Vol. 141: Bill Buckley returns

…and I have one personal gripe

William F. Buckley Jr. was 26 and fresh out of college in 1951 when he launched his career as a provocateur. In God and Man at Yale, he excoriated his alma mater for its allegedly atheistic/collectivist leanings and called for the firing of faculty members whose ideas conflicted with his own conservative Catholic values.

“I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” Buckley declared, sounding much like Martin Luther at Wittenberg. Four years later, in the maiden issue of his National Review, Buckley proclaimed, with similar puckish grandiloquence, “We stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’”

These sweeping pronouncements tended to crumble upon even the most cursory examination. Why, a reader might have asked Buckley, did you stay at Yale? Was someone pointing a gun at your head? Are you not aware that fine Catholic universities like Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College, and Villanova were established precisely to address your concerns? Where does your belief about Christianity and atheism leave the world’s billions of non-atheist non-Christians? And on what rational basis did you arrive at your belief?

As for stopping history, exactly where would you stop it? Before or after the fall of the Soviet Union? Before or after the development of anesthesia and antibiotics? Before or after the elimination of slavery? Before or after the invention of the printing press?

Fully formed at age ten

Although he died in 2008 at the age of 82, Buckley has seized our attention again this year– his centennial– with the publication of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, a 1,018-page magnum opus by Sam Tanenhaus. (No, I haven’t read it. I’m waiting for the movie.)

From the 1950s onward, this one-man force of nature almost singlehandedly coaxed the modern conservative movement into being. Buckley made a career of poking holes in liberal pieties, but he never sat still long enough to apply the same sort of Socratic analysis to himself. In an astonishingly hyperactive career as editor, essayist, TV host, novelist, yachtsman, arts connoisseur, political candidate, and bon vivant, he produced 55 books, 5,600 newspaper columns, 1,429 TV episodes of “Firing Line,” and 2,800 public speeches— a body of work that’s remarkable both for its sheer quantity and also for its inevitable shallowness.

I say this as someone who read Buckley’s column and watched his TV show frequently until about 1975, when it occurred to me that Buckley had said everything he was ever going to say. Although I rarely agreed with Buckley, I read him and watched him as a way of testing my own ideas, a process Buckley never applied to himself. His ideas— essentially, a belief in the virtues of conservatism, Christianity, free enterprise, and his own brilliance— were fully formed around the age of ten, and thereafter he resisted all efforts to test, question, modify, or expand them. At each opportunity for personal growth in his life— and goodness knows he had hundreds— Buckley instinctively opted for style over substance, for celebrity over scholarship, for brilliance over wisdom, and for rhetoric (that is, the use of language to win arguments) over philosophy (that is, an open-minded search for truth).

Pat Boone’s complaint

But let me focus here on a personal gripe. Buckley boasted that he could write his thrice-weekly newspaper column, “On the Right,” in 20 minutes. Most of us media wretches assume that a column requires as much time as it takes to get the facts right, at the very least. In Overdrive (1983), his “personal documentary” of a typical week in his life, Buckley mentioned (without apparent remorse) two columnizing gaffes that he himself committed in his haste.

In one case, Buckley had appeared on “The Merv Griffin Show” with the singer John Davidson. In the course of the show, Davidson remarked that he and his wife owned an X-rated film that they showed on their home VCR, and Davidson said he thought that was very healthy. A few days later and hundreds of miles away, Buckley wrote a column about that conversation. But by then he had forgotten Davidson’s name, and rather than check it out (must finish the column in 20 minutes, after all), he referred to the singer first as a “Pat Boone type” and thereafter in the column simply as “Pat Boone.” Needless to add, the real Pat Boone— a high-profile evangelical Christian— was not amused.

Buckley’s response to the error was to express his apologies, pay $5,000 to Boone, and jest about the widespread ignorance of antonomasia, the device he had used in substituting Boone’s name for Davidson’s.

In another case, Buckley referred in a column to a fund-raising party thrown by the TV producer Norman Lear in 1980 for the Democratic presidential candidate Jerry Brown. After receiving a letter of complaint from Lear, Buckley “researched my memory” and found that the party in question was not thrown by Norman Lear at all, but by Francis Coppola. (All liberal producers look alike, right?) Buckley attempted to laugh the matter off with a charming note to Lear.

The Boston Globe’s verdict

As someone who lacks Buckley’s brilliance, I generally devote three or four hours each Friday to a first draft of this weekly column. Then I sleep on it for a night or two, checking facts and adding new insights or witticisms over the weekend. I polish it one more time on Monday morning before sending the final version to the processor by noon. Even then, I can make changes right up to the 4 p.m. Monday posting time. I figure that’s the least I owe my paying subscribers (and even the free ones). But subscribers didn’t figure in Buckley’s equation.

(My weekly column routine, of course, is squeezed in between my full-time job as a busboy at Pizza Hut.)

At one point in Overdrive, Buckley tells of writing to Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, to complain that the Globe was buying Buckley’s column but rarely using it. Buckley contended that the editorial page editor, Martin Nolan, was biased against him, and he provided evidence that such bias was uninformed and unjustified. Winship passed the letter on to Nolan, who replied: “If any three of your columns were as well-researched as your letter to Tom Winship was, we’d all be better off. Many columnists, including George Will, whom we both admire, now write twice weekly. That schedule allows a more discriminating choice of subject matter and more time to write.”

Buckley summarily rejected this suggestion that he write less frequently (and presumably more carefully). “I have not approached you with a request to appraise my work,” he replied.

Of course not. If God asked people what they think of Him, He wouldn’t be God. As Tanenhaus notes, Buckley represented a “a new kind of public figure: not precisely a journalist or commentator or analyst, but a performing ideologue.”

His one big thing

Buckley, I would submit, accomplished one valuable and important thing. He fathered and nurtured modern conservatism as a political and intellectual movement (even if, as Tanenhaus observes, he never really could say what American conservatism was or should be). He provided the incubator where deeper conservative thinkers could develop and flourish. Through his own exuberant personal example, he shattered the old stereotype of conservatives as reactionary crackpots and gloomy curmudgeons. In the process, he performed a service not only for conservatives but for liberals as well, since both left and right need a healthy opposite, in much the same way that, say, a human needs both a left leg and a right leg in order to walk.

This one big thing of Buckley’s, of course, is one big thing more than most of us achieve in our lifetimes.

Unfortunately, Buckley’s solution to the smug orthodoxy of liberalism was to replace it with the smug orthodoxy of conservatism. The real problem in this or any society, I submit, is neither liberalism nor conservatism; it’s smugness and orthodoxy. But Buckley was too busy nailing his theses to the wall over and over again— albeit in new forms and with updated tools— to pause for that sort of discussion. Must produce another column, you know.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com