Paying Attention To The Sky

William F. Buckley Jr. marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse.

Let me indulge some nostalgia here: I am a child of the sixties and grew up with William F. Buckley.  I thought he was the funniest thing on TV and like many others had a bowl of popcorn and a dictionary handy when Firing Line came on. No one has ever replaced him for me. The only one the least comparable with WFB (in terms of vocabulary and scholarship) is David Hart, but he’s not a media figure and not political.  A month or so ago I was haunting the library when I saw Judis’ biography of WFB and picked it up.  All the old stories were in there and it was a great memory lane read. Anyways, here are some anecdotes that capture some of Buckley… I do miss him.

The Army Influence
When Bill entered the Army, he was an obnoxious brat incapable of forming friendships except with a select few whose background, beliefs, and intelligence he approved of. When he left the Army two years later, he had learned a certain humility and had become capable of appreciating people who didn’t share his background and beliefs. He explained what he had learned in the Army in a long letter to his father:

I don’t know whether you were aware of this while I was in Millbrook, but I was not very popular with boys. After a good deal of self-analysis, I determined that the principal reason for this revolved around my extreme dogmatism — particularly in matters concerning politics and the Catholic Church. I could not understand another point of view; it seemed to me that anyone who was not an isolationist or a Catholic was simply stupid. Instead of keeping these sentiments to myself, I blurted them out and supported them upon the slightest provocation. I was intolerant about all kinds of things. I would not sit in on sex conversations or trivial gossip because I considered them wrong. Because I was intellectually able to support most of my arguments, my opponents would normally lose out in any discussion. The result of this was that my company was very little sought for except by a few close friends.

When I went to the Army, I learned the importance of tolerance, and the importance of a sense of proportion about all matters — even in regard to religion, morality etc. Some friends I made whom I really prized were atheistic, and even immoral. But I learned. nevertheless, that regardless of the individual’s dogmas, the most important thing as far as I was concerned was the personality: would his friendship broaden your horizon or provide you with intellectual entertainment? I found that there were actually very few prerequisites to, the good friend: he had to have a good sense of humor, a pleasant personality and a certain number of common interests.

Bill had not abandoned his political or religious convictions, nor the sense that he had a mission to defend these beliefs in a world that was hostile to them. But in the Army, he had learned to distinguish the rules of personal friendship from those of political combat.

 Publisher’s Statement in National Review’s First Issue
Buckley saw conservatism as a radical and dissenting philosphy. He made the point in a “Publisher’s Statement” that he wrote for the first issue:

Let’s face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course: if National Review is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who do.

Winter Vacations in Switzerland
Buckley spent most of his evenings at dinner parties. According to Kenner, the most memorable was an evening that he and the Buckley’s spent with Charlie and Oona Chaplin, who lived in Monteux. The dinner party at a restaurant in Vevey had been arranged by Buckley’s friend James Mason, who was also there. Chaplin was preoccupied with the assassination of President Kennedy, which had occurred three months earlier, and he suggested to his guests that it had been a plot by the CIA or Texas John Birchers.

“I don’t trust the FBI. Do you, Mr. Buckley?” Chaplin asked.

“No,” Buckley replied. “After all, they let you get out of the country without paying your income tax.”

Pat kept kicking Bill under the table, but Chaplin himself was amused by Buckley. “Bill was being masterfully skeptical,” Kenner recalled. “He was dissenting quite principally from the things that Chaplin was saying without offending him in any way.” Later, Oona Chaplin told Pat, “Mrs. Buckley, you mustn’t mind. Don’t kick your husband. I’ve been kicking mine for thirty years, and it simply doesn’t work.”

Lessons from Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham
Drawing from the theme of the unfinished Revolt Against the Masses, he declared that “there is growing in America a spirit of resistance to the Twentieth Century. . . . In America we are dragging our feet; kicking, complaining; hugging on to our ancient moorings.” But the revolt against the twentieth century was by no means complete, and if conservatives attempted to hurry it beyond its accepted pace, they might risk sidetracking it. Buckley put into his words what he had learned from Chambers and Burnham and what had been reinforced by the Goldwater experience:

A conservative is concerned simultaneously with two things, the first being the shape of the visionary or paradigmatic society towards which we should labor; the second, the speed with which it is thinkable to advance towards that ideal society and the foreknowledge that any advance upon it is necessarily asymptotic; not, at least, until the successful completion of the Society for the Abolition of Original Sin. How this movement, considering the contrary tug of history, has got as far as it has got, is something that surpasses the understanding of natural pessimists like myself. Even so, I am guilty of yielding, from time to time, to the temptation to overstress the ideal, often at moments when the prudential should weigh most heavily. I urge you to join with me in trying to resist that temptation.

These two insights — that conservatism, even on the eve of Goldwater’s humiliation, was on the rise, but that conservative politics, to succeed, must mediate between the ideal and the prudential — would inform Buckley’s politics over the next decades and, through his writings, would influence a great many conservative politicians. Buckley’s speech to the New York Conservatives marked his final break with his own radical and pessimistic past.

The Mayoralty Campaign, City of New York 1965
REPORTER:          What would you do if you were elected?
BUCKLEY:            Demand a recount.

Buckley refused to display what he later called “the usual neurotic confidence of all political candidates.” But he also feared that, come November, he might not only lose, but lose big. “I felt no confidence, other than in the cogency of my views, and would have found it personally and professionally embarrassing to go about town speaking nonsense about my own expectations,” he wrote later.

In reporting his announcement, the Herald Tribune described Buckley as a “right-wing and ultra-conservative debater” and warned that 1965 was not a proper year for “staging esoteric debates.”  But Buckley’s wit and defiance of convention thoroughly charmed the city’s press corps and even attracted national media attention to the campaign. While the editors fulminated, the reporters and columnists covered Buckley’s press conferences the way they might a good Broadway show. According to The New Yorker, the members of the press had a “non-partisan reaction: regardless of what Buckley says, they thoroughly enjoy the way he says it. They seem to be grateful for being spared campaign clichés, and to relish his wit, vocabulary, and rococo style.”

Writing in the New York World-Telegraph after Buckley’s first press conference, Murray Kempton commented:

We have already had candidates for mayor various enough to satisfy every taste except the most refined, and the apparition of William F. Buckley may complete the scale. The truly refined taste, after all, progresses from discontent with each way the thing is being done to the final decision that the thing ought not to be done at all. And Buckley made it plain yesterday that he does not merely disdain the opposition but rather disdains the office itself.

Buckley carried through these indignities as handsomely and containedly as any gentleman ranker offered his first introduction to the men’s latrine. He also had the kidney to decline the usual humiliation of soliciting the love of the voters, and read his statement of principles in a tone for all the world that of an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript assemblage of Zulus.

The Mayoralty TV Debate
The first televised debate was held on Sunday, September 26, and was broadcast over WCBS-TV. Lindsay was platitudinous (“I ask all New Yorkers to join me, to roll up their sleeves, to care”), Beame was visibly nervous and tedious (“I will go to Washington, where I will be welcomed as a Democrat, and fight for federal aid”), and Buckley was acerbic and witty. Asked if he still would be “flabbergasted” if he were elected, Buckley responded, “Having heard Mr. Beame and Mr. Lindsay, I would be flabbergasted if I weren’t elected.”

The Unmaking of a Mayor
By making his writing more personal, Buckley changed his literary persona. He became far more attractive to his readers — appearing in print the way his friends and his colleagues on National Review experienced him. In his early books, Buckley appeared to be an arrogant brat. In The Unmaking of a Mayor, Buckley portrayed himself as an innocent in the wilds of politics; his humor was often at his own expense. For instance, he (recounted his experience the evening of the day in which he had proudly announced his plan for a bicycle path through Manhattan — a proposal that all his advisers had urged him to forgo because it would be seen as flippant.

I remember the evening of that press conference, which I spent at the home of an old Negro election-district boss in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a former Pullman porter of indefatigable political energy and utterly total recall, who had promised to deliver me the entire Bronx, or whatever, and had got together his family and a few lieutenants. We sat about the living room while his warm and hospitable wife in the kitchen below sent up a torrent of sandwiches, cakes, drinks, cigars, as the old gentleman rambled around in his copious memory telling us of this and that. His daughter-in-law, a sophisticated, slightly cynical, more than slightly bemused nurse’s aide from a local hospital, told me at one point: “You know, I was for John Lindsay until today.” “What,” I asked, delighted, “did John Lindsay do today?” “It was that ridiculous bicycle scheme,” she said. I paused. But only for a moment, let the devil record. “That was ridiculous, wasn’t it,” I exclaimed — changing the subject, and concluding that as of that moment, I had really and truly become a politician, and how would I formulate that sin at my next session with my confessor.

The Bill Buckley of God and Man at Yale had charmed older conservatives and inspired younger ones who felt themselves to be part of an embattled Remnant. But the new Buckley could win the sympathy and attract the interest of a far broader range of readers. The Unmaking of a Mayor made Buckley into a popular writer.

Dislike For Politics
He expressed his dislike for politics in more abstract terms in a speech he gave in December 1965 at National Review’s tenth anniversary celebration.

Politics, it has been said, is the preoccupation of the quarter educated, and I do most solidly endorse this observation, and therefore curse this country above all things, for its having given sentient beings very little alternative than to occupy themselves with politics it is all very well to ignore [the Johnson administration’s] Great Society. But will the Great Society ignore us? . . . Where can we go and feel free not to read the New York Times? No such freedom exists nowadays, which is the conclusive reason, surely, to deplore this century’s most distinctive aggression, which is against privacy, publicly understood

WFB at the U.N.
Having convinced himself that Nixon wasn’t simply trying to appease the right wing by appointing him and that he might have some impact at the U.N., Buckley agreed to serve for one term, from September to December. Over the summer, he was confirmed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (When the FBI called Rusher to check routinely on Buckley, it asked him, “Has Mr. Buckley done anything since 1969 that might embarrass the Nixon administration?” “No,” Rusher replied, “but since 1969 the Nixon administration has done a great deal that has embarrassed Mr. Buckley.”

Buckley’s experience, from the first day, confirmed his initial misgivings about the U.N. job. At the orientation in Washington, Buckley was told that someone must always sit at the U.S. desk in the General Assembly and appear to be listening to the speaker. “Above all, we were warned, we must guard against falling asleep.” When Buckley met with Scali (the UN Ambassador who had asked him to the public delegate position) to receive his formal assignment, Scali began to hedge on appointing him as the head of the Third Committee delegation. It was “my first premonition,” Buckley wrote later, “that Walter Mitty was dead.”

The first week, he sent Scali a memorandum, with a copy to Kissinger, outlining what he thought could be accomplished on the Third Committee. “Unless I am instructed to do otherwise,” he wrote, “I plan to feel free to discuss human rights even if the inference can be drawn from what I say that I also believe in human rights within the Soviet Union.” Scali called him in the next morning and instructed him not to send memoranda either to him or to Kissinger and to clear all his speeches with him. And Scali warned Buckley that détente with the Soviet Union was the “overarching policy.”

Over the next months, Scali and his aides vetoed one after another of Buckley’s speeches as being too “provocative.” A column Buckley wrote describing a speech by Zaire’s President Mobutu (“An aide to General Mobutu placed his speech on the podium, and, after he was done, retrieved it. Such menial tasks as placing one’s own speech on a podium are inconsistent with the pride of the President of Zaire.”) caused a furor in the White House, which was planning to receive the offended Mobutu. Buckley’s best lines had to be reserved for unofficial addresses.

On United Nations Day, Buckley gave a speech on New York politics at a buffet lunch organized by New York socialite Mrs. John Loeb. During the question-and-answer session, a black ambassador asked Buckley what his views were on a transportation bond referendum. “To tell you the truth,” Buckley replied, “I have not studied the issue, which I can divulge in good conscience because I don’t have to vote on it, since I vote in Connecticut.” Mrs. Loeb interjected, “You see, Mr. Ambassador, in America, we don’t vote where we work, we vote where we sleep.” “Well,” Buckley responded, “even that is not exactly correct. If I voted where I slept, I would vote in the United Nations.”

Meeting Ronald Reagan
Buckley’s friendship with Reagan dated back to 1960 when Reagan, the chairman of Democrats for Nixon in California and National Review subscriber, introduced him at a Nixon rally in Beverly Hills. Buckley described the incident in an article about Reagan:

He was to introduce me at a lecture that night in Beverly Hills. He arrived at the school auditorium to find consternation. The house was full and the crowd impatient, but the microphone was dead; the student who was to have shown up at the control room above the balcony to turn on the current hadn’t. Reagan quickly took over. He instructed an assistant to call the principal and see if he could get a key, He then bounded onto the stage and shouted as loud as he could to make himself heard. In a very few minutes the audience was greatly enjoying itself. Then word came to him: no answer at the principal’s telephone. Reagan went offstage and looked out the window. There was a ledge, a foot wide, two stories above the street level, running along the side of the window back to the locked control room. Hollywoodwise, he climbed out on the ledge and sidestepped carefully, arms stretched out to help him balance, until he had gone the long way to the window, which he broke open with his elbow, lifting it open from the inside and jumping into the darkness. In a moment, the lights were on, the amplifying knobs turned up, the speaker introduced.

With David Niven
While Buckley was in Switzerland, Saving the Queen appeared. Although the major reviews were lukewarm—in The New York Times, Walter Goodman called it “serviceable entertainment”– it quickly climbed to the top of the best-seller list. Buckley, Niven, and Gaibraith continued their friendly competition over whose books were superior. Asked by an interviewer to explain Saving the Queen’s success, Gaibraith said, “Bill Buckley has a genuine talent for fiction, as his discriminating readers have always known.” He called Buckley’s decision to write novels “a quantum step in self-recognition.”

David Niven had reasons of his own to take Buckley down a notch. When Niven’s second book of memoirs had appeared in 1975, he had asked Buckley for a jacket blurb and Buckley had responded with “Probably the best book ever written about Hollywood.” When Saving the Queen was about to be published, Buckley asked Niven for a blurb, and the actor, busy filming, told Buckley to write it for him. When they were in Switzerland, Buckley told him casually that he had submitted a statement in his name, “Probably the best novel ever written about fucking the Queen. David Niven.” “1 think that was the only time I ever saw him really caught off balance,” Buckley said. “For about half a second, which for him was a long time. Then he started to laugh.”

But Niven got his revenge that winter. Buckley and Niven painted together in Switzerland at an atelier they rented, and Niven brought the painter Marc Chagall to visit. Niven, who described Buckley as “the worst amateur painter in the world,” had warned him not to show Chagall any of his paintings, but Buckley insisted upon trotting out a collection of paintings, including several of his own. When Chagall came upon a blank canvas, he exclaimed, “I like that one best.”

Debating the Panama Canal Treaties with Ronald Reagan
Reagan became the national leader of the campaign against the treaties, using it as the first stage of his 1980 campaign for the presidency. Buckley and Reagan were both concerned that their disagreement over the treaties might endanger their friendship, and they took pains to soften the blow of their difference. After an exchange of correspondence on the issue, Reagan wrote Buckley: “I must confess we are still disagreeing on the matter of the canal. [But] I assure you it would not in any way affect the friendship I feel for you.”

In January, the two aired their differences in a public debate. Reagan accepted Buckley’s invitation to join him in a special two-hour Firing Line, staged at the University of South Carolina. Buckley took along George Will and Burnham as seconds, while Reagan was accompanied by Pat Buchanan and Latin-American expert Roger Fontaine.

Buckley was in a difficult situation for a debater — one that, ironically, recalled his Yale days. The audience was very conservative and supportive of Reagan’s rather than his own position. Reagan was able to appeal to sentiment — the imperial nostalgia that had affected Americans after the American defeat in Vietnam — while Buckley had to call on his listeners to rise above sentiment. But just as he had at Yale, he relished the situation. “If Bill was concerned, he never showed it,” Neal Freeman recalled. “He delighted in debate and rebuttal.” The debate was held in a theater in the round, with the two camps seated facing each other. The Washington Post described it as a “Super Bowl of the right.” To the audience’s applause, Reagan, tanned and relaxed, argued that without control of the Canal, the U.S. could get pushed around in time of war when it needed to send its ships through the Canal. Buckley, somewhat disheveled, his hair fashionably long, his eyebrows popping up and down, his tongue darting, responded that the U.S. would be better off militarily if the Panamanians were not harboring resentment against the U.S. for controlling part of their land. If the U.S. needed to move its Navy quickly through the Canal, Buckley said, “that mobility is more easily effected if we have the cooperation of the local population.”

The two men made the most of their own embarrassment at being on opposite sides of a major public issue.

If Lloyds of London had been asked to give odds that I would be disagreeing with Ronald Reagan on a matter of public policy, Buckley began, I doubt they could have flogged a quotation out of their swingingest betting man because judging from Governor Reagan’s impeccable record, the statisticians would have reasoned that it was inconceivable that he should make a mistake. But of course it happens to everyone. I fully expect that someday I’ll be wrong about something.

After the two debaters had made their opening presentations, they were given seven minutes to question each other. “Well, Bill,” Reagan began, “my first question is why haven’t you already rushed across the room to tell me that you’ve seen the light? ““I’m afraid that if I came any closer to you the force of my illumination would blind you,” Buckley replied.

When Reagan claimed that it was the Torrijos government, rather than the people of Panama, that was demanding the return of the Canal, Buckley turned his wit on Reagan’s argument.

BUCKLEY:  But it was before Torrijos became the dictator that the initial riots took place demanding an assertion of sovereignty. How do you account for that?

REAGAN:  I think the first time that it was expressed was in 1932 in the Charter of the new Communist Party of Panama that they put as one of their top objectives the taking over of the Canal.

BUCKLEY:  Are you saying that the Communists invented patriotism in Panama?

REAGAN:  No, no.

BUCKLEY:  Yes. Well, you really tried to say that.

In his concluding remarks, Buckley made light of Reagan’s recitation of the history of American-Panamanian relations. He recounted the explanation of the Louisiana Purchase that James Thurber had given to two inquiring ladies:

He said, “Louisiana was owned by two sisters called Louisa and Anne Wilmont, and they offered to give it to the United States, provided it was named after them. That was the Wilmont Proviso.”

Now, intending no slur on my friend Ronald Reagan, the politician in America I admire most, his rendition of recent history and his generalities remind me a little bit about that explanation for the state of Louisiana having been incorporated into this country. He says we, in fact, don’t negotiate under threats, and everybody here bursts out in applause. The trouble with that is that it’s not true.

Buckley’s performance—designed at once to re-establish his credentials as a hardliner and to appeal to American generosity—was masterful and largely defused Reagan’s jingoistic appeals.

Buckley got the last word not only on Reagan but on the press. In his story on the debate, Washington Post reporter Ward Sinclair chided Buckley for being wrong. “He says Cortez crossed Panama and was the first to espy the the Pacific Ocean. It was Vasco Nüfiez de Balboa.” Buckley responded in a letter to the Post.

What I said in my speech was, “If there is a full-scale atomic war, the Panama Canal will revert to a land mass, and the first survivor who makes his way across the isthmus will relive a historical experience like stout Cortez when, with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific and ail his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.”

The lines are from John Keats, his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” I felt presumptuous enough correcting Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy without straightening out Keats’s historical solecism. But tell Mr. Sinclair not to worry: It happens all the time, people’s inability to tell where I leave off and Keats begins.

Buckley wrote later of Reagan’s stand on Panama, “I think, ironically, that Reagan would not have been nominated if he had favored the Panama Canal Treaty, and that he wouldn’t have been elected if it hadn’t passed. He’d have lost the conservatives if he had backed the treaty, and lost the election if we’d subsequently faced, in Panama, insurrection, as in my opinion we would have.” (Overdrive. 119.)