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William F. Buckley, R.I.P.
by Stephen Cox
William F. Buckley, Jr., America's foremost intellectual conservative, died on February 27 at the age of 82.
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Stephen Cox is a professor at UC San Diego. His most recent book is The New Testament and Literature.
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So wide was his influence and so complicated was his political character that it is impossible to write about him without arousing controversy, which is another word for bitter criticism. Left-liberals of Buckley's generation, and their disciples in the current age, feel toward him the kind of emotion that turns faces purple and makes veins protrude. Many libertarians feel the same way. Yet for millions of Americans, including many working-class people who might have been expected to reject Buckley's effetely literate style, he was the hero who introduced them to libertarian as well as conservative ideas.
Buckley was the son of an oilman and the member of a large and at times very eccentric family. He was a devout Roman Catholic whose first book, "God and Man at Yale" (1951), exposed the shocking fact that the faculty of his Ivy League alma mater inhabited a secular and collectivist intellectual world that was not only isolated from much of the rest of the intellectual world but was even more isolated from ordinary American thinking. This revelation actually did shock people. "God and Man" was very mild stuff. Its almost incredibly hostile reception by the Eastern brain trust showed that it had something important to say.
The great event of Buckley's life was his founding of National Review in 1955. NR gave conservatives a rallying place, a means of self-definition, and a staging area for the electoral campaigns they eventually won. It was the cradle of the modern conservative movement. In the beginning, and from time to time thereafter, NR also gave libertarians a place where they could be heard by a national audience. It provided an arena in which libertarians and conservatives could cooperate, if they wished to do so, in attacking their common enemy, the modern liberal state. In addition, however, it provided an arena in which conservatives could try to define their differences from libertarians, most of whom were used to calling themselves, for want of a then-more-readily-communicable term, "conservatives."
On the whole, this process was good for both sides, as intellectual honesty usually is; but it wasn't pretty to watch, because of the way it was carried out. National Review mounted what was, in effect, a purge against Ayn Rand, the greatest contemporary influence on libertarians. It published a long review falsely implying that her ideas weren't libertarian but totalitarian. This attack wasn't just ugly; it was morally wrong. Rand responded by publishing an embarrassingly premature "obituary" of the conservative movement. Many libertarian isolationists (and most libertarians were and still are isolationists) viewed NR chiefly as a proponent of the Cold War and of military interventionism in general.
The libertarian economist Murray Rothbard and his followers castigated Buckley's movement for abandoning the principles of what Rothbard called the Old Right, the isolationist and (sometimes) small-government people of the preceding generation — people such as Robert Taft and John T. Flynn. Rothbard and his friends believed that Buckley had hijacked a movement that should have been theirs. When, in the 1960s, libertarian students broke with Young Americans for Freedom, which Buckley had helped to create, they knew the joy of advocating purely libertarian positions. For many of them, as for Rothbard and Rand, Buckley remained a Satanic figure. It didn't help that Buckley, who had made his way to real political power, displayed only a mild amusement toward these adversaries.
Despite all this, it's hard to resist the conclusion that on balance both conservatives and libertarians benefited from their encounters with one another, in and around the house that Buckley built. No, the acrimony and recriminations weren't beneficial, but each side did need to define itself — as well as ally itself with others.
The best years of National Review were the early ones, when both libertarians and conservatives regularly published in its pages. National Review moved many people "up from liberalism," in Buckley's phrase, and many of those people became libertarians. A lot of them would never have found that road if they hadn't started off with NR. Buckley himself had been deeply influenced by such radical libertarians as Frank Chodorov, as well as by such conservatives as Russell Kirk. He called himself a libertarian. He entertained libertarian ideas and spokesmen on his long-running television show, "Firing Line." If you made a list of the ideas and policies he espoused, you'd find that most of them were authentically libertarian. He was the first American that most people of the time actually heard hammering away at the laws against marijuana, or questioning Keynesian economics, or protesting the idea that what this country needs is more control by the forces of social democracy,
more "government control over our lives."
No one has greater respect for the so-called Old Right than I do. I wrote a book about Isabel Paterson, one of the most prominent members of the Old Right — if, that is, the Old Right had anything like a membership, which it didn't. (Few of the putative members liked or agreed with many of the others, if they had ever heard of them, which in some cases they hadn't.) But it was obvious why Buckley's movement supplanted the "Old Right." The latter was politically moribund.
In his old age, Albert Jay Nock, another libertarian hero of Buckley's and a prominent litterateur of the 1920s, boasted that he could still write an essay that would "rock the nation." He never wrote that essay, and it wouldn't have rocked the nation if he had. Not then. Not that late in the game. The ideas of people like Nock had to be revived, and only Buckley, as it appears, had the ability to revive them on a big scale — even if the operation was only a partial success.
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It was probably hard for Buckley to write a note to the garbageman without making it amusing.
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In his early television appearances, Buckley came across as a lisping grotesque. It's hard to imagine anyone liking that person inside the tube. Gradually, and probably with difficulty, he created another self-image: acerbic yet avuncular, patrician yet colloquial. "If you had to decide," he asked his guests on "Firing Line," "whether the United States should be governed by the faculty of Harvard College or by 2,000 people chosen at random from the Boston phone directory, which would you choose?" Even college professors answered, "The second, of course." He wrote sarcastically of "New York City, which groan[ed] under the weight of the greatest density of intellectuals per acre this side of Socrates' academy," but which still couldn't explain why the "residents of Detroit, or West Virginia, or Key West" should "subsidize the cost of rapid transit in New York City."
As the years went on, Buckley got too chummy with his famous TV guests, trading compliments and inside jokes with fools like John Kenneth Galbraith, and calling these antics "debates." But at his iconoclastic best, Buckley was the man who said of Galbraith, who had told him he was on his way to lecture at the University of Moscow, "So long as Galbraith continues to teach economics to the Soviet Union, we will have a market for our excess grain." Buckley was the man who wrote in his obituary for Eleanor Roosevelt, " 'With all my heart and soul,' her epitaph should read, 'I fought the syllogism.' " One of Buckley's coldest ironies was directed at John F. Kennedy: "Kennedy after all has lots of glamor. Gregory Peck with an atom bomb in his holster."
Buckley wasn't H.L. Mencken. He wasn't Emerson. He wasn't La Rochefoucauld — not by a long shot. But somebody in the late 20th century had to puncture the modern liberals' balloons, and Buckley was very good at doing that. Few people have been better. And the exposure and demoralization of the modern liberal state is a necessary condition for its dismantling.
Buckley's wit in person — on TV and in private letters — was often much better than his wit on the printed page. His printed style was often too heavy. His novels were unreadable, except by people who bought them because they idolized the author. But his personal comments were dependably fresh and witty. It was probably hard for him to write a note to the garbageman without making it amusing. This was an inborn tendency, but he didn't try to repress it, even when it was likely to get him into trouble.
Buckley wrote scores of little books — often compilations of his journalism — but he never wrote the big book that he planned in his early days. Its title, according to Russell Kirk and others, was to be "The Revolt Against the Masses." Kirk finally concluded that the book would never come out. "He'll never do it," he told me, attributing the failure to Buckley's expensive style of life and his need to keep money coming in from his journalism and his public speaking and those little books of his. I don't know whether Kirk (who had written his own big book, and had conducted his intellectual life heroically, with perilous means of financial support) was right about that. Maybe the problem was simply that Buckley's libertarian-conservative philosophy was never coherent enough to stand forth on its own, in theoretical form. But, like Kirk, I wish I could have read Buckley's big book, whether I approved of its message or not.
What Buckley achieved instead of a major political theory was the most influential editorial career that any American ever had. He started NR, he made it successful, and he used it to push the country more or less in the direction he wanted it to go. He had immensely more power than anyone else in his profession ever attained. He enjoyed it. But, like any good editor, he knew his limitations — and he was a very good editor, as long as his heart was in his work. He recognized talent when he saw it, and he worked with it as well as anyone could. Go to the library and read the first few volumes of National Review. You'll see what I mean.
When I was researching the life of Isabel Paterson, I had the opportunity to study the difficult relationship between a brilliant editor (Buckley) and a brilliant writer (Paterson), whom he courted and tried hard to exploit, in the best sense of that term. The relationship resulted in a few substantial articles by Paterson, and many substantial headaches for Buckley. He never got over his anger at Paterson for the hard time she gave him when he was a young man, but he never became so successful that old friends ceased to interest him. When Paterson died, he wrote a long, many-sided obituary, the kind of account that reflected real feeling for an "intolerably impolite" and "awesomely talented" writer. (His essay was written when "awesome" meant something.) Fifteen years later, he linked her with Friedrich Hayek, in a tribute to that great free-market economist ("Essays on Hayek," ed. Fritz Machlup, with a foreword by Milton Friedman). According to him, Hayek and Paterson
were libertarians who were nobody's fools and whose words deserved respect.
About ten years after that, I came along, investigating Buckley's relationship with Paterson, and asked for access to his correspondence. He was instantly and warmly helpful. When, after many more years, I published my book, he mentioned it in a New Yorker interview (making sure that Paterson's name was spelled correctly) and wrote a long review for NR, in which he again paid her the tribute of frustrated admiration. It was late in his life, and it must have been an inconvenient task, reviewing my book. But he did it anyway.
In his obit for Paterson (NR, Jan. 28, 1961) he had said, "If I go wherever she is, when I leave this vale of tears, I expect she will be there at the gates, with a bill, 10 cents a word, for every word quoted from her in this aggrieved obituary notice." I like to think that she's there right now, presenting her bill, and when Buckley rejects it, she'll continue her debate with him — the great libertarian and the great conservative, discussing the ideas that divided and united them.
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