace’s tongue naturally,” he wrote.54
Kevin Phillips, who coined the phrase “The New Right” and endorsed most of the New Right’s policy positions, launched a series of highly personal attacks on Bill Buckley. He criticized Buckley for joining the establishment Council on Foreign Relations and “abandoning Middle America to load up his yacht with vintage wines and sail across the Atlantic.” He faulted National Review for lauding conservative intellectuals Wilhelm Röpke and Eric Voegelin, asking sarcastically, “So what have they to say to Kansas City and Scranton? “55
In his syndicated column, NR senior editor Jeffrey Hart responded that National Review was never intended to be a mass circulation magazine. Its founders assumed that in Middle America, “and yes in Kansas City and Scranton,” there resided individuals “addicted to good prose and to theoretical perception” who possessed “unprecedented leverage.” NR‘s founders, Hart wrote, saw that conservatism must be viable “as an intellectual as well as a popular and political presence.”56
An adamant Phillips remained dismissive of Buckley and the other “elitists” at National Review. A more gracious note was struck by Richard Viguerie, who, in his bestselling manifesto The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead, wrote that it was Buckley’s “unique contribution” to draw together three kinds of conservatives in America—classical liberals like Frank Chodorov, traditional conservatives like Russell Kirk, and anti-Communists like Whittaker Chambers. “The New Right owes much of what we believe in and are fighting for,” Viguerie said, “to such outstanding men and the catalyst who brought them together, William F. Buckley Jr.”57
There were now four kinds of conservatives: classical liberals or libertarians, traditional conservatives, anti-Communists, and New Right populists or social conservatives. A fifth variety would soon appear, the neoconservatives, with whom Buckley, the master fusionist, would form a close relationship.
MUGGED BY REALITY
A series of events in the late 1960s and early 1970s jolted a small but influential group of old-fashioned liberals—mostly Jewish and residing in New York City—and forced them to move out of their no longer comfortable Democratic digs. The happenings included the 1972 presidential nomination of ultraliberal George McGovern; the seeming willingness of modern liberals to let Vietnam and any other nation under siege fall into the hands of the Communists; the refusal of prominent Democrats to fault the United Nations for its virulent anti-Israel rhetoric; and the revolution in sexual and social relations that produced what the liberal critic Lionel Trilling called the “adversary culture.”
In Irving Kristol’s memorable phrase, neoconservatives were liberals who had been “mugged by reality.” They attacked the radicals as despoilers of the liberal tradition. Kristol called for a return to the “republican virtue” of the founding fathers and invoked the idea of a good society. He endorsed the notion of a “moral and political order” and conceded that the idea of a “hidden hand” had its uses in the marketplace.58 Confronted with reality, the founder of neoconservatism did not merely endorse but embraced conservative principles and practices.
Mainstream conservatives warmly welcomed Kristol and his friends. Buckley set the tone by declaring that Kristol was “writing more sense in the public interest these days than anybody I can think of.” The two men had gotten to know each other at a monthly luncheon group called the Boys Club, organized by Buckley and the New York liberal intellectual Richard Clurman. Harvard social scientists Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer noticed they were being treated in National Review “with a much higher level of intellectual honesty” than in liberal journals.59 Buckley recognized the formidable brain power of the neoconservatives and their ready access to the mass media, attributes which would serve the conservative movement well.
In the early 1970s, as NR approached its twentieth anniversary, there were grumblings that its editor-in-chief had become so great a celebrity that he was growing indifferent to the course of the magazine and the conservative movement he had founded—charges that had little merit when one considers his frenetic schedule of TV programs, newspaper columns, lectures, and editorial involvement in National Review. It was at this moment that Buckley published an intriguing and too-little-known work, Four Reforms: A Guide for the Seventies.
In just 128 pages, the author proposes solutions for four of the most persistent problems in modern America—welfare, taxes, education, and crime. Regarding welfare, he first suggests that “the burden of the nonprofessional work done on behalf of the aged” be done by high school graduates who would voluntarily donate one year of service before going on to college. He then proposes a series of governmental reforms including the appropriation of federal funds for social welfare only to states whose per capita income “is below the national average.”60 In his New York Times book review, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then ambassador to India and later a safely liberal U.S. senator from New York, rejected Buckley’s welfare reform, saying that the people who needed welfare were “as likely to be found in high income states as in low.” But Moynihan offered no alternative, contenting himself with saying, erroneously, that the problem “will have greatly receded by the mid-1980s.”61 In fact, the “problem” receded only in 1996 when a Republican Congress passed historic welfare reform over President Bill Clinton’s veto—twice.
With regard to taxes, Buckley reflects the influence of Albert Jay Nock and Milton Friedman by proposing the elimination of the progressive income tax and the institution of a flat tax of 15 percent on all income.
Taking up education, he suggests a constitutional amendment incorporating the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and forbidding the denial of “any relief authorized by any legislature for children attending non-public schools.” (Catholics and evangelicals heartily endorsed this reform.) As Moynihan said, the treatment of Catholic schools was “a scandal of American juridical and political liberalism.”62 Perhaps in due course, Buckley writes, “we shall move into a voucher system…at any grade school.” Until that day, “the immediate concern is to husband such private schools as there are.”63
He concludes with the hardest of lines on crime, proposing that the Fifth Amendment be repealed and procedures regarding an accused person should adhere to the criterion: “Did he do it?” He adds that the goal should be “speedier justice.”64
Commenting on an earlier Buckley book, Cruising Speed, the Christian Science Monitor said that Bill Buckley’s writing “forces the reader to give up or think.”65 Buckley liked that judgment so much he reprinted it on the inside back cover of Four Reforms.
Even the protean Buckley did not accomplish all these things all by himself. Longtime associate Linda Bridges has estimated that at the long height of his career (from 1966 to 1999), he kept busy a secretary, one and sometimes two typists, and four researchers. (The researchers he shared with the magazine.) This supporting group did not include the NR staff, the Firing Line production staff, and a limousine and driver that enabled him to work—dictating a letter, polishing an essay or a speech—while going from place to place.66
One of Bill Buckley’s most significant public-policy contributions to the modern conservative movement (and to the Reagan presidency) was as an early champion of supply-side economics. As the historian Brian Domitrovic points out, among participants in public debate, Buckley was “the one who spotted nascent supply-side economics” in early 1971. A concrete Buckley action was to hire a young economist, Alan Reynolds, making NR the first journal of public opinion to have a writer with a supply-side perspective on staff.
National Review, Domitrovic says, “was the lone beacon” (even before the Wall Street Journal) “pointing the way out of a nearly unprecedented economic darkness in the early 1970s.” The solution: stable money and tax cuts, major elements of what came to be called the supply-side revolution. Buckley also used Firing Line to deflate old Keynesians like John Kenneth Galbraith and raise up supply-siders like George Gilder, Arthur Laffer, and Robert Bartley. He later remarked, with obvious satisfaction: “It is not wide of the historical mark to say that during the years Firing Line has been produced, socialism has collapsed.”67
SAILING AND SAVING
As he approached fifty, Bill Buckley resolved to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in his sailboat Cyrano, a long-held dream. He also responded positively to an intriguing suggestion from his book editor Samuel Vaughan to write a novel.
Buckley’s authorial model was the popular spy novelist Frederick Forsyth, who had written The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File—not John le Carré, an apostle of moral and political equivalence. Buckley later explained that he had “only a single idea in mind…. I would write a book in which the good guys and the bad guys were actually distinguishable from one another. I took a deep breath and further resolved that the good guys would be—the Americans.”68
To correct the record about the CIA—which he insisted “seeks to advance the honorable alternative in the struggle for the world”—he created the character of CIA operative Blackford Oakes, who was young, dashing, “distinctively American.” Buckley’s first novel, Saving the Queen, was greeted by generally favorable reviews and quickly achieved bestseller status. Buckley’s favorite review was reportedly the one by a liberal professor of English at the University of Missouri, who confessed he liked the novel but salved his conscience by adding, “The hero of Saving the Queen…is tall, handsome, witty, agreeable, compassionate and likeable, from which at least we can take comfort in knowing that the book is not autobiographical.”69 As readers of this work know, the similarities between Oakes and Buckley are in fact numerous.
The second Blackford Oakes novel, Stained Glass, published in 1978, won the American Book Award as the best suspense novel of the year. There would follow nine more Oakes novels, culminating in Last Call for Blackford Oakes, which appeared in 2005. Each book demonstrated that the CIA and the KGB were not the mirror image of each other any more than the United States and the Soviet Union were.
Buckley’s favorite mode of relaxation—even in gale force winds—was sailing. He had learned to sail as a child on a lake in northwestern Connecticut and kept a succession of boats at Wallacks Point, on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound. His son, Christopher, wrote that his father’s greatness “was of a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea.” Great men, he said, “always have too much sail up.” They take great risks and they are ever impatient—for the next adventure.70
In 1975, Bill Buckley, Christopher, and the rest of the crew sailed across the Atlantic, starting in Miami and four thousand miles later dropping anchor in the shadow of Gibraltar. They had such a good time that Bill Buckley declared they must sail across the Pacific, which they did, from Honolulu to New Guinea, ten years later. As they made their way across the endless Pacific, Christopher Buckley felt more and more like Christopher Columbus searching eagerly for land, for an island where they could swim without someone standing “shark-guard” with an assault rifle, and for a stretch of sleep longer than four hours.71
The moment they dropped anchor, Bill Buckley would look at this watch and say, “Okay, it’s ten o’clock now. What say we shove off at two?” Christopher was learning that for his father “it was the voyage, not the stopping. Great men are not idlers…. They’re built for speed.”72