Llewellyn
King
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March 3, 2008
William F. Buckley: A
Life of Fun
All of my adult life, William F. Buckley Jr. has been a player on the
national stage. It is hard to believe that Buckley is no longer with us
– that he has to be moved in our mental computers from an active folder
to one labeled memory.
Thousands of writers have claimed that Buckley was the father of modern
conservatism. Maybe. What is certain is that Buckley has carried the
conservative standard from the time he wrote his seminal book, God
and Man at Yale. He followed this with the founding of the
National Review in 1955. The National Review sought to give
an intellectual patina to the business-dominated conservatism of the
Eisenhower era.
Buckley was grandee – a boisterous intellectual who, at some level,
never left the debating society at Yale. Above all, Buckley was a man of
fun. His conservatism was never in tow with the conservatism of the
Republican Party. It was Buckley conservatism, as much informed by the
high spirits of European aristocracy as it was by the yeoman farmers of
America.
To
win elections, conservatism needs a large dash of populism, which it got
from Ronald Reagan. This was not Buckley's way. He was elite, witty,
cosmopolitan and urbane.
Buckley also was hugely imaginative. He did things that had never been
done before. His long-running television program, Firing Line,
was all Buckley – intellectuals disagreeing with wit and erudition. It
was a mainstay for 17 years on PBS – at the time, the only network for
intellectuals. While many conservatives were damning PBS, Buckley was
quietly remaking it with his own very original program. In typical
fashion, Buckley did not want to see it become the product of a
committee or university when he moved on. So he struck the set:
Firing Line ceased production, but it is still remembered as an
example of how television can do talking heads well.
His son, the author Christopher Buckley, said that Buckley's
contribution to the conservative movement was, among other things, to
drive “the kooks” out of it. He broke with the John Birch Society and
kept his distance from the radicalism of Pat Buchanan. Buckley’s
thoughts on talk radio and extreme conservatives like Ann Coulter and
Laura Ingraham have not been recorded.
The conventional wisdom is that Buckley paved the way for Barry
Goldwater to run for president, and the Young Americans for Freedom, who
Buckley organized to support Goldwater, became the foot soldiers in the
Reagan Revolution. But it seems to me that Buckley was always outside
the conservative movement. His importance was as a provider of ideas and
a tutor of young conservative writers, ranging from George Will to David
Brooks. Most major conservative thinkers pass through the National
Review.
Buckley was not a fixture in Washington. He was not published in The
Washington Post, and he was not a courtier in the Reagan
Administration, as was George Will. Many conservatives loved Buckley in
principle, but kept their distance in practice. They worried about some
of his not-so-conservative positions like calling for the legalization
of marijuana, and his enthusiasm for continental Europe. He loved
Switzerland and retired there to write many of his books.
Even in religion, Buckley was not quite part of the movement he was
credited with founding. Evangelicals embraced conservatism, and
conservatives embraced evangelicals. Buckley, however, remained a very
devout, very orthodox Roman Catholic.
Buckley tried to understand popular taste, but he confessed that he
could not get the hang of it, especially rap music. Buckley was born a
patrician who would never have to worry about money. He could apply his
considerable talents and energy to his interests, including wine, food,
literature and sailing.
Sometimes, Buckley seemed bored with politics. It is said that out of
the public arena, he did not discuss politics. Buckley had many
favorites, most of whom shared his theatricality but not his political
views. He was a close friend of John Kenneth Galbraith, the left-wing
economist. He was enchanted by Malcolm Muggeridge, a radical British
journalist and roue, who converted to Catholicism later in life and
wrote a book about Jesus.
Everyone who worked at the National Review, or was a friend of
Buckley's, used the same word to describe the ethos: Fun. Buckley was
fun to be around and it was enormous fun to have him on the national
stage. Sometimes the fun was mischievous, as when he proposed that
Eisenhower should run as a vice president on the Nixon ticket, after he
finished his term as president. It was a joke, but it was one that sent
scholars running to the books and lawyers pondering the legality of it.
Then there was the time he ran for mayor of New York. There were strings
of bon mots every day, and the press had to discipline itself to cover
the serious candidates and not the entertainment provided by Buckley.
Buckley did not like debating politicians. He liked debating clever
people such as Normal Mailer, Gore Vidal and Michael Kinsley. Buckley
was a prodigious writer and his output ranged from politics to book
reviews to travel articles. He was so industrious that he actually wrote
a book about his own industry – a snapshot of two weeks in the life of
one of the nation's greatest dilettantes.
Buckley was without peer, and appears to be without a successor.
© 2008 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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