The Pen Is Mightier

Eight Ways to Understand the Literary-Political Impact of William F. Buckley Jr.

Note: The following is the lecture I delivered for the Declaration of Independence Center at the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) on March 27. My case was that William F. Buckley Jr deserves to be considered the most influential journalist or literary figure in American history—greater even than Mark Twain or Walt Whitman.

On the occasion of the 100th birthday of William F. Buckley Jr., it may seem extravagant or implausible to stake out the claim that Buckley is the most influential journalist in American history. To a generation of young conservatives coming of age today, he seems a remote or perhaps obsolete or even irrelevant figure, but I propose that in spite of different circumstances and new styles dominant today, he deserves this accolade.

To be sure, the claim that he is the most influential journalist in our history depends upon a number of important collateral aspects of his life and career beyond his writing that I shall enumerate in due course, but the point of this lecture is to recapture the spectrum of his qualities of mind and action that made him so unique and significant, and to the extent possible see if we can emulate them today.

Rather than presenting a potted biography, I propose considering eight aspects or ways of thinking about Buckley that I hope can provide enduring insight and possible example to emulate yourself.

It is necessary first to set out the context of his arrival on the scene, why he was something fresh and new, and why he became not only the central figure of the conservative movement that was serious both intellectual and politically, but the first famous conservative thinker and public celebrity.

There had been some conservative writers and activists before Buckley burst upon the scene in the 1950s, but they tended to be obscure to the general public, and with few exceptions mostly bland in their writing, eccentric, and in a decisive respect non-political; that is, they were more nostalgic than combative, pining more for a lost world of chivalry and aristocratic privilege, than rolling up their sleeves and engaging in anything grubby like election campaigns. What conservative political organizations then existing were small, marginal, cranky, and mostly protest groups, with little plan or energy for actual political competition.

At the time Buckley came to adulthood, there was no conservative movement beyond a single figure—Robert A. Taft, the two-time presidential candidate known as "Mr. Conservative." Taft was formidable; Milton Friedman told me once that Taft was the single-smartest politician he ever met, and Milton met a lot of them starting with Franklin Roosevelt, but it was clear by the early 1950s that Taft represented a distinct minority inside the Republican Party (which made him a minority of a minority), and that the GOP as a whole was firmly in the control of an establishment that was only slightly less liberal than the Democrats who had given us the New Deal.

There's a famous quote from the literary critic Lionel Trilling in his 1950 classic, The Liberal Imagination, that gets cited in virtually every history of the period, and I would be remiss if I didn't recall it again here, for those few who may not ever have heard it: "It is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation," Trilling wrote; "the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” You can find similar dismissive sentiments from another leading book by a prominent liberal of the time, Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center. Mid-century was a great time for liberals and liberalism.

I should hasten to add that Trilling was not himself hostile to conservative ideas. In fact, his Liberal Imagination was meant as a warning to his fellow liberals to be more self-critical; today it would be considered a conservative book, which is more a reflection of the ideological ruin most universities have made of English literature and criticism today. But that's a story for another occasion.

Following some time in uniform late in World War II (and a brief period in the early CIA), Buckley came to Yale University in 1946. He was well prepared from his upbringing in a wealthy, conservative Catholic household that included much private tutoring and boarding school both in the U.S. and Britain. At Yale he cut quite a figure, becoming editor of the Yale Daily News, and a leading debater. It was clear he was destined for great things after his graduation in 1950.

What Yale did not expect was that his debut on the national scene would come in the form of a surprise best-seller that was an attack on Yale for its leftism. God and Man at Yale was a book ahead of its time, with its harsh criticisms of a growing ideological monoculture, faculty bias in the classroom, and degraded curriculum. Today this kind of criticism of our colleges and universities appears in countless places and barely summons a yawn. At the time, though, it caused a sensation. The left-leaning critic Dwight Macdonald observed: Yale "reacted with all the grace and agility of an elephant cornered by a mouse." McGeorge Bundy, then president of the Ford Foundation and later national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson—and a key architect of our fabulously successful strategy in the Vietnam War—wrote an extensive attack on the book in The Atlantic. Buckley had clearly got everyone's attention.

Noting that Yale had begun, as had nearly all of America's oldest colleges, as an explicitly Christian institution, Buckley's most famous statement in the book was: "I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level."

Eventually this first work led to one of Buckley's most famous axioms, namely that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard University. Today I expect Buckley might say that it is better to be educated by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard University.

In any case, there's an interesting detail in the previous quotation from God and Man at Yalethat slips by unless you study Buckley and the period closely. The key term is "individualism." Although "individualism" here is a stand-in for free-market capitalism, just as collectivism is a synonym for socialism, it is significant that the word "conservative" does not feature in the book at all. This is not an accident. Buckley did not at that time describe himself as a conservative. He much preferred the label "individualist." Partly this reflects the influence on him of two of his early mentors, the near-anarchist libertarian Albert Jay Nock (who was a close family friend), and the now-forgotten Frank Chodorov, another anti-statist who championed "individualism." In fact, Chodorov once said, “anyone who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose.”

By degrees, however, Buckley came to the view that conservative was a better label because it captured a broader spectrum of complementary ideas. And what he thought a conservative movement worthy of the name needed was a prominent magazine to serve as a rally point for writers and thinkers to contest the dominant intellectual and political culture of the time. Thus National Review was born in 1955, with Buckley as editor at the impossibly young age of 30.

The paradox to keep in mind for this moment is that for liberals, America in the mid-1950s was already conservative, and that was the problem. Between a conformist culture as exciting as cold mashed potatoes, a sluggish economy, and an uninspiring and unimaginative President Eisenhower, liberals thought the nation was underperforming, so to speak. For Buckley and other conservatives, the nation's anti-Communism was weak, faltering, and ineffective, and Eisenhower and the Republican Party faulted for not contesting, let alone rolling back, the New Deal. People like to say that today we suffer from deep political polarization, and there is considerable nostalgia for the 1950s across the political spectrum, but in fact the roots of today's divisions can be seen back in that decade.

The famous mission statement of National Review, easily available on the internet today, is quite radical sounding. The most famous line from the mission state is that "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 so urge it."

You can argue pro and con on the proposition that the Stop sign Buckley and conservatism set out was simply run over by the secular advance of the left since 1955 in most areas of politics, policy, and culture. There is one other paragraph from that founding mission statement that finds a distinct echo with today:

"Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world . . . Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity."

I'll put a pin in this for the moment to note that a number of populist or "nationalist" conservatives on the scene today, many of whom are prominent parts of Trump's base of support, have come to have warm feelings for the New Deal, and also lustily attack what they like to call "Conservatism, Inc." including even using the phrase Buckley used here about the "well-fed right." Ceteris paribus, as Buckley liked to say, what goes around comes around.

Now, I said near the outset that the best way to comprehend Buckley as the most significant journalist on history as well as the key figure of late 20th century conservatism is by considering eight aspects of his character and thought, some of which overlap, and are an example of the old and often stale axiom that the total is greater than the sum of the parts, and that is emphatically the case with Buckley.

He was, first, much more than a journalist. He was an "organization man." The reason he can be said to have been the most influential conservative of his time is that he catalyzed a lot of practical political activism, often indirectly and behind the scenes, but sometimes more visibly such as hosting the founding of Young Americans for Freedom in 1961. He helped to found, also often directly and sometimes indirectly, important conservative intellectual organizations like the Philadelphia Society.

In other words, his reach was extensive; everyone from the period has a Buckley connection of some kind.

Second was his personality and style. He was the ultimate happy warrior, with an impish smile, flashing eyes, almost always cheerful. More on this in a moment.

He was also slightly exotic, as he spoke with an accent of no known country on the planet. The best I can do is to make it a combination of southern New England patrician leavened with a week at British boarding school. Perhaps it is an effect of having learned English as his second language. As a small child he learned to speak Spanish from his governess before English from his parents.

Despite his aristocratic upbringing and bearing, in his long-running TV show Firing Line, he slouched noticeably in his chair, his hair poorly combed and his suit often visibly wrinkled, often seeming to affect a pose of boredom. In fact he was highly attentive and ready to pounce quickly on any contestable thought from his guest.

Watching Firing Line today, a viewer can't help but be struck by the slow pace compared to Tik-Tok, or 6-minute segments on cable news. Firing Line had a spare set, no moving cameras or colorful, brightly lit backgrounds. It was seemingly designed to make you reach for the remote control to change channels. And yet the show did big ratings for PBS.

Third, a crucial element of his personality and style that deserves separate enumeration was his legendary humor and quick wit. There are countless examples, but two of my favorite examples of his spontaneous wit come from his Playboy magazine interview in 1970. The first question he was asked was, "Why did you agree to sit for an interview with Playboy?" Buckley: "Because I calculate that it is the best way to communicate with my teenage son." Later, asked about solutions to the problem of overpopulation, Buckley shot back: "Get people to stop reading Playboy."

Once again there is a sharp contrast between Buckley and conservatives who came before and after him, many of whom seldom displayed much wit, except sarcasm here and there, which can be an effective but limited form of wit. Every time I see Jordan Peterson today, for example, he seems always to have the look of an oncologist about to deliver a grim diagnosis to a patient, and I don't think he ever tells a joke. With Buckley even his liberal opponents couldn't help but laugh at his witticisms, often when they were the target.

Fourth: As an editor and leader of an intellectual movement, he was a convener of eccentrics and outliers in the pages of National Review: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a cape-wearing Austrian count and old-school monarchist; or Ernest van den Haag, an irascible social scientist who could annoy conservatives almost as much as liberals. Add to these names the critical mass of former Communists such as Whittaker Chambers, Ferank Meyer, James Burnham, Max Eastman, and Willi Schlamm. I sometimes think Buckley liked to have such colorful figures in the pages of National Review precisely because of their names that sounded like characters from a Baroque novel, but Buckley's eclecticism in collecting a truly diverse band of writers made the magazine a cornucopia of ideas and thinkers, and the scene of lively debates among different conservative camps and perspectives. The magazine was a big tent, as was Buckley. Equally notable is that Buckley's first priority, spotting and promoting young talent, above all finding writers who could actually write well, led him to launching the writing careers of several notable young liberals, such as Joan Didion and Garry Wills.

Fifth: As a journalist, he had an idiosyncratic style, which I don't recommend that aspiring writers try to imitate closely, except for practice and as a way of experimenting and developing your own style. Every columnist has a distinctive style, but Buckley broke all the rules or conventions of the trade. He challenged newspaper readers with a high degree of erudition. He liked to use subordinate clauses that were not strictly necessary to his argument, but which he thought added a certain rhythm to his prose. Subordinate clauses can serve a useful purpose, by slowing the reader to linger on a crucial point, but it is a device to be used judiciously. He liked to use Latin phrases: ceterus paribus (all things being equal) has already been mentioned; also mutatis mutandis (comparing two or more cases or situations). Now and then he liked to drop in a French phrase, too; another language he knew well from childhood instruction.

When he wasn't dropping in a Latin phrase, he was using big or obscure words that drove readers to their dictionaries—terms like "tergiversation," or "rodomontade." "Ratiocination" was a special favorite: it just means sustained thinking or reflection on a specific thing. I'll note, however, that he seldom used a big or obscure word gratuitously to affect an air of intellectual superiority or pretention; an attentive reader could usually guess at the meaning of an obscure term by its context in the sentence or paragraph. I often had the experience of reaching for a dictionary to look up an unknown word in a Buckley column, and finding that it meant what I had guessed it meant. So I enjoyed reading his columns as a vocabulary-building exercise, though my high school English teachers were less enthusiastic when I'd borrow Buckley's terms for my English class essays.

Another important trait of Buckley as a writer is his discipline. Writing three newspaper columns a week is quite a load of its own on top of books, features, editorials for National Review, and editing the work of others. Buckley used to spend six weeks in Switzerland every winter to ski, but it wasn't vacation. He spent at least two hours in the morning writing, skied in the afternoon, and then returned to his typewriter for an hour and a half before dinner, demanding that he compose a minimum of 1,500 words every day. Then dinner was a moveable feast with friends and famous guests such as the actors David Niven and Roger Moore, who also wintered in the Alps.

There is a final aspect of Buckley's journalism to take in—namely, that a startlingly high proportion of his columns were attacks or critiques not about specific issues, but of other journalists and celebrities, and their defective take on an issue. It is one thing to go after an elected official—that comes with the job of an office holder and is expected, and most journalists do that. But Buckley liked to pick on other journalists and Hollywood celebrities for their statements on political issues. This is a practice from his earliest years as a public writer in the 1950s.

Newspaper editors today would frown on all of these traits of Buckley's style—the subordinate clauses, the Latin phrases, five-dollar words from the Oxford English Dictionary, targeting other journalists, and other stylistic traits I could add in a complete list. (David Brooks once told me that there is an unwritten rule at the New York Times editorial page that its columnists never criticize one another.)

For one example of his penchant for picking on other writers, take this opener about novelist Norman Mailer: "I do not know of anyone whose dismay I personally covet more; because it is clear from reading the works of Mr. Mailer that only demonstrations of human swinishness are truly pleasing to him... Pleasant people, like those of us on the Right Wing, drive him mad, and leech his genius."

This leads directly to my sixth aspect: Buckley had a talent for friendship with people who were his ideological opponents and frequent targets of his article. He thrashed the socialist economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in print and in many public debates, but also went skiing with Galbraith in Switzerland in the winter. He had a cordial friendship with Norman Mailer, once pranking the egotistic novelist with an entry in the index of one of his booms that read, "Mailer, Norman—hi Norman!" And then it included the index page nu,mber where this entry appeared. Buckley attended Yankees games with Ira Glasser, then head of the ACLU, which Buckley routinely attacked in his columns. What all these figures had in common is that they never took Buckley's critiques and humorous jabs personally. They respected serious disagreement, and delighted in his exuberant company.

This arises from or connects to a seventh important aspect—his generosity and charity, literally in the case of his financial support for many individuals and causes, usually away from public notice. He operated as something of a one-man private foundation, providing financial backing for authors to pursue a promising book project; floating forgivable loans to small and struggling conservative organizations, paying some personal expenses for friends and NR contributors who were facing financial hardship.

This aspect of Buckley is connected to his devout Catholic faith, of course, about which one could write an entire book. But one way to appreciate fully his essential generosity toward even his adversaries is to take in his many obituaries. His obituaries are literary gems, often deeply moving, but some of his very best are his tributes about figures he attacked and with whom he never did strike up any kind of friendship.

A good example is the case of Arthur Schlesinger Jr, the towering liberal historian who died in January 2007, only a few months before Buckley's own passing. Over the decades Buckley directed some of his sharpest barbs at Schlesinger, such as: “Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s obsessive partisanship has disqualified him as a historian.” Or: “I shall always be glad to give publicity to any lapse by Professor Schlesinger into sanity, and do not worry that such a guarantee will heavily mortgage my future time.” And much worse, which Schlesinger returned in kind—even going so far as to sue Buckley for defamation at one point, and refusing repeated invitations to appear on Buckley's TV show.

Yet Buckley's obituary for Schlesinger opens thus: “I always regretted that we didn’t become friends, because the thousands who succeeded in doing so found friendship with Arthur Schlesinger very rewarding. For one thing, to behold him—to listen to him, observe him, read him—was to coexist with a miracle of sorts.” This kind of treatment of his ideological adversaries is typical of his obituary catalogue, many of which are collected in a fine book A Torch Kept Lit.

Eighth and finally, Buckley's direct political influence was enormous. One overlooked episode of his career was his gonzo and quixotic run for mayor of New York City in 1965, the year after Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat, after which conservatism was thought to be at low ebb if not finished off. It was an unpromising idea, and Buckley never thought he had any chance to win. In fact, when asked what he would do if he did, perchance, win, he replied: "Demand a recount."

But it was not a mere symbolic or protest candidacy. He ran a real campaign, with signs, rallies, advertisements, and all the usual trappings of a campaign. His purpose was to raise a banner that the rapid deterioration of America's major cities was not inevitable, but that regnant liberalism was incapable of enacting serious policies to stem rising crime, deteriorating schools, soaring welfare dependency, and a faltering business climate. A decade later New York fell formally into bankruptcy, and had to be bailed out and restructured by Wall Street bankers. Fifteen years later, New Yorkers had reached the end of their rope, and elected Rudy Guiliani, who proceeded to enact many of the policies Buckley advocated in 1965, leading to a dramatic turnaround for the city that many people thought impossible.

In other words, Buckley was ahead of time, and his memoir of that campaign, The Unmaking of a Mayor, is regarded by specialists in urban politics as a classic in the field, still very much worth reading 60 years later.

There was one other aspect of that campaign that appears prescient just now. Buckley and his campaign managers thought they were most likely to attract votes from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where liberal Republicans lived in still significant numbers back then. To the surprise of Buckley and his campaign, both pre-election polls, and the final election results, found him drawing most of his support from Queens, Staten Island, and other outer-borough neighborhoods populated mostly by working class and lower middle-class citizens that typically voted heavily Democratic, but who had less and less patience with liberalism as the 1960s wore on. In other words, Buckley had stirred what we now think of as the key part of the Trump coalition.

A few years later in 1970 Buckley's brother James, a successful Wall Street lawyer, won a fluke election to the U.S. Senate from New York, thus planting the Buckley family in the real world of elective politics.

Buckley's political influence ultimately extended to two presidents, most significantly Ronald Reagan, but also Richard Nixon to some extent. Nixon didn't like Buckley or the "Buckleyites," as he derided them in private conversation, but Nixon knew he needed Buckley's support to the extent he could get it, and Nixon took notes assiduously whenever he met with Buckley. It was Buckley, along with Nixon rival Nelson Rockefeller, who recommended Henry Kissinger to Nixon, though later Buckley became a fierce critic of Nixon and Kissinger over detente.

George Will likes to argue, not entirely facetiously, with near syllogistic precision (syllogisms being another favorite Buckley literary device) that Buckley won the Cold War, by saying that without Bill Buckley, there would have been no National Review; without National Review, no Goldwater candidacy in 1964; no Goldwater candidacy, no Reagan presidency in 1980; no Reagan, no end of the Cold War. QED. It is a fanciful or contingent chain of causation, but not entirely ridiculous either. Reagan was a charter subscriber to National Review at its founding in 1955, and grew personally close to Buckley, providing him with a private address at the White House to which Buckley could send letters and thoughts directly to him.

In the end Buckley wrote more than 40 books, including ten spy novels, numerous collections of his best columns and articles, three memoirs of sailing expeditions, two mini-memoirs of what a week in his life was like (which attracted strange criticisms from his opponents), and several short books about specific subjects like Anti-Semitism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and—his final book—his friendship with Ronald Reagan. Add to this countless lectures and debates—including at least one here at Ole Miss that I know of—as well as his own TV show on PBS that got some of the highest ratings of any PBS show. A mark of his own broader cultural celebrity were his numerous appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, back when that program was the only late-night talk show, which meant it had huge ratings. And let's not forget the many impressions of him done by premier comedians such as Robin Williams, impressions that began on comedy shows as early as the 1960s, such as Laugh-In. This shows his penetration into popular culture.

It is tempting to call Buckley the Godfather of conservatism, even as Irving Kristol became known and celebrated as the Godfather of neoconservatism. But the term really doesn't fit Buckley at all; he was not the least bossy or fearsome in the way we think of a Godfather. Few conservatives feared Buckley's wrath; in any case his rare disapproval was seldom expressed in wrathful terms. Rather, everyone sought his approval and counsel.

Maybe his story and example are non-replicable for many obvious and less obvious reasons. But it is hard to imagine the history of country, and its political cycles, having gone the way they did without his enormous influence, and whenever we are in the "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" mode—which we should be often—Buckley's name deserves a place high on the list.