THE BUILDER
Wherever he was—in New Guinea, Gstaad, or Wallacks Point—Bill Buckley kept his eye on the state of the conservative movement, including and most especially the political fortunes of Ronald Reagan. The two conservatives had first met in January 1961 when Reagan, then the host of the popular television program GE Theater, was to introduce Buckley to an assembly of mostly doctors and their wives at a Los Angeles high school. However, it was discovered that the microphone was dead, and the control room at the rear of the hall was locked. As the audience grew increasingly restive at the delay of the program, Reagan decided to take remedial action.
The future president walked to the side of the hall and looked through the window at the ledge running the length of the building some two stories above traffic. He slipped out the window and with his back to the wall sidestepped carefully on the parapet toward the control-room window. Reaching it, he broke the glass with his elbow and disappeared into the control room. “In a minute there was light in the upstairs room,” Buckley later wrote, “and then we could hear the crackling of the newly animated microphone.”1
For Buckley, Reagan’s movements that night were a “nifty allegory of his approach to foreign policy”—the calm appraisal of a situation, the willingness to take risks, and then the decisive moment “leading to lights and sound—and music, the music of the spheres.”2
The Yale University graduate and the Eureka College alumnus had much in common: Each was tall (Reagan 6′1′′, Buckley 6′2′′), handsome, ambitious, a gifted speaker with a ready wit, an inveterate reader with an abiding interest in ideas, and a star in his profession. Each was a committed conservative—Reagan the zealous convert from liberalism, Buckley the cradle conservative. Each had a strong libertarian streak and viewed government almost always as the problem, not the solution. Each was a fierce anti-Communist who believed that you could only trust the Communists to be Communists—although Reagan would come to believe that you could trust some Communists if you carefully verified their actions. A close friendship developed, reinforced by Nancy Reagan’s warm approval of Bill and Pat Buckley, who knew many of the same socially prominent New Yorkers she did.
There was a significant intellectual difference between the two conservatives: Buckley’s innate skepticism—deepened by the influence of Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham—about the possibility of altering the course of history contrasted with Reagan’s sunny belief that, in the words of Thomas Paine, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”3
When Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, NR enthusiastically endorsed his candidacy. By the early 1970s, Buckley was convinced that “Reagan was capable of becoming President.”4 Following Agnew’s exit in disgrace in 1973, the magazine dubbed Reagan the leader of conservatism. But after twenty often frustrating years of building a conservative alternative to the liberal establishment, Buckley could not help wondering what there was to lead.
In a November 1975 interview, a saturnine Buckley said: “As of this moment [the movement] is going nowhere.” At the twentieth-anniversary dinner of National Review, Buckley described in detail the leftward tilt of Western civilization, led by American capitalists “fleeing into the protective arms of the government at the least hint of commercial difficulty.” He suggested that survival might well depend upon something like Albert Jay Nock’s Remnant.
Still, he would not submit to despair, because from the right angle it could be seen that “Communism is theoretically and empirically discredited.” All over the world, he said, “enslaved people continue to dream about freedom.” Inroads against poverty were successful “in almost exact correspondence to the vitality of the private sector.” And most significant of all, “there are no signs at all that God is dead. He appears to have survived even Vatican II.”5
In these remarks we see the three major ideas that guided Bill Buckley from the beginning of his career: a contempt for Communism, a firm belief in private enterprise, and an abiding faith in God. As at previous anniversary dinners, Buckley pledged that he and the magazine would continue to persevere. “We have stood together for one-tenth the life span of this Republic,” he said, “and we must resolve to stand with it, and its ideals, forever.”6
In the same interview in which Buckley said that the conservative movement was “going nowhere,” he added, “That would change if Reagan were to decide to challenge Mr. Ford in the primary.” Some conservatives, including leaders of the New Right and NR publisher William Rusher (but not Buckley), were pushing the idea of starting a third, conservative party. Reagan disavowed any interest in the idea. Conservatives lustily cheered Reagan at the 1975 meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) when he asked, “Is it a third party that we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all the issues troubling the people?”7
Reagan hesitated and then decided to do as Buckley had suggested: challenge incumbent president Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. A turning point for Reagan had been Ford’s refusal to meet with famed Russian dissident and author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. For Reagan and Buckley there was no greater anti-Communist than the man who wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. “The public acclaim by Solzhenitsyn of the kind of thing we were doing,” Buckley said, “was an enormous stroke in the ideological heavens and his Gulag book simply broke the back of the intellectual pro-Communist left.”8
Buckley shared the movement’s elation when Reagan sought his party’s nomination—he had been encouraging Reagan to seek the presidency since at least 1973, and backed his bid in his column, although he played no formal role in the campaign. He felt sharp disappointment when Ford won the nomination in a heartbreakingly close vote at the national convention—1,187 delegates to 1,070. Reagan thanked his advisers and workers, many of whom were weeping, and reminded them that although “we lost…the cause goes on.” And he added a couple of lines from an old Scottish ballad, “I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile; though I am wounded, I am not slain. I shall rise and fight again.”9
Although James Burnham suggested Jimmy Carter as worthy of NR‘s support (Burnham pointed to Carter’s exemplary naval service and his farming background), Buckley stuck with Gerald Ford, who, he said, “had adopted the Reagan line” and accepted the Republican Party platform, drafted by two staunch Reaganites—Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Representative Jack Kemp of New York. When, in a presidential debate, Ford declared, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” Buckley attempted but failed to explain away one of the most indefensible assertions in modern politics. President Ford’s statement that “I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union” was “the ultimate Polish joke,” said Buckley.10 Most Americans did not get the joke and elected Carter president.
They soon regretted their vote. By mid-1979 the inflation rate stood at 13.3 percent, unemployment was 8 percent, and the economy had stalled. Instead of acknowledging his own ineptitude, the ever-sanctimonious Carter faulted the American people, who, he said, were deep in the throes of a “crisis of confidence.” The president was unwilling to concede that Americans were being strangled by “stagflation” (zero economic growth coupled with double-digit inflation), a condition created by the Carter administration.11
TO THE RESCUE
Ronald Reagan was very nearly the perfect conservative candidate—charismatic, articulate, experienced, and principled. In January 1978, two years before the presidential campaign was expected to begin, Bill Buckley in his syndicated column effectively endorsed the sixty-six-year-old Ronald Reagan for president. He directly addressed the question of whether the former California governor was too old by recounting how Reagan had insisted on participating in a touch football game the preceding Thanksgiving at the Buckley estate and was “indistinguishable” in his energy and skills from his eighteen-year-old son, Ron Jr. Buckley predicted that voters, if asked whether Reagan should run, would reply, after noting Reagan’s obvious energy and fitness, “Why not?”12
A decisive turn to the right in politics seemed possible—and not only in America. In May 1979, the Conservative Party won control of the British Parliament, and Margaret Thatcher became the new prime minister. In a euphoric column titled “Margaret Is My Darling,” Buckley pointed out that Thatcher had a large mess to clean up but concluded: “Evelyn Waugh complained that the trouble with our century is that we never succeeded in turning the clock back a single second. The voters may now have proved him wrong.”13 Thatcher and Reagan would become close political allies who, together with Pope John Paul II, would institute the strategic and other policies that brought the forty-year-old Cold War to a peaceful and unexpectedly swift end.
Declaring his candidacy in November 1979, Reagan went on to best six of the GOP’s brightest in the presidential primaries: Senate Republican leader Howard Baker; former treasury secretary John Connally; Senator Bob Dole, the 1976 vice presidential nominee; Congressman Phil Crane, chairman of the American Conservative Union; liberal congressman John Anderson; and George H. W. Bush, former everything, including U.S. envoy to China, CIA director, and chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Buckley and Reagan saw each other during the 1980 campaign and frequently talked on the telephone, but rarely discussed political strategy. One exception: when Reagan fired campaign manager John Sears just before the New Hampshire primary and replaced him with Bill Casey, he called Buckley to ask for his support. One lasting Buckley contribution was his strong recommendation that the Reagan campaign hire the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tony Dolan—a Yale graduate—as a speechwriter. Dolan went on to become a key speechwriter during the eight White House years. “The best thing Buckley did,” said Casey later, “was bugging me into hiring a guy named Tony Dolan.”14
Before and after Reagan was nominated, Buckley delighted in squelching insinuations about the former actor’s mental capacity. He wrote, for example, that Reagan was “simple minded enough to cherish no other ideals than those of the Founding Fathers.” After the national Republican convention, Buckley acted as an intermediary between Reagan and his old friend Henry Kissinger, who was in touch with wives of the American hostages in Iran. The former secretary of state had secured the willingness of their spokeswoman to issue a “contradictory statement” if President Carter should denounce Reagan’s stand on the hostages. Buckley also told Reagan, with tongue in cheek, that Kissinger “would be willing to make a public declaration of his non-availability for public office.”15
In the same playful manner, Buckley wrote Reagan that he thought he would be elected but assured the future president and longtime friend that he aspired to no government job of any kind. Reagan immediately wrote back that he was disappointed. “I had in mind,” he informed Buckley, “to appoint you ambassador to Afghanistan”—which the Soviets had invaded the preceding winter, precipitating a prolonged and bloody conflict. Buckley responded in kind that he would accept the challenging assignment. For the next eight years, in many of his communications with President Reagan, he would report on his “secret mission” to Kabul, “where, in our fiction, I lived and worked.” In his letters to Buckley, President Reagan sometimes addressed him as “Mr. Ambassador.”16
As election day approached, conservatives reflected on the lessons learned in the past decades as, led by Bill Buckley, they had built their movement:
• It is not enough to be philosophically right, political strategist Morton Blackwell was fond of saying. You must also be technologically proficient. Conservatives must be expert in such tools of politics as precinct organization, communications, canvassing, direct mail, and polling.
• Conservatives must work together. There is not only safety but also strength in numbers.
• Conservatives should be realistic in their goals and patient about their realization. Like the Fabians in Great Britain and the progressives in America, conservatives must prepare themselves for a long march.
• Conservatives should be prudently optimistic, trusting in the ultimate good sense of the American people to make the right political decisions if given the right information.
From the founding of National Review, Bill Buckley had worked to implement such ideas. He had been no armchair intellectual; he had engaged in direct political action, as with the founding of Young Americans for Freedom and the Conservative Party of New York, and running for mayor of New York City. He had labored hard and successfully to bring together conservatives of varying backgrounds and beliefs. Influenced by Burnham and Chambers, he had generally adopted a pragmatic attitude regarding political goals.
His ingrained pessimism, however, had blunted any deep confidence in the ability of the people—the masses—to make the right decisions, with or without the necessary information. And yet he understood full well the many flaws of the elite, accounting for his early witticism, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”17 The putdown of the Harvard faculty is consistent with his criticism of the self-absorbed Yale faculty in God and Man at Yale and suggests a willingness to be persuaded, at certain times, of the wisdom of the masses.
Although most of the national polls reported that the 1980 presidential election would be close, Reagan won in an electoral landslide and by more than eight million popular votes. He carried forty-four states (the same number as Lyndon Johnson in his runaway victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964), with a total of 489 electoral votes. His total of 43.9 million votes was the second largest on record, behind only Nixon’s 47.2 million in 1972. This conservative triumph provided solid evidence about the aptitude of “We the people” to govern—as would the political triumphs that followed, from Reagan to Newt Gingrich to the early George W. Bush, and the bright constellation of conservative philosophers, popularizers, and politicians who emerged in the coming years.
Reagan’s political coattails helped the GOP to pick up twelve seats in the Senate in 1980, giving it majority control for the first time in a quarter of a century. House Republicans gained thirty-three seats, almost all of them conservatives. Former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern said that the voters had “abandoned American liberalism.” The Washington Post acknowledged that 1980 was not an ordinary election year: “Nothing of that size and force and sweep,” the Post editorialized, “could have been created over a weekend or even a week or two by the assorted mullahs and miseries of our times.” Liberal pollster Louis Harris concluded that Reagan had won “his stunning victory” because conservatives of all varieties, particularly the Moral Majority, “gave him such massive support.”18
As he often did, columnist George Will put the victory in perspective and credited the person most responsible (after the candidate himself) for it: “What happened in 1980,” he said, “is that American conservatism came of age.” Speaking at the twenty-fifth-anniversary dinner of National Review, Will noted that sixteen years before, Barry Goldwater had made the Republican Party “a vessel of conservatism” and that NR had filled the vessel with “an intellectually defensible modern conservatism.” The principal architect of that achievement, he said, was William F. Buckley, “the Pope of the conservative movement, operating out of a little Vatican on 35th Street.”19
It is a felicitous phrase, but I suggest a different metaphor: William F. Buckley Jr. was the St. Paul of the conservative movement, proselytizing tirelessly across America, fighting the good fight against liberal heretics, exhorting and, when necessary, warning the conservative faithful to mend their ways, knowing the race was not over, even with the coming of the Reagan presidency.
A CONSERVATIVE ESTABLISHMENT
Ronald Reagan came to the presidency with several important political advantages. He had an express mandate from the American people, who knew what he intended to do: cut income taxes from top to bottom, reduce the size of the federal government for the first time since the New Deal, and make the American military number one in the world. To help in this revolutionary task, he had a Republican Senate and a feisty Republican minority in the House determined to avoid legislative gridlock. And he had something else—a vital, committed conservative movement.
Reagan could turn to the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and other think tanks for ideas.
He could call on groups like the American Conservative Union, the National Rifle Association, and the National Right to Life Committee for political muscle.
He could staff his administration with professionals who had gotten their start in the movement, such as Richard V. Allen, Tony Dolan, and Kenneth Cribb.
He could ask neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Kenneth Adelman, and Elliott Abrams for foreign-policy assistance.
He could depend on the support of opinion molders like Bill Buckley, George Will, and Patrick J. Buchanan.
Buckley was proud of his and National Review‘s decades-old contribution to the Reagan triumph, but he did not hesitate to question the president. From tax cuts to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Buckley would make his case on issues through NR, his column, and his many friends and protégés who populated the administration. The Buckleyites included Aram Bakshian and Tony Dolan in the White House speechwriting office, Christopher Buckley as a speechwriter for Vice President George H. W. Bush, Daniel Oliver as general counsel to the Department of Education, Evan Galbraith as U.S. ambassador to France, Jim Buckley as undersecretary of state for security assistance, and Bill Casey as director of the CIA.
“Whenever there is a big philosophical issue and people want to weigh in,” Casey said, “Buckley can make a call. But he is quite cautious about doing it.” Dolan traced Buckley’s reticence to his sense of propriety. “You do not disturb a transcendent relationship, that is, a friendship, for the sake of ‘I don’t like the way the trade bill is going.’ ” For his part, Reagan would call Buckley or Bill Rusher to discuss a column or an item in NR. He was determined not to be cut off from old friends, even if he did not necessarily take their advice.20
Buckley and the president conducted a high-spirited correspondence that ranged from Buckley inviting Reagan—after he left office—to take a part in the theatrical version of his spy novel Stained Glass to a sharp debate about the treaty eliminating intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
In the first half of 1982, Bill Buckley, the intractable anti-Communist, pressed the Reagan administration to declare war on Cuba because “it is difficult to think of a measure that would give greater heart to the entire anti-communist defense enterprise.” He also criticized the president for offering to reopen negotiations on an arms control treaty with the Soviet Union just a few months after he had broken off talks as a protest against the Polish Communist government’s suppression of Solidarity. Buckley’s faith in Reagan as a champion of freedom was justified by the president’s pivotal speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in which he described the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil in the modern world” and the center of an “evil empire.” When a New York Times columnist attacked Reagan for using religion to promote a political cause, Buckley retorted, “Mr. Reagan, as leader of the Free World, does well to remind us that we are dealing with men explicitly bound to the proposition that the morality of advancing world revolution is superordinated to any other morality.”21
As Jeffrey Hart writes, Ronald Reagan set down four goals for his administration: (1) restore the American spirit of confidence and optimism; (2) get the American economy “humming” through cuts in tax rates and domestic spending; (3) build up and “renovate” American military power; and (4) stop the spread of Soviet power and “destroy” the Soviet system through the use of “moral-intellectual and economic-strategic power.”22 NR and Buckley endorsed and applauded all four objectives enthusiastically and frequently, although neither the magazine nor its editor appreciated fully that Reagan’s deliberate buildup of the American military was calculated to enable him to sit down with the Soviets and negotiate—from strength—the elimination of nuclear weapons and bring about a peaceful end to the Cold War.
Reagan made his foreign-policy intentions clear in four speeches that alerted the Soviets that a new man and a new strategy were in place in Washington, D.C. The new policy was far different from Nixon-Kissinger détente.
Speaking to the British Parliament in June 1982, the president boldly predicted that the “march of freedom and democracy…will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” In his talk to the evangelical ministers in March 1983, Reagan presented the moral and religious case for freedom and against tyranny, describing the Soviet Union as “an evil empire.” In June 1987, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the president delivered perhaps his best-remembered address, declaring, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The fourth speech came in May 1988, when Reagan offered an ode to freedom to an audience of mesmerized Russian students at Moscow State University.23
Rabidly opposed to Reagan’s military buildup were the nuclear freeze and peace movements, whose position Walter Mondale endorsed in the 1984 presidential campaign and the Democrats reiterated in their national platform. National Review skillfully skewered the arguments of the freeze movement while emphasizing the involvement of Soviet intelligence within the World Peace Council and the U.S. Peace Council and at New York City’s Riverside Church, the favorite meeting place of the peaceniks. NR senior editor Joseph Sobran provided an apt metaphor for the intimate relationship—the Hive. “When the Queen Bee in Moscow buzzes, the buzz goes down all through the Hive, buzz, buzz, buzz.”24
When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, National Review wisecracked, “There is room for optimism over the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. He has never been directly linked to the shooting of the Pope.”25 But the magazine, however inadvertently, was acknowledging a critical point—Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader, as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan realized upon meeting him. In Thatcher’s words after her first meeting with Gorbachev, “We can do business together.” Reagan prudently added the codicil, “Trust, but verify.”26
The liberal biographer John Judis, writing in 1988, argues that in the 1980s a general “malaise” afflicted Buckley’s writing and affected National Review and Firing Line. According to Judis, both the magazine and the TV program “appeared detached from national politics and exerted very little influence.” But as we have seen, NR was very much engaged with the core issues of the day such as nuclear weapons, while Firing Line highlighted prominent policy makers and pundits such as Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, George H. W. Bush, Eugene McCarthy, Jesse Helms, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Kissinger, the Dalai Lama, Robert Bork, Thomas Sowell, Edward Teller, Phyllis Schlafly, Paul Weyrich, William Rusher, and Malcolm Muggeridge, whose Christmas appearance was rebroadcast several times.
If the man and his rhetoric were less combative than they had been in 1950s and 1960s, it was because the times were different. Buckley was no longer alone in the lists but the spokesman—second only to Ronald Reagan—of a conservative phalanx out to change the direction of the nation and the world. Conservative ideas like winning the Cold War and rolling back the welfare state were no longer derided but widely debated. Communism was not expanding but contracting. Capitalism was spreading from continent to continent, inspiring some conservatives to say, “Now we are all Hayekians.” But, cautioned Buckley in an address about F. A. Hayek to the Mont Pelerin Society, “What we do not need is anything that suggests that human freedom is going to lead us to Utopia.”27
There were many targets of opportunity for a conservative, and Buckley took careful aim at most of them. In May 1983, for example, with purple-hatted bishops of the Catholic Church sitting in the front row, Buckley delivered a lecture at a Catholic college on “moral distinctions and modern warfare.” A central proposition of his remarks: “To venerate life is to attach to it first importance. Surely if we were all to do that, any talk of war, just or unjust, prudent or imprudent, limited or unlimited, provoked or unprovoked, would be an exercise in moral atavism.”28
During a tribute to President Reagan in 1985, on the occasion of National Review‘s thirtieth anniversary, Buckley pointed out that the current issue of NR discussed the Geneva summit, the war in Afghanistan, Sandinista involvement in Colombia, the attrition of order and discipline in the public schools, and the underrated legacy of Herman Kahn. Some disengagement.
SDI was the cornerstone of Reagan’s campaign to strengthen America’s national defenses—so crucial to his plans that he would never accede to Gorbachev’s repeated attempts to secure its abandonment. Among SDI’s greatest friends, Bridges and Coyne write, were Bill Buckley and National Review. Buckley retained physicist Robert Jastrow to write a regular feature, “SDI Watch,” which reported the ups and downs in the initiative’s development and the mainstream media’s attacks on it. Buckley understood that by forcing the Kremlin to expand resources to counter it, “SDI was a powerful force in the eventual dissolution of the Soviet empire.”29
President Reagan may have had the last word about Bill Buckley being out of touch at the official opening (in February 1983) of NR’s first formal Washington office, headed by John McLaughlin, who went on to found and host the long-running television discussion program The McLaughlin Group. Addressing a happy band of conservative writers, activists, members of Congress, and administration officials, Reagan looked at Buckley and said, “There’s a problem, though, Bill, that I think you should know about. It’s all the talk about your being aloof and insensitive and an out-of-touch editor. People are saying that you spend too much time away from New York. They’re also saying you’re being pushed around by your staff. And I understand there’s a new button on the market, ‘Let Buckley Be Buckley.’”30 The assembly roared with laughter, appreciating that conservatives had been complaining that White House aides were blocking the conservative agenda. A cry had gone up: “Let Reagan Be Reagan!”
That the two men enjoyed each other immensely can be seen from their vacation in April 1983 with wives Pat and Nancy at the Barbados villa of actress Claudette Colbert. While swimming the first day, Buckley asked Reagan if he wanted to earn the National Review Medal of Freedom. When the president asked what he had to do, Buckley replied, “Well, I will proceed to almost drown, and you will rescue me.”31 Reagan, who saved a recorded seventy-seven people from drowning during his summers as a young lifeguard in Dixon, Illinois, happily complied. Unfortunately, no photographer recorded the high jinks of America’s two most famous conservatives.
Despite his fondness for the president, Buckley criticized him when he felt it necessary, as when 241 Marines were killed in the fall of 1983 by a suicide bomber who rammed a dynamite-filled truck into a barracks in Lebanon. What was their mission, Mr. President? the magazine asked. What mission could have been accomplished by so few men? The invasion of Grenada and the ousting of Marxist leader Maurice Bishop were another matter. Foreign-policy specialist Brian Crozier wrote in NR that the Brezhnev Doctrine was no more. “Soviet imperial power has been rolled back, if only to the extent of 100,000 people and 133 square miles. Not much? It is enormous in significance.”32
In November 1984, Reagan won another landslide victory, carrying forty-nine states and receiving more than fifty million popular votes, the first presidential candidate in American history to do so. In an effusive postelection column, Buckley described Reagan as an “extraordinary president” who radiated an “idealistic self-assurance.” He subsequently urged the president to move dramatically in a more conservative direction, freezing entitlements and creating a “defense shield in space.” Reagan, who had voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt four times, preferred to approach the question of entitlements cautiously, focusing on the excesses of the Great Society but leaving Social Security alone. But he welcomed the idea of a space shield as part of SDI.33
In December 1985, Bill Buckley celebrated his sixtieth birthday and National Review its thirtieth anniversary with a black-tie and ball-gown banquet at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, featuring remarks by President Reagan. Senior editor Richard Brookhiser, who everyone assumed was being groomed to succeed Buckley, said that “in a hundred years, there is not a person or a thing in this room that will remain. But our ideas will remain.” Several speakers, including Jeffrey Hart and Buckley, quoted Whittaker Chambers to reinforce Reagan’s statement that the enemy America faced was an “evil empire.” Reagan leaned toward Priscilla Buckley and whispered to her, “It is an evil empire.”34
After detailing the advances of freedom around the world and the material role American conservatism had played, Reagan singled out National Review. We are gathered, he said, to “celebrate thirty years of witty, civilized pages from our beloved National Review and the damage, the terminal damages, those pages have done to modern statism and its unrelenting grimness.” He saluted Buckley, “our clipboard-bearing Gallahad,” “for setting loose so much good in the world. And, Bill,” he said, “thanks, too, for all the fun.”35
There were still miles to go for Ronald Reagan, who would oversee passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, lowering the top marginal income-tax rate from 50 percent to 33 percent and removing an estimated 4.3 million low-income families from the tax rolls; nominate to the Supreme Court the distinguished jurist Robert Bork, only to see the nominee undone by a snarling network of liberal organizations; and implement the Reagan Doctrine, which produced a Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, the election of a democratic government in Nicaragua, and the removal of forty thousand Cuban troops from Angola. And he would suffer through the Iran-contra “scandal,” which was not Watergate redux but a gross mistake in judgment. As the Republican members of a select committee of the House and Senate that investigated the funds diversion stated, “There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for the ‘internal rule of law,’ no grand conspiracy.”36
Addressing the unprecedented propaganda campaign against Judge Bork, Buckley neatly summed up the preposterous case of Bork’s critics in two short sentences: “What the opponents of Robert Bork are saying comes down to this: (1) We believe in an activist court that does not hesitate to write social policy. (2) But that social policy must be what we favor; for which reason, (3) Bork the legal scholar, the veteran teacher, administrator and judge, is not fit to serve. 37
Although not a lawyer, Buckley possessed a love of logic and precise language found in the best jurists—which led him to comment on the constitutional debate surrounding Attorney General Edwin Meese III. In October 1986, Meese shocked many on the Left when he stated that a Supreme Court decision “does not establish ‘a supreme law of the land’ that is binding on all persons and parts of the government, henceforth and forever more.”38
Meese was on firm legal ground. After all, Lincoln led a war to overturn the court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which said Congress could not stop slavery in the territories. Meese stated that there was a difference between constitutional law—the rulings of the court—and the Constitution. As Buckley wrote, “Edwin Meese…is asking merely that we (whether legislator, voter, pundit, or moralist) withhold judgment on the judicial, let alone moral, finality of a court ruling until it has survived the acquiescence of time. That is sound conservative thinking, of the kind that would surely have been welcomed by Dred Scott.”39
One Reagan action that Buckley and National Review did not welcome was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the Soviets. Buckley and Reagan wrote each other often and at length about the treaty, with Buckley raising strong objections and the president doing his best to reassure his old friend. In one letter, Buckley said bluntly, “SDI is not going to survive merely because you are in favor of it. Unhappily, it is, in my judgment, going to be spiked by Congress.”40
Europeans with whom Buckley was in touch believed that the removal of land-based missiles in Western Europe that could reach Soviet territory—the end result of the INF treaty—would persuade the Soviets they could “safely proceed on the assumption that no American president is going to commit nuclear forces to stop a Soviet blitzkrieg.” Buckley pointed out that it was not only “the far right” that was unhappy with the treaty. He mentioned Jeane Kirkpatrick and Henry Kissinger as among those who feared the consequences in “a post-Reagan age.”41
“I still think we are on solid ground on the INF Treaty,” the president responded, “based on our verification provisions and on the fact that Gorby knows what our response to cheating would be—it’s spelled Pershing.”42 (That is, if the Soviets cheated, the United States would redeploy the Pershing II missiles based in Germany and Great Britain.)
The president had an extended telephone conversation with Buckley in the fall of 1987 in which he repeated several times that he was not, as some on the Right charged, going “soft.” Rather, he said, “I’m determined that for the sake of the world we need if possible to eliminate nuclear weapons, but I am not going to do it at the expense of leaving us outweighted [sic] by them—and I haven’t softened up a bit.”43
Despite Reagan’s assurances, Buckley approved an NR cover that blared, “Reagan’s Suicide Pact.” The magazine warned that the treaty would destabilize Western Europe and leave it at the mercy of the Soviet Union. Anxious conservatives dismissed Reagan’s mantra, “Trust, but verify.” When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union quietly dissolved two years later, the full impact of Reagan’s “suicide pact” became clear. Buckley tacitly acknowledged his error in his 1995 novel, A Very Private Plot, in which a fictional Reagan muses in the Oval Office about his conservative friends who “sometimes don’t see the important things.” “And anyway,” the president says to himself, “Gorbachev isn’t giving away anything he isn’t prepared to give away. He doesn’t know how much I know about how much he’s hurting. Wasteland, the Soviet economy.”44
In his farewell address in January 1989, President Reagan reassured the men and women of the Reagan Revolution that they had made a difference—they had made the nation stronger, freer, and had left it in good hands. “All in all,” he said, with the suggestion of a twinkle in his eye, “not bad, not bad at all.”45 And then, having survived an assassin’s bullet, a recession, Iran-contra, the “borking” of his Supreme Court nominee, the slings and arrows of outraged liberals about his tax cuts, and the alarums of nervous conservatives about his summit meetings with Gorbachev, he went home with a public approval rating of 63 percent, the highest of any retiring president up to that point.
Aside from the decline of the New Right—which often criticized Reagan more harshly than his Democratic opponents—the 1980s were generally bountiful years for conservatives across the country, as all the elements of a successful political movement came together: a consistent and relevant philosophy, a national constituency, requisite financing, a solid organizational base, media proficiency, and charismatic principled leadership. National Review reached a circulation high of 200,000. The Heritage Foundation doubled its annual budget to nearly $18 million. Charles Murray, Michael Novak, Dinesh D’Souza, George Gilder, and Marvin Olasky published influential bestselling books. Foundations like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the redoubtable Earhart Foundation disbursed millions of dollars each year to think tanks, academics, authors, and publications.
There were inevitable tensions within the movement as it grew in size and influence. In the 1950s the sharpest differences were between traditionalists and libertarians as to the right balance between liberty and order. In the 1980s traditionalists and neoconservatives argued over the proper role of the state. At the 1986 national meeting of the Philadelphia Society, conservative professor Stephen Tonsor deplored the “arrogance” of former Marxists and radicals—i.e., the neoconservatives—dictating policies and beliefs to those who had never strayed from the truth. There also sprouted up in the nation’s capital a species of conservative careerists, drawn by the prospect of using political power to advance conservative goals and, even more importantly, themselves. Observing their eager wheeling and dealing, M. Stanton Evans remarked, “Too many conservatives come to Washington thinking that it is a cesspool and wind up thinking it is a hot tub.”46
During the 1980s, the external threat of Communism and the calming presence of Ronald Reagan persuaded most conservatives to sublimate their differences for the greater good. But with the collapse of Communism in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991—and the departure of the artful Reagan—disagreements between the varying kinds of conservatism became more intense.
STILL IN THE RING
Bill Buckley had no intention of leaving the public square, but as he approached sixty-five—the age when his father retired—he addressed the question of who should succeed him as editor of National Review, his most important and, he hoped, lasting contribution to the conservative movement and American politics. In 1987, Richard Brookhiser learned to his sharp disappointment that Buckley had changed his mind—he was no longer the designated successor.47 Following a brief but intense period of consultation with colleagues and friends, Buckley settled on John O’Sullivan, a brilliant, witty Anglo-Irish editor who had run newspapers and journals on both sides of the Atlantic. At the time, O’Sullivan was a special adviser and sometime speechwriter for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
NR’s thirty-fifth anniversary in 1990 coincided with Buckley’s sixty-fifth birthday, and as he had long planned, Bill Buckley announced his retirement—after 1,014 issues—as editor-in-chief and turned over the helm to John O’Sullivan. There were more than a few tears and exclamations of protest among those in attendance at the traditional black-tie banquet. Do not despair, Buckley said, smiling, for he would not discontinue his column or Firing Line or public speaking or book writing. But prudence required him to arrange for the continuation of National Review, which, “I like to think, will be here, enlivening right reason, for as long as there is anything left in America to celebrate.”48
Buckley’s notion of “retirement” was anyone else’s full-time job. He remained on the NR masthead as editor at large, which meant that while he would no longer lead the editorial meetings or edit the upfront section, “The Week,” he would be available for consultation and would let the new editor know “if there was anything he disliked.”49 Once a year, until the mid-1990s, he took over the biweekly editorial meeting to remind everyone that the contents of the magazine remained of paramount importance to him.
In addition, he stayed busy with the weekly Firing Line (although in 1988 he had cut the program from an hour to a half hour), his syndicated column (which he reduced from three times to two times a week in 1994), his lectures (trimmed from seventy to about twenty a year), and his fiction and nonfiction books, ranging from novels about Joe McCarthy and Elvis Presley to a history of the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall. In November 1991, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian award—from President George H. W. Bush, who said that “the United States honors…a tireless worker in the vineyards of liberty.”50
Surveying Buckley’s impact on American politics—including the peace dividend of the Cold War victory and the entrenchment of Reagan’s domestic legacy under President Clinton—John O’Sullivan declared that Bill Buckley “had in effect achieved his political ambitions (astonishingly ambitious ones in 1951) more completely than any other major figure of his time.”51 That is hyperbolic—Reagan led the way at home and abroad—but Buckley’s role in building the conservative movement was essential to Reagan’s success.
Almost all of those who had been with Buckley when he founded NR in 1955 and as he built the conservative movement over the following thirty years were now gone. In July 1987, after several years of declining health, James Burnham died, prompting a sorrowing Buckley to write:
I don’t think any of my colleagues would question that the figure for whom they had the greatest respect, and to whom they felt the greatest sense of gratitude, was James Burnham, who was never too busy to give the reasons for thinking as he did, or too harassed to interrupt his own work to help others with theirs. His generosity was egregiously exploited by one person, whose only excuse, now, is that at least he has documented his gratitude by penning these words.52
Burnham was the last of the major intellectual and political influences on Buckley to pass away. There had been Albert Jay Nock, the acerbic antistatist whom he had first read and met as a teenager; Willmoore Kendall, the brilliant, disputatious traditionalist who had mentored him at Yale; Whittaker Chambers, the Communist spy turned eloquent anti-Communist who had served briefly as a senior editor of National Review in its first years; and Burnham, a former man of the Left whose pragmatism in politics and policy had guided Buckley for a quarter of a century. All four men were facets of the fusionist conservatism that Buckley personified and employed to shape the American conservative movement.
In April 1994 Russell Kirk passed away. Buckley paid tribute to the fluent historian and man of letters who with his seminal work The Conservative Mind gave the movement its name. He recalled that his association with Kirk was older than the life of National Review, stretching back to the fall of 1954, when he traveled to Piety Hill in the hill country of Michigan to persuade the conservative scholar to associate “his august name” with a new magazine. Kirk agreed and for the next twenty-five years wrote about higher education in America in NR. In the ensuing fourteen years, after he had discontinued the NR column, Kirk wrote numerous books and essays, gave speeches, and “influenced the lives of another half-generation.” Few men, Buckley wrote fondly about his colleague and champion of ordered liberty, “have repaid their debt to their family, their country, and their faith so extravagantly.”53 He did not mention that Kirk had opposed the Persian Gulf War, which Buckley and the magazine endorsed, or that the Michigan native had served as state cochairman of Pat Buchanan’s insurgent presidential bid in 1992.
Kirk and his traditionalist conservatism were on Buckley’s mind when National Review celebrated its fortieth birthday in late 1995. Before discussing how to cope with the destructive legacy of seventy-five years of totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain, Buckley said a few words about the role of fusionism in the development of modern American conservatism. When NR was launched in 1955, he said, two traditions were at odds, although not with daggers drawn: the libertarian and the traditionalist. The former was “anti-statist, pure and simple.” The latter spoke of traditional values, calling for respect for our forefathers and mediating institutions such as the family, the church, and the courts.
Libertarian Frank Meyer was ultimately persuaded that “tradition was important to the good health of libertarian mores.” Traditionalist Russell Kirk acknowledged that the state was “the presumptive enemy of useful social energy, as the predicable obstacle to liberal progress.” The two schools came together in National Review, Buckley said, which “gave enthusiastic shelter to advocates of both.” The meeting of such minds as those of Meyer and Kirk “grew to be known as Fusionism; and little fusionists were born and baptized from coast to coast.”54 Although he did not say it, Buckley was the godfather of both ceremonies.
As to whether the future would take Americans “into a better world, with reduced government,” or to “a kind of Orwellian transcription of democracy,” we cannot be certain, Buckley said. We do know, he added, that “history triumphant awaits the crystallization of an informed public intelligence seeking maximum human freedom.” The easiest way for history to take its cue “is to maintain its subscription to National Review.”55
In 1998, halfway through the second term of President Bill Clinton—who had provided abundant and pungent copy for National Review—John O’Sullivan stepped down as NR editor after nearly a decade, and was replaced by the young, politically attuned Rich Lowry, the magazine’s national political reporter. In the words of biographers Bridges and Coyne, O’Sullivan had “done much to raise the magazine’s profile…and bring [its] operations into the late twentieth century.” He had hired the well-connected Kate O’Beirne away from the Heritage Foundation and installed gifted young writers like Lowry and the always insightful Ramesh Ponnuru. O’Sullivan displayed a flair for organizing, holding “fusionist” conferences in Washington and elsewhere at which traditional conservatives, libertarians, neoconservatives, and even a few liberals discussed the future of conservatism.56
Lowry recalls that he and Buckley had a one-hour luncheon at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C., at which they discussed the future of National Review. Buckley was convinced that the magazine needed “a new burst of energy,” undoubtedly conscious of the increased competition from the recently launched Weekly Standard, which was all Washington politics, all the time. Buckley had always had an eye for young talent, and Lowry’s keen political writing had caught his eye. Following their Washington luncheon, Buckley called Lowry and said, somewhat playfully, “I’m going to swing with you.” Rich Lowry was twenty-nine, the same age as Bill Buckley when he launched National Review.57
Lowry benefited from Buckley’s patience, especially in the first year, as when he admitted he had scheduled an article titled “Bomb Canada” in the same issue that the advertising director, after months of effort, had obtained an advertisement from the U.S.-Canada Friendship Council. The young editor readily conceded that Buckley operated on a higher intellectual plane. When Buckley said that an article was characterized by an “unnecessary anfractuosity,” Lowry nodded and said, “You know, I couldn’t agree with you more.”58
Aided by Buckley, the new editor took command. He surrounded himself with talented youthful conservatives like Jay Nordlinger and John Miller. He started up the enormously successful National Review Online and installed Jonah Goldberg and the energetic Kathryn Lopez, a graduate of the Catholic University of America, as editors. Under Lowry’s editorship, NR continued to be the voice of mainstream American conservatism.
National Review warned repeatedly in 1998 that Republicans should not neglect hard issues like school choice, Social Security privatization, and the passage of “emergency” spending bills in favor of an almost lascivious focus on President Clinton’s personal misbehavior and forthcoming impeachment. When the Senate in February 1999 failed to convict Clinton of high crimes and misdemeanors, recriminations among conservatives flowed hot and heavy. How could we have let him get away with it? they demanded of each other. Rich Lowry, in his carefully researched Clinton study, Legacy, argues, “There were two overriding factors that would ultimately save Clinton in the Lewinsky affair: his wife and a broad cultural shift in the American public that predisposed it to go easy on him.”59
In several speeches during the impeachment proceedings, Bill Buckley coolly analyzed why the American people had not been more outraged by behavior that even Clinton’s most eloquent defender, former Democratic senator Dale Bumpers, characterized as “indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, and shameless.”60 Elaborating on Lowry’s explanation, Buckley offered several propositions, raising the issue to a higher intellectual level:
“Many Americans seemed to be saying that public servants can be expected to be—casual—in the matter of conjugal morality.”
“Whatever the concern for morality and integrity, the political consideration inevitably figures.”
“America is correctly proud of its capacity to forgive, but also we are aware that forgiveness is a joint exercise.”
The public, Buckley noted, “does not seem to be determined to exact convincing contrition.” “What is the matter with the public?” he asked. “Why does it not understand the gravity of what is happening?” Some might say, he suggested, that “for most Americans, conduct, unless it directly affects them, is no longer evaluated by what were once publicly acknowledged as public standards.”
But he firmly rejected any such triumph of what some might call “personal detachment” and followers of Ayn Rand would term “the triumph of self-concern.” “The task ahead,” Buckley averred, “is to reconstruct our basic allegiance to what is right”—an always prime objective of National Review and its founding editor.
Pressed for years to write a “Catholic” book, Bill Buckley at last produced in 1997 Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, which William J. Bennett, a Catholic, called “a modern pilgrim’s progress” and Charles W. Colson, a Protestant, praised as a “deeply personal defense of his Catholic faith.”61 It is filled with the erudite opinions of friends and colleagues about Catholicism and its many strengths and weaknesses but sparse as to the intimate details of the author’s faith—except in two places.
Buckley traveled to Lourdes in 1994 not to seek a miraculous cure of a physical ailment—he was in comparatively good health at the time—but to satisfy his curiosity about “what exactly goes on there and what its impact might be on one first-time visitor.” He left Lourdes deeply, profoundly touched by the faith of the thousands of malades who came hoping but not expecting a miracle and who came away with “a sense of reconciliation, if not well-being.” “Our burden,” he writes, “is to keep the faith” whatever God’s plan for us, knowing that “the greatest tonic of all is divine love, which is nourished by human love, even as human love is nourished by divine love.”62
The most personal chapter is the one about the ordination of Michael Bozell, the son of his sister Patricia (Trish) Bozell, to whom he was closest of all his brothers and sisters. The chapter is prime Buckley, overflowing with descriptions of the fifty-one relatives and friends who expectantly traveled to the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes in northern France for Brother Michael’s ordination, the truly awful wine at the party the night before (alas, there was no miracle and the water remained water), a moving letter read by father Brent (now in a wheelchair) to son Michael, and a description of the monastery with its “unmistakable feel and aroma of age and piety and indomitability.”
Lying in his snug hotel bed and thinking of the young monk in his cell rising at midnight to sing his orisons, Buckley concluded that almost certainly Michael “was the happiest of us all, and that only God can dispense such a [thing] as that.”63
In June 1998, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the most influential loser in modern presidential politics, died at the age of eighty-seven, prompting a Buckley obituary detailing the Arizonan’s stubborn individualism in politics and life and his manifold contributions to American conservatism. Buckley quoted liberal Hubert Humphrey: “Barry, you’re one of the handsomest men in America. You ought to be in the movies. In fact, I’ve made just that proposal to Eighteenth Century Fox.” Buckley speculated that Goldwater probably smiled at the jest, but others, particularly on the Right, would venture that back in the eighteenth century, “Barry Goldwater would have been more at home at the Convention in Philadelphia than most modern liberals.”64
In early 1983, a perplexed Goldwater had written Buckley to inquire what he had done to “bring down the wrath” of Young Americans for Freedom and other conservative groups. Buckley gently explained that it was the senator’s pro-choice stance on abortion and his “resolute opposition to any legislative efforts to cure the usurpations of the [Supreme] Court.” Nevertheless, he reassured his conservative colleague, “your own place in history is very secure.”65
In October 1999, the man who had been given a hundred awards in his life accepted yet another—the Clare Boothe Luce Award of the Heritage Foundation. This was a signal honor by reason of the person for whom the award was named—Clare Boothe Luce, as witty, provocative, and Catholic as the recipient—and the person who introduced him, son Christopher, who concluded his introduction by saying:
I’ve watched the president of the United States hang a medal around his neck and call him a hero. I’ve listened as Cardinal O’Connor…addressed him in a room crowded with important prelates and called him “the jewel in the crown of American Catholicism.” And I have heard my mother say one thousand times, “Your father is impossible.”
And you know, they were all right.66
Buckley did not wait until the millennium to take his next steps into retirement. In December 1999 he brought the inestimable Firing Line to a close. For thirty-three years, it had maintained an unmatched level of intellectual discourse on television. The program still holds the record as the longest-running public-affairs television show with a single host.
At about the same time, Buckley announced his retirement from the lecture circuit, although he continued to speak—without a fee—before conservative organizations like the Philadelphia Society, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and National Review.
In June 2004, he relinquished his controlling shares of NR to a preselected board of trustees: his son, Christopher; Thomas L. (Dusty) Rhodes, the magazine’s president; Ed Capano, the publisher; Evan Galbraith, his old sailing friend from Yale and former ambassador to France; Daniel Oliver, former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission; and Austin Bramwell, a 2000 Yale graduate and one of NR’s youngest contributors.
But Buckley continued to write his column and turn out books at a rate that would intimidate a normal author—or indeed several of them. The same year he relinquished control of the magazine, he published a concise history of an epic event, The Fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as Miles Gone By, a literary autobiography containing previously published essays he had chosen, arranged, and newly edited. Miles Gone By wound up on the New York Times bestseller list, unusual for a collection of already published work. Buckley also submitted the manuscript of Last Call for Blackford Oakes for publication in the spring of 2005. From the very first to the last Oakes novel, the fixed philosophical star of their hero was the ideals of America. “Any failure by beneficiaries of the free world,” wrote Buckley, “to recognize what we have here over against what it is [the communists] would impose on us, amounts to a moral and intellectual nihilism.”67
In June 2004, a decade after revealing he had Alzheimer’s, Ronald Reagan quietly slipped away. The death of any president is momentous, but the passing of America’s fortieth president at the age of ninety-three evoked seven days of national remembrance, sorrow, and affection not seen since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 and the wartime death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945.
National Review devoted a memorial issue to Reagan, a faithful reader of the magazine almost from its founding and in later years a member of its board of directors. Bill Buckley contributed two essays so devotional as almost to be embarrassing, but there was no hint of embarrassment in Buckley, who compared Reagan to Lincoln, both of their lives “mythogenic beginning to end.”
Of Reagan’s foreign policy, Buckley wrote, the “conclusive factor in the matter of American security against any threat of Soviet aggression” was the character of the man in the White House, Ronald Reagan, who did not hesitate to label the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Here at home, Buckley added, Reagan told us that “most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government.” Reagan was scornful of the claims of omnipotent government, Buckley wrote, because “he felt, and expressed, the buoyancy of the American Republic.”68
The great heroes of the 1980s, Buckley said, were Lech Walesa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Andrei Sakharov, who earned their place in “freedom’s House of Lords,” but the political leader was Ronald Reagan, with his strategic vision.69
Reagan himself had already dubbed Bill Buckley a hero of freedom when he said, at National Review’s thirtieth-anniversary party, that he remembered “a time when nightmare and danger reigned and only the knights of darkness prevailed.” And then riding up came “our clipboard-bearing Galahad,” who with grace and humor and passion raised “a standard to which patriots and lovers of freedom could repair.”70