William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Invention of American Conservatism
National Review embraced Goldwater. Bozell ghostwrote his campaign book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” a hit with college students. But Goldwater was crushed in the general election, winning just 38.5 per cent of the vote. The man who crushed him, Lyndon B. Johnson, working with a Democratic Congress, expanded the federal government even further. Early in the decade, the youth had looked as if they might swing right. They swung left instead.
Despite these headwinds, in April, 1966, Buckley launched “Firing Line.” One of his first guests was Norman Thomas, probably the best-known socialist in America. He had run for President six times. (Thomas was eighty-one, and Buckley was aggressive and belittling—not a great start.) The show would remain on the air for thirty-three years, a television record for a program of its kind.
“Firing Line” never made a profit. (Neither did National Review.) The audience was small, and for a portion of its run the show was carried on PBS—awkward, since its host was generally an opponent of government spending. But it is fair, if a little oxymoronic, to call “Firing Line” a serious effort at political entertainment.
Much of success in life is owed to quickness, and Buckley was quick. Debate was his preferred medium of exposition, and he would take on anyone who could talk back to him. People who could not bored him. The liberal activist Allard Lowenstein was on his show nine times. Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Muhammad Ali, and Jesse Jackson were all guests. So was George Wallace, although Buckley hated Wallace and refused to shake his hand. You did not see people like that on television very often in the days before cable. The commercial networks would have pulled the plug on Eldridge Cleaver very fast.
And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill—Buckley was a show unto himself. Tanenhaus calls him a “performing ideologue.” He was compared to Andy Warhol, and some observers detected an element of camp. What other conservative intellectual in those years had telegenic powers like that? Heather Hendershot, in “Open to Debate” (2016), a smart book with a light touch, calls “Firing Line” a “gateway drug to conservatism.” It kept conservative ideas alive, and Buckley visible, in a liberal decade.
It’s interesting, therefore, that Buckley owes much of his lasting celebrity to two debates he lost—one with James Baldwin, at Cambridge University, in 1965, and one with Gore Vidal, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In the first, he was outclassed; in the second, he lost his cool.
Buckley had stated his position on civil rights in 1957, in a National Review editorial headlined “Why the South Must Prevail” (“South” meaning, of course, white people). The question, he wrote,
In 1963, when Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” came out (much of it was serialized in The New Yorker), Buckley published a column titled “A Call to Lynch the White God,” in which he called Baldwin “an eloquent menace,” a revolutionary, and an America-hater. And, in December, 1964, five months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, National Review ran a cover story entitled “Negroes, Intelligence and Prejudice.” It concluded that, whatever the reasons for racial differences, biological or environmental, “the needs of Negro children would be met best . . . by separate education.”
Buckley disapproved of civil disobedience and regarded Martin Luther King, Jr., as a criminal. “Word should be gently got to the non-violent avenger Dr. King,” he once wrote, “that in the unlikely event that he succeeds in mobilizing his legions, they will be most efficiently, indeed most zestfully repressed.”
At Cambridge, Buckley vastly underrated Baldwin’s skills in debate. Baldwin had been a child preacher in Harlem; like his friend Dr. King, he knew how to read a room. The topic of the debate was “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro,” a subject custom-made for Baldwin. He used a rhetorical device that many members of subordinated groups have used: he made himself into the personification of a people. “I picked the cotton,” he declared at the climax of his speech. “I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.” Baldwin spoke for twenty-four minutes and was given a two-minute standing ovation from an overflow audience.
Buckley was on next, and he was clearly shaken. He plainly did not know what to do with an opponent who had transformed himself into an entire race, and much of his response was an attack on Baldwin (who had completely ignored Buckley)—as though the history of slavery and Jim Crow could be addressed by finding things to criticize in Baldwin’s books. As was the custom, a vote was taken after the debate: Baldwin 544, Buckley 164. Buckley never let it go. He always claimed that the debate was a setup by anti-Americans. He may have lost the vote, he told Garry Wills a few years later, but “I never gave one goddam inch.”
The Buckley-Vidal fiasco came about because ABC, in those days the poorest network, could not afford complete coverage of the Democratic National Convention, and so it enlisted Buckley and Vidal as rival commentators on the proceedings. The gimmick worked as a ratings booster; Tanenhaus says that ABC drew as many as ten million viewers a night. Otherwise, it was poor casting. Neither man cared about the reputation of ABC, and they already hated each other. They’d had a run-in on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show” in 1962 that left Buckley bitter. He felt that Vidal and Paar had ganged up on him.
The 1968 Convention was, of course, the scene of the Chicago police clash with antiwar protesters, and the riots became a subject for Vidal and Buckley’s debate. At one point, Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” and got the reaction he hoped for. “Now listen, you queer,” Buckley shouted. “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.” Vidal stared at Buckley during this outburst with the expression of a cat that has just swallowed a very large canary. He could barely believe his luck. They were contracted to do one more night on the air; ABC separated them with a curtain.
In 1968, the Republican Party was still dominated by liberals like Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay. Buckley loathed Lindsay, a fellow-Yalie. One of the reasons—possibly the main reason—he ran for mayor of New York City on the Conservative Party ticket was to throw the race to the Democrat, Abe Beame. (Lindsay won anyway.) Meanwhile, the civil-rights movement split the Democratic coalition—its Southern wing peeled off, never to return—and Vietnam fractured the liberals. It was just enough for Richard Nixon to win the Presidency in an election where George Wallace carried five states.
Buckley was involved in the Nixon campaign and, after Nixon was elected, consorted with Nixon’s national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, whom he had known since 1954. Buckley sensed that Nixon was playing him, that he only pretended to listen to his advice. Kissinger certainly played him, as he played everybody. He kept Buckley on board by convincing him that getting out of Vietnam and opening relations with China weren’t betrayals of the anti-Communist cause. Kissinger, too, knew how to perform.
Besides, Buckley counted Kissinger a friend, and he was loyal to friends. This would become a problem for him with Watergate. After graduating from Yale, Buckley had served briefly in the C.I.A. with Howard Hunt, who ran the White House’s dirty-tricks operation, and he knew more about the affair than he let on. Nixon’s resignation, in 1974, must have come as something of a relief.
